Christ Jesus the mediator
As we hold to the truth that God’s message of love reaches everyone, inharmony dissolves and unity shines forth.
There’s a Bible verse that says, “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (I Timothy 2:5). For a while I didn’t quite understand the concept described, of Christ Jesus as mediator, but it became clearer to me when I attended a recital given by a renowned pianist.
Seeing I cannot read music, notes in the score are merely ink on a page to me. However, while listening to the most beautiful melodies coming from the piano, I realized that in effect the pianist was acting as a mediator for the composer – bringing to life the musical score through his playing in such a way that the audience could hear, enjoy, and understand the music.
Christian Science explains that this is what Jesus did for each of us when it comes to our relationship to God. The human mind cannot sufficiently discern and demonstrate spirituality on its own, but through the word and example of Christ Jesus, human thought is reconciled with the Divine.
So Christ Jesus was the Way-shower, or mediator, in that he reconciled us to God through the Christ, the spiritual idea that reveals the true nature of God, divine Love, to human consciousness, and hence the true idea of us all as Love’s creation, made in His image and likeness. It’s through Christ that we understand our spiritual source and demonstrate our true spiritual nature practically.
Jesus did this through love. Love is the nature of God, and is expressed in ways – such as compassion, goodness, and honesty – that help us recognize its divine source. Other expressions of Love, God, are intelligence, justice, health, harmony, grace, etc. None of these attributes of God can be cognized by the five physical senses, but they can be felt or recognized by spiritual sense.
It is important that we recognize our connection to God through the Christ. There are many other ways in which it is believed this connection to the Divine can be made, such as through crystals, stones, drugs, planets, and so on. But Christian Science helps us to understand that material objects are unable to impart intelligence to our consciousness, because they have no life in them. They have no validity, no power to perform any function.
The Christly restoration, bringing us into a conscious awareness of God, Spirit, never involves matter or the human mind. There is no affinity of Spirit with matter. Only like qualities can truly be united.
This Christly conciliation, which takes place through Christian Science, involves the recognition of the inseparability of a spiritual idea from its origin. It restores to an individual that which has always been and is now, but was temporarily lost sight of.
When I was in business, one of my portfolios was industrial relations, which involved many cases of mediation in which employees were unhappy with their employer or vice versa. I chaired many meetings that were intended to bring about resolutions. Very often, I was verbally attacked, and things were said that were intended to provoke a violent reaction. Sometimes comments were made that were just not true.
In instances like this I found it necessary to pray for composure and spiritual peace. A prayer I turned to frequently is from the “Christian Science Hymnal”: “The Christ is here, all dreams of error breaking, / Unloosing bonds of all captivity” (Rosa M. Turner, No. 412).
I held to the realization that the Christ, which is eternally present, communicates to human consciousness, revealing the goodness and peace of God’s infinite creation. Instead of reacting to barbs from meeting participants, I held to the truth that each one present was receptive to the Christ and expressed the Christly nature. This always brought harmony and unity to the discussion. The effect of the Christ, Truth, was reconciliation. Many factory strikes were resolved by this recognition of the presence of the Christ.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, wrote, “Through this redemptive Christ, Truth, we are healed and saved, and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God; we are saved from the sins and sufferings of the flesh, and are the redeemed of the Lord” (“Message to The Mother Church for 1901,” p. 11).
Christ lifts consciousness to the full understanding of our true spiritual nature. This is reconciliation – the restoration of harmony through Christ’s revealing of our at-one-ment with God, infinite Love.
Adapted from an article published in the Dec. 7, 2020, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.