'And entering Into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the
right side, clothed in a long white garment.'--Mark xvi. 5.
Many great truths concerning Christ's death, and its worth to higher
orders of being, are taught by the presence of that angel form, clad
in the whiteness of his own God-given purity, sitting in restful
contemplation in the dark house where the body of Jesus had lain.
'Which things the angels desire to look into.' Many precious lessons
of consolation and hope, too, lie in the wonderful words which he
spake from his Lord and theirs to the weeping waiting women. But to
touch upon these ever so slightly would lead us too far from our more
immediate purpose.
It strikes one as very remarkable that this superhuman being should be
described as a '_young_ man.' Immortal youth, with all of buoyant
energy and fresh power which that attribute suggests, belongs to those
beings whom Scripture faintly shows as our elder brethren. No waste
decays their strength, no change robs them of forces which have ceased
to increase. For them there never comes a period when memory is more
than hope. Age cannot wither them. As one of our modern mystics has
said, hiding imaginative spiritualism under a crust of hard, dry
matter-of-fact, 'In heaven the oldest angels are the youngest.'
What is true of them is true of God's children, who are 'accounted
worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead,' for
'they are equal unto the angels.' For believing and loving souls,
death too is a birth. All who pass through it to God, shall, in deeper
meaning than lay in the words at first, 'return unto the days of their
youth'; and when the end comes, and they are 'clothed with their house
from heaven,' they shall stand by the throne, like him who sat in the
sepulchre, clothed with lustrous light and radiant with unchanging
youth.
Such a conception of the condition of the dead in Christ may be
followed out in detail into many very elevating and strengthening
thoughts. Let me attempt to set forth some of these now.
I. The life of the faithful dead is eternal progress towards infinite
perfection.
For body and for spirit the life of earth is a definite whole, with
distinct stages, which succeed each other in a well-marked order.
There are youth, and maturity, and decay--the slow climbing to the
narrow summit, a brief moment there in the streaming sunshine, and
then a sure and gradual descent into the shadows beneath. The same
equable and constant motion urges the orb of our lives from morning to
noon, and from noon to evening. The glory of the dawning day, with its
golden clouds and its dewy freshness, its new awakened hopes and its
unworn vigour, climbs by silent, inevitable stages to the hot noon.
But its ardours flame but for a moment; but for a moment does the sun
poise itself on the meridian line, and the short shadow point to the
pole. The inexorable revolution goes on, and in due time come the
mists and dying purples of evening and the blackness of night. The
same progress which brings April's perfumes burns them in the censer
of the hot summer, and buries summer beneath the falling leaves, and
covers its grave with winter's snow.
'Everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment.'
So the life of man, being under the law of growth, is, in all its
parts, subject to the consequent necessity of decline. And very
swiftly does the direction change from ascending to descending. At
first, and for a little while, the motion of the dancing stream, which
broadens as it runs, and bears us past fields each brighter and more
enamelled with flowers than the one before it, is joyous; but the slow
current becomes awful as we are swept along when we would fain moor
and land--and to some of us it comes to be tragic and dreadful at
last, as we sit helpless, and see the shore rush past and hear the
roar of the falls in our ears, like some poor wretch caught in the
glassy smoothness above Niagara, who has flung down the oars, and,
clutching the gunwale with idle hands, sits effortless and breathless
till the plunge comes. Many a despairing voice has prayed as the sands
ran out, and joys fled, 'Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou,
Moon, in the valley of Ajalon,' but in vain. Once the wish was
answered; but, for all other fighters, the twelve hours of the day
must suffice for victory and for joy. Time devours his own children.
The morning hours come to us with full hands and give, the evening
hours come with empty hands and take; so that at the last 'naked shall
he return to go as he came.' Our earthly life runs through its
successive stages, and for it, in body and mind, old age is the child
of youth.
But the perfect life of the dead in Christ has but one phase, youth.
