54 QUESTION: Will you tell us the spiritual significance of Good Friday, please?
ANSWER: The spiritual significance of Good Friday is to take the cross that you have made upon your own shoulders. What does that mean? That you have produced circumstances in your life, in your former incarnations as well as in this life, by conscious as well as unconscious deviations from truth and divine law. This is a heavy burden.
By taking the cross upon yourself, you say Yes to self-responsibility and so to your fate. By the mere act of saying Yes, you are ready to dissolve this cross, to go through the difficulties, through the crucifixion in as positive and healthy a spirit as possible. And when I say positive, I do not mean for you to deny the existence of the difficulties, but to accept them knowing that you have produced them. They are of your own doing, whether you can see this, as you do in some instances, or not, as in others.
By finding the cause in your own erroneous actions and reactions, you take the cross upon yourself. You neither rebel against the difficulties by trying to tell yourself that an unjust fate has come upon you, nor do you indulge in a false piety by suffering the consequences of your wrong actions, thoughts or emotions, without trying to find what in you has caused them, but rather believing it to be the will of God that you simply suffer without understanding the origin of your suffering.
Only by taking the cross upon yourself in this sense will you be reborn in spirit. In that way, your own resurrection will take place. The new, free life will come to you by releasing your inner creative and healthy forces that are blocked, as long as you ignore the cause of your suffering that must lie within yourself. The release of all the petrification will be possible whenever you find that you have deviated from truth.
Thus will flow through you the life force that was turned into a destructive force by ignorantly using it in the wrong way. This is the rebirth and the resurrection that Jesus Christ showed in the symbolic act he demonstrated, apart from the spiritual meaning I have already explained in connection with the Plan of Salvation.
Every individual entity, believing in Christ or not, will have to go through this procedure before true light and release can come. The inner soul-action is the same that Jesus demonstrated in outer deeds.
But I would like to stress here that Jesus’ crucifixion did not merely take place to demonstrate symbolically what everyone must experience inwardly. The greater significance of his life and death in the entire Plan of Salvation I have already discussed [Lectures #19-22] and do not have to repeat now.
