The Light of the Universe - Gospel of Thomas

Verse - The Light of the Universe

Jesus said: "I am the light that is above all things. I am one: from me all things have come and come to me. Split the wood, I am there. Pick up a stone and you will find me there."

Comment

When he says: "I am the All," he does not mean the visible universe, the shining starry garment of the deity, but the living spirit that moves the universe and hides behind the visible cosmos. From it the sea of light of the universe, the visible manifestation of the primordial light, has emerged, returns to it at the end of all world days and, in reality, has already reached it here and now, is one with it.

Commentators believe that this word is not a sign that Thomas is a pantheist. For it clearly does not equate Christ, the light of the world, with the universe, but rather shows that Thomas, like all mystics and awakened people, is a panentheist who sees God in everything and in the universe and at the same time above everything and above the visible universe as the guiding God. He sees God in the universe in his infinite revelations, and at the same time he sees the unmanifest divine "light that is above all" and that at the same time shines in him and allows him to experience Christ's promise in the Sermon on the Mount as reality: "You are the light of the world."

Like Jacob Boehme, Meister Eckhart, Tauler and all Christian and non-Christian mystics of humanity, he recognizes God in the beginning of the inner light even in the dead rock: his view opens up into the inner life and the inner light of all things and beings, which resembles that of his own divine inner being, and he knows that in this light he is one with everything.