The fragrance of Easter is the fragrance of forgiveness. With what tenderness and courage Christ Jesus forgave even those who persecuted him and sought to lift them from the emptiness of mortality. He more than epitomized Mrs. Eddy's words in Miscellaneous Writings "To be a great man or woman, to have a name whose odor fills the world with its fragrance, is to bear with patience the buffetings of envy or malice—even while seeking to raise those barren natures to a capacity for a higher life." Mis., p. 228. Jesus' transcendent life was the sublime example of true Christ-love.
Patience and forgiveness! How vital these two God-given qualities are to mankind's salvation from sin. Not only do these qualities of infinite Love lift our own lives further in our individual resurrection and ascension, but they also bring to others the feeling that there is hope—that no one need or can be left out of Christ's redeeming love.
When Jesus faced the bitterness of the crucifixion and yet prayed for his captors, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," Luke 23:34. he was illustrating Christ's ability to save mankind from the belief of sin. The capacity for forgiveness is far more than a desirable human trait. Rather it is a characteristic of the Christ—the saving Truth that reveals man to be the image of God, Spirit, and therefore innocent of sin and mortality. Jesus could not have demonstrated his own freedom from the claims of the flesh if he had thought of man as a fleshly, sinning mortal. Only from the holy standpoint of man's God-derived nature and purity, which he knew constituted his own selfhood and the true identity of others, could he express the forgiveness that was an integral part of his ascension.
