Journeying within transcendence - from humiliation to exaltation

Despite his apparent freedom, Pilate is compelled by circumstance to condemn Jesus to death. Despite his apparent lack of freedom, Jesus is in control and, although in irony, is crowned king and lifted up in glory on the cross where a notice proclaims his kingship in all the languages of the known world. Just at the moment of death, when everything seems to fall apart, everything in fact holds together. All the facets of the personality are presented: love of money (Judas); the tendency to go along with the crowd; the impulsive violence and denial to follow the leadership of the emerging self (St Peter); the childish wishing to avoid responsibility (Pilate). Yet there is also the Jesus accepting the cross of freedom and his hour of suffering and glory. The opposites are in creative tension by something larger at the depth of being. The cross with its vertical masculine pole of consciousness; its vertical, feminine pole of unconscious grounding being; and its horizontal bar embracing the whole of life, is held in the circle of the hour and centres in joy. Each person's life can have this crowning in freedom.

The seventeenth section of St John's Gospel is related to a stage in the spiritual journey of the individual.