Jesus says:
“My earthly life may be termed a continuous Epiphany, for ‘epiphany’ means ‘manifestation.’ And I manifested Myself to men unceasingly for thirty-three years.
“When and where the manifestation was not accompanied by a miraculous ‘something’ capable of violently attracting men’s attention, always straying after what is less good, Virtue - practiced perfectly and in all of the forms by which it can be named by the Son of Joseph and Mary of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph the carpenter and Mary, a poor, silent, modest woman barely noticed by her fellow citizens because of her reserved life at home - was nonetheless such as to be a sign of supernatural manifestation. In the humble everyday virtues of love and respect for his parents, industriousness, honesty in work and honesty in gain, self-respect, obedience to laws and superiors, charity towards his neighbor, justice, temperance, and, even more so, in the senses, the Son of Joseph the carpenter was wise, and every act of his manifested a spirit in which God lived in his perfections.
“But the world, and even the little world of Nazareth, never sees the manifestations of a virtue which, because it is of an everyday kind and connected with daily events, goes humbly along its way, blossoming with thorns which become roses only if stepped upon, being wounded and dripping blood and tears, and proceeding faithfully in the virtues. Let us, then, leave aside this daily manifestation lasting thirty years of the One who grew and became fortified not only in his flesh, but in his higher part and who, possessing by nature the fullness of Wisdom and Grace, out of love for men had placed human limits on these perfections, embodied in your indigence, along with his spirit, and allowed them to grow according to the rules connected with the ages of man, thereby progressing in a measured way while growing in wisdom and grace, as the Son of Man before God, his Father, and before men, his children and now brothers and sisters, through his Incarnation.
“Oh, what light for horizons of divine knowledge a single word of my Gospel can open for you! In that ‘he became fortified’ and ‘grew’ in the Gospel of my childhood,601 what a mystery of perfect love and justice is enclosed! You read and pass on. Or you read and meditate, but you dip what is superhuman into a human substance. Your flesh is so strong in you that it overcomes the intellectual powers of the spirit. What thus happens is that only those who have slain the flesh, in its voices and overbearance, and made these ruins the base for the throne of the spirit-king are granted insights, through either the divine word or a divine infusion of intelligence bordering on perfection, for it proceeds from the Paraclete, who, by a spiritual incarnation of the Word in you, virgin spirits desirous only of an eternal marriage, infuses Himself and generates the Word in you, making you ‘bearers of Christ,’ as the virginal Bride bore his septiform ardor.
“I said ‘bordering on perfection.’ It is perfect, for it comes from God. But a human creature could not possess Perfection as it is. The creature would be dissolved by it. Dissolved, because the heart and mind of one living on earth cannot contain the total knowledge of what God is. The Infinite does not fit into the finite.
“To know God is life and joy for the disembodied spirit. For the creature in exile to know God would mean to be struck by lightning. An excessively sublime ecstasy, it would destroy intelligence and life with the flashing of its spark proceeding from the Truth. The Truth, which is good, always clothes itself in a veil of flesh to make itself bearable for your weakness, to allow your limitedness to know God and live in the knowledge of Him, bringing Heaven into you, without your dying therefrom before the time comes.
“But let us go back to the original topic.
“It is such a great joy for Me as Teacher, as the One who loves you, to speak with you - that, like loving children, are anxious to hear Me and remain with the pure eyes of spiritual infants and with a loving smile around Me, who love you - that I am unable to put a rein on my joy in instructing you - O you that are dear to my heart, O blessed ones who still let Me be the ‘Teacher’ in the midst of his beloved apostles. For this reason, I, for whom love is a flood breaking barriers to pour itself out - and the barriers are the subjects and limits I establish for my teaching out of compassion for your weakness, which wearies of listening and retaining or writing - insert other subjects into the initial one to take you with Me higher and higher and keep you clasped to Me longer, beloved students and children with whom I am pleased, as is the Father, along with Me.
