There are singular diversities in the four Gospels in their accounts
of the angelic appearances, the number, occupation, and attitude of
these superhuman persons, and contradictions may be spun, if one is so
disposed, out of these varieties. But it is wiser to take another view
of them, and to see in the varying reports, sometimes of one angel,
sometimes of two, sometimes of one sitting outside the sepulchre,
sometimes one within, sometimes none, either different moments of time
or differences produced by the different spiritual condition of the
beholders. Who can count the glancing wings of the white-winged flock
of sea-birds as they sail and turn in the sunshine? Who can count the
numbers of these 'bright-harnessed angels,' sometimes more, sometimes
less, flickering and fluttering into and out of sight, which shone
upon the vision of the weeping onlookers? We know too little about the
laws of angelic appearances; we know too little about the relation in
that high region between the seeing eye and the objects beheld to
venture to say that there is contradiction where the narratives
present variety. Enough for us to draw the lessons that are suggested
by that quiet figure sitting there in the inner vestibule of the
grave, the stone rolled away and the work done, gazing on the tomb
where the Lord of men and angels had lain.
He was a youth. 'The oldest angels are the youngest,' says a great
mystic. The angels 'excel in strength' because they delight to do His
commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word.' The lapse of
ages brings not age to them who 'wait on the Lord' in the higher
ministries of heaven, and run unwearied, and walk unfainting, and when
they are seen by men are radiant with immortal youth. He was 'clothed
in a long white garment,' the sign at once of purity and of repose;
and he was sitting in rapt contemplation and quiet adoration there,
where the body of Jesus had lain.
But what had he to do with the joy of Resurrection? It delivered _him_
from no fears, it brought to him no fresh assurance of a life which
was always his. Wherefore was he there? Because that Cross strikes its
power upwards as well as downwards; because He that had lain there is
the Head of all creation, and the Lord of angels as well as of men;
because that Resurrection following upon that Cross, 'unto the
principalities and powers in heavenly places,' opened a new and
wonderful door into the unsounded and unfathomed abyss of divine love;
because into these things 'angels desire to look,' and, looking, are
smitten with adoring wonder and flushed with the illumination of a new
knowledge of what God is, and of what man is to God. The Resurrection
of the Prince of Life was no mystery to the angel. To him the mystery
was in His death. To us the death is not a mystery, but the
Resurrection is. That gazing figure looks from the other side upon the
grave which we contemplate from this side of the gulf of death; but
the eyes of both orders of Being fix upon the same hallowed spot--they
in adoring wonder that there a God should have lain; we in lowly
thankfulness that thence a man should have risen.
Further, we see in that angel presence not only the indication that
Christ is his King as well as ours, but also the mark of his and all
his fellows' sympathetic participation in whatsoever is of so deep
interest to humanity. There is a certain tone of friendship and
oneness in his words. The trembling women were smitten into an ecstasy
of bewildered fear (as one of the words, 'affrighted' might more
accurately be rendered), and his consolation to them, 'Be not
affrighted, ye seek Jesus,' suggests that, in all the great sweep of
the unseen universe, whatsoever beings may people that to us
apparently waste and solitary space, howsoever many they may be,
'thick as the autumn leaves in Vallambrosa' or as the motes that dance
in the sunshine, they are all friends and allies and elder brethren of
those who seek for Jesus with a loving heart. No creature that owns
His sway can touch or injure or need terrify the soul that follows
after Christ. 'All the servants of our King in heaven and earth are
one,' and He sends forth His brightest and loftiest to be brethren and
ministers to them who shall be 'heirs of salvation.' So we may pass
through the darkest spaces of the universe and the loneliest valleys
of the shadow of death, sure that whosoever may be there will be our
friend if we are the friends of Christ.
II. So much, then, for the first point that I would suggest here.
Note, secondly, the triumphant light cast upon the cradle and the
Cross.
There is something very remarkable, because for purposes of
identification plainly unnecessary, in the minute particularity of the
designation which the angel lips give to Jesus Christ. 'Jesus, the
Nazarene, who was crucified.' Do you not catch a tone of wonder and a
tone of triumph in this threefold particularising of the humanity, the
lowly residence, and the Ignominious death? All that lowliness,
suffering, and shame are brought into comparison with the rising from
the dead. That is to say, when we grasp the fact of a risen Christ, we
look back upon all the story of His birth, His lowly life, His death
of shame, and see a new meaning in it, and new reasons for triumph and
for wonder. The cradle is illuminated by the grave, the Cross by the
empty sepulchre. As at the beginning there is a supernatural entrance
into life, so at the end there is a supernatural resumption of it. The
birth corresponds with the resurrection, and both witness to the
divinity. The lowly life culminates in the conquest over death; the
Nazarene despised, rejected, dwelling in a place that was a byword,
sharing all the modest lowliness and self-respecting poverty of the
Galilean peasants, has conquered death. The Man that was crucified has
conquered death. And the fact that He has risen explains and
illuminates the fact that He died.
