He meets His followers after Calvary and the Tomb and the
Resurrection, with the same words with which two casual
acquaintances, after some slight absence, might salute one another
by the way. Their very simplicity is their sublimity here. For think
of what tremendous experiences He had passed through since they saw
Him last, and of what a rush of rapture and disturbance of joy shook
the minds of the disciples, and then estimate the calm and calming
power of that matter-of-fact and simple greeting. It bears upon its
very front the mark of truth. Would anybody have imagined the scene
so? There have been one or two great poets who might conceivably
have risen to the height of putting such words under such
circumstances into the mouths of creatures of their own imagination.
Analogous instances of the utmost simplicity of expression in
moments of intense feeling may be quoted from Æschylus or
Shakespeare, and are regarded as the high-water marks of genius. But
does any one suppose that these evangelists were exceptionally
gifted souls of that sort, or that they could have imagined anything
like this--so strange in its calm, so unnatural at first sight, and
yet vindicating itself as so profoundly natural and sublime--unless
for the simple reason that they had heard it themselves, or been
told it by credible witnesses? Neither the delicate pencil of the
great dramatic genius nor the coarser brush of legend can have drawn
such an incident as this, and it seems to me that the only
reasonable explanation of it is that these greetings are what He
really did say.
For, as I have remarked, unnatural as it seems at first sight, if
we think for a moment, the very simplicity and calm, and, I was
going to say, the _matter-of-factness_, of such a greeting, as
the first that escaped from lips that had passed through death and
yet were red and vocal, is congruous with the deepest truths of
His nature. He has come from that tremendous conflict, and He
reappears, not flushed with triumph, nor bearing any trace of effort,
but surrounded as by a nimbus with that strange tranquillity which
evermore enwrapped Him. So small does the awful scene which He has
passed through seem to this divine-human Man, and so utterly are
the old ties and bonds unaffected by it, that when He meets His
followers, all He has to say to them as His first greeting is,
'Peace be unto you!'--the well-worn salutation that was bandied to
and fro in every market-place and scene where men were wont to meet.
Thus He indicates the divine tranquillity of His nature; thus He
minimises the fact of death; thus He reduces it to its true
insignificance as a parenthesis across which may pass unaffected all
sweet familiarities and loving friendships; thus He reknits the
broken ties, and, though the form of their intercourse is hereafter
to be profoundly modified, the substance of it remains, whereof He
giveth assurance unto them in these His first words from the dead. So,
as to a man standing on some mountain plateau, the deep gorges which
seam it become invisible, and the unbroken level runs right on. So,
there are a marvellous proof of the majesty and tranquillity of the
divine Man, a glorious manifestation of His superiority over death;
a blessed assurance of the reknitting of all ancient ties, after it
as before it, coming to us from pondering on the trivial words--trivial
from other lips, but profoundly significant on His--wherewith He
greeted His servants when He rose again from the dead.
II. Then note, secondly, the universal destination of the greetings
of the risen Lord.
I have said that it is possibly a mere accident that we should have
the two forms of salutation preserved for us here; and that it is
quite conceivable that our Lord really spoke but one, which has been
preserved unaltered from its Hebrew or Aramaic original in John, and
rendered by its Greek equivalent by the Evangelist Matthew.
But be that as it may, I cannot help feeling that in this fact, that
the one salutation is the common greeting among Greek-speaking peoples,
and the other the common greeting amongst Easterns, we may permissibly
find the thought of the universal aspect of the gifts and greetings of
the risen Christ. He comes to all men, and each man hears Him, 'in his
own tongue wherein he was born,' breathing forth to him greetings
which are promises, and promises which are gifts. Just as the mocking
inscription on the Cross proclaimed, in 'Hebrew and Greek and Latin,'
the three tongues known to its readers, the one kingdom of the
crucified King--so in the greetings from the grave, the one declares
that, to all the desires of eager, ardent, sensuous, joy-loving
Westerns, and all the aspirations of repose-loving Easterns, who had
had bitter experience of the pangs and pains of a state of warfare,
Jesus Christ is ready to respond and to bring answering gifts.
Whatsoever any community or individual has conceived as its highest
ideal of blessedness and of good, that the risen Christ hath in His
hands to bestow. He takes men's ideals of blessedness, and deepens
and purifies and refines them.
