Our part in resurrection
Resurrection is more than one remarkable event in the life of the Master, Christ Jesus, two thousand years ago. If resurrection did not have immediate application to our lives now, Christianity would be without a vital aspect of its practicality.
But Christianity is completely and eminently practical. Jesus had the fullest grasp of God's nature of all who have ever walked the earth. His understanding resulted in marvelous works - the curing of hopeless disease and hardened immorality. He raised others from death and proved his own life to be eternal.
What does Jesus' resurrection have to do with us? To understand the connection, we need a deeper sense of what ''resurrection'' means. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, gives this spiritual definition of the term: ''Spiritualization of thought; a new and higher idea of immortality, or spiritual existence; material belief yielding to spiritual understanding.'' n1
n1 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 593.
Resurrection is a progressive experience each of us can aspire to take part in through daily purification of thought and character. Christ Jesus is our Way shower - and he has shown us the way by his example. While Jesus was uniquely able to show the supreme triumph of love over hate, harmony over disease, and life over death, he could not relieve us from the demand to prove, by degrees, the supremacy of good in our own lives. Ultimately we too must learn that man, as God created him, is not subject to death.
During long periods of one's life, death may be far from thought, or a subject one may wish to avoid thinking about. Yet eventually we must confront its claims and come to understand what truly constitutes our life. This involves deepening our understanding of the basic Biblical truth of the allness and eternality of God, infinite Life, the Principle of all existence.
This very day, you and I may be tempted to accept, not only so-called physical deaths, but deaths in other and perhaps more subtle forms. For instance , the slow dying of affection in family relationships; the killing of one's joy; the death of inspiration and sense of purpose; the fatal caving-in of personal integrity.
We may be tempted to accept such occurrences as ''a part of life'' - as something inevitable. Yet this is not what Christ Jesus taught and lived. He taught that life is inevitable! He didn't tell people to learn to ''cope with'' diseases; he healed them. He didn't doom adulterers and other sinners, but gave them practical, uplifting, redeeming help. ''I am come that they might have life , and that they might have it more abundantly,'' n2 he said.
n2 John 10:10.
The presence of God that he demonstrated is Christ, and the Christ is with us today to lift us up - to resurrect us - from the magnetism of worldly, matter-based thinking, which would, if unresisted, keep us from really living and celebrating health, joy, well-being.
Our experiences, both good and bad, should not wear us out, but wake us up! ''Through all the disciples experienced,'' Mrs. Eddy writes, ''they became more spiritual and understood better what the Master had taught. 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.'' n3
n3 Science and Health, p.34.
Christ, Truth, is here today, able to resurrect individual consciousness from the depths of whatever somber experience has darkened it. This Christ-power becomes more apparent, its influence more deeply felt, as an understanding of God displaces the darkness of materiality.
Each day, then, affords us possibilities to progress in our individual resurrection! DAILY BIBLE VERSE Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. Ephesians 5:14