It is growth without a limit and without decline. To say that they are
ever young is the same thing as to say that their being never reaches
its climax, that it is ever but entering on its glory; that is, as we
have said, that the true conception of their life is that of eternal
progress towards infinite perfection.
For what is the goal to which they tend? The likeness of God in
Christ--all His wisdom, His love, His holiness. He is all theirs, and
His whole perfection is to be transfused into their growing greatness.
'He is made unto them of God. wisdom, and righteousness, and salvation
and redemption,' nor can they cease to grow till they have outgrown
Jesus and exhausted God. On the one hand is infinite perfection,
destined to be imparted to the redeemed spirit. On the other hand is a
capability of indefinite assimilation to, by reception of, that
infinite perfection. We have no reason to set bounds to the possible
expansion of the human spirit. If only there be fitting circumstances
and an adequate impulse, it may have an endless growth. Such
circumstances and such impulse are given in the loving presence of
Christ in glory. Therefore we look for an eternal life which shall
never reach a point beyond which no advance is possible. 'The path of
the just' in that higher state 'shineth more and more,' and never
touches the zenith. Here we float upon a landlocked lake, and on every
side soon reach the bounding land; but there we are on a shoreless
ocean, and never hear any voice that says, 'Hitherto shalt thou come,
and no farther.' Christ will be ever before us, the yet unattained end
of our desires; Christ will be ever above us, fairer, wiser, holier,
than we; after unsummed eternities of advance there will yet stretch
before us a shining way that leads to Him. The language, which was
often breathed by us on earth in tones of plaintive confession, will
be spoken in heaven in gladness, 'Not as though I had attained, either
were perfect, but I follow after,' The promise that was spoken by Him
in regard to our mortality will be repeated by Him in respect to our
celestial being, 'I am come that they might have life, and that they
might have it _more abundantly_.' And as this advance has no natural
limit, either in regard to our Pattern or to ourselves, there will be
no reverse direction to ensue. Here the one process has its two
opposite parts; the same impulse carries up to the summit and forces
down from it. But it is not so then. There growth will never merge
into decay, nor exacting hours come to recall the gifts, which their
free-handed sisters gave.
They who live in Christ, beyond the grave, begin with a relative
perfection. They are thereby rendered capable of more complete
Christ-likeness. The eye, by gazing into the day, becomes more
recipient of more light; the spirit cleaves closer to a Christ more
fully apprehended and more deeply loved; the whole being, like a plant
reaching up to the sunlight, grows by its yearning towards the light,
and by the light towards which it yearns--lifts a stronger stem and
spreads a broader leaf, and opens into immortal flowers tinted by the
sunlight with its own colours. This blessed and eternal growth towards
Him whom we possess, to begin with, and never can exhaust, is the
perpetual youth of God's redeemed.
We ought not to think of those whom we have loved and lost as if they
had gone, carrying with them declining powers, and still bearing the
marks of this inevitable law of stagnation, and then of decay, under
which they groaned here. Think of them rather as having, if they sleep
in Jesus, reversed all this, as having carried with them, indeed, all
the gifts of matured experience and ripened wisdom which the slow
years bring, but likewise as having left behind all the weariness of
accomplished aims, the monotony of a formed character, the rigidity of
limbs that have ceased to grow. Think of them as receiving again from
the hands of Christ much of which they were robbed by the lapse of
years. Think of them as then crowned with loving-kindness and
satisfied with good, so that 'their youth is renewed like the
eagle's.' Think of them as again joyous, with the joy of beginning a
career, which has no term but the sum of all perfection in the
likeness of the infinite God. They rise like the song-bird, aspiring
to the heavens, circling round, and ever higher, which 'singing still
doth soar, and soaring ever singeth'--up and up through the steadfast
blue to the sun! 'Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the
young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait upon the Lord shall
renew their strength.' They shall lose the marks of age as they grow
in eternity, and they who have stood before the throne the longest
shall be likest him who sat in the sepulchre young with immortal
strength, radiant with unwithering beauty.
