LATE ONE NIGHT I found myself reaching out for new inspiration and more spiritual light. I had been praying for a member of my family who had been unjustly treated. However, the injustice still seemed more substantive than my prayers!

I glanced at a stack of books beside me, pulled out a children's book about Jesus' healings, and leafed through the pages. I wasn't at all sure why I'd reached for this particular book, though I'd drawn on it in talking with my Sunday School kids the previous week about one of those healings. But when I came to the story, I felt impelled to read it again. Now there was no class of busy seven-year-olds—just me alone with the story. And somehow it seemed more riveting than ever.

The scene was the garden of Gethsemane, at night. The simple but powerful pictures of the children's book portrayed the shadows and the gloom and uncertainty of the situation. Suddenly a sizable group of men—Jewish priests, elders, and leaders, and also Roman soldiers—showed up at the edge of the garden and moved directly toward Jesus. The disciples were shocked to see who was leading the group. It was Judas Iscariot, their own spiritual brother who had crossed over to the opposite side and betrayed them all.

The disciples asked, "Lord, shall we fight them with our swords?" But Peter just jumped into action. He raised his sword high, and brought it down on the ear of the high Priest's servant, Malchus. As the children's book says, “At that moment, with soldiers all around to arrest him, Jesus reached out with love and touched Malchus' ear. And he was healed—right then!" (Jesus' Healings — Part 3, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 2002, pp. 49-51).

For me, this recounting in vivid, basic words breathed amazing life into the account. Feeling the full dimension of all Jesus had been facing brought a humbling perspective to the injustice the family member had suffered. Why had I felt so impressed with this? And rather than reacting, why hadn't I fully given myself to the love and spiritual truth that would lead to healing?

It was dawning on me that a greatly enlarged view of meekness was hugely essential to Christian Science healing. Interestingly, as the light came, so did the family member's healing. She said she was fine, untroubled, not upset, with no resentment of any kind. It was as though there had been no injustice and no limitations or effects from it, only a moving forward again into the good that God was constantly providing.

Who couldn't help but feel that meekness of the sort Jesus showed must be a whole lot more than refusing to react to other people's aggressions and shortcomings? Standing in the midst of that momentous situation in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus already knew the intent of Judas, and comprehended the heartless purpose of the group that had come for him. After all, he had foretold it for the disciples. Yet when the time came, Jesus still sought to bring healing—and he did!

The process wasn't like someone trying to be meek instead of angry, unresisting instead of willful. It was the same meekness Jesus had showed in front of Lazarus' tomb, where it was so evident he knew God was the only possible healer. He wasn't trying to summon up his own personal spiritual strength or knowledge. Here there was no self-assertion, only the genuine meekness and patience of "waiting on" God, a deeply established understanding that life itself was actually from God, with God, given by God. To Christ Jesus, God was the present and active Principle, Love, which always "heard" him (see John 11:41,42). And better than anyone else, he saw — and asked his followers to pray to realize — that God's "will is done in earth, as it is in heaven."

Jesus had lived and taught this meekness throughout his life — in his Beatitudes, for example: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God" (Matt.5:8), and "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5). But it's also found in his teaching that we must be "born again" of Spirit, and not the flesh, and must be as willing and open as children to learn something new, to learn of the presence of the kingdom or universe of God here now. Such humility or meekness would be requisite, Jesus knew, to find out that life and being are not the sad, conflicted, sick, material scene they appear to be. Life had to be freshly conceived of in the new light of the astonishing actuality of God who is infinite Love, and so rediscovered as spiritual and good.

When I began the public practice of Christian Science healing, one of the first cases I had was that of a taxi driver in a small suburban town who simply wasn't making a living at his job. He didn't come with a rebellious or resentful attitude that the world owed him a living. He wasn't fighting back. He was quite meek—something of an innocent—and was just reaching out for help to Christian Science and what it said about God. Shortly after we prayed, his income doubled. He was so grateful that although he had very little money, over several months he made me a painstakingly hand-carved plaque with the words "God is Love." He'd got the message! Soon he found a job in another state, and about the same time also had a quick healing of medically diagnosed bursitis.

