"Thou art loosed from thine infirmity"
"Freedom is a quality of God, which man reflects"
What indescribable joy Jesus' pronouncement, "Thou art loosed from thine infirmity," must have brought to the woman who had had "a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself"! The account in the thirteenth chapter of Luke tells us, "Immediately she was made straight, and glorified God."
Students: Get
JSH-Online for
$5/mo
Every recent & archive issue
Podcasts & article audio
Mary Baker Eddy bios & audio
Every recent & archive issue
Podcasts & article audio
Mary Baker Eddy bios & audio
Material laws would have decreed that after eighteen years of being bowed together the woman's body would require time to develop and change before normal action and erectness could be manifested. This law of matter the Master annulled. Had, however, the woman's infirmity been a reality, created by God, it could never have been eliminated by the truth of being. Truth naturally destroys only that which is untrue, or the opposite of Truth.
This is a glorious example of Jesus' healing works. Mrs. Eddy explains his manner of healing in this passage from "Unity of Good" (p. 11): "He annulled the laws of matter, showing them to be laws of mortal mind, not of God. He showed the need of changing this mind and its abortive laws. He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this change through the higher laws of God." And on the same page she makes this statement: "Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities."
How alert we need to be in our work as Christian Scientists to separate the false belief from the spiritual fact! Christian Science teaches that man in God's image and likeness never can be sick, impaired, limited, or in bondage to any of the false beliefs of the so-called mortal mind. All that can possibly be included in God's creation is that which He is imparting, constituting, governing. Freedom is a quality of God, which man reflects.
All that can be reflected in a mirror is that which is in front of the mirror. So, man, reflecting God, includes the harmony, health, completeness, beauty, perfection, and dominion of his Father-Mother God. And as we make the separation between that which is falsely claiming to belong to man and that which the Father is imparting to His perfect creation, we shall see mankind loosed from their infirmities.
The realization of the scientific truth utilized by the Master in his healing of the woman bowed together came with great encouragement to a Christian Scientist who had been struggling with a serious physical problem for many months. She had had help from practitioners and had worked earnestly herself. Many errors had been uprooted from her thinking and replaced with spiritual truths. There would be periods of improvement and even of freedom, but then the false evidence of pain and disease would again appear.
The Scientist was struck with Jesus' description of the woman as one "whom Satan hath bound." She recognized that one of the definitions which Mrs. Eddy gives of "devil" in Science and Health p. 584) is "animal magnetism or hypnotism." Therefore she began to claim her exemption from this mesmeric influence.
Each time the suggestion of pain or other false evidence would come to her, she would vigorously claim that her real being was not mesmerized, could not be mesmerized, and never had been mesmerized by this Satanic lie. She knew also that God had given her the ability to think and to act rightly.
Her consciousness, she knew, was the individual reflection of the divine, infinite consciousness, and therefore it could not be bound or mesmerized by a claim of life and intelligence in matter—animal magnetism. She acknowledged that disease had never belonged, nor had it ever been attached, to man. She knew that Jesus' words, '"Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity," applied to her. Healing was the result of her prayerful work.
The Psalmist recognized that it is impossible for man, made in God's image and likeness, to include a wrong thought. Did he not declare (Ps. 103: 12), "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us"?
And "Unity of Good" reminds us (p. 47): "Nowhere in Scripture is evil connected with good, the being of God, and with every passing hour it is losing its false claim to existence or consciousness. All that can exist is God and His idea."
