It is widely known that Jesus was a healer. What is less widely understood, even by many who know and love the gospel record of his life and healings, is that Jesus did not change sick people into well people. Christian Science helps us see that Jesus healed through his understanding that in reality, as God’s spiritual offspring, no one has ever been unwell in any way.
This spiritual understanding caused the corporeal senses to give up the opposite, false testimony of sin, disease, and death. In the Christian Science textbook, Mary Baker Eddy gives this explanation: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” pp. 476-477).
Jesus perceived, through spiritual sense, what God knows of the man of His own creating, right where others – who believed that the corporeal senses depicted reality – erroneously saw a sick, sinful, or dying material man. Jesus trusted that God was always keeping everyone perfectly well, because everyone lives in God under His loving and omnipotent care.
As the psalmist wrote, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” (Psalms 139:7, 8).
Christian Science reveals that God, who is wholly perfect and good, is the only cause and creator. He is Spirit, and created all spiritually. Therefore a so-called corporeal existence – life and intelligence in matter – must be nothing more than a false sense or dream.
No one truly was ever born into, lived in, or died out of this dream, for God’s creation is forever embraced in His perfection – the only reality. “The testimony of the corporeal senses cannot inform us what is real and what is delusive, but the revelations of Christian Science unlock the treasures of Truth” (Science and Health, p. 70).
When I first started receiving calls for help as a Christian Science practitioner – requests to pray about a problem that a person was experiencing – I would feel a heavy responsibility if the problem was considered a serious or major one. I knew that Christ, the divine manifestation of God forever voicing good, was always supplying the healing inspiration needed. But I also erroneously believed that after the call for help, a battle would ensue between the problem and my own personal power to attune my thought to that inspiration.
As I prayed about this, I realized that I was right to believe that my own personal power was inadequate to heal. Jesus said, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30).
But I did have a role. Spiritually scientific prayer involves witnessing the patient as the image of God. That image of God never has a problem, never has a disease, never lacks anything needful or truly desirable, and has never sinned. He can have nothing that needs healing. The belief that he is sick or sinful is an illusion of the corporeal senses. To agree that that illusion is a reality which needs to be cast out by personal ability is to be deluded.
I decided to keep thoughts about myself completely out of my prayers. And I no longer treated the patient as sick or suffering. Why? Because the patient is already perfectly well, exactly as God made her or him to be. I stick to treating the erroneous claim that the individual can ever have a problem of any sort.
All power to affect our well-being belongs solely to our God, and He maintains us forever harmonious, well, and free. In healing, nothing that is real changes, even though the corporeal senses stop testifying to discord and disease. The health and holiness that appear were actually there all along.
When the senses depict discord, we can see it as just an invitation to purify and spiritually exalt our thinking. As Mrs. Eddy writes in her poem “Christ My Refuge,”
O’er waiting harpstrings of the mind
There sweeps a strain,
Low, sad, and sweet, whose measures bind
The power of pain,And wake a white-winged angel throng
Of thoughts, illumed
By faith, and breathed in raptured song,
With love perfumed.Then His unveiled, sweet mercies show
Life’s burdens light.
I kiss the cross, and wake to know
A world more bright.
(“Poems,” p. 12)
The only value of any discordant experience is that it gives us motivation to study Christian Science more deeply and practice it more effectively. Then the world – and our experience – will thereafter be more bright.
Adapted from an article published in the October 2024 issue of The Christian Science Journal.
