Swami Vivekananda - Christ The Messenger, @Yoga
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Christ the Messenger
by
Swami Vivekananda
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Date:
27 November 2013
Background
Swami Vivekananda first went to the West in 1893. Between 1893 to 1897, he widely travelled to many
states of the United States and England, and conducted hundreds of public private lectures and classes.
In 1897 he came back to India.
In 1899, he went to the West for the second time. He delivered the following lecture “Christ the
Messenger” in 1900 at Los Angeles, California.
Christ, The Messenger
The wave rises on the ocean, and there is a hollow. Again another wave rises, perhaps bigger than the
former, to fall down again, similarly, again to rise — driving onward. In the march of events, we notice
the rise and fall, and we generally look towards the rise, forgetting the fall. But both are necessary, and
both are great. This is the nature of the universe. Whether in the world of our thoughts, the world of our
relations in society, or in our spiritual affairs, the same movement of succession, of rises and falls, is
going on. Hence great predominances in the march of events, the liberal ideals, are marshalled ahead,
to sink down, to digest, as it were, to ruminate over the past — to adjust, to conserve, to gather strength
once more for a rise and a bigger rise.
The history of nations also has ever been like that. The great soul, the Messenger we are to study this
afternoon, came at a period of the history of his race which we may well designate as a great fall. We
catch only little glimpses here and there of the stray records that have been kept of his sayings and
doings; for verily it has been well said, that the doings and sayings of that great soul would fill the
world if they had all been written down. And the three years of his ministry were like one compressed,
concentrated age, which it has taken nineteen hundred years to unfold, and who knows how much
longer it will yet take! Little men like you and me are simply the recipients of just a little energy. A few
minutes, a few hours, a few years at best, are enough to spend it all, to stretch it out, as it were, to its
fullest strength, and then we are gone for ever. But mark this giant that came; centuries and ages pass,
yet the energy that he left upon the world is not yet stretched, nor yet expended to its full. It goes on
adding new vigour as the ages roll on.
Now what you see in the life of Christ is the life of all the past. The life of every man is, in a manner,
the life of the past. It comes to him through heredity, through surroundings, through education, through
his own reincarnation — the past of the race. In a manner, the past of the earth, the past of the whole
world is there, upon every soul. What are we, in the present, but a result, an effect, in the hands of that
infinite past? What are we but floating waveless in the eternal current of events, irresistibly moved
forward and onward and incapable of rest? But you and I are only little things, bubbles. There are
always some giant waves in the ocean of affairs, and in you and me the life of the past race has been
embodied only a little; but there are giants who embody, as it were, almost the whole of the past and
who stretch out their hands for the future. These are the sign-posts here and there which point to the
march of humanity; these are verily gigantic, their shadows covering the earth — they stand undying,
eternal! As it has been said by the same Messenger, "No man hath seen God at any time, but through
the Son." And that is true. And where shall we see God but in the Son? It is true that you and I, and the
poorest of us, the meanest even, embody that God, even reflect that God. The vibration of light is
everywhere, omnipresent; but we have to strike the light of the lamp before we can see the light. The
Omnipresent God of the universe cannot be seen until He is reflected by these giant lamps of the earth
— The Prophets, the man-Gods, the Incarnations, the embodiments of God.
We all know that God exists, and yet we do not see Him, we do not understand Him. Take one of these
great Messengers of light, compare his character with the highest ideal of God that you ever formed,
and you will find that your God falls short of the ideal, and that the character of the Prophet exceeds
your conceptions. You cannot even form a higher ideal of God than what the actually embodied have
practically realised and set before us as an example. Is it wrong, therefore, to worship these as God? Is
it a sin to fall at the feet of these man-Gods and worship them as the only divine beings in the world? If
they are really, actually, higher than all our conceptions of God, what harm is there in worshipping
them? Not only is there no harm, but it is the only possible and positive way of worship. However
much you may try by struggle, by abstraction, by whatsoever method you like, still so long as you are a
man in the world of men, your world is human, your religion is human, and your God is human. And
that must be so. Who is not practical enough to take up an actually existing thing and give up an idea
which is only an abstraction, which he cannot grasp, and is difficult of approach except through a
concrete medium? Therefore, these Incarnations of God have been worshipped in all ages and in all
countries.
We are now going to study a little of the life of Christ, the Incarnation of the Jews. When Christ was
born, the Jews were in that state which I call a state of fall between two waves; a state of conservatism;
a state where the human mind is, as it were, tired for the time being of moving forward and is taking
care only of what it has already; a state when the attention is more bent upon particulars, upon details,
than upon the great, general, and bigger problems of life; a state of stagnation, rather than a towing
ahead; a state of suffering more than of doing. Mark you, I do not blame this state of things. We have
no right to criticise it — because had it not been for this fall, the next rise, which was embodied in
Jesus of Nazareth would have been impossible. The Pharisees and Sadducees might have been
insincere, they might have been doing things which they ought not to have done; they might have been
even hypocrites; but whatever they were, these factors were the very cause, of which the Messenger
was the effect. The Pharisees and Sadducees at one end were the very impetus which came out at the
other end as the gigantic brain of Jesus of Nazareth.
The attention to forms, to formulas, to the everyday details of religion, and to rituals, may sometimes
be laughed at; but nevertheless, within them is strength. Many times in the rushing forward we lose
much strength. As a fact, the fanatic is stronger than the liberal man. Even the fanatic, therefore, has
one great virtue, he conserves energy, a tremendous amount of it. As with the individual so with the
race, energy is gathered to be conserved. Hemmed in all around by external enemies, driven to focus in
a centre by the Romans, by the Hellenic tendencies in the world of intellect, by waves from Persia,
India, and Alexandria — hemmed in physically, mentally, and morally — there stood the race with an
inherent, conservative, tremendous strength, which their descendants have not lost even today. And the
race was forced to concentrate and focus all its energies upon Jerusalem and Judaism. But all power
when once gathered cannot remain collected; it must expend and expand itself. There is no power on
earth which can be kept long confined within a narrow limit. It cannot be kept compressed too long to
allow of expansion at a subsequent period.
This concentrated energy amongst the Jewish race found its expression at the next period in the rise of
Christianity. The gathered streams collected into a body. Gradually, all the little streams joined together,
and became a surging wave on the top of which we find standing out the character of Jesus of Nazareth.
Thus, every Prophet is a creation of his own times, the creation of the past of his race; he himself is the
creator of the future. The cause of today is the effect of the past and the cause for the future. In this
position stands the Messenger. In him is embodied all that is the best and greatest in his own race, the
meaning, the life, for which that race has struggled for ages; and he himself is the impetus for the
future, not only to his own race but to unnumbered other races of the world.
We must bear another fact in mind: that my view of the great Prophet of Nazareth would be from the
standpoint of the Orient. Many times you forget, also, that the Nazarene himself was an Oriental of
Orientals. With all your attempts to paint him with blue eyes and yellow hair, the Nazarene was still an
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