"Risen with Christ" ANNIE M. KNOTT, CSD         Christian Scientists are sometimes asked why their church does not observe “times and seasons” in the way that a good many other churches do, as, for instance, the Sunday called Easter. These questioners forget that St. Paul reproached the Galatians because they apparently did not grasp as they should the meaning of divine sonship, but instead clung to outward things, “the weak and beggarly elements” of mortal belief. He says, “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.” In Article XVII of our Church Manual (Sect. 2) we are told that “there shall be no special observances, festivities, nor gifts at the Easter season by members of The Mother Church.” Our Leader adds: “Those sacred words of our beloved Master, ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ and ‘Follow thou me,’ appeal to daily Christian endeavors for the living whereby to exemplify our risen Lord.”          Let no one think, however, that the Easter season means little to the Christian Scientist, who no longer observes it with outward ceremonial, but instead asks himself to what extent he has “risen with Christ” above earth and earthliness, consequently above doubt and fear. In his epistle to the Colossians Paul deals with this whole question in a daring and profoundly spiritual manner. He tells of the divine purpose to reveal to men that which has seemed to be a mystery, hid from the ages but made known through Christ Jesus, and he says that “the riches of the glory of this mystery” is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” The apostle then calls for faith in “the operation of God,” who raised Jesus from the dead. To the Christian Scientist this does not mean faith to believe that God did so, for this is accepted by him without question, but faith in the operation of the same divine law at the present hour and in his own experience, the unfolding faith which lifts one above sin, sickness, and the fear of death.          To those in a sense of sadness or suffering at the Easter season this Pauline message tells of a new and wonderful sense of life, not to be gained from anything material, but which comes from being “quickened together with him,” — with Christ. Nature lovers point us to the revival of plant life in the springtime, but the plant is the same as that which had appeared in meadow or garden the year before. Not so, however, with the one who has died to materiality by learning its nothingness, and who has “put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” The one who is “risen with Christ” is daily renewed in knowledge, the kind of knowledge which is power.          Christ Jesus knew that because God is omnipotent, evil is powerless, and he faced it unshrinkingly in its most hideous and fearsome forms. Those who are risen with Christ must prove it by living above anger, malice, and impurity, not in a merely negative way and on stated occasions, but by love, forbearance, meekness, wisdom, health, and harmony every day of the year. Paul says that, at most, holy days are but “a shadow of things to come,” and we would fain possess the substance, Christ forever with us, giving us “the full assurance of understanding.” Our goal is perfection, and for this we strive continually, for like the apostle we should each be ready to say of the divine power that it “worketh in me mightily.”          Christian Scientists are privileged to offer unanswerable proofs that all the truth which is symbolized by Easter observances is to them a most vital thing every day of the year, and they cannot too often ponder the words of their revered Leader on page 191 of “Miscellany”: “This glad Easter morning witnesseth a risen Saviour, a higher human sense of Life and Love, which wipes away all tears. With grave-clothes laid aside, Christ, Truth, has come forth from the tomb of the past, clad in immortality. . . . Mortality’s thick gloom is pierced. The stone is rolled away. Death has lost its sting, and the grave its victory. Immortal courage fills the human breast and lights the living way of Life.”   "'Risen with Christ'" by Annie M. Knott, CSD Christian Science Sentinel, April 22, 1916

 

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