I will always remember the first time I attended The Mother Church, weeping as I read on one of its walls these words Mary Baker Eddy adapted from her book Science and Health: “If sin makes sinners, Truth and Love can unmake them.” The hope of being able to be washed clean of years of sinful living was being shown to me for the first time.
Not long before, I had been instantly awakened by the light of the Christ, Truth, from the false desires which had overtaken my life for many years. One day, as I looked in the mirror, the words came to me clearly, “This isn’t you!” At that moment I caught a glimpse of my true nature, free from immorality. And those temptations left me forever. Shortly after that beautiful realization, I found my way to a Christian Science church.
Getting a glimpse of God’s great love for me is what instantly destroyed the plaguing sinful temptations I had unwittingly called my own.
In the years that have followed this healing, I have been discovering my true identity as the innocent child of God. As God’s beloved daughter, I have no material inheritance or material history, and I face no inevitable consequences of being born into matter, because God, Spirit, is the Father and Mother of all, and His great love and all-presence preclude even a possibility of sinful thoughts and behaviors in His spiritual offspring.
With this healing, I began to understand that the mortal sense of a “me” who appears to live in a material body with a personal mind, and includes the power and desire to sin, does not describe who I really am. This sense is a false, material concept. We read in the Bible, in the book of First John, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God” (3:1). As I was growing in my understanding of God and my spiritual identity as His daughter, I was beginning to see that, in reality, I am the innocent child of God’s creating, with a heritage that includes only purity and goodness.
In the textbook of Christian Science we read: “God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect. Man is the expression of God’s being” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 470). Further, Mary Baker Eddy states: “The real man cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom to sin. A mortal sinner is not God’s man” (Science and Health, pp. 475–476). Man always has been and always will be the individual expression of the one infinite Mind, the perfect Father, divine Love.
Getting a glimpse of God’s great love for me as His own daughter is what instantly destroyed the plaguing sinful temptations I had unwittingly called my own. In this pure love of Love, which spoke to me of my true identity as God’s own child, all darkness and hopelessness were banished. This is the Love that the Discoverer of the Christ Science spoke of when she offered those beautiful words I read that day in her church. And this is the Love which begets true compassion—compassion that has, at its foundation, a deep desire to better know God and understand man’s pure, spiritual selfhood.
Undoubtedly, the one who best demonstrated the power of God, divine Truth and Love, to heal is Christ Jesus. Because of his dual nature as the Son of God and the Son of man, Jesus presented the unseen Christ, “the divine manifestation of God” (Science and Health, p. 583), making him the great Exemplar for all mankind. More than anyone, he reflected the divine Mind. To the master Metaphysician, sin was never real! He beheld the reality of man as God’s own expression. This clear, compassionate seeing was what healed, revealing to the sick and the sinning their true identity as God’s own children.
I have always treasured the biblical account of the woman who “was taken in adultery, in the very act” (see John 8:1–11), because it so perfectly portrays the scientific Christian healing of sin through the great compassion of our loving Master. In this account by John, we are told that this woman was brought to Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees, who were testing Jesus to see which doctrine he would follow when presented with evidence of immorality. Would he obey the law of Moses, which demanded stoning, or would he be faithful to what he knew of God, divine Love, and its perfect rebuke of sin? The perfect law of Love Jesus taught and lived would never require stoning or retribution.
Ignoring their continued questioning, Jesus listened to his Father for an answer. He stooped down and wrote on the ground. The Master’s response came in the form of this challenge: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The loving Master had rebuked self-righteousness. We are then told that all the scribes and Pharisees left, one by one, beginning with the eldest among them—perhaps the wisest, the most humble. Jesus was left alone with the woman and asked these questions of her: “Where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” She answered, “No man, Lord.” And Jesus replied to her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
The unselfish uncovering of sin in human consciousness that recognizes sin as no part of one's true consciousness or identity is loving.
In one brief statement he had, with the power of Love, rebuked the sin and thus freed the woman. And not only was the woman freed, but so too were the scribes and Pharisees protected from carrying out retribution that would have turned them into murderers in the name of God. And Jesus himself was saved from entrapment. Every thought of sin had been overcome. What remained was the understanding of God and His idea, man, the reflection of Truth and Love, which Jesus saw so clearly.
Jesus never counted the sinning act as part of the woman’s true identity. He knew God, Spirit, to be the only creator of man and that Spirit’s perfect expression could never include any impurity. To him, sin was unreal and therefore had no claim on man, who is the perfect image of God, of Truth and Love. His clear rebuke to the impersonal sinning sense, seen in his command to the woman, “Go, and sin no more,” demanded that she immediately acknowledge her true spiritual identity. This was an act of true compassion—an expression of divine Love.
This kind of compassion separates sinful sense from the individual. It never condemns the person—only the sin! Jesus didn’t console the woman with human love, which oftentimes acknowledges as real a pitiful sinner in need of comfort. Rather, he consoled the woman with the truth, through his stern but loving rebuke and directive, showing that she was then and always had been the very expression of purity.
In her Message to The Mother Church for 1902, Mrs. Eddy describes our Way-shower this way: “Jesus was compassionate, true, faithful to rebuke, ready to forgive” (p. 18). Those untaught in Christian Science may think of a rebuke as being far from compassionate. Indeed, a rebuke that is motivated by self-righteousness and pride of opinion can elicit hurt. But the unselfish uncovering of sin in human consciousness that recognizes sin as no part of one’s true consciousness or identity is loving. This rebuke, with its clear vision of the perfect man, actually reflects something of the omnipotent love of God. As in the case of the adulterous woman and her accusers, the rebuke offers to the sinner the hope of realizing more of his true self, in purer, more Christlike thought and action. Mrs. Eddy shares in Science and Health: “Through the wholesome chastisements of Love, we are helped onward in the march towards righteousness, peace, and purity, which are the landmarks of Science” (p. 323).
Ultimately, we are all free from sinning sense. The rebuke that proves this can often come as it did to me that day I looked in the mirror—as the clear Christ message, the impersonal, compassionate voice of Truth and Love, speaking to one’s own thinking. Or it can come from a faithful friend who is willing to selflessly denounce the sin that would bind his neighbor. We can all know that we have authority to confront and denounce sin on the basis of its nothingness, since sin truly has no author and no expression.
In Science and Health we read: “All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise. They are not true, because they are not of God” (p. 472). To waken the sufferer from false, sinful beliefs, to “strip off their disguise,” is what our Master did. This was the kind of compassion Jesus expressed. And this is the compassion that heals.
If sin makes sinners, Truth and Love alone can unmake them.
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 270