II. The life of the faithful dead recovers and retains the best
characteristics of youth.
Each stage of our earthly course has its own peculiar characteristics,
as each zone of the world has its own vegetation and animal life. And,
for the most part, these characteristics cannot be anticipated in the
preceding stage, nor prolonged into the succeeding. To some small
extent they will bear transplanting, and he is nearest a perfect man
who carries into each period of his life some trace of the special
beauty of that which went before, making 'the child the father of the
man,' and carrying deep into old age the simple self-forgetfulness of
the child and the energy of the youth. But this can only be partially
done by any effort; and even those whose happily constituted
temperaments make it comparatively easy for them, do often carry the
weakness rather than the strength of the earlier into the later
epochs. It is easier to be always childish than to be always
childlike. The immaturity and heedlessness of youth bear carriage
better than the more precious vintages of that sunny land--its
freshness of eye and heart, its openness of mind, its energy of hand.
Even when these are in any measure retained--beautiful as they are in
old age--they are but too apt to be associated with an absence of the
excellences more proper to the later stages of life, and to involve a
want of patient judgment, of sagacious discrimination, of rooted
affections, of prudent, persistent action. Beautiful indeed it is when
the grace of the child and the strength of the young man live on in
the fathers, and when the last of life encloses all that was good in
all that went before. But miserable it is, and quite as frequent a
case, when grey hairs cover a childish brain, and an aged heart throbs
with the feverish passion of youthful blood. So for this life it is
difficult, and often not well, that youth should be prolonged into
manhood and old age.
But the thought is none the less true, that the perfection of our
being requires the reappearance and the continuance of all that was
good in each successive stage of it in the past. The brightest aspects
of youth will return to all who live in Jesus, beyond the grave, and
will be theirs for ever. Such a consideration branches out into many
happy anticipations, which we can but very cursorily touch on here.
For instance--Youth is the time for hope. The world then lies all
before us, fair and untried. We have not learnt our own weakness by
many failures, nor the dread possibilities that lie in every future.
The past is too brief to occupy us long, and its furthest point too
near to be clothed in the airy purple, which draws the eye and stirs
the heart. We are conscious of increasing powers which crave for
occupation. It seems impossible but that success and joy shall be
ours. So we live for a little while in a golden haze; we look down
from our peak upon the virgin forests of a new world, that roll away
to the shining waters in the west, and then we plunge into their mazes
to hew out a path for ourselves, to slay the wild beasts, and to find
and conquer rich lands. But soon we discover what hard work the march
is, and what monsters lurk in the leafy coverts, and what diseases
hover among the marshes, and how short a distance ahead we can see,
and how far off it is to the treasure-cities that we dreamed of; and
if at last we gain some cleared spot whence we can look forward, our
weary eyes are searching at most for a place to rest, and all our
hopes have dwindled to hopes of safety and repose. The day brings too
much toil to leave us leisure for much anticipation. The journey has
had too many failures, too many wounds, too many of our comrades left
to die in the forest glades, to allow of our expecting much. We plod
on, sometimes ready to faint, sometimes with lighter hearts, but not
any more winged by hope as in the golden prime,--unless indeed for
those of us who have fixed our hopes on God, and so get through the
march better, because, be it rough or smooth, long or short, He moves
before us to guide, and all our ways lead to Him. But even for these
there comes, before very long, a time when they are weary of hoping
for much more here, and when the light of youth fades into common day.
Be it so! They will get the faculty and the use of it back again in
far nobler fashion, when death has taken them away from all that is
transient, and faith has through death given for their possession and
their expectation, the certitudes of eternity. It will be worth while
to look forward again, when we are again standing at the beginning of
a life. It will be possible once more to hope, when disappointments
are all past. A boundless future stretching before us, of which we
know that it is all blessed, and that we shall reach all its
blessedness, will give back to hearts that have long ceased to drink
of the delusive cup which earthly hope offered to their lips, the joy
of living in a present, made bright by the certain anticipation of a
yet brighter future. Losing nothing by our constant progress, and
certain to gain all which we foresee, we shall remember and be glad,
we shall hope and be confident. With 'the past unsighed for, and the
future sure,' we shall have that magic gift, which earth's
disappointments dulled, quickened by the sure mercies of the heavens.
