The Great Gospel of John
Volume 3
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi
- Chapter 130 -
The missions and sufferings of the angels.
Here Raphael steps up and says, "I am not sleeping either, and yet you said that everyone except for you is now sleeping!"
2
Zahr says, "Friend, the fact that you are not asleep and that you can never sleep at all will be clear to any person who knows you as well as we do! Therefore you might well have saved yourself such a remark. You see, dear angel, it is quite enough that we people here are sometimes somewhat stupid, and we need no support on your behalf to become even more stupid than we are in nature; but you can truly instruct very magnificently us in many things as a consequence of your immense and immeasurable wisdom and experience, which is older than the world itself!"
3
Raphael says, "Who am I then that I am not supposed to have any sleep?"
4
Zahr says, "But I beg you, my heavenly friend, don't speak to us and ask us so pompously! You are an angel of the Lord from heaven, here equipped with a light body by the Lord out of necessity! You can throw off this body in more than lightning quickness and destroy it!
5
You are quite a different being, according to the body, to us still mortal people of this Earth. You were never born, except for the Lord God you have never had any other mother and father, out of whose body you were produced like us. You only know an immeasurable holiness since the most unthinkable times; you only know the names of pain, suffering and sadness and the better regret, but not from your own personal experience and therefore you cannot talk to people in the fullest truth about earthly human things; you can only talk to us about spiritual things that we will accept from you very thankfully, for you must be fully at home in them; but you cannot talk about physical things because you have never had to complain in a body!"
6
Raphael says, "Look, look, all the things you know! Even if I have never been inside a body, I nonetheless know better what a body is and what every fiber in it does than you could ever learn in a thousand years with all your industriousness!
7
Are we angels not those who have to care for everything that concerns the being of a person from his creation to his departure from this Earth?!
8
Are we not those who purify your souls through the suffering and pain worked in your flesh making them capable of receiving the spirit of God, and we are not supposed to know then what are your diverse sufferings and pains?! What do you think then in your mind if you can make me such a reproach!?
9
Believe me that we angels are also capable of pain and suffering! And I tell you that we often bear more pain and suffering than you, since we have to experience only too often how the stubborn people crush all our great efforts with scorn and mockery under their dirtiest feet and constantly turn their backs on us.
10
Friend, if you had as much patience with a person over whom all power would be granted if you constantly showered him with the greatest good deeds, but the person despised you extremely for all that and didn't want to hear or know anything about you and only constantly directed all his thoughts and striving to getting rid of you as his greatest dogooder and friend, possibly even to harm you for all your cares and efforts for his salvation, to destroy your good reputation and name and to make you into the craftiest traitor!? Tell me, if you were only like Cyrenius, what you would do with such a person! Would you have the patience to treat such a villain right until the end with all patience and measure and tenderness?"
11
Zahr says, raising his eyebrows at these words by the angel, "No friend! I would never have such patience in my life! Even without power I would have no patience, not to mention with power!"
12
Raphael says, "You see, and I have so much irresponsible power and strength that I quite alone could destroy and quite annihilate in the fastest instant this whole Earth, the moon, the sun and all the stars that are visible to your eye which are sheer enormous great space bodies, with everything that they carry; and yet I have always such a patience with the unchanging people of this Earth through my own free will!
13
But all that would be nothing, and would be an evil that is easy to bear; but consider now the continuing very most willful behavior of Satanas and her angels, who, as very powerful spiritual beings, constantly go around with the "laudable? plan to destroy not only us, but God as well and to take away all His power!
14
Such a thing can never happen, of course! But enough, the indestructible evil plan is there and they do not stop trying to carry it out, constantly suffer the greatest pain and agony for it, which they cause themselves through their most evil desire; but that nevertheless never totally puts them off their evil forever.
15
You see, we see all this and have the power not only to tame them in the most sensitive way but also to destroy them completely forever, and that all without responsibility before the Lord God!
16
And nonetheless we treat them as our fallen brothers with all patience and consideration and direct things strictly so that their free will is never limited by us in any way, but is and remains always free, only we always prevent with all care the effect of such things. Friend, what would you do in such circumstances?"
17
Zahr says, "There I would thrash around like a bear and would see whether such spiritual beasts would not show me obedience, particularly if I possessed your power and strength without responsibility!"
18
Raphael says, "But don't you see now that an angel of God is no such a light thing as you had imagined, and that I also see a little of the actual humanity, and recognize it and therefore can talk to you about it?!"
19
Zahr says, "Oh yes, I see that very well now; but only tell me now whether you have to be here, or is it also your free will?"
20
Raphael says, "Oh yes, I could just as well leave you according to my own freest will; but I want to stay with you, because such a thing pleases the Lord. But pleasing the Lord is also my own will, and even God Himself can do nothing against that, for therein consists the maintenance of all creation, about which you with all the countless stars cannot see even the eon part, not to mention the endless entirety and the being itself! But now the sun is close to rising and the Lord is coming back; therefore we should be fully attentive again for every sign of His!"