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Those of us who grew up in a conventional Christian social setting have inevitably received much indoctrination, from an early age, in the events associated with Jesus' last few weeks of mortal life. It is most difficult to set aside these preconceptions and to understand the import of the words of The Urantia Book apart from these fragmentary and distorted ideas. In particular, the idea of the "Kingdom of Heaven" looms large in both popular and formal Christian theology, so that it is easy to fall into the pattern of assuming that when The Urantia Book, or Jesus himself, speak of the Kingdom they necessarily mean the constellation of ideas which readily come to mind.

If you have examined your program for this week's festivities carefully, you will have noted that the words "Kingdom Citizenship" in today's topic, developing Kingdom citizenship, are placed in quotation marks. Perhaps this subtle typographic convention will signal to you that, in planning this seminar, and in using this well-worn phrase, we meant to denote something rather different than might be normally associated with either of these words alone. Perhaps we meant to suggest that, whatever we are talking about, it has little to do with kingdoms or citizens. Perhaps we meant to indicate an oxymoron, like the more familiar contradictions "military intelligence," "airline food," or "organized religion."

During this week, we are concerned with the examination, in some depth, of the second half of part IV of The Urantia Book, covering the last eight months; of Jesus' life, the morontia appearances, and the closing summaries and admonitions. The events of this narrative commence immediately before or after Peter's declaration of faith in the deity of Jesus, "You are the Deliverer, the Son of the living God." Within this part of the narrative of the Life of Jesus we find many parables and teachings as well as many factual events to which religious tradition has attached special significance. Among the events of this time, a few stand out for their unusual significance in punctuating the relationship of the divine and cosmic to the mortal and mundane. My choices for these events are: Peter's Confession, the resurrection of Lazarus, the establishment of the Supper of Remembrance, the Resurrection, and the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth. You will note that these events provide the dividing points between our daily seminar programs.

Between each successive pair of these epochal events, the authors of The Urantia Book have treated the reader to a lengthy presentation of the almost-daily details of the life of Jesus and the Apostles, as well as a detailed recitation of the master's words to his friends and enemies. In examining these four swatches of text, the Education Committee came to feel that each successive period of ministry represented or focused on a different phase of the integration of the religious individual into the totality of Supremacy, just as Jesus himself was accomplishing personal closure during this time in executing the will of his Father.

During the period immediately after Peter's confession, Jesus worked with the apostles to establish their confidence in understanding, preaching, and teaching the new religion of his personal Deity, which had been adopted and formalized at Bethsaida-Julias. With the resurrection of Lazarus, the manifestation of Jesus' deity was made clear to all observers, regardless of their belief in his divine mission. Both he and the Apostles preached this new religion to the people and he personally confronted and condemned the Jewish religious authorities in the Temple, to great public acclaim. Michael's final miraculous act on behalf of his associates and the planet of his incarnation was the establishment of the Remembrance Supper, after which he received in full measure the judgment of an evil culture on his divine ministry.

At this time the Apostles first fully confronted the realities of temporal rejection of their Master. After rising from the dead, the morontia Jesus could clarify and restate many of his teachings and instructions without the limitations imposed by the persecution of the religious authorities, limited only by the ability of his audience to comprehend his meaning. After ascending to the right hand of the Father, he was endowed with Supremacy throughout Nebadon and, with the co-operation of the Local Universe Mother Spirit, the Divine Minister, poured out his Spirit of Truth on all flesh and initiated a new era of spiritual growth and development on Urantia and throughout Nebadon.

The period which we study today is the period of public ministry of the new religion of Jesus, the Son of God, subsequent to the resurrection of Lazarus and continuing up to the establishment of the Supper of Remembrance. During this period Jesus undertook to create the experiences for his followers that he knew would gracefully accept the mythic burden of the incarnate redeemer god in which his true religion would soon be cloaked. Why did he choose to begin this work at Bethany? The Urantia Book tells us:

"Bethany was about two miles from the temple, and it was half past one that Sunday afternoon when Jesus made ready to start for Jerusalem. He had feelings of profound affection for Bethany and its simple people. Nazareth, Capernaum, and Jerusalem had rejected him, but Bethany had accepted him, had believed in him. And it was in this small village, where almost every man, woman, and child were believers, that he chose to perform the mightiest work of his earth bestowal, the resurrection of Lazarus. He did not raise Lazarus that the villagers might believe, but rather because they already believed."

