Christ said, ‘They shall see the Son of Man coming in the
clouds of Heaven’. [Matthew xxiv, 30, Matthew xvi, 27] Bahá’u’lláh said, ‘When
Christ came for the first time He came upon the clouds’. [John iii, 13] Christ
said that He had come from the sky, from Heaven—that He came forth from
God—while He was born of Mary, His Mother. But when He declared that He had
come from Heaven, it is clear that He did not mean the blue firmament but that
He spoke of the Heaven of the Kingdom of God, and that from this Heaven He
descended upon the clouds. As clouds are obstacles to the shining of the sun,
so the clouds of the world of humanity hid from the eyes of men the radiance of
the Divinity of Christ.
Men said, ‘He is of Nazareth, born of Mary, we know Him and
we know his brethren. What can He mean? What is He saying? That He came forth
from God?’
The Body of Christ was born of Mary of Nazareth, but the
Spirit was of God. The capacities of His human body were limited but the
strength of His spirit was vast, infinite, immeasurable.
Men asked, ‘Why does He say He is of God?’ If they had
understood the reality of Christ, they would have known that the body of His
humanity was a cloud that hid His Divinity. The world only saw His human form,
and therefore wondered how He could have ‘come down from Heaven’.
Bahá’u’lláh said, ‘Even as the clouds hide the sun and the
sky from our gaze, even so did the humanity of Christ hide from men His real
Divine character’.
(‘Abdu’l-Baha, from a talk, Paris, October 27, 1911, ‘Paris
Talks’)
