Article August 7, 1995 Issue

What Jesus' resurrection has to do with you

Janice Koller

We all need the proof that Christ Jesus' resurrection afforded. The allness of Spirit and the nothingness of matter cannot be fully discerned and demonstrated until it is first recognized that matter can have no effect on the life of man. Before raising Lazarus from the dead, 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." Then he uttered the direct challenge—which still speaks to his followers today—"Believest thou this?" (John 11:25, 26).

Jesus had the unique mission of proving for all time to come the fact that man's life is not dependent upon nor resident in matter. Through his healing work, including his raising of Lazarus, he repeatedly demonstrated the inability of matter to affect man and taught that God, his Father, Spirit, is the only source and maintainer of life. Yet, when he himself was crucified, his disciples' reaction indicated how little of this underlying truth of his teachings they had understood. Only by triumphing over death and the tomb could Jesus give the proof that would quicken human consciousness to a new view of man's life. It was because of Jesus' wondrous love for God and man that he submitted to the crucifixion, proving God's Spirit's, supremacy over matter. His example enabled others to believe and to understand what he had said before raising Lazarus.

Jesus was demonstrating man's spiritual identity, which the physical senses cannot perceive. This identity is the perfect expression of divine Mind and is the fact of our being here and now. But belief in intelligence and substance separate from God deludes thought and leads humanity to identify and define man's life as material. The truth of man's life as God's expression must eventually destroy every vestige of the false view, including the mistaken belief that man's senses are material. "Christ cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God. This false sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve. Rising above the false, to the true evidence of Life, is the resurrection that takes hold of eternal Truth," writes Mary Baker Eddy (Unity of Good, pp. 60–61).

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