MARY:I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now!My Son hath loved full well thee;Pray Him that I may die,That I not forgotten be!Seest thou, Maudeleyn, nowMy Son is hanged on a tree,Yet alive am I and thou,--And thou, thou prayest not for me!"MAUDELEYNsaid: "I know no red,Care hath smitten my heart sore.I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead;And thy weeping grieveth me more.Come with me; I will thee leadInto the Temple here beforeFor thou hast now i-wept full yore."MARY:"I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,--In plain or valley or in hill?Where I may hide in any caseThat no sorrow come me till.For He that all my joy was,Now death with Him will do its will;For me no better solace isThan just to weep, to weep my fill."The Maudeleyn comforted me tho.To lead me hence, she said, was best:But care had smitten my heart soThat I might never have no rest."Sister, wherever that I goThe woe of Him is in my breast,While my Sone hangeth soHis pains are in mine own heart fast.Should I let Him hangen thereLet my Son alone then be?Maudeleyn, think, unkind I wereIf He should hang and I should flee."I bade them go where was their will,This Maudeleyn and everyone,And by myself remain I willFor I will flee for no man.From St. Bernard's "Lamentation On Christ's Passion."Engl. version, 13th Cent., by Richard Maydestone.
And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrappedit in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his ownnew tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock.S. Matt. XXVII, 59, 60.
And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrappedit in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his ownnew tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock.S. Matt. XXVII, 59, 60.
It is meet in very truth to bless thee the Theotokos, the ever-blessed and all-immaculate and Mother of our God. Honoured above the Cherubim, incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim, thou who without stain gavest birth to God the Word, and art truly Mother of God, we magnify thee.
BYZANTINE.
he end had come--so it must have seemed to those who had loved and followed our Lord. As they came back from the burial, those of them who had remained true to the end, as they came out of their hiding places, those others who forsook Him and fled, they met in that "Upper Room" which was already consecrated by so many experiences. They came back from Joseph's Garden, S. John leading the blessed Mother, the Magdalen and the other Mary following, S. Peter came from whatever obscure corner he had found safety in. The other Apostles came one by one, a frightened, disheartened group, shame-faced and doubtful as to what might next befall them. The thing that to us seems strangest of all is that no one seems to have taken in the meaning of our Lord's words about His resurrection. Not even S. Mary herself appears to have seen any light through the surrounding darkness. I suppose that so much of what our Lord taught them was unintelligible until after the coming of the Holy Spirit that they rarely felt sure that they understood His meaning; and when the meaning was so unprecedented as that involved in His sayings about the resurrection we can understand that they should have been so little influenced by them.
S. Mary's grief would have been so deep, so overwhelming, that she would have been unable to think of the future at all save as a dreary waste of pain. She could only think that her Son who was all to her, was dead. She had stood by the Cross through all the agony of His dying: she had heard His last words. That final word to her had sunk very deep into her heart. She had once more felt His Body in her arms as it was taken down from the Cross; and she had followed to the place where was a Garden and a new tomb wherein man had never yet lain, there she had seen the Body placed and hastily cared for, as much as the shortness of the time on the Passover Eve would permit. And then she had gone away, not caring at all where she was taken, with but one thought monotonously beating in her brain,--He is dead, He is dead.
It would not be possible in such moments calmly to recall what He Himself had taught about death. Death for the moment would mean what it had always meant to religious people of her time and circle. What that was we have very clearly presented to us in the talk with Martha that our Lord had near the place where Lazarus lay dead. There is a fuller knowledge than we find explicit in the Old Testament, showing a growth in the understanding of the Revelation in the years that fall between the close of the Old Testament canon and the coming of our Lord. There is a belief in survival to be followed by resurrection at the last day. That would no doubt be St. Mary's belief about death. That is still the belief of many Christians to-day. "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." There are still many who think that they have accepted the full Revelation of God in Christ who have not appreciated the vast difference that the triumph of Christ over death has made for us here and now.
So we have no difficulty in understanding the gloom that fell on the Apostolic circle, accentuated as it was by the very vivid fear that at any moment they might hear the approaching feet of the Jewish and Roman officials and the knock of armed hands upon the door. What to do? How escape? Had they so utterly misunderstood and misinterpreted Christ that this is the natural outcome of His movement? Had they been the victims of foolish hopes and of a baseless ambition when they saw in Him the Christ, the one who should at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel? They had persistently clung to this nationalistic interpretation of His work although He had never encouraged it; but it was the only meaning that they were able to see in it. And now all their expectations had collapsed, and they were left hopeless and leaderless to face the consequences of a series of acts that had ended in the death of their Master and would end, they knew not how, for them. Was it at all likely that the Jewish authorities having disposed of the leader in a dangerous movement would be content to let the followers go free? Would they not rather seek to wipe out the last traces of the movement in blood?
