NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
4 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_009,01] Set down another passage, then, and we shall see how it fits our subject.
[Ste.01_009,02] ‘When evening came, He came with the Twelve.’
[Ste.01_009,03] We have the passage before us, and I must make the old observation again: you still have not managed to find a passage that does not fit our subject exactly. Outwardly this one seems to have little in common with our subject, but that is by no means the case. It has the closest possible bearing on it, and if you had not chosen it, I would have done so!
[Ste.01_009,04] ‘When it was evening, He came with the Twelve.’
[Ste.01_009,05] Who came? The Lord from eternity came.
[Ste.01_009,06] When? In the evening.
[Ste.01_009,07] And where did He come? Into the dining room prepared by His disciples.
[Ste.01_009,08] With whom? With His twelve chosen apostles.
[Ste.01_009,09] What did He do in the dining room? He held a supper at which some were satisfied and some took offence. At the supper that same evening the betrayer was also identified.
[Ste.01_009,10] Here you have the whole picture before you, and its meaning is plain enough to grasp with your hands.
[Ste.01_009,11] What is evening? It is the half-lit state of the day in which the light keeps fading until at last no effect of the sun's rays can be detected anywhere.
[Ste.01_009,12] When does such an evening come for a person? Spiritually considered, it comes when he has already read and studied a great deal. This extensive reading and study resembles the falling of the sun's rays throughout the day. Just as these rays in their appearance are of a natural kind, so are the rays of reading and study. But the sun sets at the end of the day, and evening follows at once, and at last night.
[Ste.01_009,13] It is the same with the light of reading and study. In the end the reader and student grows weary and ill-tempered because all his reading and study have not enabled him to increase his inward light, any more than the light of the sun can be increased in itself. It remains in its regular proportions. It is stronger in summer and weaker in winter, always waxing and waning in the same proportion. So too the morning light is weaker, then increases towards noon and grows weaker again towards evening.
[Ste.01_009,14] So it is with the outward education a person gets through reading and study. When he begins reading and studying in a well-stocked library, it is his morning of reading and study.
[Ste.01_009,15] When he has read his eyes sore over several years and already thinks he has eaten Solomon's wisdom by the spoonful, it is his noon, or his summer.
[Ste.01_009,16] He reads and studies on, but unfortunately finds nothing new and comes across only ideas he already knows. He grows weary. First, he can find no fresh, refreshing nourishment. Second, all his further reading and study give him no evidence for the theories he has imbibed. Instead he often finds the strongest refutations of everything he made his own with such great zeal and effort.
[Ste.01_009,17] What he truly took for gold often turns to lead. Once he recognises this metal of little worth within himself in place of gold, he becomes gloomy and disheartened, loses every footing and at last stands like a traveller on an Alpine pasture hemmed in by thick mist.
[Ste.01_009,18] See, this state is a person's evening. The common saying is, ‘When all a man's ropes snap, he crawls to the cross!’ It would of course be better to say, ‘The cross crawls over him.’
[Ste.01_009,19] In his distress he then begins to wonder whether there is anything to Christ's teaching. This thought resembles the passage, ‘And He, the Lord, came there with the Twelve in the evening.’ The person in distress understands the Lord here as the founder of the teaching and the Twelve as the teaching itself.
[Ste.01_009,20] Where does He come with the Twelve? Into the room furnished with food and drink!
[Ste.01_009,21] Who is this room? The person himself in his evening. He has an abundance of food and drink within him. But the one for whom the food has been, or ought to have been, prepared is absent. The dishes therefore stand there until the one comes who would bless the food and then partake of it. Without someone to eat it, the food is in vain and has no value.
[Ste.01_009,22] So all learning and wide reading have no value, and the person has furnished his spiritual dining room and laid his table with them in vain, if the one is absent who blesses the food, eats it and turns it into a vital juice that gives life to the spirit.
[Ste.01_009,23] But the Lord comes in the evening with the Twelve, the founder with His teaching. He enters the room, sits at the table, blesses the food and eats it. Because the food is natural in kind, its effect is like the effect of that supper at which the Lord establishes a true, living supper in deeds of love. Many disciples take offence at this and say, ‘What a hard teaching this is! Who can believe and follow it?’ The disciples then go away, and soon the betrayer is identified.
[Ste.01_009,24] Who are the disciples who take offence and go away? They are the false conclusions drawn from all the reading and study. These are set against the principles of Christ's teaching as contrary to them. Soon a general objection is raised as follows: ‘A teaching so full of individual contradictions cannot possibly be of divine origin. It is only a passing, shallow product of people without scholarly training and therefore necessarily inconsistent. In some crude earlier age they laboriously cobbled together a selection of ideas so that they could make poor humanity pay them tribute and interest.’
[Ste.01_009,25] In this way, as you say, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. Or, to put it another way, the betrayer is identified, soon goes away, and does what he was named as doing: he delivers the Living One up to death and perishes himself in the process. That is the night that follows the evening, when all is dead within the person.
[Ste.01_009,26] And so I truly come to everyone in the evening with the Twelve and find the dining room and table laid, but all the food is of a natural kind. I eat it, or approve of it, on condition that it be changed into food of active love. I say that this should be done in remembrance of Me or in My name, rather than in one's own name for self-love, self-honour and self-praise. Then the disciples begin to take offence and turn against Me. Judas is soon sitting there naked, and before long the death sentence against Me is proclaimed by way of such betrayal.
[Ste.01_009,27] So do not wait for evening. Call Me in the morning, when you are still strong and receptive. Then I shall come to you and say, ‘Do not walk too much in the rays of the sun. They weary you and make you inactive. Rather take strength under the cooling shade of the tree of life so that you remain vigorous in deed all day!’ And if I come to you in the evening too, you will know Me very well. When I ask you, ‘How is your dining room furnished? Have you perhaps nothing to eat? Are you hungry?’, you will have only a small and scant supply of food to show Me. Yet I shall bless it and sit with you at the table where no betrayer awaits Me any more. That is, I shall expand the little knowledge you have into central suns, so that you may have light from it in endless abundance.
[Ste.01_009,28] I think the passage ‘And He came there with the Twelve in the evening …’ should now stand exceedingly clear before everyone's eyes and fully cover the matter. Even so, I do not yet intend to set a limit to My generosity.