Editorial April 16, 1960 Issue

SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION

Helen Wood Bauman

To Martha, who had buried her thought in cumbering interests of household serving, Jesus said, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" (John 11: 25, 26). The Master was not speaking of his human personality, but of the Christ-idea, which he embodied and which lifts mankind above the mortal and the mundane into the consciousness of immortal being.

To believe in the Christ and so to achieve resurrection calls for more than the mere acknowledgment that the Messiah came centuries ago. To believe in such a way that mortality cannot claim him, and to prove it, one must understand the Christ as the spiritual idea of sonship and work out the divine nature which that sonship implies. Christian Science reveals individual existence in God, divine Life, and thus extends the experience of resurrection to its universal possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Unity of Good' (pp. 60, 61), "Rising above the false, to the true evidence of Life, is the resurrection that takes hold of eternal Truth." This resurrection awaits everyone.

Looking beyond the physical sense of life, one finds the metaphysical sense of it. Here the attributes of the Father are expressed in the son, God's likeness, the spiritual self, which cannot die and which needs no resurrection. The resurrection that Jesus promised is for humanity; it signifies the appearing of the real identity and the fading from thought of all that is evil and mortal. One witnesses to this resurrection when he expresses justice or is loyal to a trust; when he lets tenderness dissolve a difficult relationship with the magic of forgiveness; when he sees purity triumph over sensualism, love over hate, health over disease.

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