THE RESURRECTION
And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted; ye seek Jesus of Nazareth,
which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here.
S. Mark XVI, 6.
O God, who wast pleased that thy Word, when the angel
delivered his message, should take flesh in the womb of the
blessed Virgin Mary, give ear to our humble petitions, and
grant that we who believe her truly to be the Mother of God,
may be helped by her prayers. Through.
O Almighty and merciful God, who hast wonderfully provided
perpetual succour for the defence of Christian people in the
most blessed Virgin Mary; mercifully grant that, contending
during life under the protection of such patronage, we may be
enabled to gain the victory, over the malignant enemy in
death. Through.
OLD CATHOLIC.
Whatever may be our grief, however life may seem to have been emptied
of all interest for us, nevertheless the routine of life reasserts
itself and forces us back to the daily tasks no matter how savourless
they may now seem. We speedily find that we are not isolated but units
in a social order which claims us and calls on us to fulfil the duties
of our place. Blessed Mary was led away from the tomb of her Son in the
prostration of grief; but her very duty to Him would have forced her
thought away from herself and led her to join in the preparations which
were being made for the proper care of the Sacred Body. And in that sad
duty she would find solace of a kind; there is an expression of love in
the care we give our dead. This body now so helpless and unresponsive,
has been the medium through which the soul expressed itself to us; it
has been the instrument of love and the sacrament of our union. How well
we know it! How well the mother knows every feature of her child, how
she now lingers over the preparations for the burial feeling that the
separation is not quite accomplished so long as her hands can touch and
her eyes see the familiar features. In the pause that the Sabbath forced
on the friends of Jesus we may be sure that they were making what
preparations might be made under the restrictions of their religion, and
that they looked eagerly for the passing of the Sabbath as giving them
one more opportunity of service to the Master. There was the group of
women who had followed Him and "ministered of their substance" who were
faithful still. The Mother had no "substance"; she shared the poverty of
her Son. Her support during the Sabbath would be the expectancy of
looking once more upon His Face.
But when the first day of the week dawned it proved to be a day of
stupendous wonder. They, the Disciples and these faithful women, seemed
to themselves, no doubt, to have passed into a new world where the
presuppositions of the old world were upset and reversed. There were
visions of angels, reported appearances of Jesus, an empty tomb. Through
the incredible reports that came to them from various sources the light
gradually broke for them. It was true then, that saying of Jesus, that
He would rise again from the dead! It was not some mysterious bit of
teaching, the exact bearing of which they did not catch, but a literal
fact! And then while they still hesitated and doubted, while they still
hid behind the closed doors, Jesus Himself came and stood in the midst
with His message of peace. It is often so, is it not? While we are in
perplexity and fear, while we think the next sound will be the knock of
armed hands on the door, it is not the Jews that come, but Jesus with a
message of peace. Our fears are so pathetic, so pitiful; we meet life
and death with so little of the understanding and the courage that our
Lord's promises ought to inspire in us! We stand so shudderingly before
the vision of death, are so much appalled by the thought of the grave!
We shudder and tremble as the hand of death is stretched out toward us
and ours. One is often tempted to ask as one hears people talking of
death: "Are these Christians? Do they believe in immortality? Have they
heard the message of the first Easter morning, the angelic announcement
of the resurrection of Christ? Have they never found the peace of
believing, the utter quiet of the spirit in the confidence of a certain
hope which belongs to those who have grasped the meaning of the
resurrection of the dead?" Here in Jerusalem in a few days the whole
point of view is changed. The frightened group of disciples is
transformed by the resurrection experience into the group of glad and
triumphant missionaries who will be ready when they are endowed with
power from on high to go out and preach Jesus and the resurrection to
the ends of the earth.