The Greek notion of joy as being the good to be most wished for
those dear to us, is but a shallow one. They had to learn, and their
philosophy and their poetry and their art came to corruption because
they would not learn, that the corn of wheat must be cast into the
ground and die before it bring forth fruit. They knew little of the
blessing and meaning of sorrow, and therefore the false glitter
passed away, and the pursuit of the ideal became gross and foul and
sensuous. And, on the other hand, the Jew, with his longing for
peace, had an equally shallow and unworthy conception of what it
meant, and what was needed to produce it. If he had only external
concord with men, and a competency of outward good within his reach
without too much trouble, he thought that because he 'had much goods
laid up for many years' he might 'take his ease; and eat, and drink,
and be merry.' But Jesus Christ comes to satisfy both aspirations by
contradicting both, and to reveal to Greek and Jew how much deeper
and diviner was his desire than he dreamed it to be; and, therefore,
how impossible it was to find the joy that would last, in the
dancing fireflies of external satisfactions or the delights of art
and beauty; and how impossible it was to find the repose that
ennobled and was wedded to action, in anything short of union with
God.
The Lord Christ comes out of the grave in which He lay for every
man, and brings to each man's door, in a dialect intelligible to the
man himself, the satisfaction of the single soul's aspirations and
ideals, as well as of the national desires. His gifts and greetings
are of universal destination, meant for us all and adapted for us
each.
III. Then, thirdly, notice the unfailing efficacy of the Lord's
greetings.
Look at these people to whom He spoke. Remember what they were
between the Friday and the Sunday morning; utterly cowed and beaten,
the women, in accordance with the feminine nature, apparently more
deeply touched by the personal loss of the Friend and Comforter; and
the men apparently, whilst sharing that sorrow, also touched by
despair at the going to water of all the hopes that they had been
building upon His official character and position. 'We trusted that
it had been He which should have redeemed Israel,' they said, 'as
they walked and were sad.' They were on the point of parting. The
Keystone withdrawn, the stones were ready to fall apart. Then came
_something_--let us leave a blank for a moment--then came
_something_; and those who had been cowards, dissolved in
sorrow and relaxed by despair, in eight-and-forty hours became
heroes. From that time, when, by all reasonable logic and common
sense applied to men's motives, the Crucifixion should have crushed
their dreams and dissolved their society, a precisely opposite
effect ensues, and not only did the Church continue, but the men
changed their characters, and became, somehow or other, full of
these very two things which Christ wished for them--namely, joy and
peace.
Now I want to know--what bridges that gulf? How do you get the Peter
of the Acts of the Apostles out of the Peter of the Gospels? Is
there any way of explaining that revolution of character, whilst yet
its broad outlines remain identical, which befell him and all of
them, except the old-fashioned one that the _something_ which
came in between was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the
consequent gift of joy and peace in Him, a joy that no troubles or
persecutions could shake, a peace that no conflicts could for a
moment disturb? It seems to me that every theory of Christianity
which boggles at accepting the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as a
plain fact, is shattered to pieces on the sharp-pointed rock of this
one demand--'Very well! If it is not a fact, account for the
existence of the Church, and for the change in the characters of its
members.' You may wriggle as you like, but you will never get a
reasonable theory of these two undeniable facts until you believe
that He rose from the dead. In His right hand He carried peace, and
in His left joy. He gave these to them, and therefore 'out of
weakness they were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to
flight the armies of the aliens,' and when the time came, 'were
tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better
resurrection.' There is omnipotent efficacy in Christ's greetings.
The one instance opens up the general law, that His wishes are
gifts, that all His words are acts, that He speaks and it is done,
and that when He desires for us joy, it is a deed of conveyance and
gift, and invests us with the joy that He desires if we observe the
conditions.
Christ's wishes are omnipotent, ours are powerless. We wish for our
friends many good things, and the event turns wishes to mockery, and
the garlands which we prepared for their birthdays have sometimes to
be hung on their tombs. The limitations of human friendship and of
our deepest and sincerest wishes, like a dark background, enhance
the boundless efficacy of the greetings of the Master, which are not
only wishes but bestowments of the thing wished, and therein given,
by Him.