defeat, fairer than any victory; and from that moment he was wholly
Christ’s. Up to that time he had revered Him as a man more perfect than
others, now he recognized Him as God, as his God.
Then Jesus, who could not forget Thomas’ doubt, answered, “Thomas,
because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed.”
This is the last of the Beatitudes and the greatest: blessed are they
that have not seen and yet have believed, for in spite of the theories
of the dissectors of corpses, the only truths which have an absolute
value in reality are those which the eyes of the flesh cannot see and
hands of flesh and blood can never handle. These truths come from on
high and reach the soul directly: the man whose soul is locked shut
cannot receive them, and will see them only on the day in which his
body, with its five limited doorways, is like a shabby worn-out garment
left upon a bed, in the interval before men hide it underground like a
noisome afterbirth.
Thomas is one of the saints and yet he was not one of those blest by
that Beatitude. An old legend relates that up to the day of his death
his hand was red with blood, a legend true with all the truth of a
terrible symbolical meaning, if we understand from it that incredulity
can be a form of murder. The world is full of such assassins who have
begun by assassinating their own souls.
THE REJECTION OF THE RESURRECTION
Christ’s first companions were at last convinced that His second and
eternal life had begun. He who had been killed, who had slept as a
corpse sleeps, covered with the perfumes of Nicodemus and the
winding-sheet of Joseph, had after two days awakened like a God. But how
long it took them to admit the reality of His return!
And yet the enemies of Christ, to make an end to the greatest obstacles
in the way of their other negations, have accused those very astonished,
perplexed Disciples with having willingly or unwillingly invented the
myth of the resurrection. Caiaphas and his followers claimed that the
Disciples carried off the body by night and then spread around the news
of the empty sepulcher in order that weak-headed mystics might more
readily believe that Christ was risen and thus allow those cheats to
continue their pestiferous trickery in the name of the dead Trickster.
And Matthew says that the Jews bought some witnesses with “large money”
that if needful they should report that they had seen Simon and his
accomplices violate the sepulcher and carry away on their shoulders a
heavy burden wrapped in white.
But His modern enemies, through a last remnant of respect for those who
founded with their blood the indestructible Church, or rather through
their profound conviction of the simple-mindedness of the first martyrs,
have given up this idea of deceit. Neither Simon nor the others could
have acted out such a deception; they never could have kept such a piece
of trickery straight in their poor thick heads. But if they were not
consciously deceiving, they were certainly stupid victims of their own
fancy or of the knavery of others.
These enemies of Christ affirm that the Disciples hoped so vividly to
see Jesus rise from the dead as He had promised, and that the
resurrection was so urgently needed to counteract the disgrace of the
crucifixion, that they were induced, almost forced, to expect it and to
announce it as imminent. Then in that atmosphere of superstitious
suspense, the vision of a hysterical woman, the hallucination of a
dreamer, the delusion of an unbalanced man sufficed to spread the news
of the appearance of Christ about the little circle of the desolate
survivors. Some of them, unable to believe that the Master had deceived
them, easily put their faith in the affirmations of those who claimed to
have seen Him after His death. And, by dint of repeating the fantasies
of these wild dreams, they ended by taking them seriously themselves and
by convincing the more candid souls. Only on condition of such a
posthumous confirmation of the divinity of the dead man was it possible
to hold together those who had followed Him and to create the first
stable organization of the universal Church.
But those who with their accusations of stupidity or fraud try to
undermine the certainty of the first Christian generation, forget too
many things and too many essential things.
First of all is the testimony of Paul. Saul the Pharisee had been to
school to Gamaliel, and might have been present, even though at a
distance and as an enemy, at Christ’s death, and certainly knew all the
theories of his early teachers, the Jews, about the pretended
resurrection. But Paul, who received the first Gospel from the lips of
James, called the brother of the Lord, and from Simon, Paul famous in
all the churches of the Jews and the Gentiles, wrote thus in his first
letter to the Corinthians: “Christ died for our sins according to the
scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day
according to the scriptures; and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the
twelve: After that he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once;
of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen
asleep.” The Letter to the Corinthians is recognized as authentic even
by the most disdainful and suspicious nosers-out of falsification. The
first Letter to the Corinthians cannot have been written later than the
spring of the year 58, and hence it is older than the oldest Gospel.
