51 The new earth is already there
LG51
His students asked him:
When will the dead find rest
and when will the new earth come?
He told them:
What you expect has already come,
but you don’t recognize it.
The first logion of the Thomas gospel started like this:
Everyone who understands these words
death will not taste.
Logion 18 and 19 already provided an explanation of that promise. Logion 18 says:
Fortunately he who is standing in the beginning
He will know the end
and do not taste death.
Logion 19 perhaps makes it even more puzzling than it already was:
Fortunately he who was before he was there.
So there is the beginning, that beginning was apparently there before you existed and if you stand in it you will not taste death.
Logion 2 adds that you will then find peace.
Nice promises, for sure. What does it mean? The students ask again. Apparently it is still not clear to them.
And they add something to the question about the peace of the dead:
When will the new earth come?
So now it is no longer just about the personal redemption of death, but also about a new earth. That is a big step further.
For your personal salvation you should look for something within yourself that already existed before you were born.
The same applies to the entire earth! The new earth that Isaiah predicted is already there. Isaiah said (65:17):
See, I create a new heaven and a new earth.
Isaiah is entirely focused on the future. That new heaven and earth are yet to come, in the future. They will one day be created by Yahweh. Not by man, therefore, but by Yahweh.
Jesus – radically – reverses that. That so-called new earth is already there, has always been there. The students do not recognize it. They also do not understand what was said in the previous logion that the unique and sacred uniqueness of each individual and of the All can be obscured behind the belief in all kinds of images that do not correspond to that.
That new earth, which is not new at all, can only be recognized in the here and now by releasing all those images.
LG51^BM CON~LG1/2/18/19