So much of human life appears to revolve around an intransigent but often undetected trust in the sheer materialism of things and the resulting attempt to build up one's life on the "sand" of that basis. "What else can anybody do?" the human mind contends. "This is where you find yourself now. So get on with it. You need money, satisfaction, success, pleasure. You can be reasonably kind in the process. Get a life, like everyone else."

But the Bible doesn't mince words; it exposes this contention for what it is — the pride of life, the very antithesis of meekness. And the J. B. Phillips translation of the same passage drives home the point even more unavoidably, explaining: "A man cannot love the Father and love the world at the same time. For the whole world-system based as it is on men's desires, their greedy ambitions and the glamour of all that they think splendid, is not derived from the Father at all, but from the world itself" (I John 2:16, 17).

Jesus understood that no possible combination of human pride, ego, and even superior personal talents and capabilities—all grounded in a life supposedly at some great remove from God—could possibly constitute life or fulfill what it means for us to be God's image. Speaking for himself and his followers, he said: "I can of mine own self do nothing: . . . I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me" (John 5:30); "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30); "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63).

Too hard to believe? Well, hard for the stubbornly prideful mind anchored in material life to believe, but not too hard for those who set aside old ways and views and are meekly willing to learn and to work at demonstrating something decidedly new.

But when we're talking about meekness, are we talking about submissiveness, passiveness, blandness, not being willing to fight for our rights? Did Jesus look as though he was submissive in healing Malchus' ear or raising Lazarus from the dead? The human mind's reactive, aggressive, selfish, shortsighted sense never holds the power it imagines it has. But what is mightier, and can afford more boldness, than finding the power of God present in our lives?

At one level, the healing of Malchus' ear has enormous lessons to teach us about the powerful capacities of spiritual truth and love to heal the most awful divisions and conflicts. No matter how unlikely the human situation, the length and depth of a conflict, the human personalities involved, we're unfazed when we base our healing on a newly perceived reality of God's infinite good. That reality cannot be confined to working within the elements of an ugly scene. The consciousness of God and His universe that comes through prayer irresistibly joins, unifies, the hearts of humankind.

But in an even broader way, Jesus' example of healing in the worst of situations tells what is most needed to continue experiencing, in these times, Christianly scientific healing as explained in Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded this Science, presented it as the action of God Himself, of Mind-power and Mind-healing, the exact opposite of some well-honed grasp of metaphysical language—or as she described it, "hecatombs of gushing theories" (Science and Health, p. 367). Her counsel on a day-by-day basis to those closest to her frequently underlined a crucial, timeless distinction. She wrote to one student, for example: "The healing will grow more easy and be more immediate as you realize that God, Good, is all and Good is Love. You must gain Love, and lose the false sense called love. You must feel the Love that never faileth,—that perfect sense of divine power that makes healing no longer power but grace" (L08565, Mary Baker Eddy to Frank W. Gale, June 9, 1891, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity).

At one time, a member of Mrs. Eddy's staff was called on to heal her when she was in great pain. His prayer did bring the much-needed healing. But the next morning, he asked her a surprisingly honest and humble question in front of the assembled household group: "How did I heal, the other day, when I felt so helpless to do for some one who saw so far above me?" The answer Mrs. Eddy gave was, "Through that helplessness you let Truth in and it was Christian Science which healed the case, not your own exertion" (Reminiscences of Lida Fitzpatrick, December 9, 1903, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

The rules of Christian Science have deeper roots than in moral maxims—they are grounded in the Christianly scientific discovery and healing experience of God and His creation. Nothing less than meekness would be mighty enough to displace the impression of material life as all there is. But a spiritual seeker, building with humility on the rock of Christ, can't help coming to the life-changing understanding Jesus was teaching—that we are in fact living in God, Spirit, now, and our innocence of evil is intact. To catch sight of this, even in a degree, is to know God is the Healer.