Many of those who had known the living Christ were still living at that
time and could easily have contradicted or undeceived the Apostle.
Corinth was at the gates of Asia, inhabited by many Asiatics, in close
relation with Judea; Paul’s letters were public messages which were
publicly read at gatherings, and copies of them were made to send to
other churches. The solemn and specific testimony of Paul must have come
to Jerusalem, where the enemies of Jesus, many of them still alive,
would have found some way to controvert them by other witnesses. If Paul
could have thought a valid confutation possible, he never would have
dared write those words. That he was able therefore, so short a time
after the event, publicly to affirm a prodigy so contrary to ordinary
beliefs and to the interests of Christ’s watchful enemies, shows that
the resurrection was not merely a phantasy of a few fanatics, but a
certainty denied with difficulty, easily proved. We have no other record
except this letter of Paul’s of the appearance of Christ to the five
hundred brothers, but we cannot even for a moment imagine that Paul, one
of the greatest and purest souls of early Christianity, could have
invented it,—he who had so long persecuted those who believed in the
reality of the resurrection. It is extremely probable that the
appearance of Christ to the five hundred happened in Galilee on the
mountain spoken of by Matthew, and that the Apostle had known one of
those who had been present at that memorable meeting.
But this is not all. The Evangelists, who set down with some
incoherence, but with the greatest frankness, the recollections of
Jesus’ first companions, admit, perhaps without wishing to, that the
Apostles themselves did not expect the resurrection and found it hard to
believe. When we read the four Gospels with attention we see that they
continued to doubt even with the risen Christ before them. When on
Sunday morning the women ran to tell the Disciples that the sepulcher
was empty and Christ alive, the Disciples accused them of raving. When
later He appeared to many in Galilee: “And when they saw him, they
worshipped him:” said Matthew; “but some doubted.” And when He appeared
at evening in the room where they were taking supper, there were some
who could not believe their own eyes and hesitated until they had seen
Him eating. Thomas still doubted after this, until the moment when his
Lord’s body was actually before his own.
So little did they expect to see Him rise again that the first effect
upon them of His appearance was fright. “They were affrighted and
supposed that they had seen a spirit.” They were therefore not so
credulous and easily fooled as their defamers would have them. And they
were so far from the idea of seeing Him return a living man among the
living that when they first saw Him they mistook Him for another. Mary
of Magdala thought that He was the gardener of Joseph of Arimathea;
Cleopas and his companions were not able to recognize Him all along the
road; Simon and the others when He came to them upon the shore of the
lake, “knew not that it was Jesus.” If they had really been expecting
Him, Himself, their minds on the alert, burning with longing, would they
have been frightened, would they not have known Him at once? When we
read the Gospels, we get the impression that Christ’s friends, far from
inventing His return, accepted it almost because they were forced, by
external coercion, and after much hesitation; the exact contrary, in
short, of what is desired to be proved by those who accuse Christ’s
friends of being deceived or of having deceived.
But why this hesitation? Because the warnings of Christ had not been
able to dislodge from those slow and indocile minds the old Jewish
repugnance to the idea of immortality. The belief in the resurrection of
the dead was for centuries and centuries foreign to the wholly material
mentality of the Jews. In a few prophets like Daniel and Hosea there are
some passing traces of the idea, but it does not appear explicitly
except in one passage of the story of the Maccabees. At the time of
Christ the common people had a confused idea of it as a distant miracle,
a part of the conceptions of the Apocalyptic writers, but they did not
think it possible before the final upheaval of the great day: the
Sadducees denied it firmly and the Pharisees admitted it as the remote
and common reward of all righteous men. When the superstitious Antipas
said that Christ was John risen from the dead, he meant to say with a
vigorous figure of speech that the new Prophet was like a second John.