“Let us leave aside the everyday manifestations of my life and take up the major ones. My Birth, the Presentation in the Temple, the Adoration of the Magi coming from the East, the Discussion with the Doctors, the Baptism in the Jordan, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, and the Ascension into Heaven. Except for the last one, you have received the vision of each and a commentary by your God and his Mother. Through my commentary or by the light of your mind - a mirror directed towards the Light and increasing its luminosity by concentrating upon itself the Light which it reflects through the anxiousness of love and which mirrors itself therein in a loving response - you have been able to see how to every manifestation there corresponds the sanctification of the ones among those present who have the ‘good will’ required of men to possess Peace - that is, God.
“The shepherds, the first ones to whom the Incarnate Word became manifest,602 were left sanctified thereby. Grace worked in them like a seed in the earth whose winter activity is not seen by man’s eye, but which blossoms into a stem and spike when the time comes, and man sees it and rejoices, thinking of the future bread.603 In the shepherds Grace thus worked during the thirty years of my concealment and then blossomed into a holy spike when the time came in which the good separated from the wicked to follow the Son of God, who passed along the ways of the world, casting forth his loving cry to rally together the sheep of the eternal flock, scattered and dispersed by Satan.
“You would have seen them if you had been present among the throngs following Me. Even more: you would have seen them as my messengers, for with their simple, convinced narrations they proclaimed the Christ, saying, ‘It is He. We recognize Him. The lullabies of the angels descended upon his first wails. We were told that men of good will would have peace. Good will is the desire for Good and Truth. Let us follow Him. Follow Him yourselves. And we shall have the peace promised by the Lord.’
“Humble, ignorant, and poor, my first ambassadors among men stationed themselves like sentinels along the way of the King of Israel, the King of the world - faithful eyes, honest mouths, loving hearts, thuribles with the fragrance of their virtue, to make the air less foul around the Divine Person, who had become incarnate for their sake, and as far as the foot of the cross I found them, after having blessed them with my gaze along the bloody road to Golgotha, the only ones in the unrestrained mob who did not curse, but still loved, believed, and hoped and looked at Me with compassionate eyes, thinking of the far-off night and weeping over the Innocent One, whose first sleep was upon unpleasant wood and whose last was upon even more painful wood. This was because my epiphany to them, upright souls, had sanctified them.
“And so it was with the Three Wise Men of the East;604 and Simeon and Anna;605 and Andrew and John, at the manifestation at the Jordan;606 and the fullness of sanctity for Peter, James, and John on Tabor;607 and Mary Magdalene in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea on Easter Sunday:608 and the perfection of holiness on the Mount of Olives for the twelve, forgiven for their moment of bewilderment and rendered faithful again by the love burning in them.609
“Gamaliel and Hillel, along with him, were neither simple, like the shepherds, nor holy, like Simeon, nor ascetic, like the Three Wise Men. In him, and in his teacher and relative, it was the tangle of the Pharisaical lianas that choked off the Light and the unfettered expansion of the plant of Faith. But in their being Pharisees there was purity of intention. They believed they were right and desired this. They wished for it by instinct, for they were just, and by study, for their spirits, discontented, cried out, ‘This bread is mixed with too much ash. Give me the bread of the real Truth!’
“Not strong to the point of having the courage to break these lianas, humanity still held him excessively as its slave and, along with it, considerations of human esteem, personal danger, and the well-being of the family. Gamaliel had been unable to ‘comprehend God, who was passing by,’ and use ‘the intelligence and the freedom which God has given man,’ in the words of Rabbi Gamaliel,610 for this recognition and this shift in thought, whereby he would have changed from a doctor of error - for men had corrupted Truth, turning it into Error for their gain into a disciple of the Truth.