What in these first days the resurrection meant to them was no doubt
just the return of Jesus. He was with them once more, and they were
going to take hope again in the old life, to resume the old mission
which had been interrupted by the disaster of Calvary. All other feeling
would have been swallowed up in the mere joy of the recovery. But it
could not be many hours before it would be plain that if Jesus was
restored to them He was restored with a difference. A new element had
entered their intercourse which was due to some subtle change that had
passed upon Him. We get the first note of it in that wonderful scene in
Joseph's Garden when the Lord appears to the Magdalen. There is all the
love and sympathy there had ever been; but when in response to her name
uttered in the familiar voice the Magdalen throws herself at His Feet,
there is a new word that marks a new phase in their relation: "Touch Me
not, for I am not yet ascended."
This new thing in our Lord which held them back with a new word that
they had never experienced before must have become plainer each day. S.
Mary feels no less love in her Son restored to her from; the grave, but
she does not find just the same freedom of approach. S. John could no
longer think of leaning on His Heart at supper as before. Jesus was the
same as before. There was the same thoughtful sympathy; the same tender
love; but it is now mediated through a nature that has undergone some
profound change in the days between death and resurrection. The humanity
has acquired new powers, the spirit is obviously more in control of the
body. Our Lord appeared and disappeared abruptly. His control over
matter was absolute. And in His intercourse with the disciples there was
a difference. He did not linger with them but appeared briefly from time
to time as though He were but a passing visitor to the world. There were
no longer the confidential talks in the fading light after the day's
work and teaching was over. There was no longer the common meal with its
intimacy and friendliness. There was, and this was a striking change, no
longer any attempt to approach those outside the apostolic circle, no
demonstration of His resurrection to the world that had, as it thought,
safely disposed of Him. He came for brief times and with brief
messages, short, pregnant instructions, filled with meaning for the
future into which they are soon to enter.
What did it mean, this resurrection of Jesus? It meant the demonstration
of the continuity of our nature in our Lord. The Son of God took upon
Him our nature and lived and died in that nature. Our pressing question
is, what difference has that made to us? How are _we_ affected? Has
humanity been permanently affected by the resumption of it by God in the
resurrection? If the assumption of humanity by our Lord was but a
passing assumption; if He took flesh for a certain purpose, and that
purpose fulfilled, laid it aside, and once more assumed His
pre-incarnate state, we should have difficulty in seeing that our
humanity was deeply affected by the Incarnation. There would have been
exhibited a perfect human life, but what would have been left at the end
of that life would have been just the story of it, a thing wholly of the
past. It is not much better if it is assumed that the meaning of the
resurrection is the revelation of the immortality of the human spirit,
that in fact the resurrection means that the soul of Jesus is now in the
world of the spirit, but that His Body returned to the dust. We are not
very much interested in the bare fact of survival. What interests us is
the mode of survival, the conditions under which we survive. We are
interested, that is to say, in our survival as human beings and not in
our survival as something else--souls.
A soul is not a human being; a human being is a composite of soul and
body. It is interesting to note that people who do not believe in the
resurrection of our Lord, do not believe in our survival as human
beings, consequently do not believe in a heaven that is of any human
interest. But we feel, do we not? a certain lack of interest in a future
in which we shall be something quite different in constitution from what
we are now. We can think of a time between death and the resurrection in
which we shall be incomplete, but that is tolerable because it is
disciplinary and temporary and looks on to our restitution to full
humanity in the resurrection at the Last Day. And we feel that the
promise, the certainty of this is sealed by our Lord's resurrection from
the dead. We are certain that that took place because it is needful to
the completion of His Work.
The Creed is one: and if one denies one article one speedily finds that
there is an effect on others. The denial of the resurrection is part and
parcel of the attempt to reduce Christianity to a history of something
that once took place which is important to us to-day because it affords
us a standard of life, a pattern after which we are to shape ourselves.
