_He is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto
him_.--ST LUKE xx. 38.
It is a recurring cause of perplexity in our Lord's teaching, that he
is too simple for us; that while we are questioning with ourselves
about the design of Solomon's earring upon some gold-plated door of the
temple, he is speaking about the foundations of Mount Zion, yea, of the
earth itself, upon which it stands. If the reader of the Gospel
supposes that our Lord was here using a verbal argument with the
Sadducees, namely, "I _am_ the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;
therefore they _are_," he will be astonished that no Sadducee was found
with courage enough to reply: "All that God meant was to introduce
himself to Moses as the same God who had aided and protected his
fathers while they were alive, saying, I am he that was the God of thy
fathers. They found me faithful. Thou, therefore, listen to me, and
thou too shalt find me faithful unto the death."
But no such reply suggested itself even to the Sadducees of that day,
for their eastern nature could see argument beyond logic. Shall God
call himself the God of the dead, of those who were alive once, but
whom he either could not or would not keep alive? Is that the Godhood,
and its relation to those who worship it? The changeless God of an
ever-born and ever-perishing torrent of life; of which each atom cries
with burning heart, _My God_! and straightway passes into the Godless
cold! "Trust in me, for I took care of your fathers once upon a time,
though they are gone now. Worship and obey me, for I will be good to
you for threescore years and ten, or thereabouts; and after that, when
you are not, and the world goes on all the same without you, I will
call myself your God still." God changes not. Once God he is always
God. If he has once said to a man, "I am thy God, and that man has died
the death of the Sadducee's creed," then we have a right to say that
God is the God of the dead.
"And wherefore should he not be so far the God of the dead, if during
the time allotted to them here, he was the faithful God of the living?"
What Godlike relation can the ever-living, life-giving, changeless God
hold to creatures who partake not of his life, who have death at the
very core of their being, are not worth their Maker's keeping alive? To
let his creatures die would be to change, to abjure his Godhood, to
cease to be that which he had made himself. If they are not worth
keeping alive, then his creating is a poor thing, and he is not so
great, nor so divine as even the poor thoughts of those his dying
creatures have been able to imagine him. But our Lord says, "All live
unto him." With Him death is not. Thy life sees our life, O Lord. All
of whom _all_ can be said, are present to thee. Thou thinkest about us,
eternally more than we think about thee. The little life that burns
within the body of this death, glows unquenchable in thy true-seeing
eyes. If thou didst forget us for a moment then indeed death would be.
But unto thee we live. The beloved pass from our sight, but they pass
not from thine. This that we call death, is but a form in the eyes of
men. It looks something final, an awful cessation, an utter change. It
seems not probable that there is anything beyond. But if God could see
us before we were, and make us after his ideal, that we shall have
passed from the eyes of our friends can be no argument that he beholds
us no longer. "All live unto Him." Let the change be ever so great,
ever so imposing; let the unseen life be ever so vague to our
conception, it is not against reason to hope that God could see
Abraham, after his Isaac had ceased to see him; saw Isaac after Jacob
ceased to see him; saw Jacob after some of the Sadducees had begun to
doubt whether there ever had been a Jacob at all. He remembers them;
that is, he carries them in his mind: he of whom God thinks, lives. He
takes to himself the name of _Their God_. The Living One cannot name
himself after the dead; when the very Godhead lies in the giving of
life. Therefore they must be alive. If he speaks of them, remembers his
own loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he
could; and if he could not, how could he create them? Can it be an
easier thing to call into life than to keep alive?
"But if they live to God, they are aware of God. And if they are aware
of God, they are conscious of their own being: Whence then the
necessity of a resurrection?"
For their relation to others of God's children in mutual revelation;
and for fresh revelation of God to all.--But let us inquire what is
meant by the resurrection of the body. "With what body do they come?"
Surely we are not required to believe that the same body is raised
again. That is against science, common sense, Scripture. St Paul
represents the matter quite otherwise. One feels ashamed of arguing
such a puerile point. Who could wish his material body which has indeed
died over and over again since he was born, never remaining for one
hour composed of the same matter, its endless activity depending upon
its endless change, to be fixed as his changeless possession, such as
it may then be, at the moment of death, and secured to him in worthless
identity for the ages to come? A man's material body will be to his
consciousness at death no more than the old garment he throws aside at
night, intending to put on a new and a better in the morning. To desire
to keep the old body seems to me to argue a degree of sensual
materialism excusable only in those pagans who in their Elysian fields
could hope to possess only such a thin, fleeting, dreamy, and
altogether funebrial existence, that they might well long for the
thicker, more tangible bodily being in which they had experienced the
pleasures of a tumultuous life on the upper world. As well might a
Christian desire that the hair which has been shorn from him through
all his past life should be restored to his risen and glorified head.
Yet not the less is the doctrine of the Resurrection gladdening as the
sound of the silver trumpet of its visions, needful as the very breath
of life to our longing souls. Let us know what it means, and we shall
see that it is thus precious.
