The healing love of Christ

Perhaps there have been times in our lives when everything in us has cried out to feel loved in a way that would make a practical difference. Maybe we were facing a prolonged illness, or grieving the loss of someone dear to us, or fighting some internal battle with fear, discouragement, or sensuality.

For anyone in these situations, the core message of Christianity can resound with hope. It says to each one of us, “You can most certainly experience the love of Christ, which heals.”

The Gospels illustrate the love of our devout Savior, Christ Jesus, toward every individual who appealed to him for healing. It was a love that flowed freely through the very fiber of Jesus’ life and teachings and healing ministry.

So profound and enduring was its impact on the many lives that it touched, that this love must have been divine in origin. And this Christly, God-impelled love is as real and vital today as it was when Jesus walked the earth.

Christian Science takes up the important distinction between the human man Jesus – who was among humanity for a relatively brief period of time – and the Christ, Truth, which he said would be with humanity forever. For example, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) and “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). We might take the first statement as referring to the divine and eternal Christ – the spiritual identity of the human man, Jesus, that the second quote refers to.

One way of defining the role of Christ in our lives is as the anointing love of God, revealing us all to be sons and daughters of the one divine Father-Mother God, who is Love itself. Christ comes to receptive consciousness, showing our true selfhood to be entirely spiritual, created in the likeness of God, Spirit, and so exempt from the vagaries of a so-called material existence.

In quietude and humility we experience the healing effect of this divine influence. It silences persistent doubt, self-judgment, sinful tendencies, even health verdicts associated with devastating outcomes. It disentangles thought enrapt with the seeming complexities of a situation, freeing us from the grips of fear. The effect of Christ welcomed in consciousness is moral and physical healing, and harmonious adjustments in our lives and relationships.

Jesus’ role in human history was unique and world-changing. Yet he didn’t claim for himself one iota of personal healing ability; rather, he said he couldn’t do anything without God (see John 8:28). Nor did he indicate that the spiritual healing he practiced was confined to that particular period in history or limited to a few immediate followers. He credited God with all the goodness and light and love that he expressed.

As a child I would sometimes think, “What if I could come to Jesus with this problem I’m having?” I would imagine what that might be like, naturally assuming that he would heal me.

Eventually I came to see that the entire gospel message points to the eternal grace of God, whose love for each of us is free-flowing, constant, full, and always present to heal and to save. Once when I was ill, a simple prayer acknowledging, “God’s eternal Christ is present in my consciousness now, doing for me what Christ would do were I in the presence of Jesus,” resulted first in a sense of peace and then in quick healing of the physical difficulty.

Mary Baker Eddy, a lifelong student of the Bible and devoted follower of Christ Jesus, writes in the textbook of Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness. The Christ is incorporeal, spiritual, – yea, the divine image and likeness, dispelling the illusions of the senses; the Way, the Truth, and the Life, healing the sick and casting out evils, destroying sin, disease, and death” (p. 332).

We are free at any time during our day to entertain in prayer the healing Christ. Christ inspires us to know ourselves increasingly as God knows us, to feel our heavenly Father’s love, and to experience more and more consistently the healing impression of this love upon our lives.