Rest isn’t a word many people would associate with the crucifixion of Christ Jesus.

There isn’t much that could be considered more devoid of rest than the unjust arrest, sham trial, and wholly undeserved and cruel punishment to which rulers of his day subjected “the best man that ever trod the globe,” as Mary Baker Eddy described Jesus (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 52). The enormity of the injustice was compounded by what was being rejected: God’s message of humanity’s salvation through Christ, the forever reality of our eternal, harmonious, spiritual relationship to God.

In the midst of all the hardships in his life, though, Jesus was privy to a special kind of rest, according to Mrs. Eddy, who discovered Christian Science. In No and Yes she writes: “The real Christ was unconscious of matter, of sin, disease, and death, and was conscious only of God, of good, of eternal Life, and harmony. Hence the human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and royalty of his being,—holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as real” (p. 36).