Our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, clearly describes Jesus' earthly mission. She says (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 74), "Christ Jesus' sense of matter was the opposite of that which mortals entertain: his nativity was a spiritual and immortal sense of the ideal world. His earthly mission was to translate substance into its original meaning, Mind."
Jesus' sense of matter was different from that which mortals accept. At the pool of Bethesda, as he approached the man who had been impotent for thirty-eight years, the Master did not accept the false testimony of a diseased and helpless material body. He saw the spiritual idea, the man God made in His image and likeness, the complete expression of infinite, divine Mind. Jesus must have recognized instantly and clearly that the picture of impotence was but a phase of mortal belief, unreal and never any part of man, God's image.
This clear sense of the spiritual nature of man, of his eternal perfection, enabled the Master to perform the so-called miracles to which Mrs. Eddy refers in the same article: "He walked upon the waves; he turned the water into wine; he healed the sick and the sinner; he raised the dead, and rolled away the stone from the door of his own tomb." He was able to wipe out beliefs of hate, jealousy, and destruction, mortal apprehensions and so-called material laws. He had dominion over material laws, mortal fears, and over all belief in any life or intelligence in matter.
