HOW JESUS SPOKE TO WOMEN.
"But why wasn't he as gentle with good women?" said Leopold.
"Wasn't he?" said the curate in some surprise.
"He said What have I to do with thee to his own mother?"
"A Greek scholar should go to the Greek," said the curate. "Our
English is not perfect. You see she wanted to make him show off, and
he thought how little she knew what he came to the world for. Her
thoughts were so unlike his that he said, What have we in common! It
was a moan of the God-head over the distance of its creature.
Perhaps he thought: How then will you stand the shock when at length
it comes? But he looked at her as her own son ought to look at every
blessed mother, and she read in his eyes no rebuke, for instantly,
sure of her desire, she told them to do whatever he said."
"I hope that's the right way of it," said Leopold, "for I want to
trust him out and out. But what do you make of the story of the poor
woman that came about her daughter? Wasn't he rough to her? It
always seemed to me such a cruel thing to talk of throwing the meat
of the children to the dogs!"
"We cannot judge of the word until we know the spirit that gave
birth to it. Let me ask you a question: What would you take for the
greatest proof of downright friendship a man could show you?"
"That is too hard a question to answer all at once."
"Well, I may be wrong, but the deepest outcome of friendship seems
to me, on the part of the superior at least, the permission, or
better still, the call, to share in his sufferings. And in saying
that hard word to the poor Gentile, our Lord honoured her thus
mightily. He assumed for the moment the part of the Jew towards the
Gentile, that he might, for the sake of all the world of Gentiles
and Jews, lay bare to his Jewish followers the manner of spirit they
were of, and let them see what a lovely humanity they despised in
their pride of election. He took her to suffer with him for the
salvation of the world. The cloud overshadowed them both, but what
words immediately thereafter made a glory in her heart! He spoke to
her as if her very faith had reached an arm into the heavens, and
brought therefrom the thing she sought.--But I confess," the curate
went on, "those two passages have both troubled me. So I presume
will everything that is God's, until it becomes a strength and a
light by revealing its true nature to the heart that has grown
capable of understanding it. The first sign of the coming capacity
and the coming joy, is the anxiety and the question.--There is
another passage, which, although it does not trouble me so much, I
cannot yet get a right perception of. When Mary Magdalene took the
Master of Death for the gardener--the gardener of the garden of the
tombs! no great mistake, was it?--it is a lovely thing, that
mistaking of Jesus for the gardener!--how the holy and the lowly,
yea the holy and the common meet on all sides! Just listen to their
morning talk--the morning of the eternal open world to Jesus, while
the shadows of this narrow life still clustered around Mary:--I can
give it you exactly, for I was reading it this very day.
"'Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?'
"'Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid
him, and I will take him away.'
"'Mary.'
"'Master!'
"'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my
brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your
Father; and to my God and your God.'
"Why did he say, DO NOT TOUCH ME? It could not be that there was any
defilement to one in the new body of the resurrection, from contact
with one still in the old garments of humanity. But could it be that
there was danger to her in the contact? Was there something in the
new house from Heaven hurtful to the old tabernacle? I can hardly
believe it. Perhaps it might be. But we must look at the reason the
Master gives--only of all words hard to understand, the little
conjunctions are sometimes the hardest. What can that FOR mean?
'Touch me not, FOR I am not yet ascended to my Father.' Does it
mean, 'I must first present myself to my Father; I must first have
His hand laid on this body new-risen from the grave; I must go home
first?' The child must kiss his mother first, then his sisters and
brothers: was it so with Jesus? Was he so glad in his father, that
he must carry even the human body he had rescued eternal from the
grave, home to show him first? There are many difficulties about the
interpretation, and even if true, it would still shock every heart
whose devotion was less than absolutely child-like. Was not God WITH
him, as close to him as even God could come to his eternal son--in
him--ONE with him, all the time? How could he get nearer to him by
going to Heaven? What head-quarters, what court of place and
circumstance should the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible hold? And yet
if from him flow time and space, although he cannot be subject to
them; if his son could incarnate himself--cast the living,
responsive, elastic, flowing, evanishing circumstance of a human
garment around him; if, as Novalis says, God can become whatever he
can create, then may there not be some central home of God, holding
relation even to time and space and sense? But I am bewildered about
it.--Jesus stood then in the meeting point of both worlds, or rather
in the skirts of the great world that infolds the less. I am talking
like a baby, for my words cannot compass or even represent my
thoughts. This world looks to us the natural and simple one, and so
it is--absolutely fitted to our need and education. But there is
that in us which is not at home in this world, which I believe holds
secret relations with every star, or perhaps rather, with that in
the heart of God whence issued every star, diverse in kind and
character as in colour and place and motion and light. To that in
us, this world is so far strange and unnatural and unfitting, and we
need a yet homelier home. Yea, no home at last will do, but the home
of God's heart. Jesus, I say, was now looking, on one side, into the
region of a deeper life, where his people, those that knew their own
when they saw him, would one day find themselves tenfold at home;
while, on the other hand, he was looking into the region of their
present life, which custom and faithlessness make them afraid to
leave. But we need not fear what the new conditions of life will
bring, either for body or heart, for they will be nearer and sweeter
to our deeper being, as Jesus is nearer and dearer than any man
because he is more human than any. He is all that we can love or
look for, and at the root of that very loving and looking.--'In my
Father's house are many mansions,' he said. Matter, time, space, are
all God's, and whatever may become of our philosophies, whatever he
does with or in respect of time, place, and what we call matter, his
doing must be true in philosophy as well as fact. But I am
wandering."