Again, youth has mostly a certain keenness of relish for life which
vanishes only too soon. There are plenty of our young men and women
too, of this day, no doubt, who are as _blasé_ and wearied before they
are out of their 'teens as if they were fifty. So much the sadder for
them, so much the worse for the social state which breeds such
monsters. For monsters they are: there ought to be in youth a sense of
fresh wonder undimmed by familiarity, the absence of satiety, a joy in
joyful things because they are new as well as gladsome. The poignancy
of these early delights cannot long survive. Custom stales them all,
and wraps everything in its robe of ashen grey. We get used to what
was once so fresh and wonderful, and do not care very much about
anything any more. We smile pitying smiles--sadder than any tears--at
'boyish enthusiasm,' and sometimes plume ourselves on having come to
'years which bring the philosophic mind'; and all the while we know
that we have lost a great gift, which here can never come back any
more.
But what if that eager freshness of delight may yet be ours once
again? What if the eternal youth of the heavens means, amongst other
things, that _there_ are pleasures which always satisfy but never
cloy? What if, in perpetual advance, we find and keep for ever that
ever new gladness, which here we vainly seek in perpetual distraction?
What if constant new influxes of divine blessedness, and constant new
visions of God, keep in constant exercise that sense of wonder, which
makes so great a part of the power of youth? What if, after all that
we have learned and all that we have received, we still have to say,
'It doth not yet appear what we shall be'? Then, I think, in very
profound and blessed sense, heaven would be perpetual youth.
I need not pause to speak of other characteristics of that period of
life--such as its enthusiasm, its life by impulse rather than by
reason, its buoyant energy and delight in action. All these gifts, so
little cared for when possessed, so often misused, so irrevocably gone
with a few brief years, so bitterly bewailed, will surely be found
again, where God keeps all the treasures that He gives and we let
fall. For transient enthusiasm, heaven will give us back a fervour of
love like that of the seraphs, that have burned before His throne
unconsumed and undecaying for unknown ages. For a life of instinctive
impulse, we shall titan receive a life in which impulse is ever
parallel with the highest law, and, doing only what we would, we shall
do only what we ought. For energy which wanes as the years wax, and
delight in action which is soon worn down into mechanical routine of
toil, there will be bestowed strength akin to His 'who fainteth not,
neither is weary.' All of which maturity and old age robbed us is
given back in nobler form. All the limitation and weakness which they
brought, the coldness, the monotony, the torpor, the weariness, will
drop away. But we shall keep all the precious things which they
brought us. None of the calm wisdom, the ripened knowledge, the
full-summed experience, the powers of service acquired in life's long
apprenticeship, will be taken from us.
All will be changed indeed. All will be cleansed of the impurity which
attaches to all. All will be accepted and crowned, not by reason of
its goodness, but by reason of Christ's sacrifice, which is the
channel of God's mercy. Though in themselves unworthy, and having
nothing fit for the heavens, yet the souls that trust in Jesus, the
Lord of Life, shall bear into their glory the characters which by His
grace they wrought out here on earth, transfigured and perfected, but
still the same. And to make up that full-summed completeness, will be
given to them at once the perfection of all the various stages through
which they passed on earth. The perfect man in the heavens will
include the graces of childhood, the energies of youth, the
steadfastness of manhood, the calmness of old age; as on some tropical
trees, blooming in more fertile soil and quickened by a hotter sun
than ours, you may see at once bud, blossom, and fruit--the expectancy
of spring, and the maturing promise of summer, and the fulfilled
fruition of autumn--hanging together on the unexhausted bough.