My last letter broke off rather abruptly with a promise to do my best to
set forth hereafter the Resurrection of Christ as it may be regarded
from a natural point of view.
Looking at the facts in this light, we have in the first place to set
before ourselves the short life of One of whom we must merely say that
He was unique in the goodness and grandeur of His character, and that He
died with the unfulfilled purpose of redeeming mankind from sin,
deserted for the moment by the few disciples who had adhered to Him
almost to the last. He died, for the time, the most pitiable, the most
despair-inspiring death that the world has ever witnessed, asking in His
last moments why He had been “forsaken” by God. But His death—pardon me
if I deviate for one moment from material to celestial facts, provided
that I never deviate into miracles—was really the triumph over death,
and His Spirit had in reality (we speak in a metaphor) broken open the
bars of the grave and ascended to the throne of the Father carrying with
Himself the promise of the ultimate redemption of mankind. This was now
to be revealed to the world as the culminating vision in that continuous
Revelation through the Imagination by which the minds of men had been
led to look beyond this life to a life that knows no end. Speaking
terrestrially, we must say that the influence of Jesus, love, faith,
remorse, were moulding the hearts of the disciples on earth to receive
the truth; speaking celestially we may say that Jesus bent down from His
throne by the right hand of God to prepare them for the manifestation of
His victory. What in this crisis exactly befell on earth we shall never
know. The tradition that Jesus appeared on the third day, or after three
days, to His disciples, is so naturally derived from the prophecy of
Hosea “on the third day he shall raise us up”—a prophecy probably
applied by Jesus to Himself—that we can place no reliance on its
numerical accuracy. Nor do we know exactly where Jesus first appeared to
His disciples. The oldest tradition[28] declared that they were to “go
to Galilee” after their Master’s death, and that He had promised to
guide them thither; but a subsequent account interpreted the words about
“Galilee” quite differently.[29] In any case, before many days had
elapsed, to some one disciple, perhaps to Mary Magdalene—out of whom
there had been cast “seven devils”—it was given to see the Lord Jesus.
Here, by the way, we must note the remarkable prominence given in all
the Gospels to the part played by women in receiving the first
manifestations of Christ’s Resurrection. Writers who were careful to
avoid giving occasion for unbelief might naturally have desired to give
less prominence to the testimony of highly imaginative and
impressionable witnesses; and indeed St. Paul, in his brief list of the
appearances of Jesus (possibly because writing as an Apostle who had
seen Christ, he desired to confine himself almost entirely to
manifestations witnessed by Apostles), makes no mention of the
appearances to women: their prominence, therefore, in all the Gospels,
testifies strongly to the early and universal acceptance of the
tradition that women were the first witnesses to the risen Saviour. But
to resume. The news quickened the faith even of those disciples who had
not seen and who could not yet believe; and presently apparitions were
seen—a thing almost, though (I believe) not quite, unique in visions—by
several disciples together. Probably the most frequent occasions for
these manifestations were when they had met together to partake of the
body and blood of their Master; and it was in the moment of the breaking
of the bread that the image of the Living Bread was flashed before them,
appearing in the form of Jesus giving Himself for them, and uttering
words of blessing, comfort, or exhortation, audible to the ears of the
faithful, who at the same moment were handling His body and touching the
blood which flowed from His side. At other times he appeared before them
with other messages; to the women he seemed to wave them off as if
deprecating a too close approach, or as if bidding them go hence and
carry the glad tidings to the Apostles; others He seemed to rebuke for
their want of faith; in the sight of others, His hands, outstretched in
the attitude of parting benediction, seemed to send forth His disciples
to preach His word with promise of His presence; but how these messages
were conveyed, whether by gesture simply, or by spiritual voice (as in
the case of St. Paul), audible perhaps to one, and by him interpreted to
the rest, or audible to all that were in the same faithful
sympathy—these and other details cannot now be determined.
“Why did not the adversaries of Christ confront His followers by
producing the body from the tomb, thus disproving the story that His
body had risen from the dead?” The tomb was probably empty. That is
probable for two reasons, first because the earliest traditions agree
that the women going to the tomb found the stone rolled away; and
secondly, because the adversaries of Jesus appear to have themselves
subsequently circulated a story that the disciples had stolen away the
body. This they would hardly have done if they had known that their own
explanation could be at any moment refuted by opening the tomb, which
would have shown the body still lying there. Possibly some of the
enemies of Jesus had themselves removed the body, influenced by some of
those predictions of Jesus about Himself, which, though they had not the
power to inspire the disciples with faith in the moment of His death,
had power to inspire His enemies with a vague fear. Being almost
surprised in the act, they may not have had time to replace the great
stone at the entrance of the tomb, when the women arrived; if so, the
action of Christ’s own enemies prepared the way for the belief in His
resurrection by exhibiting to the sorrowing disciples the stone rolled
away and the empty sepulchre. First came the cry, “He is not here,” and
that prepared the way for “He is risen.”