We know from The Urantia Book that Jesus' teachings concerning the Kingdom ofHeaven became increasingly confusing to his Apostles and Disciples during this time. This confusion stems from the admixture of human, evolutionary religious ideas with the divine revelation of the kingdom. This confusion also comes about through Jesus' deliberate choices to enhance the mythic quality of the terminal weeks of his bestowal. Finally, I suggest this confusion arises from various pre-existent aspects of Jesus' divine nature.

John the Baptist had ignorantly or unwisely initiated the use of the term "Kingdom of Heaven" to describe the message and mission of the promised Deliverer. Jesus' public ministry was hostage to this inappropriate and Messianic terminology from its inception. While these words guaranteed that Jesus would attract public attention, they also deflected attention from his simple message as the Son of Man, even as they continue to do so today. Eventually, Jesus' followers would divide between the Antioch cult which taught a religion about Jesus and the Philadelphia cult which taught a religion of the Kingdom of Heaven. I suggest to you today that neither of these groups were true to the religion of the Son of Man, and that the teachings of Jesus himself regarding the Kingdom were intended as scaffolding for the creation and eventual retrieval of the future Christian church and not in the least as a final revelation of his truth to the planet.

These are surely surprising thoughts. Let me refer you to The Urantia Book. First, as to the church in Philadelphia, note Jesus' final words to Abner:

"Jesus met Abner at Heshbon, and Andrew directed that the labors of the seventy should not be interrupted by the Passover feast; Jesus advised that the messengers should go forward with their work in complete disregard of what was about to happen at Jerusalem. He also counseled Abner to permit the women's corps, at least such as desired, to go to Jerusalem for the Passover. And this was the last time Abner ever saw Jesus in the flesh. His farewell to Abner was: "My son, I know you will be true to the kingdom, and I pray the Father to grant you wisdom that you may love and understand your brethren."

The book seems to indicate that Abner and his followers were unable to avail themselves of this grant of wisdom in later years. I believe it is wrong to conclude that, simply because the cult in Philadelphia held the truest concept for the longest time of Jesus' teachings about the kingdom, and included some of the folk from Bethany, that it necessarily was true to the Master's bestowal mission. Consider for a moment what the book has to say about the value and import of Jesus' teachings:

"You learn about God from Jesus by observing the divinity of his life, not by depending on his teachings. From the life of the Master you may each assimilate that concept of God which represents the measure of your capacity to perceive realities spiritual and divine, truths real and eternal. The finite can never hope to comprehend the Infinite except as the Infinite was focalized in the time-space personality of the finite experience of the human life of Jesus of Nazareth."

Further along, we are told:

"Jesus well knew that God can be known only by the realities of experience; never can he be understood by the mere teaching of the mind. Jesus taught his apostles that, while they never could fully understand God, they could most certainly know him, even as they had known the Son of Man. You can know God, not by understanding what Jesus said, but by knowing what Jesus was. Jesus was a revelation of God."

Continuing, we find:

"But mark you! never did Jesus say, "Whoso has heard me has heard God." But he did say, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." To hear Jesus' teaching is not equivalent to knowing God, but to see Jesus is an experience which in itself is a revelation of the Father to the soul. The God of universes rules the far-flung creation, but it is the Father in heaven who sends forth his spirit to dwell within your minds."

Finally:

"Jesus is the spiritual lens in human likeness which makes visible to the material creature Him who is invisible. He is your elder brother who, in the flesh, makes known to you a Being of infinite attributes whom not even the celestial hosts can presume fully to understand. But all of this must consist in the personal experience of the individual believer. God who is spirit can be known only as a spiritual experience. God can be revealed to the finite sons of the material worlds, by the divine Son of the spiritual realms, only as a Father. You can know the Eternal as a Father; you can worship him as the God of universes, the infinite Creator of all existences."

Given, then, that the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven is only peripherally related to Jesus' revelation of the Father to the individual believer, what is the function of this teaching that has given it such prominence over the past two thousand years? Consider the unusual effort which Jesus invested in the creation and stabilization of a myth focusing on this teaching:

"All morning Jesus had thought about his entry into Jerusalem. Heretofore he had always endeavored to suppress all public acclaim of him as the Messiah, but it was different now; he was nearing the end of his career in the flesh, his death had been decreed by the Sanhedrin, and no harm could come from allowing his disciples to give free expression to their feelings, just as might occur if he elected to make a formal and public entry into the city."

So what did he do?

