gospel of Thomas 88

Jesus said, "The angels and the prophets will come to you and give to you those things you (already) have. And you too, give them those things which you have, and say to yourselves, 'When will they come and take what is theirs?'"

The second half of this saying from Jesus doesn't mean much to me. But the first half carries one of the most important messages of all spiritual teachings. And if we can understand this, then we have taken a big step towards liberation.

Jesus says that the angels and the prophets will come to you and give you what you already have. The angels: messengers of God, the mysterious, something beyond the material. And the prophets: the prophets are humans, no different to you and me. And yet they have seen something of truth. And the prophets, they are trying to share that, a deeper truth.

The angels and the prophets will come to you – the unmanifest and the manifest. It's coming to you from two directions: the mysterious, otherworldly, intangible; and in very simple human forms, the material world that we know and love. The same thing is coming to you from both directions.

The angels and the prophets will come to you and give you what you already have. And this is it. If we can understand this one simple point, so much of our baggage and hindrances will drop away. They will give you what you already have. Your divinity, your godliness, is already in you. In your essence, you are divine. You may have forgotten it, you may have lost touch with it. But it is there within you. And the spiritual journey is about getting in touch with that.

But you already have it. You must never forget that. You already have everything that you need. So without the prophets, you're not lacking. They may, if you are lucky, help you get in touch with your divinity. But even without the prophets, you can find that within yourself.

And similarly, the angels coming to you – God coming to you – is not giving you anything new that you don't already have. You are not lacking anything. It is all there within you: the divine.

But we are not used to thinking in that way. We have become so material in our lifestyle that we are always looking to the outside. We are always looking to get something from outside. Food, money, houses, cars – everything comes from the outside. And we gather it, we accumulate it, or we consume it. But the whole mentality, usually, is that we need something from the outside. And in the material world, we do. We do need food. We do need water. But our spiritual essence does not come that way. It is here within us all along.

So for me, this is one of the most important teachings of Jesus: that the angels and the prophets are giving us what we already have. They're not really giving it to us at all. They're just pointing it out: look, within you, you have this diamond; you have this precious jewel beyond compare!

And if we can get in touch with that within ourselves, do you think we will still worry so much, about how much money we have, about how big our house is, or how fast our car is? Material things are pathetically trivial, in comparison to the grandeur of your essence. Nothing else can come close to that. There's nothing wrong with all this material stuff. And there's nothing wrong in enjoying it. But it's only half of life, and the less significant half at that.

So let's dive into ourselves and get in touch again with the most amazing gift that we have been given. But we have been given that gift through our own existence. It's not something that we are missing and that we need to acquire from the outside. We don't need the prophets to give it to us. And we don't even need the angels to give it to us. For it is here within us, in every heartbeat, in every breath. More fundamental even than those, is our essence, our divinity – flawless, incorruptible, and eternal.