Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.” When Jesus heard that, He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. Then after this He said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” (John 11: 1-7)
So today we’re going to be looking in detail at John chapter 11, verse seven, and this will set us up for reflecting on the following couple of verses.
Thereupon – after this – He is saying to His disciples, “We should proceed going into Judea again. (Jonathan Mitchell New Testament)
We’ve already seen how the name Jesus, from a spiritual perspective, represents the more interior aspects of the Word, or Logos. And so far as the human mind is concerned, this name describes the operation of the Lord’s love for the salvation of the human race and its influx into the psychological structures of the human mind. This is constantly seeking out, that is, this influx is constantly seeking out what is its own within the mind that has been drawn from the Texts of Divine revelation. So speech in the Word represents the activity of thought and so when we read of the Jesus speaking, what is then signified is the coming to perception in the form of thought as an experience of what the Divine love is seeking. So when we read of Jesus
saying to his disciples, We should proceed going into Judea again,
we need to lift our thinking out of natural ideas of persons, places, times and spaces and give attention to how this might relate to what is spiritually relevant. For the Word of the Lord as to its internal meaning deals with nothing else than the processes and structures of the human mind and of the activity of the Word in bringing that mind through a progression of countless states of transition toward its regeneration.
So if Jesus represents the operation of the Lord’s love for the salvation of the human race, then His speech represents the perception of Divine truth flowing forth from that love into the human mind. So this statement,
we should proceed going into Judea again,
signifies the initiation of a change of state that the Lord’s love brings about in a mind receptive to its inflow. And that receptivity is only possible when there is within the mind what is His own upon which that love can act, this being what exists there that has been drawn from the letter of the Word, coupled with a desire for applying truth to life, or what is termed an active affection for truth. And so when we talk about applying truths to life, we mean the life of the mind and the specific means of applying things has to do with the act of self examination and repentance, or what is termed in the Greek, metanoia.
Good or love becomes truth when it is perceived within the human mind. This is because truth is good in a form that can be intellectually perceived. The interior love of the Logos or Word represented by Jesus becoming truth is represented by him speaking, by Him saying to his disciples. So the disciples themselves represent those psychic structures that are built up within the mind through the continual practice of the Word. His disciples, spiritually understood, constitute our understanding of the Word into which influx from the Divine can be received, and by which the Lord can be perceived, and so responded to.
Once a psychological state connected to the regeneration of the human mind has been consolidated, so that mind exists in a state of stability. This then becomes the base from which the advance to a new state is created can be initiated. By definition, spiritual transitions from one stable psychological state of mind to another involve a movement into intermediary psychological states that lack the stability of the originating state, but must be embraced for the regenerative process to advance. So such intermediary states of mind are represented in the word by journeyings, or a movement through space and time from one place to another. So from a Logopraxis perspective, this statement,
We should proceed going into Judea again,
indicates a transition toward a new state being initiated by the operation of the Word within the human mind as it is being applied to its life.
It should be remembered that what the Lord speaks must come to pass. And here, as elsewhere, the utterance of the Lord is the continuous projection of Divine law or Divine order into the individual and collective human mind. And that law, that Divine presence, is that which governs the recreation or regeneration of the mind. Now this can be seen if we remove our thought from what is natural or sensuous when reading the Word. In particular regarding the name Judea here, we are not to think of it as a place, but as something describing a spiritual or psychological state. And following on from that, we can see that if we take the Holy Land as a whole, we have represented the full complex of spiritual states that make up the psychological operating ground of the Word or the logos within the human mind. That land at the time of the Lord’s first advent was divided into three regions or states and so represented the three great general states found within the human mind. These went by the names of the state of Galilee, the state of Samaria, and the state of Judea. By Galilee is represented that degree or state of mind that is concerned with how to act in life. By Samaria is that degree that gives energy to understanding concepts and principles that are hopefully aligned with our values. And by Judea we have represented the seat of our sense of self or what is often referred to as proprium and this is where the affections and loves belonging to the will reside.
Now, as the regeneration of the human mind involves, representatively, the raising of Lazarus from out of the midst of that which is dead, the Lord says to his disciples,
we should proceed going into Judea again.
The spiritual life involves being placed in front of the unbelief and resistance of the human will to the authority of the Word. Therefore, the Word leads the seeking soul back into Judea again, and again, and again. What this illustrates is that there is a continual movement or cycle whereby the things belonging to the infernal proprium have to be brought to the surface or brought to consciousness and it is these aspects that are termed evils. For what is resistant to what is genuinely of heaven needs to be exposed if we are to be able to have it dealt with and have our sense of self moved into a new state of being. So it is these evils or this resistance to the things of heaven to the Lord himself, to what is good and true, that is the state of spiritual death. And this must be exposed through the work of self examination. There is no other way that that a reciprocity between the Lord and ourself can actually take place other than through the removal of what is preventing us from experiencing the Lord in all his fullness. So it is through this process of self examination and subsequent repentance that a new human, a new proprium, a heavenly proprium is able to be raised up, and it is raised up through the transformation that the shunning of evils as sins against the Lord facilitates.
Now, this is what is meant by metanoia, or that change of mind that comes when the natural finally is made subservient to what is spiritual. And the initiation of this is what is represented by what this verse states.
Thereupon after this, he is saying to his disciples, we should proceed going into Judea again.
So that completes our look at verse 7 and hopefully that sets us up for exploring the next step in this series which is verses 8 and 9 in this process toward seeing Lazarus raised from out from among the dead.