Reluctance to admit such an extraordinary infraction of the laws of
death was so profoundly rooted in the Jewish people that the very
Disciples of Christ were not disposed to admit the possibility of the
resurrection without reiterated proofs, although they had seen Him raise
others from the dead and had heard Him predict His own resurrection. And
yet they had seen Him bring to life with His powerful summons the son of
the Widow of Nain, the daughter of Jairus, the brother of Martha and
Mary: the three sleepers whom Jesus had awakened because of His
compassion for the grief of a mother, of a father, of a sister. But it
was the habit and the fate of the Twelve to misunderstand and to forget.
They were too set upon their material thoughts to be ready to believe at
once such a victory over death. But when they were convinced, their
certainty was so firm and strong that from the sowing of those first
enforced witnesses has sprung up an enormous harvest of men born again
in the faith of the resurrected One—which the centuries have not yet
mowed down.
The calumnies of the Jews, the accusations of false witnesses, the
doubts of the Disciples, the plots of implacable enemies, the fallacious
sophistry of the progeny of Thomas, the fantasies of heresiarchs, the
distorted conceptions of men eager to prove Christ definitely dead, the
turns and twists of the myth-spinners, the mines and assaults of the
higher and lower criticism have not availed to wrench from the millions
of human hearts the certainty that the body taken down from the cross of
Golgotha reappeared on the third day to die no more. The people chosen
by Christ condemned Him to death, hoping to have done with Him, but
death refused Him as the Jews had refused Him, and humanity has not yet
finished its accounting with that assassinated Man who came out from the
sepulcher to show that breast where the Roman lance had forever made
visible the heart which loves those who hate Him.
The cowardly souls who will not believe in His first life, in His second
life, in His eternal life, cut themselves off from true life: from life
which is generous acceptance, spontaneous love, hope in the invisible,
certainty of the truth which passeth understanding. They themselves are
dead, although they seem living, those who refuse Him, as death refused
Him. Those who drag the weight of their still warm and breathing corpses
over the patient earth laugh at the resurrection. The second birth in
the spirit will not be granted to those who reject life, but an
appalling and inevitable resurrection will be granted to them on the
last day.
THE RETURN BY THE SEA
When the tragedy had drawn to a close with its greatest sorrow, its
greatest joy, every one turned again to his own destination, the Son to
the Father, the King to His Kingdom, the High Priest to his basins of
blood, the fishermen to their nets.
These water-soaked nets, with broken meshes, torn by the unaccustomed
weight of the great draughts, so many times mended, patched, knotted
together again, which had been left by the first fishers of men without
one backward look, on the shores of Capernaum, had finally been mended
and laid on one side, by some one with the prudence of the stay-at-home
who knows that dreams are soon over and hunger lasts for all one’s
lifetime. The wife of Simon, the father of James and John, the brother
of Thomas, had saved the casting nets and the drag-nets as tools which
might be useful, in memory of the exiles, as if a voice had said to
those who had remained at home: “They too will come back; the Kingdom is
fair, but far distant, and the lake is fair now, to-day, and full of
fish. Holy is holiness, but no man lives by the spirit alone. And a fish
on the table now is worth more to a hungry man than a throne a year from
now.”
And for a time the wisdom of the stay-at-homes, taken root in their
native countryside like moss on a stone, was vindicated. The fishermen
returned. The fishers of men appeared again in Galilee and once more
took the old nets into their hands. They had received the order of Him
who had drawn them away from there that they should be witnesses to His
shame and to His glory. They had not forgotten Him and they could never
forget Him: they always talked of Him among themselves and with all
those who were willing to listen to them. But Christ on His return had
said, “We will meet again in Galilee.” And they had gone away from
ill-omened Judea, from the mercenary city ruled by its murderous
masters, and they had trod once more the road back to their sweet, calm
fatherland, whence the loving ravisher of souls had snatched them away.
