NEUOFFENBARUNGAbgarus wrote this letter three weeks after the Lord’s reply to the fourth letter.
BJ.01_Brief_5,01 Abgarus, a little prince of Edessa, sends greetings from us children of the night to Jesus, the good Saviour who has appeared in the land of the Jews around Jerusalem as the primordial light and the eternal primal power that makes everything anew, heavens, worlds and beings. The first to be called do not recognise him, yet those who have languished in darkness for thousands of years do.
BJ.01_Brief_5,02 O Lord, what mortal could grasp the greatness of your love for us human beings, who are only your creatures? Out of this love you now wish to make all things new, and yet you yourself wish to walk a path that seems to my human understanding almost impossible and inconceivable for God.
BJ.01_Brief_5,03 Though you are present on this earth, which you could blow away with a breath, as an ordinary person among other people, you nevertheless govern and sustain all infinity from your innermost divine being. Every speck of dust on earth, every drop in the sea, the sun, moon and countless stars heed the almighty voice of your heart, the eternal centre of all things and beings in all infinity.
BJ.01_Brief_5,04 How endlessly blessed your disciples must be if, in the brightest daylight of their spirits, they recognise you even as I, a poor sinner, do out of my night.
BJ.01_Brief_5,05 If only my feet were not lame, I would have been with you long ago. As it is, my wretched feet have kept me from my greatest joy. Yet now I bear it all gladly, for you, O Lord, have deemed me worthy enough to speak by letter with a poor fool like me and teach me so many wondrous things that I could learn only from you, O Lord, and never from a human being.
BJ.01_Brief_5,06 What did I once know of a life after death? All the wise people in the world could not have solved this riddle for me. Our teaching about many gods offers an imagined immortality, but it is no more like reality than one empty dream is like another in which you walk across the sea and sail a ship across the land.
BJ.01_Brief_5,07 But you, O Lord, have shown me in word and deed that only after the death of our very frail bodies does a most perfect, true and free life of the spirit begin, to remain unchanged for ever.
BJ.01_Brief_5,08 For this reason I have made it my duty to offer you in this letter my most fitting thanks for this boundless grace, O Lord, though my thanks amount to nothing at all beside it.
BJ.01_Brief_5,09 But what, O Lord, could I give you that you had not first given me?
BJ.01_Brief_5,10 It seems to me that true thanks from the heart are perhaps the one thing most truly our own, since ingratitude surely belongs to us entirely. So I can offer you nothing, O Lord, but my poor thanks, with the fullest assurance that I stand ready to put into effect at once in my small state whatever you graciously command me. In accordance with your wish, I not only had the great offender against the state released from prison at once but also brought him straight to my school and to my table.
BJ.01_Brief_5,11 My human understanding is insufficient to judge whether I acted rightly or, as people say, did too much of a good thing. So I come to you in this letter about this matter too, O Lord, asking you graciously to give me the right guidance.
BJ.01_Brief_5,12 My love, my thanks and my most childlike obedience are yours alone, O Lord Jesus. May your will be done.