A healing rebuke

We’ve all done it: hung up the phone. Blocked a text sender. Told a scammer we wouldn’t be scammed. An implied or spoken “No” ended these exchanges. In our rebuke was the authority that silenced what would try to impose itself on us.

But are we so definitive when it comes to the thoughts that would intrude on us, bombard us – indeed, scam us – with suggestions of despair, illness, anger, or injustice?

Christ Jesus is our model for this mental censure. The Gospels relate numerous times in his healing practice when he used rebuke as a tool in his spiritual arsenal – not against individuals, but in casting out intrusive, material beliefs that are the seedbed of sin and disease. This showed his utter rejection of any assumption that challenged the supremacy and reality of God, good, and of man as actually Godlike and spiritual.

And following in his footsteps, as he said we could and would, we have this same spiritual capacity, and the inherent right, to reject the evil that would say that we are subject to sickness, disability, injustice, or anything else that isn’t of God.

Of course, to know what isn’t of God, we first have to know what is. Didn’t Jesus’ life exemplify the nature of God as our loving, all-wise Father-Mother? As inviolate Truth, boundless Love, limitless Life? Jesus understood that God is truly All, and all good – no possibility or allowance for evil.

The discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, demonstrated the spiritual logic of this perception when she wrote in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “Since God is All, there is no room for His unlikeness. God, Spirit, alone created all, and called it good. Therefore evil, being contrary to good, is unreal, and cannot be the product of God” (p. 339).

In moments when we’re tempted to make room in our thought for the possibility of evil – to justify or fear it in ourselves or another – we can start by remembering that our rejection of anything that opposes itself to God is based on the fact that what we’re rebuking is a lie about who we really are: God’s child, His expression. So there’s actually nothing behind whatever claims the opposite of that spiritual fact.

In other words, we aren’t rebuking the suggestion of evil simply because it’s the “right” thing to do but because it’s the only thing to do in light of what is true. And Christ, the spirit of Truth that Jesus so palpably lived and demonstrated, empowers us today to know, feel, and inevitably side with the right and real.

Such was the case for me when I received a call from a fellow church member whose young child had dislocated her shoulder. It was one of the first calls I had from someone outside of my family for help through prayer. The mother was distraught. And as soon as we hung up, I felt so responsible and, at the same time, inadequate, that I was frozen with fear. I struggled for some time to turn to God, to pray. But then these Bible words came: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalms 46:10).

Oh, yes, I saw, it is God, our divine Principle, Love itself, not me, who is in charge, who is responsible. When the mom called again a short time later, I heard the little girl cry out in pain, and I found myself decisively rejecting the whole impression of injury and harm. This situation was so wrong, so not of God, that it couldn’t possibly be true. I wholeheartedly welcomed instead God’s tender mercy for this little one. A moment later, her mother called back and said her daughter’s shoulder had just popped back into place.

When we renounce what is loveless and divinely unjust, it invariably puts us on the side of Truth, and then we find ourselves sticking with what’s good, health-giving, and real. Once thought has turned, there need be no turning back.

It’s comforting to know that it is not our personal fortitude or know-how that compels our rebuke or ensures the success of our healing practice but Spirit’s own impetus and evidence made plain to us, Spirit’s offspring. Each of us has the right – and ability – to silence evil’s clamor as illegitimate and to accept and rejoice in the truth of God’s ever-present goodness and love, where we forever abide.

Adapted from an editorial published in the June 2, 2025, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.