THE FORTY DAYS
To whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by
many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and
speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.
Acts I, 3.
Open unto us the door of thy loving kindness, O blessed
Mother of God; we have set our hope on thee, may we not be
disappointed, but through thee may we be delivered from
adversity, for thou art the saving help of all
Christian people.
O Mother of God, thou who art a deep well of infinite mercy,
bestow upon us thy compassion; look upon thy people who have
sinned, and continue to make manifest thy power. For thee do
we trust, and to thee do we cry, Hail! even as of old did
Gabriel, the chief of the angelic hosts.
RUSSIAN.
These Forty Days that intervened between our Lord's resurrection and
ascension must have been utterly bewildering in the experience of the
Apostles. Our Lord was once more with them; He had come back from the
grave; that would have been the central experience. But in His
intercourse with them He was so changed, the same and yet with a vast
difference. We think of the perplexed group of the disciples gathered in
the familiar place, going over the recent facts and trying to adjust
themselves to them. Just what is the difference that death and
resurrection have made, we hear them discussing. Is it that He appears
and disappears so strangely, not coming any longer to be with them in
the old way, with the old familiar intercourse? There is obviously no
failure in Himself, no decline in love; but there is a decline in
intimacy. They themselves feel a strange awe in His presence such as
they had not been accustomed to feel in the past. They feel too that
this restrained intercourse is but temporary, that at any moment it may
end. The instructions He is giving them are so obviously final
instructions, fitting them for a future in which He will not be
with them.
Amid all this perplexity we try to see Our Lady and to get at her mind.
She was no doubt in the small group eagerly waiting our Lord's coming,
dreading each time He left them that He would return no more. One
thinks of her as less bewildered than the others because her interest
was more concentrated. She had no problems to work out, no perplexities
to absorb her; she had simply to love. Life to her was just love--love
of the Son Whom she had brought forth and Whom she had followed so far.
She lived in His appearings; and between them she lived in remembrance
of them. One does not think of her as dwelling very much on what He
says, but as dwelling upon Him. The thought of Him absorbs her. She has
passed into that relation to our Lord that in the years to come many
souls will strive to acquire--the state of absorbed contemplation, the
state in which all things else for the time recede and one is alone with
God. God so fills the soul that there is room there for nothing else.
For the Apostles these were days of immense importance as days in which
they were compelled to reconstruct their whole view of the meeting of
our Lord's mission and of their relation to it. They came to these days
with their settled notion about the renewed Kingdom of Israel and of our
Lord's reign on earth which His teaching hitherto had not been able to
expel; but now they are compelled to see that the Kingdom of God of
which they are to be the missionaries is a Kingdom in another sense than
they had so far conceived it. It differs vastly from their dream of an
Israelite empire. It is no doubt true that this mental revolution is of
slow operation, and that even when certain truths are grasped it will
still take time to grasp them in all their implications. For long their
Judaism will impede their full understanding of the meaning of the
Kingdom of God. It will be years before they can see that it is a
non-Jewish fact and that other nations will stand on an equality with
them. But they will by the end of the Forty Days have grasped the fact
that they are not engaged in a secular revolution and are not entering
on a career of worldly power. They will be ready for their active
ministry after Pentecost, a ministry of spiritual initiation into the
Kingdom of God. When in response to their preaching men asked the
question: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" They were ready with
their answer: "Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of
the Holy Ghost."
So the Forty Days were filled with new meanings emerging from the old
teaching, of suddenly grasped significance in some saying of our Lord
that they had assumed that they understood but in reality had attributed
little meaning to. It is one of the striking things about our relation
to spiritual truth that we can go on for long thinking that we are
attaching a meaning to something which in fact, it turns out, has meant
almost nothing to us. Some day a phrase which we have often read or
repeated suddenly is lighted up with a significance we had never dreamed
of. We have long been looking some truth in the face, but in fact it has
never laid hold of us; we have made no inferences from it, deduced no
necessity of action, till on a day the significance of it emerges and
we are overwhelmed by the revelation of our blunder, of our stupidity.