So they would have thought, gathered in that Upper Room, while outside the Jewish authorities were keeping the Passover. What a Passover it was to them with this nightmare of a rebellion which threatened their whole place and power passed away. What mutual congratulations were theirs on the clever way in which the whole matter had been handled. There had been a moment when they were on the very point of failure, when Pilate was ready to let Jesus go free. That was their moment of greatest danger; and they took their courage in both hands and threw the challenge squarely in the face of the cowardly Governor: "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend!" The chief priests knew their man, and they carried their plan against him with a determined hand, declining to accept any compromise, anything less than the death of Jesus. Great was the rejoicing; hearty were the mutual congratulations in the official circles of Jerusalem. It had been long since they had celebrated so wonderful a Passover as that!
So limited, so mistaken, is the human outlook on life. They had but to await another night's passing and all would be changed. But in the meantime the position of the disciples was pitiful. They were in that state of dull, hopeless discouragement that is one of the most painful of human states. It is a state to which we who are Christians do from time to time fall victims with much less excuse. We are hopeless, we say and feel. We look at the future, at the problems with which we are fronted, and we see no ray of light, no suggestion of a solution. We have been robbed of what we most valued and life looks wholly blank to us. For those others there was this of excuse,--they did not know Jesus risen, they did not know the power of the resurrection life. For us there is no such excuse because we have a sure basis of hope in our knowledge of the meaning of the Lord.
Hope is one of the great trilogy of Christian Virtues, the gift to Christians of God the Holy Ghost. As Christians we have the virtue of hope, the question is whether we will excercise it or no. It is one of the many fruits of our being in a state of grace. Many blunder when they think of hope in that they confound it with an optimistic feeling about the future. We hear of hopeful persons and we know that by the description is meant persons who are confident "that everything will be all right," when there seems no ground at all for thinking so. They have a "buoyant temperament," by which I suppose is meant a temperament which soars above facts. That not very intelligent attitude has nothing to do with the Christian virtue of hope. Hope is born of our relation to God. It is the conviction: "God is on my side; I will not fear what man can do unto me." It is the serene and untroubled trust of one who knows that he is safe in the hands of God, and that his life is really ordered by the will and Providence of God.
This virtue, had they possessed it, would have carried the disciples through the crisis of our Lord's death. They had had sufficient experience of Him to know that they might utterly rely on Him in all the circumstances of their lives. He had always sustained them and carried them through all crises. They had often been puzzled by Him, no doubt; they had felt helpless to fathom much of His teaching, but they had slowly arrived at certain conclusions about Him which He Himself had confirmed. On that day at Caesarea Phillipi they had reached the conclusion of His Messiahship, a slumbering conviction had broken into flame and light in the great confession of S. Peter. The meaning of Messiahship was a part of their national religious tradition; and although in some important respects mistaken, they yet, one would think, have been led to perfect trust in our Lord when they acknowledged His Messianic claims. But death? They could not get over the apparent finality of death. But, again, perhaps we are not very far beyond this in our understanding of it. To us still death seems very final.
But it was just that sense of its finality--of its constituting a hopeless break in the continuity of existence--that our Lord was engaged in removing during these days which to them were days of hopelessness and despair. When they came to know what in these days was taking place; and when the Church guided by the Holy Spirit came to meditate upon the meaning of our Lord's action it would see death in a changed light. The sense of a cataclysmic disaster in death would pass and be replaced by a sense of the continuity of life. Hitherto attention had been concentrated on this world, and death had been a disappearence from this world, the stopping of worldly loves and interests. Presently death would be seen to be the translation of the human being to a new sphere of activities, but involving no cessation of consciousness or failure of personal activities. Men had thought, naturally enough in their lack of knowledge, of the effect of death on the survivors, of the break in their relations with the dead. Now death would be viewed from the point of view of the interests of the person who is dead; and it would emerge that he continued under different conditions, and in the end it would come to be seen that even in the relations of the survivors with the dead there was no necessary and absolute break, but that the new conditions of life made possible renewed intercourse under altered circumstances.
Our Lord, the disciples learned not long after, during these days went to preach to the spirits in prison, which the thought of the Church has interpreted to mean that He carried the news of the Redemption He had wrought through His dying, to the place of the dead, to the region where the souls of the faithful were patiently waiting the time of their perfecting. The doors of the heavenly world could not be opened till the time when He by His Cross and Passion, by His death and resurrection, opened them. The Heads of the Gates could not be lifted till they were lifted for the entrance of the King of Glory. But once lifted they were lifted forever; and when He ascended up on high He led His troop of captives redeemed from the bondage of death and hell.