"Having decided upon making a public entrance into Jerusalem, the Master was confronted with the necessity of choosing a proper method of executing such a resolve. Jesus thought over all of the many more or less contradictory so-called Messianic prophesies, but there seemed to be only one which was at all appropriate for him to follow. Most of these prophetic utterances depicted a king, the son and successor of David, a bold and aggressive temporal deliverer of all Israel from the yoke of foreign domination. But there was one Scripture that had sometimes been associated with the Messiah by those who held more to the spiritual concept of his mission, which Jesus thought might consistently be taken as a guide for his projected entry into Jerusalem. This Scripture was found in Zechariah, and it said:

"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king comes to you. He is just and he brings salvation. He comes as the lowly one, riding upon an ass, upon a colt, the foal of an ass."

Jesus seemed to use his divine mind to locate the required donkey, several miles away in Bethphage. After Peter and John had secured the beast and Jesus began his journey, we are told:

"When he had finished speaking, they began the descent of Olivet and presently were joined by the multitude of visitors who had come from Jerusalem waving palm branches, shouting hosannas, and otherwise expressing gleefulness and good fellowship. The Master had not planned that these crowds should come out from Jerusalem to meet them; that was the work of others. He never premeditated anything which was dramatic."

Apparently the premeditated decision to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah was not considered as dramatic at the time as we find it to be, looking back at these events through two thousand years of misconception.

I do not mean by these words to attack the significance of the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. Rather, I seek to free our mortal understanding of Jesus' revelation of the divine nature of the Father from misconceptions which are rooted in our own acculturation within a distortion of a myth projected by Jesus himself. In fact, Jesus was soon to perform that act which gave meaning to this entire Kingdom of Heaven rigamarole and enshrined within it the true core of socialized spiritual power which became his unique gift to humankind.

If the resurrection of Lazarus was judged Jesus' mightiest deed as a man, and if we may presume to say that the resurrection of himself in morontia form was, in some sense, the mightiest visible deed of Michael of Nebadon, the formerly incarnate deity; if the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth was the initial majestic consequence of Michael's attainment of Supremacy throughout the local universe, then the establishment of the Supper of Remembrance was the fullest expression of the conjoined human and divine natures in service to humankind on the planet of his bestowal.

For untold centuries the most enlightened individuals among humankind had sought to know God and to worship the divine presence. Primitive peoples worshipped the stone in which God dwelt. Slightly more advanced peoples worshipped the archetype of the sun, the cow, the harvest, or some other sustainer of human life. The power of the shaman lay in his ability to invoke the presence of the god and, in some cases, make it incarnate. The matchless Moses invented the Hebrew worship system which provided a sacred, private place for the invisible spirit of God to dwell (along with his favorite stones, of course) and receive worship from those most qualified to represent his chosen people. At last, God was recognized as spirit (of sorts), but the average person was now being denied access to the divine presence.

In establishing the Remembrance Supper, Jesus changed all this forever. The Remembrance Supper is a true sacrament because it encompasses a covenant that God has made with humankind. The power to invoke the presence of God has been given into the hands of all peoples. It was never required for man to worship God in the divine presence to be known, recognized, and loved, yet Jesus has here committed his divine self, the Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon, personally to receive the worship of his mortal children upon any and all such occasions throughout time and space. A fragment of the volitional ubiquity of supreme deity (never to be confused with the divine omnipresence) has been made subject to the human will, the decision to perform this single act, to celebrate the Supper of Remembrance.

And this covenant is directly related to Jesus' acceptance of Peter's confession and to the teaching of his deity as the Son of God. For in this covenant Michael has accepted the primitive human concept of God indwelling a thing and worship as a place and time dependent experience and has endowed this experience with cosmic reality. Michael has thus many times returned to the planet of his bestowal, though only spiritual eyes have beheld him.

But the Remembrance Supper is more than a mere covenant. It is a dynamic spiritual process by which the spirit, through the mediation of mind, attains mastery over the material and literal. And the Remembrance Supper is especially significant in the way it supports Jesus' true ideal and idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, for:

"The characteristic difference between a social occasion and a religious gathering is that in contrast with the secular the religious is pervaded by the atmosphere of communion. In this way human association generates a feeling of fellowship with the divine, and this is the beginning of group worship. Partaking of a common meal was the earliest type of social communion, and so did early religions provide that some portion of the ceremonial sacrifice should be eaten by the worshipers. Even in Christianity the Lord's Supper retains this mode of communion. The atmosphere of the communion provides a refreshing and comforting period of truce in the conflict of the self-seeking ego with the altruistic urge of the indwelling spirit Monitor. And this is the prelude to true worship--the practice of the presence of God which eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of man."