The old houses had a mellow beauty, with the white banners of newly
washed linen, and the young grass greening along the old walls, and the
tables cleaned by humble old hands, and the oven, which every week spat
out sparks from its flaming mouth. And the quiet fishing-town had
beauty, too; with its tanned naked boys, the sun high over the level
market-place, the bags and baskets in the shadow of the inns, and the
smell of fish which at dawn was wafted over it, with the morning breeze.
But more beautiful than all was the lake: a gray-blue and slate-colored
expanse on cloudy afternoons: a milky basin of opal with lines and
patches of jacinth on warm evenings; a dark shadow flecked with white on
starry nights: a silvery, heaving shadow in the moonlight. On this lake
which seemed the very spirit of the quiet, happy countryside, the
fishermen’s eyes had for the first time discovered the beauty of light
and of water, nobler than the heavy unlovely earth and kinder than fire.
The boat with its slanting sails, its worn seats, the high red rudder,
had from their childhood been dearer to them than that other home which
awaited them, stationary, whitened, four-square on the bank. Those
infinitely long hours of tedium and of hope as they gazed at the
brilliant water, the swaying of the nets, the darkening of the sky, had
filled the greater part of their poor and homely lives.
Then came the day when a Master, poorer and more powerful than they, had
called them to Himself to be workers with Him in a supernatural,
perilous undertaking. The poor souls uprooted from their usual
surroundings had done their best to be lighted by that flame, but the
new life had trodden them out like grapes in the wine-press, like olives
in the olive crusher in order that their rough hearts should yield up
tears of love and pity.
It was only after the Cross had been raised on Golgotha that they had
wept with true sorrow: and only after the Crucified Leader had returned
to break bread with them that they had been kindled anew to hope.
And now they had come home, bringing back only a few recollections, and
yet those recollections were enough to transform the world. But before
beginning the work which He had commanded, they were waiting to see Him
whom they loved in the place which He had loved. They were different men
from the men who had gone away, more restless, sadder, almost estranged,
as if they had come back from the land of the lotus-eaters and saw from
beyond with purer eyes a new earth indissolubly united with Heaven. But
the nets were there, hung up on the walls, and the boats at anchor
swayed up and down on the water. Once more the fishers of men, perhaps
out of nostalgia, perhaps out of material need, began to be lake
fishermen.
Seven Disciples of Christ were together one evening in the harbor of
Capernaum, Simon called Peter, Thomas called Didymus, Nathanael of Cana,
James, John and two others. Simon said, “I go afishing.”
His friends answered, “We also go with thee.”
They went into the boat and put off, but all that night they caught
nothing. When day came, a little depressed because of the wasted night,
they came back towards the shore. And when they were near they saw in
the faint light of the dawn a man standing on the shore, who seemed to
be waiting for them. “But the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.”
“Children, have ye any meat?” called the unknown man.
And they answered, “No.”
“Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find.”
They obeyed and in a moment the net was so full that they were scarcely
able to draw it in. And they all began to tremble because they had
guessed who it was awaiting them.
“It is the Lord,” said John to Simon.
Peter answered nothing, but hastily drew on his fisher’s coat (for he
was naked), and cast himself into the sea that he might be first on
shore. The boat was scarcely two hundred cubits from the land and in a
few moments the seven Disciples were about their Lord. And no one asked
Him, “Who art thou?”—because they had recognized Him.
On the shore there were bread and a lighted brazier with fishes broiling
on it, and Jesus said, “Bring of the fish which ye have now caught.”
And for the last time He broke the Bread and gave to them and the fish
likewise. After they had finished eating Jesus turned to Simon and under
His look the unhappy man, silent till then, turned pale: “Simon, son of
Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?”
The man who had denied Him, when he heard this question full of
tenderness, but for him so cruel, felt himself carried back to another
place beside another brazier with other questions put to him, and he
remembered the answer he had made then, and the look from Christ about
to die and his own great lamentation in the night. And he dared not
answer as he wished: “Yes” in his mouth would have been boasting and
shamelessness: “No” would have been a shameful lie.
“Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee.”
He made no claim for himself but “thou knowest that I love thee,” Thou
who knowest all and seest into the most hidden hearts. “I love thee”:
but he had not the courage to add “more than these” in the presence of
the others, who knew what he had done.
Christ said to him, “Feed my lambs.”
And for the second time He asked him: “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou
me?”
And Peter in his trouble found no other answer than, “Yea, Lord; thou
knowest that I love thee.”
Why dost Thou still make me suffer? Dost Thou not know without my
telling Thee that I love Thee, that I love Thee more than at first, as I
have never loved Thee, and that I will give up my life to affirm my
love?
Then Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”
And for the third time He insisted, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou
me?”
He was drawing from Peter three affirmations, three new promises to
cancel his three denials at Jerusalem. But Peter could not endure this
repeated suffering. Almost weeping, He cried out, “Lord, thou knowest
all things; thou knowest that I love thee!”
The terrible ordeal was over, and Jesus went on, “Feed my sheep. Verily,
verily I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and
walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt
stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry whither
thou wouldest not.”
That is, to the cross, like the cross where they nailed me. Know,
therefore, what it means to love me. My love is brother to death.
Because I love you, they have killed me: for your love for me, they will
kill you. Think, Simon, son of Jonas, what is the covenant which you
make with me, and the fate which is before you. From now on, I shall not
be at hand to take you back, to give you the peace of forgiveness, after
coward fallings from grace. From now on defections and desertions will
be a thousand times more serious. You must answer for all the lambs
which I leave in your care and as reward at the end of your labors you
will have two crossed beams, and four nails as I had, and life eternal.
Choose: it is the last time that you can choose and it is a choice for
all time—irrevocable. For an account will be asked of you as a servant
left in the place of his master: and now that you know all and have
decided, come with me.
“Follow me!”
Peter obeyed, but turning about saw John coming after him and said,
“Lord, and what shall this man do?”
Jesus said to him, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to
thee? follow thou me!”
For Simon the primacy and martyrdom; for John immortality and endless
waiting. He who bore the same name as the precursor of Christ’s first
coming was to prophesy His second coming. The historian of the end was
to be persecuted, a solitary prisoner, but he was to live longer than
all the others and to see with his own eyes the crumbling of the stones,
not one left upon another, of the ill-omened hill of Jerusalem. In his
sonorous blue desert, in the midst of the blinding light and the immense
blackness of the midnight sea, in his vision of the great deeds of the
last day he will rejoice and suffer. Peter followed Christ, was
crucified for Christ and left behind him the eternal dynasty of the
Vicars of Christ: but John was not permitted to find rest in death: he
waits with us, the contemporary of every generation, silent as love,
eternal as hope.
THE CLOUD
Once more they returned to Jerusalem, leaving their nets, this time
forever, travelers setting out upon a journey, the stages of which were
to be marked by blood.
In the same place where He had gone down to the city glorified by men,
in the shade of blossoming branches, He was to rise again after the
interval of His dishonor and His resurrection, in the glory of Heaven.
He remained in the midst of men, for forty days after the resurrection,
for as long a time as He had remained in the desert after His symbolic
death by water. Although His body seemed human, His life was
transfigured into the ultimate sublimination of humanity and He was
ready to enter as pure spirit, into the spirit of the Father from whom
He had been separated thirty years before, that He might cast a gleam of
heavenly light upon the shadow-darkened world.
He did not, as before, lead a life in common with the Disciples, because
He was separated now from the life of living men; but He reappeared to
them more than once to confirm His great promises, and perhaps to
explain to those most capable of receiving them those mysteries which
were not written down in any book but were passed on, under the seal of
secrecy, through all the apostolic period and the following periods, and
were imperfectly set down later under the title of Arcana Disciplina.