The Great Gospel of John
Volume 6
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
At the Sea of Galilee (John 6)
- Chapter 136 -
Appreciation of beauty, a blossom of truth.
We stayed awake all night as it was My wish and finally also the wish of all. Only one hour before sun up we went to outside, namely to the beautifully arranged garden of the Captain. There were graceful walkways of foliage and lawn benches, a lot of flowers of all kind, a rose forest, jasmine brushes and also spikenard oil plants existed in great quantities. In addition there were all types of noble fruit trees which grew anywhere on earth and all admired this skilfully, beautiful and useful arranged garden.
2
But I said: "Behold, just like this model of a garden, also a right person according to the will of God should be arranged! He also should combine the true and good with the beautiful and elated. If he does this, he thereby proves, that he resembles God, his Creator, in everything.
3
Look at the great charm of all these flowers! How delightfully they are decorated and one outranks the other's magnificence! Yes, why so? In the end following the blossom of a still so charming beautiful rose, is only a very simple and never good looking seed, whose predecessor was the blossom, and for the seed's production the so beautiful blossom was not really necessary. However, God therefore also choose for all His works the aesthetic in the highest degree, so that thereby also in man for all bliss the necessary sense of beauty is awakened. Once this has been fully awakened in man, such person is then also receptive for all truth and for all good whose originator is the truth.
4
See, our dear friend, the Captain, has a lot sense for everything beautiful and therefore also for what is useful and good! If he would not have such sense, then also these My truths which guides man to the recognition of the only true God and to the recognition of himself, would be indifferent to him and he would not have accepted them; but because he possess a lot of sense for beauty - of which the outlay of this wonderful beautiful garden is more than sufficient proof -, he also was the first who was most concerned about the reception of My life teaching here and to follow it strictly and precisely. Therefore everyone should do likewise and such will be credited to him by God quite well!
5
Go to the house of a person! If you find it very neatly and according to circumstances elegantly arranged, you already can reckon on it that this person's inner is arranged likewise. But if you come to a house of another person and find everything dirty and a generally total lack of homely order, you immediately can turn around and follow the sentence given to you by My disciples, namely to never throw the pearls of My gospel to the pigs! It would also be totally in vain; since as said: a person who has no sense of beauty, which is actually the blossom of truth, has also no sense for the truth, which follows the blossom as a useful life seed.
6
However, by that I do not want to say that a person should do nothing else than strive by all kind of earthly costly means to elevate his house, his gardens and his fields and pastures to such splendour, so that all people are placed in the biggest amazement. Since such over-extensive sense of splendour would only too soon degenerate to the thickest self-conceit, self-love, arrogance and lust for power; for the poorer people it would only be a testimony that the owner of such splendour must be an excessively rich person. One would, to yield something from him, honour him too much by excessively admiring his splendour, whereby such person soon and easily could overdo it and invest even more to make people serving him even more and finally gain some imperious right over the admires.
7
Therefore such excessive sense for splendour and beauty means nothing, because in the end it is even worse than the decaying dirtiness. Such sense means arrogance and is a sin of human nature, which never promotes the soul to the everlasting life. However, the sense for beauty and order, which produces with its diligence and true zeal only everything beautiful, true and good, like this garden here, is a virtue which can be most certainly recommended to everyone.
8
But now about something else; since now the Captain and the toll collector are arriving, and I do not want to praise the garden too much in their faces; afterwards the Captain will anyway hear about it what I meant by it."