The fact is that we assume that our conduct is quite right, and we
interpret truth in the light of our conduct rather than interpret
conduct in the light of truth. It is the explanation, I suppose, of the
fact that so many people read their Bible regularly without, so far as
one can see, the reading having any effect upon their conduct. The
conduct is a settled affair and they are finding it reflected in the
pages of the Gospel. Their minds are already definitely made up to the
effect that they know what the Gospel means, and that is the meaning
that they put into the Bible. One does not know otherwise how to account
for the fact that it is precisely those who think themselves "Bible
Christians" who are farthest from accepting the explicit teaching of the
Bible. If there is anything plain in the New Testament it is that the
whole teaching of our Lord is sacramental. If anything is taught there
one would think it was the nature and obligation of baptism, the
Presence of our Lord in the Sacrament of the Altar, the gift of
Confirmation, the meaning of absolution. Yet it is to "Bible Christians"
that sacraments appear to have no value, are things which can be
dispensed with as mere ornaments of the Christian Religion.
I wonder if we have wholly got beyond that point of view? I wonder if we
have got a religious practice which is settled or one that is
continually expanding? I wonder if we force our meaning on the Bible or
if we are trying to find therein new stimulus to action? That in truth
is the reason for reading the Holy Scriptures at all--to find therein
stimulus, stimulus for life; that we may see how little or how much our
conduct conforms to the ideal set out there. We do not read to learn a
religion, but to learn to practice the religion that we already have.
Now to take just one point in illustration. The commission of our Lord
to His Church in the person of the Apostles was a commission to forgive
sins. "He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy
Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and
whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained." As to how in detail,
this commission is to be exercised is a matter for the Church to order
as the circumstances of its life require. As I read my Bible certain
facts emerge: I am a sinner; Christ died for my sins; He left power in
His Church for the forgiveness of sin--of my sin. And then the question
arises: What is the bearing of all that on my personal practice? Have I
settled a practice for myself to which I am subjecting the teaching of
the Bible and the Church? Or am I alert to see a contrast or a
contradiction between my practice and the teaching of the Bible and the
Church, if such exist? Now there are many people in the Church who make
no use of the sacrament of penance, and there are many others who make
use of it very sparingly. It is clear that either they must be right, or
the Bible and the Church must be right. It is clear that such persons,
to press it no farther, are imposing the interpretation of their own
conduct on the teaching of the Christian Religion and asserting by
their constant practice that that interpretation is quite inadequate,
notwithstanding the contrary practice of the entire Catholic world.
That, to put it mildly, is a very peculiar intellectual and
spiritual attitude.
We can most of us, I have no doubt, find by searching somewhere in our
religious practice parallel attitudes toward truth. We have settled many
questions in a sense that is agreeable to us. We cannot tell just how we
got them settled, but settled they are. Take a very familiar matter
which greatly concerns us in this parish dedicated to the Blessed Virgin
Mary, the question of the honour and reverence due to our Blessed
Mother. We had got settled in our practice that certain things were
right and certain wrong. I doubt if a very intelligent account of
this--why they were right or wrong--could, in many cases have been
given. But the settled opinion and practice was there.
And then came the demand for a review; that we look our practice
squarely in the face and ask, "What is the ground of this? Does it
correspond with the teaching of Scripture and of the Catholic Church?