Brethren, let us lay this to heart, that unless we believe in the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the saying 'He was crucified' is the
saddest word that can be spoken about any of the great ones of the
past. If Jesus Christ be lying in some nameless grave, then all the
power of His death is gone, and He and it are nothing to me, or to
you, or to any of our fellow-men, more than a thousand deaths of the
mighty ones of old. But Easter day transfigures the gloom of the day
of the Crucifixion, and the rising sun of its morning gilds and
explains the Cross. Now it stands forth as the great redeeming power
of the world, where my sins and yours and the whole world's have been
expiated and done away. And now, instead of being ignominy, it is
glory, and instead of being defeat it is victory, and instead of
looking upon that death as the lowest point of the Master's
humiliation, we may look upon it as He Himself did, as the highest
point of His glorifying. For the Cross then becomes His great means of
winning men to Himself, and the very throne of His power. On the
historical fact of a Resurrection depend all the worth and meaning of
the death of Christ. 'If He be not risen our preaching is vain, and
your faith is also vain.' 'If Christ be not risen, ye are yet in your
sins.' But if what this day commemorates be true, then upon all His
earthly life is thrown a new light; and we first understand the Cross
when we look upon the empty grave.
III. Again, notice here the majestic announcement of the great fact,
and its confirmation.
'He is risen; He is not here.' The first preacher of the Resurrection
was an angel, a true ev-angel-ist. His message is conveyed in these
brief sentences, unconnected with each other, in token, not of
abruptness and haste, but of solemnity. 'He is risen' is one word in
the original--a sentence of one word, which announces the mightiest
miracle that ever was wrought upon earth, a miracle which opens the
door wide enough for all supernatural events recorded of Jesus Christ
to find an entrance to the understanding and the reason.
'He is risen.' The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is declared by angel
lips to be His own act; not, indeed, as if He were acting separately
from the Father, but still less as if in it He were merely passive.
Think of that; a dead Christ raised Himself. That is the teaching of
the Scripture. I do not dwell here, at this stage of my sermon, on the
many issues that spring from such a conception, but this only I urge,
Jesus Christ was the Lord of life; held life and death, His own and
others', at His beck and will. His death was voluntary; He was not
passive in it, but He died because He chose. His resurrection was His
act; He rose because He willed. 'I have power to lay it down, I have
power to take it again.' No one said to Him, 'I say unto Thee, arise!'
The divine power of the Father's will did not work upon Him as from
without to raise Him from the dead; but He, the embodiment of
divinity, raised Himself, even though it is also true that He was
raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. These two statements
are not contradictory, but the former of them can only be predicated
of Him; and it sets Him on a pedestal immeasurably above, and
infinitely apart from, all those to whom life is communicated by a
divine act. He Himself is 'the Life,' and it was not possible that
Life should be holden of Death; therefore He burst its bonds, and,
like the ancient Jewish hero, though in far nobler fashion, our Samson
enters into the city which is a prison, and on His strong shoulders
bears away the gates, that none may ever there be prisoners without
hope.
Now, then, note the confirmation of this stupendous fact. 'He is
risen; He is not here.' The grave was empty, and the trembling women
were called upon to look and see for themselves that the body was not
there. One remark is all that I wish to make about this matter--viz.
this, all theories, ancient or modern, which deny the Resurrection,
are shattered by this one question, What became of Jesus Christ's
body? We take it as a plain historical fact, which the extremest
scepticism has never ventured to deny, that the grave of Christ was
empty. The trumped-up story of the guards sufficiently shows that.
When the belief of a resurrection began to be spread abroad, what
would have been easier for Pharisees and rulers than to have gone to
the sepulchre and rolled back the stone, and said, 'Look there! there
is your risen Man, lying mouldering, like all the rest of us.' They
did not do it. Why? Because the grave was empty. Where was the body?
They had it not, else they would have been glad to produce it. The
disciples had it not, for if they had, you come back to the
discredited and impossible theory that, having it, and knowing that
they were telling lies, they got up the story of the Resurrection.
Nobody believes that nowadays--nobody can believe it who looks at the
results of the preaching of this, by hypothesis, falsehood. 'Men do
not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.' And whether the
disciples were right or wrong, there can be no question in the mind of
anybody who is not prepared to swallow impossibilities compared to
which miracles are easy, that the first disciples heartily believed
that Jesus Christ was risen from the dead. As I say, one confirmation
of the belief lies in the empty grave, and this question may be put to
anybody that says 'I do not believe in your Resurrection':--'What
became of the sacred body of Jesus Christ?'
Now, note the way in which the announcement of this tremendous fact
was received. With blank bewilderment and terror on the part of these
women, followed by incredulity on the part of the Apostles and of the
other disciples. These things are on the surface of the narrative, and
very important they are. They plainly tell us that the first hearers
did not believe the testimony which they themselves call upon us to
believe. And, that being the state of mind of the early disciples on
the Resurrection day, what becomes of the modern theory, which seeks
to explain the fact of the early belief in the Resurrection by saying,
'Oh, they had worked themselves into such a fever of expectation that
Jesus Christ would rise from the dead that the wish was father to the
thought, and they said that He did because they expected that He
would'? No! they did not expect that He would; it was the very last
thing that they expected. They had not in their minds the soil out of
which such imaginations would grow. They were perfectly unprepared to
believe it, and, as a matter of fact, they did not believe until they
had seen. So I think that that one fact disposes of a great deal of
pestilent and shallow talk in these days that tries to deny the
Resurrection and to save the character of the men that witnessed it.