Jesus as Teacher and Master

From the Lesson

Part IV of the Urantia Book — The Life and Teachings of Jesus — is the longest single document about the historical Jesus ever written. Seven hundred pages of papers, dictated (the revelators claim) by a midwayer commission with access to the actual events, walk us day by day through a life that has been the most discussed and least understood in human history. To read it is to feel that, for the first time, the man steps out from behind the icon.

Michael of Nebadon — who Jesus actually is

The Urantia revelation begins by telling us something the Gospels could not: who Jesus is in the larger cosmology. He is not a prophet, not a messenger, not even merely the eternal Son in disguise. He is Michael of Nebadon — the Creator Son of this local universe, the personal architect of the very superuniverse sector that includes our planet. He literally built the world he was born on. He fashioned the human form he wore.

And he came to Urantia (the name the revelators give to Earth) to fulfill the seventh and final of his bestowals — the long Paradise mandate that requires every Creator Son to live, at least once, the life of one of his lowliest creatures in order to earn the unconditional sovereignty of the universe he created. He chose Urantia for that bestowal. He chose Mary's womb. He chose the obscurity of a Galilean carpenter's shop. And he did it so that, when he assumed full sovereignty afterward, no being in his domain — angel, midwayer, or mortal — could ever say that he ruled them without first having walked their road.

This is the deep meaning of the Incarnation that the Urantia revelation restores: not a payment for sin, not a sacrifice to an angry deity, but the earned sovereignty of love. Michael now rules Nebadon not by right of creation alone but by the right of having lived it from the inside.

The religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus

The Papers make a distinction that, alone, would justify the entire revelation: there is the *religion of* Jesus — the actual living relationship he had with the Father — and there is the religion about Jesus** — the centuries of doctrine, dogma, and institutional accretion that have grown up around his memory. The first is universal and inexhaustible. The second is a human cultural artifact that has, at times, obscured the very man it claims to honor.

What was the religion of Jesus? The Urantia revelation says: utter, childlike, unbroken consciousness of the fatherhood of God and the consequent brotherhood of all human beings. Nothing more, nothing less. Every parable, every healing, every confrontation with the religious authorities of his day, flows from those two facts. The kingdom of heaven is the universal family that follows once you have grasped them. The whole of Jesus' ethics is act consistently with the fact that every person you meet is, like you, a son or daughter of the same Father.

The Master as teacher

The Urantia portrait of Jesus restores his humanity without diminishing his divinity. He is funny. He is tired. He weeps. He loses his temper at the temple. He grows up. He learns. He is a builder and a sailor and a musician. He listens more than he speaks, and when he speaks, he prefers stories to systems. He never wrote a word. He left no organization. He refused to be made king. His method, the Papers tell us, was simple: he revealed God to man and man to himself. Every encounter in the Gospels makes more sense in this light. Jesus is not handing out doctrines; he is holding up a mirror in which the divine spark in each person finally becomes visible to itself.

The four levels of his ministry

The Papers describe Jesus' Galilean ministry as proceeding on four levels at once. He spoke to crowds in parables that planted seeds for generations. He taught the twelve apostles in plain language that shaped the post-resurrection church. He instructed the seventy evangelists in deeper philosophy. And he reserved his highest and most personal teachings for inner-circle conversations with figures like Nathaniel, Thomas, Rodan of Alexandria, and Mary Magdalene. Anyone who reads only the Gospels gets the outer rim. The Urantia Papers give us all four levels.