In but a few days, most of us will celebrate Christmas. The Christ’s mass. From Greek christos and Latin missa. That was in the old days. Today we buy and give presents for each other––emulating the Three Magi? Others try to catch a breather, a rest, eat and drink much too much––except for the shopkeepers who try to make enough money to last them halfway through the next year.

I find it strange, having typed the title of this little treatise, that the word is underlined in red, denoting a spelling mistake. Few of us seem to know, (and this includes the billionaire, Mr. Gates, whose Word 98 I am using), that Yeshûa is an abbreviated form of Yehoshûa, the original name under which Jesus walked the earth. Nowadays we spell it with a J, as in Jeshua, although the Hebrew letter Yod has a soft sound to it.

Most Hebrew names have an etymological meaning, and Yehoshûa is no exception. Yehoshûa (or Jehoshua, which gave the Greeks a head start to changing it to Jesus) means ‘Jah is help’, ‘Jah is salvation’, or ‘deliverance through Jah’. Jah is, of course, short for Jehova, literally, The Existing One. I capitalize it though the Hebrews only had capital letters, making them all the same. You can read all about it in my Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism. It’s quite fun. It sort of changes your way of looking at things. It certainly changed my thinking. That’s why I wrote Yeshûa––A Personal Memoir… it’s a long title.


But neither this essay nor my book is concerned with the etymology of Jesus’ name. Rather they both try to deal with the biblical quotation, which implies that Jesus went for years of study and work to reach his short ministry. After all, didn’t Luke write that Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man?" Hence my book, but that’s another story. Literally! Imagine––studying for eighteen years for just three years of ministry. Must have been important… Perhaps that is why, as of today, he still affects, in one way or another, more than one billion people. We call him the Messiah, the Savior, the only Son of God, no matter how drank some of us get at Christmas. Still, we’ll sober up eventually, and he’ll remain the Saviour. For another Christmas, the next year.

But the strangest thing is that we are not really talking about a man, no matter how great, holy, even divine he might be. We are talking about a state of consciousness. The Christ Consciousness. The state of awareness that is within all of us, hidden under layers of traditions, old habits, extraneous desires, or animalistic instincts. Yes, it rests, dormant, in all of us. All we must do to awaken it, within us, is to change our mind about who we really are. Our state of consciousness. Now. At Christmas.

May you all have a joyful one.