Editorial May 9, 1994 Issue

Principle or person?

Richard C. Bergenheim

When reading the Gospels, have you noted how consistently Jesus turned people away from a worship of himself and curbed the belief that he exercised a personal power of his own? This is especially evident in the Gospel of John. Jesus emphasized that his teaching and healing works testified to the power and presence of his Father, divine Spirit. This wasn't a false modesty. It explained the eternal spiritual power of the message his life conveys to the world. It reveals a key point for all who desire to practice or experience Christian healing today.

If Christ Jesus had presented nothing more than a particularly powerful charismatic personality, the stir that he created in people's hearts would have been short-lived. He would simply have been a phenomenon of his own time. But Jesus did not live to glorify himself; he lived to glorify God, to make God known. He prayed, "Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee" (John 17:1). Jesus' sinlessness enabled the glory of God to shine through his life. His self-denial, his rejection of an ego apart from God, lifted the clouds of personal sense that would obscure the light of holiness, the nature of divinity, the infinity of good, the consciousness of Love.

Jesus never ceased to bear witness to his divine Principle, Love. So as we probe the Scriptures and unlock their meaning through our study of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and begin to understand Jesus and the significance of his words and works, we see the nature of divinity. But we don't see this as an observer; Christ, Truth, doesn't project a picture on the screen of thought while we sit casually in our theater seats. In divine Science, to see means to experience. We discover that our life is actually a perpetual manifestation of God's creative power. This is how we learn that Jesus illustrated what it means for man to be the image and likeness of God.