Else should we be very much in the dark. We gain from the Christian
Revelation a conception of God as a kindly Father Who desires His
children to follow the example of His Son. That example, no doubt, must
not be pressed too literally, must be adapted to modern conditions; but
we can get some light and guidance from the study of it. Still, if you
do not care to follow it nothing will happen to you. It is merely a
pleasing occupation for those who are interested in such things. The
affirmation of the resurrection, on the other hand, is the affirmation
of the continuity of the work of God Incarnate; it is an assertion that
Christianity is a supernatural action of God going on all the time, the
essence of which is, not that it invites the believer to imitation of
the life of Christ, so far as seems practical under modern conditions,
but that it calls him to union with Christ; it makes it his life's
meaning to recreate the Christ-experience, to be born and live and die
through the experience of Incarnate God. It fixes his attention not on
what Jesus did but on what Jesus is. It insists on a present vital
organic relation to God, mediated by the humanity of Jesus; and if there
be no humanity of Jesus, if at His death He ceased to be completely
human, then there is no possibility of such a relation to God in Christ
as the Catholic Religion has from the beginning postulated; and unless
we are to continue human there seems no continuing basis for such a
relation to one another in the future as would make the future of any
interest to us. For us, as for S. Paul, all our hope hangs on the
resurrection of Christ from the dead; and if Christ be not risen from
the dead then is our faith vain.
For us then, as for the men who wrote the Gospel, and for the men who
planted the Church and watered it with their blood, the resurrection of
Jesus means the return of His Spirit from the place whither it had gone
to preach to the spirits in prison and its reunion with the Body which
had been laid in the tomb in Joseph's Garden, and the issuing of
perfect God and perfect man from that tomb on the first Easter morning.
That humanity had, no doubt, undergone profound changes to fit it to be
the perfect instrument of the spirit of Christ Jesus henceforward. It is
now the resurrection body, the spiritual body of the new man. We
understand that it is now a body fitted for the new conditions of the
resurrection life, and we also understand that it is the exemplar of
what our risen bodies will be. They will be endowed with new powers and
capacities, but they will be human bodies, the medium of the spirit's
expression and a recognisable means of intercourse with our friends. We
lie down in the grave with a certainty of preserving our identity and of
maintaining the capacity of intercourse with those we know and love.
That is what really interests us in the future which would be
uninteresting on other terms; and that is what our Lord's appearances
after the resurrection seem to guarantee. He resumed a human intercourse
with those whom He had gathered about Him. He continued His work of
instruction and preparation for the future. And when at length He left
them they were prepared to understand that His departure was but the
beginning of a new relation. But also they would feel much less that
there was an absolute break with the past than if He had not appeared to
them after the Crucifixion, and they had been left with but a belief in
His immortality. They would, too, now be able to look on to the future
as containing a renewal of the relations now changed, to read a definite
meaning into His promises that where He is there shall His servants be.
It is much to know that we are immortal: it is much more to know that
this immortality is a human immortality. One feels in studying the
pre-Christian beliefs in immortality that they had very little
effectiveness, and that the reason was that there was no real link
connecting life in this world with life in the next. Death was a fearful
catastrophe that man in some sense survived, but in a sense that
separated his two modes of existence by a great gulf. Man survived, but
his interests did not survive, and therefore he looked to the future
with indifference or fear. This life seemed to him much preferable to
the life which was on the other side of the grave. So far as the Old
Testament writings touch on the future world, they touch upon it without
enthusiasm. There is an immense difference between the attitude of the
Old Testament saint toward death and that, for instance, of the early
Christian martyr. And the difference is that the martyr does not feel
that death will put an end to all he knows and loves and set him, alive
it may be, but alive in a strange country. He feels that he is about to
pass into a state of being in which he will find his finer interests not
lost but intensified. At the center of his religious expression is a
personal love of Jesus and a martyr's death would mean immediate
admission to the presence and love of His Master. He would--of this he
had no shadow of doubt--he would see Jesus, not the spirit of Jesus, but
the Jesus Who is God Incarnate, whose earthly life he had gone over so
many times, Whom he felt that he should recognise at once. Death was not
the breaking off of all in which he was interested but was rather the
fulfilment of all that he had dreamed. And this must be true always
where our interests are truly Christian interests. It is no doubt true
that we find in Christian congregations a large number of individuals
whose attitude toward death and the future is purely heathen. They
believe in survival, but they have no vital interest in it. I fancy that
there are a good many people who would experience relief to be persuaded
that death is the end of conscious existence, that they do not have to
look forward to a continuous life under other conditions. And this not
at all, as no doubt it would in some cases be, because it was the
lifting of the weighty burden of responsibility for the sort of life one
leads, because it was relief from the thought of a judgment to be one
day faced, but because the world to come, as they have grasped its
meaning, is a world in which they have no sort of interest. Our Lord in
His Presentation of the future does actually point us to the natural
human interest by which our affection will follow that which we do in
fact value. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." But
the class of whom I am thinking have no treasures. Notwithstanding some
sort of conformity to the Christian Religion, conceived most likely
under the aspect of a compulsory moral code, there is nothing in their
experience that one can call a love of our Lord, no actually felt
personal affection for Him that makes them long to see Him. There were
those with whom they had intimately lived and whom they had loved and
who have passed through the experience of death, but in the years that
have passed they have become used to living without them and there is
no passionate longing to be with them again. There are no interests in
their lives which when they think of them they feel that they can carry
with them to the world beyond. Whatever they have succeeded in
accumulating in life is hardly to be regarded as heavenly treasure!
