Brightly colored kites  filling the skies. That’s how Good Friday, the Friday before Easter Sunday, is celebrated in Bermuda. The exuberant display commemorates a missionary who, according to legend, was having trouble explaining Christ Jesus’ disappearance known as the ascension. The missionary drew a picture of Jesus on a kite and sent it sailing, then cut the string once it was high in the sky.

The Easter season reminds us of the ever-present Christ that Jesus embodied. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the Science of Jesus’ teachings, defines Christ as “the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583). Because God, Spirit, is eternal and ever present, His spiritual idea, Christ, must also be eternal and ever present, raising us into the light of health and hope, which St. Paul describes as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

Maybe we don’t always feel that presence. Maybe we feel that our connection, our reason for hope, has been cut, and that hope is sailing away, never to be seen again. This is why the experience of Jesus’ students, or disciples, during and after the crucifixion speaks to us today. The Easter story tells of when they felt that way as well. 

The disciples had witnessed firsthand what Jesus accomplished in his career. He was unswerving in his obedience to God and in his pure, unselfish love for and service to God and humanity. That love and obedience enabled him to heal sin and disease. He taught his disciples to do the same healing work based on that same understanding of and fidelity to God, Love.

His teachings demand that individuals give up self-will and materialism and begin to gain—and act on—an understanding of the fact that each of us, created by God, Spirit, is wholly spiritual. This demand was no more popular in his day than it is in ours. Resistance to it, expressed as hatred and malice, condemned Jesus to a public execution.

Jesus’ enemies hoped to kill Jesus’ divine message by killing the man. And when Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross and buried in a tomb, it appeared that they had succeeded. In despair, apparently believing their teacher had failed, the disciples went into hiding. Without his personal presence, they didn’t see how they could carry on his work. It must have seemed impossible not to believe that evil had won.

Because God, Spirit, is eternal and ever present, His spiritual idea, Christ, must also be eternal and ever present, raising us into the light of health and hope.

What a lesson to us never to give up hope—never to stop striving to understand and demonstrate our true, fearless, spiritual nature and our God-given dominion over evil! The disciples were wrong. Evil had not won; Jesus had. In fact, he had overcome what the Bible calls “the last enemy”—death (I Corinthians 15:26). 

This seemed such an impossibility to many of the disciples that they refused to believe those who reported that they had seen Jesus alive after the crucifixion. One disciple insisted he would not believe it unless he could actually touch the wounds left by the nails and the spear. But when Jesus came to them in person, they acknowledged with joy that he had risen. Though some had been about to return to their old way of life, his reappearance caused them to yield to the divine will and rededicate themselves to preaching, teaching, and demonstrating the healing power he had shown them “throughout the whole world” (Mark 14:9).

Mrs. Eddy writes of the disciples’ transformation after they recognized his victory: “His resurrection was also their resurrection. It helped them to raise themselves and others from spiritual dulness and blind belief in God into the perception of infinite possibilities” (Science and Health, p. 34). The Easter story is here to enable all to raise themselves into the perception of those infinite possibilities. In the pages of this magazine are testimonies by people who were raised out of sin and sickness by the light of the Christ shining in their consciousness. Indeed, the true celebration of Easter is not in ritual but in our thought and actions—in lives made new and hearts redeemed.

Immediately before he ascended, Jesus left these words for his disciples then and throughout all time: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. . . . And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:15, 17, 18).

You are never cut off from hope, never separate from God’s ever-present love. Christ is forever risen, is here. Let it lift you, too—and enable you to follow.

Lisa Rennie Sytsma, Associate Editor