A sound answer to the world’s woes

The subject of the Christian Science Bible Lesson this week, “Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?” is one of 26 recurring titles designated by Mary Baker Eddy. Her stirring and sometimes surprising questions help expose humanity’s distinct needs, while revealing the powerful yet ever-new reality of God’s presence and power. To me, the Golden Text heralds the core demand, and hope, this Lesson brings: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (Matt. 10:8, American Standard Version).

Perhaps no more concise summary of the difficulties facing the world exists than the words sin, disease, and death. Whether singly or in combination, they describe the spectrum of woe. But this Lesson approaches even the most daunting difficulties from an entirely spiritual and accurate standpoint.

For example, Section I includes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (see John 1:1–5, citation 1). Amplifying it, the New Living Translation of the Bible renders the last verse, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.” Science and Health quotes and expands it this way: “The Bible declares: ‘All things were made by Him [the divine Word]; and without Him was not anything made that was made.’ This is the eternal verity of divine Science.” The passage continues, “If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear. As vapor melts before the sun, so evil would vanish before the reality of good. . . . How important, then, to choose good as the reality!” (p. 480, cit. 1). The sections of the Lesson that follow illustrate that last sentence.

Along the way, I found words and phrases that seemed important. One was lodestar, used in Science and Health to describe the connection between the cross, history, and “the demonstration of Christian healing” (p. 238, cit. 7). I learned from the dictionary that lodestar is “a star that leads, a guiding star, especially the polestar.”

I’m sure that this unwavering “light that shineth in darkness” must have touched the conscious and unconscious thoughts of a widowed mother and her dead son as Jesus approached their funeral procession outside the city gates of Nain (see Luke 7:12–16, cit. 12). Jesus raised this dead man for a practical, spiritual purpose, and the people who saw it “glorified God.” Note that they said, “God hath visited his people” (verse 16). Were they awakened, too?

In the same section, Science and Health observes, “The spiritual fact and the material belief of things are contradictions; but the spiritual is true, and therefore the material must be untrue” (p. 289, cit. 12). The conduct of a group of sufferers appearing in Section IV represents this point, in that the spiritual and material oppose each other. Ten men have been permanently quarantined because of their leprosy. They appeal as one man to Jesus. But when he points them toward restoration, their responses diverge. Hurrying to see the religious authorities in Jerusalem, as Jesus has directed, they find themselves healed on the way. This marvelous demonstration of divine healing power fills them with even greater urgency—nine of them, apparently aware only of a physical change, hurry to have their healings sanctioned according to Jewish custom, enabling them to return to society. However, one, a Samaritan outcast, so grateful for the cause of his healing, comes back to glorify God—as the crowd at the disrupted funeral in Nain had done, falling “on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks” (see Luke 17:12–19, cit. 15). All ten were healed, but this man receives the Master’s commendation.

Additional examples in the Lesson reveal not only Jesus’ ability to heal, but underline his command to heal the sick and all forms of despair and death. In addition to the accounts already mentioned, there’s a sweetly simple healing of “a great fever” (see Luke 4:38–40, cit. 6). And Section V includes a complex story of insanity and its complete cure as “devils” enter into a herd of pigs (see Luke 8:27, 28, 30–35, cit. 17). Each of these dramatic experiences brings out the opposite natures of Spirit and matter, yet reveals that “. . . the spiritual is true, and therefore the material must be untrue. Life is not in matter” (Science and Health, p. 289, cit. 12).

Each narrative in the Lesson has important and distinct implications. And Jesus’ approach was always calm and unafraid. He must have expected that all his followers would emulate his example—and his words are a sublime coda for disciples in any age: “Your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20, cit. 18).

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