Let us first ask what is the use of this body of ours. It is the means
of Revelation to us, the _camera_ in which God's eternal shows are set
forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with
our fellow-men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through
the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of
love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both
trained outwards from ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest
selves to find God. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence,
this slow glacier-like flow of clothing and revealing matter, this ever
uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God's making
than the spirit that is clothed therein.
We cannot yet have learned all that we are meant to learn through the
body. How much of the teaching even of this world can the most diligent
and most favoured man have exhausted before he is called to leave it!
Is all that remains to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can but
believe that the spiritual body of which St Paul speaks will be a yet
higher channel of such revelation? The meek who have found that their
Lord spake true, and have indeed inherited the earth, who have seen
that all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning, who would not cast a
sigh after the loss of mere animal pleasure, would, I think, be the
least willing to be without a body, to be unclothed without being again
clothed upon. Who, after centuries of glory in heaven, would not
rejoice to behold once more that patient-headed child of winter and
spring, the meek snowdrop? In whom, amidst the golden choirs, would not
the vision of an old sunset wake such a song as the ancient dwellers of
the earth would with gently flattened palm hush their throbbing harps
to hear?
All this revelation, however, would render only _a_ body necessary, not
this body. The fulness of the word _Resurrection_ would be ill met if
this were all. We need not only a body to convey revelation to us, but
a body to reveal us to others. The thoughts, feelings, imaginations
which arise in us, must have their garments of revelation whereby shall
be made manifest the unseen world within us to our brothers and sisters
around us; else is each left in human loneliness. Now, if this be one
of the uses my body served on earth before, the new body must be like
the old. Nay, it must be the same body, glorified as we are glorified,
with all that was distinctive of each from his fellows more visible
than ever before. The accidental, the nonessential, the unrevealing,
the incomplete will have vanished. That which made the body what it was
in the eyes of those who loved us will be tenfold there. Will not this
be the resurrection of the body? of the same body though not of the
same dead matter? Every eye shall see the beloved, every heart will
cry, "My own again!--more mine because more himself than ever I beheld
him!" For do we not say on earth, "He is not himself to-day," or "She
looks her own self;" "She is more like herself than I have seen her for
long"? And is not this when the heart is glad and the face is radiant?
For we carry a better likeness of our friends in our hearts than their
countenances, save at precious seasons, manifest to us.
Who will dare to call anything less than this a resurrection? Oh, how
the letter killeth! There are who can believe that the dirt of their
bodies will rise the same as it went down to the friendly grave, who
yet doubt if they will know their friends when they rise again. And
they call _that_ believing in the resurrection!
What! shall a man love his neighbour as himself, and must he be content
not to know him in heaven? Better be content to lose our consciousness,
and know ourselves no longer. What! shall God be the God of the
families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created
towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, go
moaning and longing to all eternity; or worse, far worse, die out of
our bosoms? Shall God be God, and shall this be the end?
Ah, my friends! what will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I
continue to love God as I have learned to love him through you, if I
find he cares so little for this human heart of mine, as to take from
me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms? True, I might have a
gaze at Jesus, now and then; but he would not be so good as I had
thought him. And how should I see him if I could not see you? God will
not take you, has not taken you from me to bury you out of my sight in
the abyss of his own unfathomable being, where I cannot follow and find
you, myself lost in the same awful gulf. No, our God is an unveiling, a
revealing God. He will raise you from the dead, that I may behold you;
that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking
out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same
mighty hand of brotherhood, the same delicate and gentle, yet strong
hand of sisterhood, to me, this me that knew you and loved you in the
days gone by. I shall not care that the matter of the forms I loved a
thousand years ago has returned to mingle with the sacred goings on of
God's science, upon that far-off world wheeling its nursery of growing
loves and wisdoms through space; I shall not care that the muscle which
now sends the ichor through your veins is not formed of the very
particles which once sent the blood to the pondering brain, the
flashing eye, or the nervous right arm; I shall not care, I say, so
long as it is yourselves that are before me, beloved; so long as
through these forms I know that I look on my own, on my loving souls of
the ancient time; so long as my spirits have got garments of revealing
after their own old lovely fashion, garments to reveal themselves to
me. The new shall then be dear as the old, and for the same reason,
that it reveals the old love. And in the changes which, thank God, must
take place when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that
the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves; that the more
the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more
like they are to what we thought them in our most exalted moods, to
that which we saw in them in the rarest moments of profoundest
communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their
imperfections when we loved them the truest?
Lord, evermore give us this Resurrection, like thine own in the body of
thy Transfiguration. Let us see and hear, and know, and be seen, and
heard, and known, as thou seest, hearest, and knowest. Give us
glorified bodies through which to reveal the glorified thoughts which
shall then inhabit us, when not only shalt thou reveal God, but each of
us shall reveal thee.
And for this, Lord Jesus, come thou, the child, the obedient God, that
we may be one with thee, and with every man and woman whom thou hast
made, in the Father.