“He was not the only one. Nicodemus, too, and Joseph of Arimathea along with him were unable to trample formulas and customs under foot and openly embrace the new Doctrine, and they came to it ‘secretly out of fear of the Jews.’611 The latter two were more advanced in good, to the point of daring to make the gesture of mercy on Friday. Rabbi Gamaliel was less advanced. But - observe the power of upright intention - his human justice becomes imbued with the superhuman, whereas Saul’s is sullied with the demoniac, in the hour when the unleashing of Evil places them at the crossroads between good and evil, the just and the unjust.612
“The tree of Good and Evil rises up before every man, presenting the fruits of Evil with a more appetizing appearance, and among its fronds Temptation hisses with the deceitful voice of a nightingale. It is up to man, a creature endowed with reason, to be able to discern and choose only the good fruit, even if it is thorny on being picked, bitter to the taste, and base in appearance. The metamorphosis into softness, sweetness, and beauty occurs when the spirit has chosen and nourished itself on this holy bitterness.
“Saul eagerly reaches out for the fruit of Evil, Hatred, and Crime. Gamaliel, overcoming the tenacious lianas of humanity and custom, by the flourishing of the distant seed of light which my fourth epiphany had placed in his heart, in a heart with upright intention, and which he had received and defended with honest affection and a noble thirst to see it sprout, reaches out for the fruit of Good. His will and my Blood break the hard rind of that seed, which he has protected, and under the sun of the apostolic words and Stephen’s faith, the young plant of his Christianity and his sanctity in my eyes is born. Forgiven for not having understood beforehand, his desire to become my follower is blessed by the Most High and turns into reality, with no need to be struck by lightning on the road to Damascus,613 as it was necessary for the haughty one,614 who would not have been conquered for the Light in any other way.
“I shall make no other comment because it is not necessary. Little John, little just one who love those who are just and wish to know they are holy, you have discovered that Rabbi Gamaliel is holy in my eyes because he was just. Be just, too, increasingly.
“Christ has manifested Himself to you as well. Not once, but on different occasions. Not only with his appearance, but with his wisdom. Let your justice grow, then, in proportion to his self-revelation. I shall manifest Myself to you even more and for a long time still. And, if you are always deserving of it, with my word as long as I will, and with my presence always, I shall thus be with you, until the moment you are with Me. I am now your guest, as in a new Bethany. You shall then be my guest - more than a guest, a wife. When you are taken up to the throne of your King, little new Esther,615 rendered beautiful and fragrant, not with feminine adornments, but because you are dripping with the oil of sacrificial myrrh and the aromas and scents of love and faithfulness and purity, and every virtue which is mine - you receive everything from Me. I have ordered my and your angel to adorn you and give you what you need, and I have given you seven plus seven maids: my gifts and my sacraments, for what belongs to the Love-Spirit is also mine. You will be loved more than so many others who think they are in place of favor and are similar to the resentful Haman and, like him, out of pride hate Christ’s wise and faithful ones. And you will find grace and favor before your King and peace and blessings for those for whom you pray, since your prayer will be heard by God.
“Now go in peace. The hand of your Lord is upon your head.”
In the evening Jesus adds:
“Little John, now that you have rested, add this.
“The Church, divinely inspired, remembers Gamaliel together with the story of the one whose martyrdom was the April rain making the stem burst into an ear. And it is in these days of August that in her annals the Church recalls the recovery of the body of Stephen and of him who found the way to God, sought through remembrance of my voice as a child throughout his life, the way pointed out to him by the enraptured gaze of my first martyr.616
“That’s enough for now. I shall come tomorrow to make you happy.”
601 Luke 2:52.
602 Luke 2:8-20.
603 From this point on, the text of this commentary coincides with a section entitled “The Different Effects and Consequences of Encounters with Christ,” included after the episode of “The Martyrdom of Stephen” in the work on Christ’s life.
604 Matthew 2:1-12.
605 Luke 2:33-38.
606 John 1:35-40.
607 Matthew 17:1-8; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36.
608 Mark 16:9; John 20:11-18.
609 Mark 16:20; Luke 24:50-53; Acts 1:3-14.
610 The reference is to a vision on August 7 which is included in the life of Christ.
611 John 19:38-39.
612 Another reference to the vision mentioned in note 610.
613 Acts 9:3-9; 26:12-18.
614 The reference is to the Apostle Paul before his conversion.
615 See the Book of Ester
616 Another reference to the vision on August 7. Cf. note 610.