How long the visionary period lasted we cannot tell. It is almost
certain that there were many more visions than the five recorded by St.
Paul (1 Cor. xv. 6, 7). At least one of St. Paul’s five visions, that to
St. James, is not mentioned in any of our extant Gospels; on the other
hand St. Paul omits some of those peculiar to the third or fourth
Gospels, as well as the manifestations to the women. Perhaps the visions
were so many, and all so like each other, that the Church found it
difficult to select which to record; and each Evangelist chose those
which appeared to him fittest, either because they were the earliest, or
because the witnesses were numerous, or because they were apostolic, or
because they contained the most striking proof of a veritable
resurrection. We may therefore easily accept the statement that the
period of visions lasted for forty days or even for a much longer time,
probably till the disciples felt emboldened to take an active course in
preaching the Gospel.
Concerning Christ’s manifestation to St. Paul I have said enough in my
last letter—if anything needed to be said—to shew that it must have been
of the nature of a vision, and (in a sense) “subjective.” But it differs
from the rest in that it was made to an enemy while the other
manifestations were made to devoted disciples. Love, remorse, faith,
affection, stimulated the Apostles to cry, “He cannot have died,” and
prepared their souls to see the image of Jesus risen; but where, it may
be asked, was the spiritual preparation in the heart of St. Paul to
receive such a vision? You may trace it in the words which St. Paul
heard from Jesus: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” They
shew that the future Apostle had been struggling, and struggling hard,
against the compunctions of conscience. Being a lover of truth from his
childhood, he was prepared to give up all for its sake; but recent
events had made him ask whether he was not fighting against the truth
instead of for the truth. He had been persecuting the Christians; but
their faith and patience had made him doubt whether they might not be
right and he wrong. When the first martyr Stephen looked up to heaven
and there saw Jesus seated at the right hand of God, then or soon
afterwards, the question must have arisen in the mind of the persecutor,
“What if the follower of the Nazarene was speaking truth? What if the
crucified Jesus whom I am now persecuting was really exalted to God’s
throne?” Such was the struggle through which Saul’s mind was passing
when the Spirit of Jesus, acting indirectly through the constancy and
faith of His persecuted disciples, having first insensibly permeated and
undermined the barriers of Pharisaic training and education, now swept
all obstacles before it in an instantaneous deluge of conviction that
this persecuted Jesus was the Messiah. At that same moment the Messiah
Himself (who during these last months and weeks of spiritual conflict
had been bending down closer and closer to the predestined Apostle from
His throne in heaven) now burst upon the convert’s sight on earth.
But I think I hear you saying, “All this sounds well; but he has
repeatedly described these visions of the risen Saviour as subjective:
how then can he call them real? What is real?” Let me refer you to the
paper of Definitions which I enclosed in a previous letter.[30]
1. _Absolute reality cannot be comprehended by men, and can only be
apprehended as God, or in God, by Faith._
2. _Among objects of sensation, those are (relatively) real which
present similar sensations in similar circumstances._
Now if you try to regard the manifestation of the risen Christ under the
second head, as an “object of sensation,” you must pronounce it
“unreal,” inasmuch as it would not “present similar sensations in
similar circumstances;” by which I mean that, with similar opportunities
of observation, different persons (believers, for example, and
unbelievers) would not have derived similar sensations from it. But your
conclusion would be false because you started from a false premise:
these manifestations cannot be classed “among objects of sensation.”
The movements of the risen Saviour appear to me to have been the
movements of God; His manifestations to the faith of the Apostles were
divine acts, passing direct from God to the souls of men. Since
therefore these manifestations belonged to the class of things which
“can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by faith,” I call them
“absolute realities”—as much more real than flesh and blood, as God
Himself is more real than the paper on which I am now writing.
Footnote 28:
Mark xvi. 7; Matthew xxviii. 7: “He goeth before you _into Galilee_.”
Footnote 29:
Luke xxiv. 6: “Remember how he spake unto you _while he was yet in
Galilee_.”
Footnote 30:
See _Definitions_ at the end of the book.
XXIII
THE SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION