What new thing is God doing in your life?
For the Lesson titled "Mortals and Immortals" from May 13 - 19, 2013
The Christian Science Bible Lesson this week, titled “Mortals and Immortals,” encourages us to see newness and freshness in our lives.
The Pharisee Nicodemus came to Jesus looking for a new perspective. He was one of the leaders in the synagogue, and might have come to Jesus at night because Jesus was not a formally educated scholar or scribe. When Jesus told him he needed to become new, or born again, in order to experience the kingdom of God, he didn’t understand at first what Jesus meant (see John 3:1–7, citation 10). How can we usher out the old sense of limitations and mortality and usher in the eternal now of immortality?
When the biblical authors spoke of eternity, they often used the Greek aionios (or eons, often translated as “forever”—see I Timothy 1:17, cit. 5.), which literally meant for an indeterminate amount of time, or for a very long time.
Today we understand that infinity and eternity aren’t big numbers that you could count to if you counted for a long time, but they are wholly different concepts from limited amounts of time or space. Infinity is unrelated to “a lot” or even a googolplex. It is an unlimited spiritual idea unexplainable using measurements of time. Infinity and numbers are separate concepts that rely on opposite premises—one immortal, the other limited.
Throughout his letters, the Apostle Paul speaks of the necessity for fresh, spiritual, immortal thinking and how important it is to reject outdated or mortal thinking (see, for example, II Corinthians 3:17, 18, cit. 11). Mary Baker Eddy explains: “Mortals can never know the infinite, until they throw off the old man and reach the spiritual image and likeness” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 519, cit. 14). A man “with an unclean spirit” (see Mark 1:23–27, cit. 12, and Luke 4:33–37), with what today we would refer to as a kind of mental illness, discovered mental freedom and clarity when Jesus healed him.
This is the first healing that these Gospels record. It was just the beginning of Jesus’ mission to show us that the kingdom of God, God’s eternal newness and nowness, is within us. We can experience immortality right now and have no need to feel limited in any way. As we read in Section 4 of this Lesson: “Jesus cast out evil spirits, or false beliefs.... Jesus did his own work by the one Spirit.... He never described disease, so far as can be learned from the Gospels, but he healed disease” (Science and Health, p. 79, cit. 17).
The account of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is recorded only in the Gospel of John (chapter 11, cit. 16). Jesus raised Lazarus just a short while before what we call Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered triumphantly into Jerusalem, several days before the crucifixion. It seems that Jesus was preparing people’s thought for the idea of the immortality of life before he was resurrected himself.
What new thing is God doing in your life this week to open your thought and to allow you to see more of your spirituality and immortality in a fresh way? Mrs. Eddy writes, “Man in the likeness of God as revealed in Science cannot help being immortal” (Science and Health, p. 81, cit. 3). Let’s look for renewal by the Spirit in all our actions.
