Dear Friends,
The seventh step in our meditations on the First Beatitude comes from Robert Powell’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer Course, available on the Sophia Foundation’s website as pdf. (For the first of these meditations, and their background motivation, see here; for the second meditation see here; for the third see here; for the fourth see here; for the fifth see here; for the sixth see here).
The first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Imagine Jesus being “led by the spirit into the wilderness... and he fasted”—he was so poor that the support of the elements failed him. Jesus was led into the wilderness by the same Spirit represented by the dove at the Baptism, and there he now met objectively (from without) the two powers who had been driven out of him by the dove. Prior to this he had to fast for forty days. Fasting brings about a condition of being less physical. Here it means that the four elements were not present.
Earth – fact; water – metamorphosis; air – human interest in everything; fire – warmth. He had no support from anything fixed, no formative forces, no stimuli, and no warmth. He had to create everything from his own resources. All the supports offered to the human being on earth failed him. Fasting is an imaginative picture of this. Then, after the forty days in the wilderness, he became a “giver.” The World Teacher brings something extra to the Earth. In the “wilderness”: this indicates he was left totally to the resources of the Spirit. And then temptation came upon him, upon the nameless, poor, and hungry One—to tempt him with false glory. The first three petitions of the Lord’s prayer contain the overcoming of the three temptations in the wilderness: Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.
With Jesus Christ, the Resurrection was a birth. During the entire three years on Earth he was occupied with building up his resurrection body, from an embryonic state. In this analogy the Baptism corresponds to conception and the Resurrection to birth, so the three years in between are “embryonic.”
From the Maltese tradition one knows that the Angels who served Christ after the temptation were those of the twelve apostles. This is why the apostles failed him, because they were without their Angels. The Angels served and helped Christ with the building up of his resurrection body, and enabled human beings to understand Christ by transmitting his words. For example, at the Sermon on the Mount one must imagine that the twelve Angels of the apostles were around Christ, then the twelve apostles, and then the other human beings. At the event of Pentecost, when Christ had completed building up his resurrection body, the Angels returned to the apostles.