And if it does not, what am I going to do about it? Have I only a
collection of prejudices there where I supposed that I had a collection
of settled truths? Do I see that it is quite possible that I may be
wholly wrong, and that I am hindered by pride from reversing my
attitude?" For there is a certain pride which operates in these matters
of belief and practice as well as elsewhere. We are quite apt to pride
ourselves on our consistency and think it an unworthy thing to change
our minds. That is rather a foolish attitude; changing one's mind is
commonly not a mark of fickleness but of intellectual advance. It means
oftentimes the abandonment of prejudice or the giving up of an opinion
which we have discovered to have no foundation. This is rather a large
universe in which we live, and it is improbable that any man's thought
of it at any time should be adequate. Intellectual progress means the
assimilation of new truths. The Christian Religion is a large and
complex phenomenon, and any individual's thought of it at any time must
be, in the nature of things, an inadequate thought. Progress in religion
means the constant assimilation of new truths--new, that is, to us.
Surely it is a very peculiar attitude to be proud of never learning
anything, making it a virtue to have precisely the same opinions this
year as last! I should be very much ashamed of myself if a year were to
pass in which I had learned nothing, had changed my mind about nothing.
In religion, one knows that the articles of the Faith are expressed in
the dogmatic definitions of the Church; but one will never know, seek as
one will, all that these mean in detail, all that they demand in
practice. And our only tolerable attitude is that of learners constantly
seeking to fill up the _lacunae_ in our beliefs and practice.
In fact, any living Christian experience is always in process of
adjustment. Those who conceive a dogmatic religion as an immovable
religion, as a collection of cut and dried formulae which each
generation is expected to learn and repeat and to which it has no other
relation, are quite right in condemning that conception, only that is
not, in fact, what the Christian Religion is. The content of the
Christian dogmas is so full and so complex that there is never any
danger of intellectual sterility in those who are called to deal with
them; and their application to life is so rich and so manifold that
there is not the least danger that those who set out to apply them to
the problems of daily existence will become mere formalists. The attempt
to live a truly Christian life is a never-ending, inexhaustible
adventure. Only those can miss this fact who have utterly misconceived
Christianity as a barren set of prohibitions, warning its devotees off
the field of great sections of human experience. There are those who
appear to imagine that the primary business of Christianity is to deal
with sin, and that in order to keep itself occupied it has to invent a
large number of unreal sins. Unfortunately sin, as the deliberate
rejection of the known will of God, exists; and, fortunately, the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ Who came into the world to save sinners also
exists. We can be unendingly thankful for that. But it is also true that
the action of Christianity is not exhausted in the negative work of
dealing with sin. Christianity is primarily a positive action for the
bringing about and development of the relation of the soul with God in
the state of union. We may say that Christianity has to turn aside from
this its proper business of developing the spiritual life to the
preliminary work of dealing with sin which kills spirituality and
hinders its development. But it is not necessary to make the blunder of
assuming that this dealing with sin is the essential work of
Christianity because it has so continually to be at it, any more than
it is necessary to assume that the essential work of a farmer is the
digging up of weeds. Surely it would be no adequate treatise on
agriculture which would confine itself to description of the nature of
weeds and of methods of dealing with them. There is a branch of theology
which deals with sin, the methods of its treatment and its cure; but
there are also other branches of theology: and the direction of the Holy
Scripture is not to get rid of sin and stop; but having done that, to go
on to perfection.
Christian experience is a constant process of adjustment, a constantly
growing experience. By the study of the Christian revelation it is
always finding new meanings in old truths, new modes of application of
familiar practices. This simply means that the Christian is alive and
not a fossil. It means that his relation to our Lord is such that it
opens to him inexhaustible depths of experience. It is easy to see this
in the concrete by taking up the life of almost any saint. It is easy to
trace the growth of S. John from the young fisherman, fiery, impatient,
who wished to call down fire from heaven upon his adversaries as Elijah
did, and gained the rebuke: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are
of," to the mature and supremely calm and simple experience which is
reflected in the Gospel and Epistles. It is easy to trace the
development of the impulsive, zealous Pharisee that Paul of Tarsus was,
through all the stages of spiritual growth that are reflected in his
Letters, till he is Paul the aged waiting to depart and be with Christ
"which is far better." You can study it in the confessions of S.
