Chapter One-Pentecost
Serializing Rudolf Steiner’s Fifth Gospel in Story Form (1991)
The awakening itself was a strange experience. The Disciples felt that something from the Cosmos had descended upon them, or perhaps had returned with them from a long sleep. It seemed to the Disciples that they were awaking after living for many, many days in a dream into which all of them had fallen. They talked among themselves about the condition that had just passed, which had affected all of them equally. Peter, John and James all were forced to admit how they had fallen into the deepest of sleep-like conditions, between what we know as Ascension and Pentecost.
During the forty days, they walked about in a kind of sleep in which each of them carried out all the affairs of everyday life. They went about just like a normal person, and people did not notice their different state of consciousness. The Disciples agreed it had been a wonderful, dream-filled sleep, a sleep that pervaded them not with mere dream-pictures, but with pictures of a heightened consciousness, bringing them experience of things as they are in the full day light of Spirit.
As they looked back, visions of mighty events just transpired lit up inside them, as submerged dreams rise into wakefulness in the morning. Gradually the Apostles recalled and understood what had occurred between the Mystery of Golgotha and Ascension. It was as if they rubbed their eyes, looked back into recent memories and said: ‘During this time, we were together with Him first here, then there. He spoke with us, but only now is what happened becoming clear to us. Awakened by the Spirit of Cosmic Love, these men awakened to a new understanding of things they had just passed through, things which had occurred in the most intimate connection with their own souls, but which they had gone through in a dream-like state and not fully grasped.
They called the new presence in their souls the Substance of All-prevailing Love. The Disciples felt as if they had been quickened from on high by this Love, as if this Love had come down and joined intimately with the soul of each of them.
The Disciples realized what had taken place in the larger sense too. What had been previously only outside the Earth, outside in the Cosmos, was now in and of the Earth. The Earth had been re-membered with the love forces of God. They felt wakened and warmed by this primal force of Love waking and warming the Universe.
To the other people observing and those who came to hear how they were speaking, the Disciples seemed altogether strange. Other believers around the Disciples knew the men who followed Christ Jesus were men who had lived their whole lives very simply, in a simplicity that would be extraordinary for our time; this was known. A few of the Disciples had certainly behaved somewhat strangely during recent days, as if lost in a dream. But now it seemed to their friends that the men closest to Jesus had become transformed, as if their souls had been made new. They seemed to have lost all narrowness, all selfishness; they seemed to possess largeness of heart, an all-embracing tolerance, and a deep understanding of and good humor for everything that is human.
Moreover, they were able to express themselves so anyone could understand the meaning of their words. If a person spoke one-on-one to a Disciple, the other felt the Disciple was looking into his heart and read there the deepest, innermost secrets of the supplicant’s soul. Using this ability, the Disciples were able to console any and every single individual who came to them and to say what was needed for that person. It was soon the talk of the town that such a transformation had taken place in a number of men all at once.
Peter’s experience was like that of a man who wakes in the morning and recalls the last events of the night before. When we look into the innermost soul of Peter, it was dawning on him that his normal waking consciousness had been completely absent when he had denied Christ three times.
He looked back on the scene, remembering how he had been asked whether he knew the Galilean. He realized he had denied any such connection because his complete waking consciousness had already begun to fade as an intermediate state of consciousness began to set in like an outspreading night, making clear thinking impossible. In a kind of dream, he had withdrawn into an altogether different world. In this way Peter was able to understand his recent actions and forgive himself for the triple Denial that obsessed him when he first awoke.
Once relieved of this burden, there now dawned in Peter’s soul — indeed in the souls of all the Disciples — an understanding of what had happened on Golgotha. All associations that Peter had slept through the last number of days, rose like a clairvoyant dream before his soul. Before the eyes of Peter came pictures of the Mystery of Golgotha. Because he was now quickened by the All-prevailing Love, he was able to gaze at those events with a full understanding. He realized that the body on the Cross was the same body he had often accompanied in life. Jesus had died on the Cross. Yet Peter knew the dying was actually more like a birth, a birthing to the Earth of that Spirit now pouring into himself and into the other Disciples. Peter felt it as a ray of aeonic Love penetrating his soul, born when Jesus died on the Cross. The All-prevailing Cosmic love, which had only been present outside and around the Earth previously, was now been born into the Earth.
Peter began to fathom that the rest of his life would be concerned — not with the things that give value to Earthly existence, but with what radiates out from the awakened human heart. We will return to Pentecost when it occurs chronologically in our story.
