The Mutual Debt (3) Earth’s Due to Heaven

This divine possibility is not just a nirvanic silence but the full flowering of the Divine Nature, the Divine Qualities,  the Divine Power, Divine Gnosis, Divine Peace and Bliss,  in one word the Divine Perfection within us. This is what is bequeathed to earth and man. While on one hand, we inherit the earth’s labour and agony through an identification with the soil of earth nature, on the other hand, we also inherit the divine possibility within it. What is needed is to convert all experiences of life into the blossoming of the Divine Life within us. It is to show us how to do this that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother came. Though Divine they became human so that the human in us may become divine.  This act of the Divine becoming human is what is known as the doctrine of Avatarhood. The purpose of Avatarhood is to open the way for man, to remove the thorns from man’s path, to help in the blossoming of the Divine Nature in us, above all to place before us God’s own example of how to be, how to lead our life and conduct our affairs so as to make a quicker ascension to the Divine Life.

This ascension to the Divine Life is Earth’s due to heaven. Since the Creator brought out the Creation with this purpose and no other, that is to say, to create many miniature divinities sharing all the various Divine powers, He owes it to us to descend into the play to give a further fillip to the Purpose.  This is the great sacrifice in which the Infinite,  the Eternal becomes the seemingly limited and death-bound. But this is one side of the story. The Divine has done what He came to do. He has sacrificed His divinity and chosen to be thus limited. He has consented to enter the gates of death and hell so as to clear our path.

He who would save the race must share its pain:
This he shall know who obeys that grandiose urge.
The Great who came to save this suffering world
And rescue out of Time’s shadow and the Law,
Must pass beneath the yoke of grief and pain;
They are caught by the Wheel that they had hoped to break,
On their shoulders they must bear man’s load of fate.
Heaven’s riches they bring, their sufferings count the price
Or they pay the gift of knowledge with their lives.
The Son of God born as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead’s debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
His will has bound to death and struggling life
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed salvation’s testament with his blood:
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
The Deity compensates the creature’s claim,
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
A retribution smites the incarnate God.
His love has paved the mortal’s road to Heaven:
He has given his life and light to balance here
The dark account of mortal ignorance.
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God’s martyred body for the world;
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
He carries the cross on which man’s soul is nailed;
His escort is the curses of the crowd;
Insult and jeer are his right’s acknowledgment;
Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.
He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour’s way.
He who has found his identity with God
Pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light.
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.

This passage referring to the story of Christ is symbolic of all Avatars, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Sri Aurobindo. The Avatara is God become human. His main purpose is to help man become even as God.