The curate was wandering, but the liberty of wandering was essential
to his talking with the kind of freedom and truth he wanted to
mediate betwixt his pupil and the lovely things he saw.
"I wonder where the penitent thief was all the time," said Leopold.
"Yes, that also is a difficulty. There again come in the bothering
time and space, bothering in their relation to heavenly things, I
mean. On the Friday, the penitent thief, as you call him, was to be
with Jesus in Paradise; and now it was Sunday, and Jesus said he had
not yet been up to see his Father. Some would say, I am too literal,
too curious; what can Friday and Sunday have to do with Paradise?
But words MEAN in both worlds, for they are not two but one--surely
at least when Jesus thinks and speaks of them; and there can be no
wrong in feeling ever so blindly and dully after WHAT they mean.
Such humble questioning can do no harm, even if, in face of the
facts, the questions be as far off and SILLY--in the old sweet
meaning of the word--as those of any infant concerning a world he
has not proved.--But about Mary Magdalene: He must have said the
word TOUCH ME NOT. That could not have crept in. It is too hard for
an interpolation, I think; and if no interpolation, it must mean
some deep-good thing we don't understand. One thing we can make sure
of: it was nothing that should hurt her; for see what follows. But
for that, when he said TOUCH ME NOT, FOR I AM NOT YET ASCENDED TO MY
FATHER, she might have thought--'Ah! thou hast thy Father to go to,
and thou wilt leave us for him.'--BUT, he went on, GO TO MY BRETHREN
AND SAY UNTO THEM: I ASCEND UNTO MY FATHER, AND YOUR FATHER; AND MY
GOD AND YOUR GOD. What more could she want? Think: the Father of
Jesus, with whom, in all his knowledge and all his suffering, the
grand heart was perfectly, exultingly satisfied,--that Father he
calls our Father too. He shares with his brethren--of his best, his
deepest, his heartiest, most secret delight, and makes it their and
his most open joy: he shares his eternal Father with us, his perfect
God with his brethren. And whatever his not having yet ascended to
him may mean, we see, with marvel and joy, that what delayed
him--even though, for some reason perfect in tenderness as in truth,
he would not be touched--was love to Mary Magdalene and his mother
and his brethren. He could not go to the Father without comforting
them first. And certainly whatever she took the TOUCH ME NOT to mean
or point at, it was nothing that hurt her.--It just strikes me--is
it possible he said it in order to turn the overwhelming passion of
her joy, which after such a restoration would have clung more than
ever to the visible presence, and would be ready to suffer the pains
of death yet again when he parted from her--might it be to turn that
torrent into the wider and ever widening channel of joy in his
everlasting presence to the innermost being, his communion, heart to
heart, with every child of his Father? In our poor weakness and
narrowness and self-love, even of Jesus the bodily may block out the
spiritual nearness, which, however in most moods we may be unable to
realise the fact, is and remains a thing unutterably lovelier and
better and dearer--enhancing tenfold what vision of a bodily
presence may at some time be granted us. But how any woman can help
casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a lowly grandeur,
such a tender majesty, such a self-dissolving perfection--I cannot
imagine. The truth must be that those who kneel not have not seen.
You do not once read of a woman being against him--except indeed it
was his own mother, when she thought he was going all astray and
forgetting his high mission. The divine love in him towards his
Father in heaven and his brethren of men, was ever melting down his
conscious individuality in sweetest showers upon individual hearts;
he came down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water
the earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw him as he was and did
not worship!"
Helen turned and glided back into the house, and neither knew she
had been there.