There then is the vital centre of the Christian doctrine of the world to
come,--that it is a life continuous with this life, not in bare
existence, but in the persistence of relations and interests upon which
we have entered here. At the center of that world as it is revealed to
us, is Jesus Christ, God in our nature, and about Him ever the saints of
His Kingdom, who are still human with human interests, and who look on
to the time when the fulness of humanity will be restored to them by the
resurrection of the body. The interests that are vital here are also the
interests that are vital there, the interests of the Kingdom of God. As
the Christian thinks of the life of the world to come he thinks of it as
the sphere in which his ambitions can be and will be realised, where the
ends of which he has so long and so earnestly striven will be attained.
His life has been a life given to the service of our Lord and to his
Kingdom, and it had, no doubt, often seemed to small purpose; it has
often seemed that the Kingdom was not prospering and the work of God
coming to naught. And then he looks on to the future and sees that the
work that he knows is an insignificant fragment of the whole work; and
he thinks with longing of the time when he shall see revealed all that
has been accomplished. He feels like a colonist who in some outlying
province of an empire is striving to promote the interests of his
Homeland. His work is to build up peace and order and to civilise
barbarous tribes. And there are days when the work seems very long and
very hopeless; and then he comforts himself with the thought that this
is but a corner of the empire and that one day he will be relieved and
called home. There at the centre he will be able to see the whole fact,
will be able to understand what this colony means, and will rejoice in
the slight contribution to its upbuilding that it has been his mission
to make. The heart of the Christian is really in the Homeland and he
feels acutely that here he is on the Pilgrim Way. But he feels too that
his present vocation is here and that he is here contributing the part
that God has appointed him for the upbuilding of the Kingdom, and that
the more he loves our Lord and the more he longs for Him the more
faithfully and exactly will he strive to accomplish his appointed work.
They are right, those who are continually reproaching Christians with
having a centre of interest outside this world; but we do not mind the
reproach because we are quite sure that only those will have an
intelligent interest in this world who feel that it does not stand by
itself as a final and complete fact, but is a single stage of the many
stages of God's working. We no more think it a disgrace to be thinking
of a future world and to have our centre of interest there than we think
it a disgrace for the college lad to be looking forward to the career
that lies beyond the college boundaries and for which his college is
supposed to be preparing him. We do not consider that boy ideal whose
whole time and energy is given to the present interests of a college,
its athletics, its societies, and in the end is found to have paid so
little attention to the intellectual work that he is sent there to
perform that he fails to pass his examinations. Christians are
interested in this world because it is a province of the Kingdom of God
and that they are set here to work out certain problems, and that they
are quite sure that the successful solution of these problems is the
best and highest contribution that they can make to the development of
life in this world. They do not believe that as a social contribution to
the betterment of human life a saint is less valuable than an agnostic
professor of sociology or an atheistic socialistic leader; nor does the
Christian believe that strict attention to the affairs of the Kingdom of
God renders him less valuable as a citizen than strict attention to a
brewery or a bank. A whole-hearted Christian life which has in view all
the relations of the Kingdom of God in this or in any other world, which
loves God and loves its neighbour in God, is quite the best contribution
that a human being can make to the cause of social progress. If it were
possible to put in evidence anywhere a wholly Christian community I am
quite convinced that we should see that our social problems were there
solved. I think then we shall be right to insist that what is needed is
not less otherworldliness but more: that more otherworldliness would
work a social revolution of a beneficent character. The result might be
that we should spend less of our national income on preparations for
war and more in making the conditions of life tolerable for the poor;
that we should begin to pay something of the same sort of care for the
training of children that we now bestow on the nurture of pigs and
calves. We might possibly look on those whom we curiously call the
"inferior races" as less objects of commercial exploitation and more as
objects of moral and spiritual interest.
