We, too, can rise

“He is risen!”

This was a vital greeting to early Christians. Vital as in essential, but also alive, energizing, inspiring. The expected response to the greeting was, “He is risen indeed!” This celebrated the history-altering fact that the inspired teacher and healer Jesus Christ, who had been so unjustly crucified, rose up alive just as he had promised.

In their own way, his early followers had also risen. He showed that life isn’t the mortal existence it seems to be, but the endless experience and expression of immortal Life, God. Jesus’ resurrection awakened his disciples to the unbroken continuity of this divine Life, and striving to understand what he did and proved can awaken us today.

But he was not illustrating an immortality after death. Conquering death was his highest evidence of Christ, the spiritual idea of the perfection of God and God’s creation, which he proved throughout his healing ministry. Every time he cured a physical or mental malady, or lifted someone out of sin, Jesus showed that immortality was right there.

We can rise to this recognition. As we seek to better understand God, Christ uplifts our sense of how God truly created us. While this truth of what we are rightly fills us with joy, it also brings an awareness of where we seem to fall short of that true individuality. As we are honest to ourselves about the need for change and hunger for it, the desire to grow in our grasp and expression of our God-given identity empowers us to let go of false traits. As we do so, the evidence that we are God’s offspring, harmonious and sinless, emerges in practical ways.

Following his victory over death, Jesus went still further in his demonstration of freedom from the limits of materialism. The experience is described in the Bible as being “carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51). This was not a shift in location, but in thought. It was his final rising above any remaining consciousness of being bound by matter.

As a result of this ascending thought, those with him, still mired to a degree in the corporeal conception of existence, were no longer able to see or hear him. This showed them just how “high” we can go – that is, how far we ultimately will each rise above the misperception that we are mortal to the recognition that we are immortal and spiritual.

This is how one of the early followers of Jesus expressed what happened: “When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). These words point to the ongoing relevance of Jesus’ ultimate demonstration of rising fully above the false belief that we are material. While this final step of individual salvation isn’t replicated all at once, it exemplifies our capacity daily to take steps in this direction. Through yielding to Christ, we accomplish what feels humanly out of reach. Beholding the true, spiritual idea of what we are enables us to rise above and correct thoughts seemingly captive to the specter of ourselves or others as beholden to matter.

In “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” and her other writings, the discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, shows us how this rising in thought brings freedom. However ingrained a conviction of being material appears to be, Christ causes us to rise above that mistaken sense of identity, enabling us to discern the fullness of Spirit and demonstrate our identity as Spirit’s harmonious, wholesome offspring.

Rising to accept and embrace this true view of God and what God creates, brings resolution and healing in all aspects of our life. As Science and Health promises, “We can, and ultimately shall, so rise as to avail ourselves in every direction of the supremacy of Truth over error, Life over death, and good over evil, and this growth will go on until we arrive at the fulness of God’s idea, and no more fear that we shall be sick and die” (p. 406).

With every step of spiritual progress and healing, our thought rises above the mental tug to mistakenly exalt matter as reality. As we instead exalt Spirit, God, as All, we can say today, “He is risen indeed!” With each faithful footstep, the Christ rises anew to human view through our understanding and proof of the Truth that Jesus’ healing ministry, resurrection, and ascension have shown us.

Adapted from an editorial published in the April 2023 issue of The Christian Science Journal.