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Putting on the Love of the Lord – The Odes of Solomon – Ode 3

putting on the love of the Lord

This is a continuation of our series of postings on the early Christian writings, the mystical Odes of Solomon, written in Apostolic times.

As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27).

I am putting on the love of the Lord.
And his members are with him, and I am dependent on them and he loves me.
For I should not have known how to love the Lord, if he had not loved me.
For who is able to distinguish love, except the one that is loved?
I love the Beloved and my soul loves him, and where his rest is there also am I.
And I shall be no stranger, for with the Lord Most High and Merciful there is no grudging.
I have been united to him for the Lover has found the Beloved, And because I love him that is the Son I shall become a son.
For he who is joined to him Who is immortal, will also himself become immortal.
And he who has pleasure in the Life, will become living.
This is the Spirit of the Lord which is not false, which teacheth the sons of men to know his ways.
Be wise and understanding and vigilant. Alleluia.
–Ode of Solomon 3 [Ode 2 has been lost.]

  • I am putting on the love of the Lord.

At the moment we are clothed in the material body. The Zoroastrian sage, Kaspar, said:

“Man was a thought of God, formed in the image of the Septonate, clothed in the substances of soul. And his desires were strong; he sought to manifest on every plane of life, and for himself he made a body of the ethers of the earthly forms, and so descended to the plane of earth. In this descent he lost his birthright; lost his harmony with God, and made discordant all the notes of life. Inharmony and evil are the same; so evil is the handiwork of man” through the body which the Essene teacher Elihu called “the body of desires” (Aquarian Gospel 58:25-28).

“The lower self, the carnal self, the body of desires, is a reflection of the higher self, distorted by the murky ethers of the flesh. The lower self is an illusion, and will pass away; the higher self is God in man, and will not pass away. The lower self is the embodiment of truth reversed, and so is falsehood manifest” (Aquarian Gospel 8:7-9). It is the body of desires that separates us from God by turning us outward away from the inner kingdom of God toward the transient world and creating in us a myriad desires, none of which can be fulfilled because nothing in the world can ever be possessed, but only grasped and eventually lost.

There is, however, another body, the “body of union” that is the immortal spirit.

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The Odes of Solomon, the Oldest Christian Hymns

Today we are introducing a new commentary on some of the earliest Christian writings, the mystical Odes of Solomon, written in Apostolic times. We plan on publishing the commentary later this year.

Notes on the Odes
by Hierodeacon Simeon Goldstein, the
Translator of the Odes

Odes of Solomon-oldest Christian HymnsDiscovery of the Odes

This great work of mystical depth, divine insight, and spiritual illumination is, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the truly great spiritual and literary discoveries of the Twentieth Century. But unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls which were dramatically discovered by shepherds in a desert cave, the Odes were prosaically found in neglected manuscripts gathering dust on the shelves of London libraries. Before 1785 the Odes were only known by references in lists of apocryphal books, and from a Latin quotation by Lactantius. Then in 1785 a manuscript containing selections from five of the Odes was bought by the British Museum from the heirs of a London physician, Dr. Anthony Askew. This was the Codex Askewianus which contains the only known version of the Pistis Sophia, itself a great work of spiritual wisdom. The Pistis Sophia contains selections from five of the Odes of Solomon: Ode 1 (in chapter 59), Ode 5: 1-11 (in chapter 58), Ode 6: 8-18 (in chapter 65), Ode 25 (complete, in chapter 69), and 22 (complete, in chapter 71). The Pistis Sophia designates these specifically as “Odes of Solomon.”

Then, on January 4, 1909, J. Rendel Harris was sorting through some Syriac leaves which had been lying for nearly two years on some bookshelves in his office. Soon his attention was riveted by Syriac passages which were identical with those quoted in the Pistis Sophia and the passage quoted by Lactantius. This was indeed the lost book of the Odes of Solomon. It was published that same year as The Odes and Psalms of Solomon: Now First Published from the Syriac Version (Cambridge: University Press, 1909).

Nothing at all was known of the previous history of the manuscript, except that it had been on Harris’ shelves for as long as two years, and had come from “the neighborhood of the Tigris.” Unfortunately, the opening leaves which contained all of the first and second Odes and the beginning of the third, are missing. As already mentioned, the first Ode is found in the Coptic of the Pistis Sophia, but the second and beginning of the third are regrettably still lost to us.

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What Did Jesus Really Say in the Sermon on the Mount?

Sermon on the Mount
In this introduction to A New Look at the Beatitudes, I will be using The New Testament: An Expanded Translation, by Kenneth Wuest since it presents the more philosophical side of Jesus words. To do this, it is extremely literal, sometimes so much so that the English is awkward, but it extracts the full meaning of the Greek wording. The esoteric understanding, of course, will be up to us.

“And having opened His mouth He went to teaching them, saying, Spiritually prosperous are the destitute and helpless in the realm of the spirit, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
–Matthew 5:3

Spiritually prosperous

Wuest is translating as “spiritually prosperous” the Greek word makarios. The word can mean both blessed and happy, but both expressions are too weak. Makarios means supremely blessed or happy in the sense that it is the ultimate degree of blessedness or happiness. Yet, it also means to be fortunate–in the literal sense of possessing a fortune and “well off”–prosperous. The idea is that of spiritual abundance, of spiritual superabundance. “God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.” (II Corinthians 9:8)

The fullness of spiritual capacity and manifestation is implied here. Modern Christianity is so materialistic that virtually every time they speak of being blessed they mean gaining money. This is especially true of the televangelists and their forerunners the “New Thought” churches. Therefore Wuest is certainly justified in putting the adjective “spiritually” in the translation. Otherwise the Sermon on the Mount will just be another “God’s Prosperity Plan For His People.”

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