We shall no doubt do this when we have more fully grasped what the
resurrection of Christ has done and made possible. It is no account of
that resurrection to think of it as a demonstration of immortality. It
only touches the fringes of its importance when we think of it as
setting the seal of divine approval upon the teaching of Jesus. We get
to the heart of the matter when we think of the risen humanity of our
Lord as having become for us a source of energy. The truth of our Lord's
life is not that He gave us an example of how we ought to live, but that
He provided the power that enables us to live as He lived. Also He gave
us the point of view from which to estimate life. The writer of the
Epistles to the Hebrews uses a striking phrase when he speaks of "the
power of an endless life." Is not that an illuminating phrase when we
think of our relation to our Lord? His revelation of the meaning of
human life has brought to us the vision of what that life may become and
the power to attain that end. The fact of our endlessness at once puts a
certain order into life. Things, interests, occupations fall into their
right places. There are so many things which seem not worth while
because of the revelation of the importance of our work. Other things
there are which we should not have dared to undertake if we had but this
life in which to accomplish them. But he who understands that he is
building for eternity can build with all the care and all the
deliberation that is needed for so vast a work. There is no haste if we
select those things which have eternal value. We can undertake the
development of the Christian qualities of character with entire
hopefulness. The very conception of the beauty and perfectness of the
fruits of the Spirit might discourage us if our time were limited. But
if we feel that the work we have done on them, however elementary and
fragmentary, as long as it is honest and heartfelt, will not be lost
when death comes, then we can go securely on. We can go on in any
spiritual work we have undertaken without that sense of feverish haste
lest death overtake us and put an end to our labour which so affects men
in purely secular things. To us death is not an interruption. Death does
not destroy our human personality, nor does it destroy our interest in
anything that like us is permanent. We feel perfectly secure when we
have identified ourselves with the business of the Kingdom of God. Then
we almost feel the throb of our immortality; the power of an endless
life is now ours. We have not to wait for death and resurrection to
endue us with that power because it is the gift of God to us here, that
gift of enternal life which our Lord came to bestow upon us. Only the
gift which we realise imperfectly or not at all at its bestowal we come
to understand in something of its real power; and henceforth we live in
the possession and fruition of it, growing up "into Him in all things,
which is the Head, even Christ."
Hail, thou brightest Star of Ocean;
Hail, thou Mother of our God;
Hail, thou Ever-sinless Virgin,
Gateway of the blest abode.
Ave; 'tis an angel's greeting--
Thou didst hear his music sound,
Changing thus the name of Eva--
Shed the gifts of peace around.
Burst the sinner's bonds in sunder;
Pour the day on darkling eyes;
Chase our ills; invoke upon us
All the blessings of the skies.
Show thyself a watchful Mother;
And may He our pleadings hear,
Who for us a helpless Infant
Owned thee for His mother dear.
Maid, above all maids excelling,
Maid, above all maidens mild,
Freed from sin, oh, make our bosoms
Sweetly meek and undefiled.
Keep our lives all pure and stainless,
Guide us on our heavenly way,
'Till we see the face of Jesus,
And exult in endless day.
Glory to the Eternal Father;
Glory to the Eternal Son;
Glory to the Eternal Spirit:
Blest for ever, Three in One.
PART TWO