Hyung Jin Moon
February 21, 2010
Cheon Bok Gung, Seoul Korea
Brothers and sisters from around the world,
We are so grateful and honored to be able to participate together here, in this incredible holy land, this holy site here. We attend our True Parents here in Chung Pyung. Our True Parents are not just normal human individuals.
When I studied the world's religions, and really delved into the different religious scriptures, and tried to understand the different figures in the other religious traditions, I really understood and felt at some level, that these individuals were, of course, people, but they were also much more than that.
You can imagine at the Last Supper, where the disciples and apostles surrounded Lord Jesus, shared a meal with him, before they moved towards the crucifixion. And in that time, of the great prophets of the past, we see a common pattern that exists among normal people, who live in that time. The pattern is, to see a prophet, not with your spiritual eyes, but to see them with the physical eyes. We can see this pattern that occurred when Jesus was crucified, even his apostles at the very last, at the eve of his crucifixion, denied him, stepped away in faith, and did not declare their belief in Christ.
Even in the story of the Buddha in India, 2500 years ago, his cousin (Devadatta) saw him with human eyes, not as someone who had reached the highest level of Enlightenment, which is known as Anuttara samyak sambodhi in the Buddhist tradition, and even tried to kill and murder him.
We can see on the eve of the Hegira, in the Muslim tradition, which is the emigration that the Muslims have to make from Mecca, where they were persecuted and oppressed by the Quarish, the dominant tribe, and they had to make their way into Medina -- on the eve of that night, the prophet Mohammed was to leave, there was a plot against his life.
Again the people did not understand the prophet was sent by God. These individuals were sent by God, chosen by God. And this is the same pattern that also exists, when we witness True Parent's life. For they are not normal individuals, but they come to fulfill the mission of Jesus Christ, as the Messiah and the Lord of the Second Advent. And they have been thoroughly misunderstood. They have been persecuted and attacked. There have been assassination attempts on their lives. They have been put into concentration camps, beaten and tortured, flailed.
In every single way, they experienced so many tribulations. In our own understanding of True Parents, we understand that True Parents went through six different trials and tribulations. They were imprisoned six times, under communist regime in North Korea; they were imprisoned under the colonial Japanese occupation. They were imprisoned and unjustly crucified and tortured. But also as Unificationists, we see True Parents not only experiencing these six tortures and imprisonments, and then the final seventh , which was a miraculous helicopter crash where they survived -- 16 people survived the helicopter crash.
We don't see this simply with our physical eyes, as somebody who was just very lucky, or has good fortune. We see this as the hand of God. We see this as the course they had to live to fulfill the mission of the Messiah, which is to live the living death, the living sacrifice. For the world's sins from all the levels of the individual to the family, the tribe, the society, the nation, the world, cosmic including spiritual -- accumulation since the Fall of Man. And this is the kind of life that True Parents have lived. They have lived through those 7 experiences, what we refer to as the Seven Deaths -- that they have even experienced physical death. That the disciples actually had to retrieve and salvage his body, (which had been thrown out into the snow) and had to thaw him out in a small hut. And they experienced the miraculous hand of God, as True Father came back to life from his frozen and beaten form.
When we understand the true love that True Father teaches us that he has revealed to the world, that up till now, we have tried to understand up till now through many theologies and many philosophies, what the nature and essence and divinity of God is. And fundamentally, it is beyond human grasp. But True Father has allowed us the picture, and the description of what God's divinity is and what His essence is. He has taught us that the divinity of God is true love. And that true love is a love that is a parental love. That is so profound and heroic. That it is willing to die and die; give up its soul; descend into the deepest and darkest hells, not just once for the sake of friends, but again and again, endlessly for the sake not only of just the children, but even for the worst enemy. And this is the type of true love that they ask us to inherit.
We are standing in the presence of the one, the first in human history who have inherited that kind of parental love. The type of heroic, parental love, the cosmic love that can even overcome death in the graves, which they overcame in the Seven Deaths and Resurrections.
Brothers and sisters let us understand who we stand before today. If we stood before Jesus, if we stood before the Buddha, if we stood before Mohammed, peace be upon him, what kind of attitude would we be in I ask you today? We stand before the Lord of the Second Advent. We stand before the Messiah who has come, who has come and given, laid down his life, not only once, but over seven times, endlessly, so that we could be free from torment.
Brothers and sisters, it is on this occasion, that we can understand the true significance of the True Parents, we can understand what kind of people they are, and what kind of incredible mission they have come to do. Let us not only see them with physical eyes, as our physical parents or our teacher, but let us open our spiritual eyes, and see them, as our Lord and Savior. Let us all rise, and give a resounding round of applause to our beloved True Parents, the True Parents of Heaven and Earth. Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon!