What Does Jesus Mean in the Bible Read through 4 lenses

• **Jesus models the ultimate surrender: honest anguish followed by total submission to God's will.**

The deepest teaching on surrender. The human form resists annihilation with everything it has. Yet 'Not my will but yours' = ultimate ego-death: active, conscious surrender of ego's deepest drive (survival). It is acceptance of the isness of this moment at its most extreme.

Even the mind most lost in its own torment carries something that recognizes love the instant it appears. Before any argument is made, before the anguish is understood, the deepest part of the self runs toward the presence of what would heal it. The suffering that seemed total was never the whole of the mind.

That running is the truth breaking through the ego's hold. The same one who could be tamed by no restraint bows at once before love, because love asks nothing and threatens nothing and answers the one longing the torment had buried. What guilt could not silence was this: the mind's own memory of the peace it came from, awake and reaching.

• Jesus afar off: the presence of love appearing at the edge of a tormented mind, recognized before it is understood

To die daily is the steady dissolving of the lower self, the old outer man of appetite and reaction quieted a little more each day so the inner Christ-light can rise in his place. This is no single death at the end of years but a work repeated every morning, the flesh-mind laid down again and again on the altar of the body. Christ here names the awakened consciousness within a person, the higher self that grows only as the animal self is spent. The dying and the rejoicing are one motion, for what falls away is loss to the ego and gain to the spirit.

• The daily death is simply this: the small self is put down over and over until the larger awareness stands where it once ruled.

• Christ Jesus: the awakened higher consciousness rising within a person, the inner light that grows as the lower self fades

• Jesus mentions the old rule: a man who sends his wife away only has to give her a written notice of divorce. In those days a man could do it easily, for small reasons, and simply walk away. The paper made it legal, but it did not make it right.

Jesus closes that easy door. He says that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual unfaithfulness, pushes her toward adultery, and whoever marries her also commits adultery. Marriage is a trust from God, and how you treat your wife is a test of your character. Living with a spouse means bearing her moods and faults with patience, and that patience is a kind of training for the soul, a way of grinding down your own pride and temper. Walking away the moment things get hard is following the lower self, which wants comfort and runs from every burden. Divorce is allowed but it is among the things God dislikes most. So a man must not use what the law permits as an excuse for what his heart should never do: casting someone off and leaving her harmed.