THE VISION OF THE CROSS.
1. [97 (xii.)] And having danced these things with us, Beloved, the Lord went out. And we, as though beside ourselves, or wakened out of sleep, fled each our several ways.
2. I, however, though I saw the beginning of His passion could not stay to the end, but fled unto the Mount of Olives weeping over that which had befallen.
3. And when He was hung on the tree of the cross, at the sixth hour of the day darkness came over the whole earth.
And my Lord stood in the midst of the Cave, and filled it with light, and said:
4. “John, to the multitude below, in Jerusalem, I am being crucified, and pierced with spears and reeds, and vinegar and gall is being given Me to drink. To thee now I speak, and give ear to what I say. ’Twas I who put it in thy heart to ascend this Mount, that thou mightest hear what disciple should learn from Master, and man from God.”
5. [98 (xiii.)] And having thus spoken, He showed me a Cross of Light set up, and round the Cross a vast multitude, and therein one form and a similar appearance, and in the Cross another multitude not having one form.
6. And I beheld the Lord Himself above the Cross. He had, however, no shape, but only as it were a voice—not, however, this voice to which we are accustomed, but one of its own kind and beneficent and truly of God, saying unto me:
7. “John, one there needs must be to hear those things, from Me; for I long for one who will hear.
8. “This Cross of Light is called by Me for your sakes sometimes Word (Logos), sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes Door, sometimes Way, sometimes Bread, sometimes Seed, sometimes Resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes Life, sometimes Truth, sometimes Faith, sometimes Grace.
9. “Now those things [it is called] as towards men; but as to what it is in truth, itself in its own meaning to itself, and declared unto Us, [it is] the defining (or delimitation) of all things, both the firm necessity of things fixed from things unstable, and the ‘harmony’ of Wisdom.
10. “And as it is Wisdom in ‘harmony,’ there are those on the Right and those on the Left—powers, authorities, principalities, and dæmons, energies, threats, powers of wrath, slanderings—and the Lower Root from which hath come forth the things in genesis.
11 [99]. “This, then, is the Cross which by the Word (Logos) hath been the means of ‘cross-beaming’ all things—at the same time separating off the things that proceed from genesis and those below it [from those above], and also compacting them all into one.
12. “But this is not the cross of wood which thou shalt see when thou descendest hence; nor am I he that is upon the cross—[I] whom now thou seest not, but only hearest a voice.
13. “I was held [to be] what I am not, not being what I was to many others; nay, they will call Me something else, abject and not worthy of Me. As, then, the Place of Rest is neither seen nor spoken of, much more shall I, the Lord of it, be neither seen [nor spoken of].
14. [100 (xiv.)] “Now the multitude of one appearance round the Cross is the Lower Nature. And as to those whom thou seest in the Cross, if they have not also one form, [it is because] the whole Race (or every Limb) of Him who descended hath not yet been gathered together.
15. “But when the Upper Nature, yea, the Race that is coming unto Me, in obedience to My Voice, is taken up, then thou who now hearkenest to Me, shalt become it, and it shall no longer be what it is now, but above them as I am now.
16. “For so long as thou callest not thyself Mine, I am not what I am. But if thou hearkenest unto Me, hearing, thou, too, shalt be as I [am], and I shall be what I was, when thou [art] as I am with Myself; for from this thou art.
17. “Pay no attention, then, to the many, and them that are without the mystery think little of; for know that I am wholly with the Father and the Father with Me.
18. [101 (xv.)] “Nothing, then, of the things which they will say of Me have I suffered; nay that Passion as well which I showed unto thee and the rest, by dancing [it], I will that it be called a mystery.
19. “What thou art, thou seest; this did I show unto thee. But what I am, this I alone know, [and] none else.
20. “What, then, is Mine suffer Me to keep; but what is thine see thou through Me. To see Me as I really am I said is not possible, but only what thou art able to recognise, as being kin [to Me] (or of the same Race).
21. “Thou hearest that I suffered; yet I did not suffer: that I suffered not; yet I did suffer: that I was pierced; yet was I not smitten: that I was hanged; yet I was not hanged: that blood flowed from me; yet it did not flow: and in a word the things they say about Me I had not, and the things they do not say those I suffered. Now what they are I will riddle for thee; for I know that thou wilt understand.
22. “Understand, therefore, in Me, the slaying of a Word (Logos), the piercing of a Word, the blood of a Word, the wounding of a Word, the hanging of a Word, the passion of a Word, the nailing (or putting together) of a Word, the death of a Word.
23. “And thus I speak separating off the man. First, then, understand the Word, then shalt thou understand the Lord, and in the third place [only] the man and what he suffered.”
24. [102 (xvi.)] And having said these things to me, and others which I know not how to say as He Himself would have it, He was taken up, no one of the multitude beholding Him.
25. And when I descended I laughed at them all, when they told Me what they did concerning Him, firmly possessed in myself of this [truth] only, that the Lord contrived all things symbolically, and according to [His] dispensation for the conversion and salvation of man.