Augustine in its first stage and follow it through its later stages in
his letters and other writings, and in many another saint beside. If you
have any spiritual experience at all you can trace it in your own case:
you have grown, not through dealing with sin, but through the pursuit of
ideal perfection, that perfection which is set before you by the
Christian Religion. You may not feel that you have gone very far: that
is not the point at present; you know that you have found a method by
which you may go on indefinitely; that there is no need that you should
stop anywhere short of the Beatific Vision. You do know that your
religion is not the deadening repetition of dogmas which the unbeliever
conceives it to be, but is the never ceasing attempt to master the
inexhaustible truth that is contained in your relation to our Lord. You
do know that however far you have gone you feel that you are still but
on the threshold and that the path before your feet runs out into
infinity. Let us go back again to our examination of the experience of
the Apostles. When we examine their training we find there, I think, two
quite distinct elements both of which must have had a formative
influence upon their ministry. In the first place there was the element
of dogmatic teaching. There is a class of persons who are accustomed to
tell us that there is no dogma in the New Testament, by which they
appear to mean that the particular dogmatic affirmations of the Creed
are not formulated in the pages of the New Testament, but are of later
production. That, no doubt, is true; but nevertheless it would be
difficult to find a more dogmatic book than the New Testament, or a
more dogmatic teacher than was our Lord. And our Lord taught the
Apostles in a most definite way the expected acceptance of His teaching
because He taught it. "He taught as one having authority, and not as the
scribes," it was noted. The point about the teaching of the scribes was
that it was traditional, wholly an interpretation of the meaning of the
Old Testament. It made no claim to originality but rather based its
claim on the fact it was not original. Our Lord, it was noticed, did not
base His claim on tradition. In fact He often noticed the Jewish
tradition for the purpose of marking the contrast between it and His own
teaching. "Ye have heard that it hath been said of old time ... but I
say unto you." He commonly refused to give an explanation of what He had
said, but demanded acceptance on His authority. He brought discipleship
to the test of hard sayings, and permitted the departure of those who
could not accept them. He cut across popular prejudices and took small
account of the "modern mind" as expressed by the Sadducees. He expected
the same unhesitating submission from the Apostles whom He was training,
though it was also a part of their training to be the future heralds of
the Kingdom that they should have the "mysteries of the Kingdom"
explained to them. But from the time when Jesus began to preach, saying
"the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand," He preached and taught with the same
unhesitating note of certainty, and with the same demand for
intellectual submission on the part of those who heard Him.
And that continues to the end. During the Forty Days, the few sayings
that have come to us have the same ring of authority, of dogmatic
certainty. The result was that when the Apostles went out to teach they
were equipped with a body of truth which they presented to the world in
the same unhesitating way. Indeed, that is the only way in which the
central truths of the Christian Faith can be presented. They are not the
conclusions of argument, which may be taken up and argued over again to
the end of the world,--they are the dicta of revelation. We either know
them to be true because they have been revealed, or we do not know them
to be true at all. They are mysteries, that is, truths beyond the
possibility of human finding which have been made known to man by God
Himself. They are the appropriate data of religion and what
distinguishes it from philosophy. The presence of mystery in philosophy
is annoying, and the aim is to get rid of it, but a religion without
mystery is absurd. Religion deals with the fundamental relations between
God and man and the light it brings us must be a supernatural light.
Such a religion in its presentation naturally cut across the
preconceptions of the traditionalists in Jerusalem to whom nothing new
could be true, as across the preconceptions of the sophists of Athens,
to whom nothing that was not new was interesting.
This dogmatic equipment was but one side, however, of the Apostolic
training for their future work, a training to which the finishing
touches, so to say, were put during the Forty Days. The other side of
the training was the impression upon them of the Personality of our
Lord, the effect of their close association with Him. This has an
importance that dwarfs all other influences of the time; and we feel all
through the Gospel that it was what our Lord himself counted upon in
forming them for their mission. In the beginning "He chose twelve to be
with Him," and their day by day association with Him was constantly
changing their point of view and reforming their character. It was not
the teaching, the explanation of parables, or the sight of the miracles;
it was the silent effect of a personality that was in contact with them
constantly and was constantly presenting to them an ideal of life, an
ideal of absolute submission to the will of the Father and of utter
consecration to the, mission that had been committed to Him.
