The power of sacrifice

Jesus is transformed through his sacrifice. Nobody is ever transformed without sacrifice. You have to pay for it: the cross is the price that you pay for it. You have to DIE to be reborn. you have to lose all to gain God.
Jesus begat himself. That phenomenon happened on the cross. He hesitated for a time, he was very much puzzled – it was natural. For a single moment he could not see God anywhere. All was lost, he was losing all; he was going to die and there seemed to be no possibility... That happens to every seed. When you put the seed into the earth, one moment comes when the seed is losing itself, and there must be hesitation – the same hesitation that happened to Jesus on the cross. The seed is dying, and the seed must cling to the past. It wants to survive – nobody wants to die. And the seed cannot imagine that this is not death, that soon it will be resurrected in a thousandfold way, that soon it will start growing as a sprout.
The death of the seed will be the birth of the tree, and there will be great foliage and flowering and fruits, and birds will come and sit on the branches and make their nests, and people will sit under the shade of the tree; and the tree will talk to the clouds and the stars in the night, and will play with the sky, and will dance in the winds; and there will be great rejoicing. But how can this be known to the poor seed which has never been anything else? It is inconceivable. That’s why God is inconceivable.
It cannot be proved to the seed that this is going to happen, because if the seed asks ’Then let me SEE what you are going to do’, you cannot make it available, you cannot make visible to the seed what is going to happen. It is going to happen in the future, and when it happens, the seed will be gone. The seed will never meet the tree. Man never meets God. When the man is gone, God descends.
Jesus hesitated, was worried, was bewildered. He shouted, almost shouted against the sky ’Why have you forsaken me? Why? Why this torture for me? What wrong have I done to you?’ A thousand and one things must have crossed his mind.
The seed is dying, and the seed is completely oblivious to what is going to happen next. It is not possible for the seed to conceive of that NEXT step, hence faith, hence trust is needed. The seed has to trust that the tree will be born. With all the hesitation, with all kinds of fear, insecurities, with all kinds of anguish, anxiety – in spite of all of them – the seed has to trust that the tree will happen, that the tree is going to happen. It is a leap into faith.
And that leap happened to Jesus: he relaxed on the cross and he said ’Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done...’ His heart was palpitating. It is natural. Your heart will also palpitate, you will also be afraid when that moment of death comes to you, when that moment comes when your self disappears and you are losing yourself into a kind of nothingness, and there seems to be no way to survive, and you have to surrender.
You can surrender in two ways: You can surrender reluctantly, then you will miss the real point of it, then you will simply die and will be born again. If you can relax in deep acceptance, trust, if you can surrender without any resistance... That’s what Jesus did; that is the greatest miracle. To me that is the miracle – not that he gave health to somebody who was ill, or eyes to somebody who was blind, or cured the leprosy of somebody; or even helped Lazarus to revive, to come back to life – and he had died. No, those are not real miracles to me, they are all parables, metaphors. Every Master has given eyes to those who are blind, and ears to those who are deaf. Each Master has brought people out of their death that they call life, has called them out of their graves. Those are metaphors.
But the real miracle is when Jesus – in spite of all of his hesitations, worries, doubts, suspicions – relaxes, surrenders, and says ’Thy will be done,’ that moment Jesus disappears, Christ is born.