I have taught Christian Science Sunday School for many years and continue to learn from being there. Presently I teach first- and second-graders, and whenever a healing appears in the weekly Bible Lesson, I ask them, “What did Christ Jesus say to the person healed?”
Understanding man as God’s very image and likeness, Jesus was able to dismiss disease as an illusion.
For example, to the crippled man waiting at the pool of Bethesda, thinking that healing would result by his being the first into the pool when the water bubbled up, Jesus said, “Wilt thou be made whole?” When the man answered that he had no one to help him into the pool, Jesus replied, “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” And the man was immediately able to walk (see John 5:2–9).
As the students and I have continued reading about Jesus’ healings, paying close attention to what he said, we’ve realized his remarks to those he healed were brief and obviously said with authority. Jesus was unimpressed by physical conditions; he was confident of healing because he knew that as the child of God, man is in reality 100 percent spiritual and perfect. Understanding man as God’s very image and likeness, Jesus was able to dismiss disease as an illusion, not a reality created or condoned by God.
Mary Baker Eddy writes: “Jesus never asked if disease were acute or chronic, and he never recommended attention to laws of health, never gave drugs, never prayed to know if God were willing that a man should live. He understood man, whose Life is God, to be immortal, and knew that man has not two lives, one to be destroyed and the other to be made indestructible” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 369).
Jesus never wandered from the healing truth but spoke with authority based on spiritual reality.
Reading this passage in the Lesson recently, I asked myself, “When I hear of a problem, whether it is in the next room or on the other side of the world, do I wonder, ‘Where did this problem come from?’ or ‘What’s causing it?’ or ‘Can this really be healed?’ ” Those questions, and all the what-ifs that present themselves, are based on an unreal, material sense of things. Jesus never wandered from the healing truth but spoke with authority based on spiritual reality.
I often ask my Sunday School students, “How did Jesus heal?” While there are many aspects to Jesus’ healing, they have found it helpful to memorize the answer that speaks to his spiritual authority, beginning on page 476 of Science and Health: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.”