We all know this silent pressure of life upon life. We have most of us,
I suppose, experienced it either from our parents or from friends in
later life; and we can through that experience of ours attempt the
explanation of our Lord's influence on the Apostles. There were not only
the hours of formal teaching--they, in a way, were perhaps the less
important from our present point of view. We have more in mind the
informal talks that would go on as they went from village to village in
Galilee, or as they gathered about the door of some cottage in the
evening or sat in the shelter of some grove during the noon-day heat. It
was just talk arising naturally out of the incidents of the day, but it
was always talk guided by Jesus--talk in which Jesus was constantly
revealing Himself to them, impressing upon them His point of view,
making plain his own judgment upon life. And when we turn to His formal
teaching we realise how revolutionary was His point of view in regard to
life, how He swept aside the customary conventions by which they were
accustomed to guide life, and substituted the radical principles that
they have left on record in the Sermon on the Mount for the perplexity
of a world yet far from understanding them. Evidently the Apostles would
find their accustomed values tossed aside and a wholly new set of values
presented to them.
I suppose we find it difficult to appreciate how utterly revolutionary
the Gospel teaching continually is, not because we have become
accustomed to follow it, but because we have got used to hearing it and
evacuating it of most of its meaning by clever glossing. It was thus
that the teaching classes in Jerusalem avoided the pressure of Old
Testament ideals by a facile system of interpretation which made "void
the Word of God by their traditions." Human nature has not altered; and
we succeed by the same method in making the Gospel of none effect. We
are so well accustomed to do this that we lose the point and pungency of
much of our Lord's teaching. But we know that the apostles did not. We
know that they presented that teaching in all its sharpness to would-be
disciples. It could not be otherwise with those who for three years had
been in day by day intimacy with our Lord and had assimilated His point
of view and his judgment on life.
One effect of their contact with our Lord in the days following the
resurrection would be that whatever changes the passage to a new level
of existence had wrought in Him, it had not changed either the tone of
His teaching or the beauty and attractiveness of His Personality. The
concluding charges that were given them, the great commission of
proclaiming the Kingdom with which they were now definitely endued, the
powers which were committed to them in the great words: "All power is
given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all
nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have
commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the
world," would but confirm and strengthen all that had gone before in
their experience of Him. The Jesus of the resurrection was no pale ghost
returned from the grave, intermittently to appear to them to assure them
of the fact of immortality. He was "the same Jesus" Whom they had known
for three years, and whose return from the dead triumphant over the
powers that had opposed Him, set quite plainly and definitely the seal
of indisputable authority upon all the teaching and the example that had
gone before. The period of their probation was over: The commission was
theirs: It remained that they should abide in Jerusalem until they
should be "endued with power from on high."
Proclaimed Queen and Mother of a God,
The Light of earth, the Sovereign of saints,
With pilgrim foot up tiring hills she trod,
And heavenly stile with handmaids' toil acquaints;
Her youth to age, her health to sick she lends;
Her heart to God, to neighbor hand she bends.
A Prince she is, and mightier Prince doth bear,
Yet pomp of princely train she would not have;
But doubtless, heavenly choirs attendant were,
Her Child from harm, herself from fall to save:
Word to the voice, song to the tune she brings,
The voice her word, the tune her ditty sings.
Eternal lights enclosèd in her breast
Shot out such piercing beams of burning love,
That when her voice her cousin's ears possessed
The force thereof did force her babe to move:
With secret signs the children greet each other;
But, open praise each leaveth to his mother.
Robert Southwell, S.J. 1560-1595.
PART TWO