OTHER CHRISTS

The Mystic Christ - Chapter Preview

Some forms are products of devotees' imaginations. Yet other forms are of Divine Personalities who actually lived in the past like Sri Rama or Sri Krishna. They are not simply imaginary forms meant only for concentration. As you know, Lord Buddha, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Jesus Christ were great souls who lived at one time. Likewise, Sri Rama and Sri Krishna were Divine Incarnations who lived on this earth. They were not mere mythical heroes. Ammachi, Awaken Children, vol. 2

The Christ is universal and timeless and has been appearing before humanity in a fleshly form since the dawn of the world.

The common orthodox view is that Jesus proved his superiority over other spiritual leaders like Buddha or Krishna because he accepted the ultimate sacrifice of the crucifixion and the other spiritual leaders did not do this. The idea here is that Jesus sacrificed his body so that we might be relieved of our sins. A common analogy is to refer to Jesus as a sacrificial lamb and, therefore, we have been saved by the "blood of the lamb."

Sacrifice - 1. to offer as a sacrifice 2. to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy esp. for an ideal, belief, or end 3. to sell at a loss. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

Only if we give up something that is important to us can we say it is a sacrifice. If we donate our old discarded clothes to charity, it is not a sacrifice. Great masters like Jesus do not consider their bodies, and subsequently all the pleasures it can buy, to be desirable. For an incarnation of God, the greatest sacrifice is having a body. To these great ones the body is a prison which they willingly inhabit for the sole purpose of relieving the suffering of the world and restoring righteousness. For them, the sacrifice is to be in this world away from their true abode which is heaven. It is like allowing oneself to be locked in a prison to help and serve the prisoners. It is a relief to get out of the prison, in this case the physical body, when the task is completed. For us the death of the body appears to be a sacrifice because our ego depends on it. We desire the pleasures the body can give us and we mistakenly project this point of view onto Jesus. But for Jesus, who had no ego and did not need a body to substantiate an ego, getting rid of the body was a blessing. Jesus revealed that he preferred to move on to the next world as he was dragging his cross through the street on the way to be crucified:

A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children." Luke 23:27-28, NIV

Jesus is telling the weeping women that it is worse to be in the world than to be leaving it. That would be the logical conclusion of one who is leaving this world and all of its sorrows and going to paradise. Jesus reveals his sublime destination to one of the criminals who is being crucified along with him:

Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." Jesus answered him, "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise." Luke 23:42-43, NIV

The Buddha is called The Compassionate One because he agreed to remain in the body and teach mankind instead of entering into nirvana (heaven) at the point of his supreme enlightenment. Thus we can make the point that the Buddha's sacrifice was as great as Jesus' because he agreed to stay in the prison of the body for the benefit of suffering humanity. Ammachi sits for 10 or 12 hours a day with no break hugging all that come to see her. Often the crowds in India number 10 to 20 thousand in a single day. She hugs each one into the late morning hours and will not leave until the last person is hugged. Here is a present day Christ who is the very embodiment of love and compassion. We could not imagine ourselves even lifting our arm 20 thousand times in a day to deliver the hugs. And day after day, year after year for 20 years! Her life is a supreme sacrifice of the body and the ego.

The most important aspect of Jesus' life was that he championed love as the path to salvation. According to Jesus it is the amount of love we have mustered in the course of our life that grants or denies entry into heaven and not the crucifixion. It is love and not the crucifixion that destroys sin.

In truth, there is one Only Begotten Son, the Christ, who has appeared as all of the incarnations throughout all time. Each incarnation brings the same essential message but stated in a different way to suite the times and the various cultures. To say that one is greater than any of the others because some act was performed that the others did not perform is simply ignorance.

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