Is time a primary element of all that is real? It appears to be. But try to find a beginning to time, and we have to ask, "What came before that?" Or an end, "What comes after?" There is no way of comprehending time other than to recognize it as a mental concept, limited, finite, mortal—a dream of something that has no real explanation.
Christ Jesus knew this. He explained his own existence as a child of the eternal One, saying, "Before Abraham was, I am,"John 8:58 not I was. The spiritual idea of infinite Mind that is Christ forever—and was known as Jesus in human time—exists now, not because the Christ outlasts centuries but because centuries are an illusion. There is no time.
When Jesus was crucified, he appeared to mortal sight to die. But the spiritual idea, the Christ, is immortal, timeless Truth. The human Jesus knew enough of his true identity to be conscious of his divine Life, and he knew this Life to be untouched by the dream of material events. Since he could see the unreality of the sequence of events from "before Abraham was" to the present, he could also see the unreality of the sequence of events from before his own human birth to the moment of his crucifixion and apparent death on the cross. It was something different from a trial, a sentence, bearing a cross up a hill, being crucified there, and dying; it was a matter of mental images true or false, each to be recognized for what it was. Death to Jesus was not the result of a series of events but a culminating error of the belief of life in matter, of which time is primary. Because he knew this, he was not subject to the belief others held of him—that he had died at the end of such a series. Life, to him, was God, eternal good; and death was as unknown to the idea of God that Jesus knew himself to be as it is to Life itself.
