- 28 - Between the Father and Christ there prevails a perfect unity of love, and every one of God’s creatures can attain this unity with the Father. Christ asks God for it on behalf of his disciples: John 17: 22-23: ‘that they may be one, as we are one, I united with them, and Thou with me, so that they may attain to the highest perfection of unity with us.’ • You see how illogical it is for your church [the Catholic Church] to base its contention of the divinity of Christ upon the statement ‘I and the Father are one’ – considering that the same oneness that the Son has with the Father is promised to all who believe. If you will study those remarks of Christ in which he describes his relationship with his Father, you will see how sacrilegious it is to refer to Christ as God, to picture him as the giver, whereas he is but the recipient and can give to others only what he himself receives from God. – • The same sacrilege with which the Jews charged Christ when they falsely asserted that he made himself God’s equal is committed today by the people who make Christ God in spite of the fact that Christ himself spurned any such pretensions. Christ’s teaching concerning his own person, concerning the source of his doctrine and the might and power he possesses was, consequently, that he had received each and every thing from the Father. In and of himself he has nothing. He is not God. There were things God withheld, even from Christ, and which He reserved to Himself. Witness Christ’s answer to the sons of Zebedee: Matthew 20: 23: ‘The places at my right and at my left are not mine to give, for they will be bestowed upon those to whom they are allotted by my Father.’ The Day of Judgment is also not known to the Son, but to the Father alone: Matthew 24: 36: ‘The day and the hour of fulfillment are known to no one, neither to the angels of heaven, nor to the Son, but to my Father alone.’ Christ also did not obtain permission from God to evade the agony of death upon the Cross. Hence his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane that the cup be permitted to pass by him was not heard. Christ’s own family, as well as the Apostles and those of the people who believed in him, saw in him nothing more than a ‘prophet’ – ‘God’s emissary’.. It is true that his mother knew that in him was incarnated one of the ‘Sons of God’, for this had been revealed to her by the angel before Christ was born. But she was also aware that he was human and that he had human infirmities. His conduct in public and the doctrines preached by him did not meet with her approval. She had known that his teachings differed substantially from the doctrines held by the Jewish religion, but to see him proclaim his views openly to the multitudes weighed heavily upon her. She had pictured his mission on earth in a very different light, and when she heard that Jesus in his sermons had spoken out strongly against the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people and had publicly branded as false many of the tenets of their ancient faith, she, in company with her other sons, sought to restrain him, and even tried to compel him to return to his parental home, believing that in this way she could allay the ill will that his actions had aroused among the priests, scribes and Pharisees.
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