It is through these lifted Gates that the companies of the sanctified have been streaming ever since; and the difference that has been made in our view of death has been immense. If we have the faith of a Christian death has been transformed. There remains, of course, the natural grief which is ours when we part from those whom we love. This grief is natural and holy as it is in fact an expression of our love. It is not rebellion against the will of God, but is the expression of a feeling wherewith God has endowed us. But there is no longer in it the sting of hopelessness that we find, for instance, in the inscriptions on pagan tombs, nay, on tombs still, though created by Christians and found in Christian cemeteries. Rather it is the expression of a love which is learning to exercise itself under new conditions. We do not find it possible to reverse all our habits in a moment; and the new relation with the dead is one to which we have to learn to accustom ourselves. I remember a case where a mother and a son had never been separated for more than a day at a time, though he was far on in manhood. There came a time of indeterminate separation and the mother's grief was intense notwithstanding that there was no thought of a permanent separation. It took some time for her to accustom herself to the new mode of communication by letter. It is not far otherwise in death; it takes some time for us to accustom ourselves to the new mode of intercourse through prayer, but we succeed, and the new intercourse is very real and very precious. In a sense, too, it is a nearer, more intimate intercourse. It lacks the homely, daily touches, no doubt; but in compensation it reveals to us the spiritual values in life. We speedily learn, we learn almost by a spiritual instinct, what are the common grounds on which we can now meet. By our intercourse with our dead we get a new grasp on the truth of our common life in Christ: it is in and through Him that all our converse is now mediated. We have little difficulty in knowing what are the thoughts and interests which may be shared under the new conditions in which we find ourselves. Our perception of spiritual interests and spiritual values grows and deepens, and our communion with our dead becomes an indication of the extent of our own spiritual growth.
There come times in the spiritual experience of most of us when we seem to have got to the end. There is a deepening sense of failure which is not, when we analyse it, so much a failure in this or that detail, as a general sense of the futility of the life of the Church as expressed in our individual lives. It came to those primitive congregations, you remember, to which S. Peter was writing; "Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation." It is the weariness of continuous effort from which we conclude that we are getting quite insufficient results.
No doubt that is true. The results are never what we expect, possibly because the effort is never what we imagine it to be. We continually underestimate the opposing force of evil, the difficulty of dealing with a humanity which falls so easily under the slightest temptation. It is not that sinners decline to hear the Word of God, but that those who profess themselves to be the servants of God, and who in fact intend to be such, are so lamentably weak and ineffective. We think of the effort of God in the Incarnation; we have been following that effort in some detail through the Passion. We are surprised, shocked, disheartened by the spectacle of the hatred that innocence stirs up, at the lengths men will go when they see their personal ends threatened. We are horrified by Caiphas, Pilate, Herod. But is that the really horrifying thing about the Passion of our Lord? To me the supreme example of human incomprehension is that all the disciples forsook Him and fled, that He was left to die almost alone. There we get the most disheartening failure in the tragedy.
For we expect the antagonism of the world, especially that part of the world that has seen and rejected Christ. There we find Satanic activities. One of the outstanding features of the literature of to-day in the Western world, the world that had known from childhood the story of Jesus, is its utter hatred of Christianity; its revolt from all that Christianity stands for. This is markedly true in regard to the Christian teaching in the matter of purity. The contemporary English novel is perhaps the vilest thing that has yet appeared on this earth. There have been plenty of unclean books written in the course of the world's history--we have only to recall the literature of the Renaissance--but for the most part they have been written in careless or boastful disregard of moral sanctions which they still regarded as existing; but the novel of the present is an immoral propaganda--it is deliberately and of malice immoral, not out of careless levity, but out of deliberate intention. You do not feel that the modern author is just describing immoral actions which grow out of his story, but that he is constructing his story for the purpose of propagating immoral theory. He hates the whole teaching of the Christian Religion in the matter of purity. He has thrown it overboard on the ground that it is an "unnatural" restraint. To those who have studied the development of thought since the Renaissance there is nothing surprising in this.
But what does still surprise those who are as yet capable of being surprised is the light way in which the mass of Christians take their religion. Occasionally, in moments of frankness, they admit that they are not getting anything out of it; but it is harder to get them to admit that the reason is that they are not putting anything into it. You do not expect to get returns from a business into which you are putting no capital, and you have no right to expect returns from a religion into which you are putting no energy. What is meant by that is that those Christians who are keeping the minimum routine of Christianity, who are going to High Mass on Sunday (or perhaps only to low Mass) and then making the rest of the day a time of self-indulgence and pleasure; who make their communions but rarely; who do not go to confession, or go only at Easter; who are giving no active support to the work of the Gospel as represented in parish and diocese have no right to be surprised if they find that they do not seem to get any results from their religion; that it is often rather a bore to do even so much as they do, and that they see no point in permitting it further to interfere with their customary amusements and avocations. I do not know what such persons expect from their religion, but I am sure that they will be disappointed if they are expecting any spiritual result. Naturally, they will be disappointed if they look in themselves for any evidence of the virtue of hope. The most that can be looked for under the circumstances is that mockery of hope, presumption.
We are not to be discouraged in our estimate of the Christian Religion by this which seems to be the failure of God. We are not to echo the cry: "Since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." S. Peter pointed out to those pessimists that all things do not continue the same, that there are times of crisis which are the judgments of God. Such a judgment was that of old which swept the wickedness of the world away, "whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." He goes on to state that the present order likewise will issue in judgment: "The heavens and the earth which are now ... are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." What renders men hopeless is the feeling of God's inactivity; but this declaration of impending judgment certifies the active interest of God. God's dealing with the world is a perpetual judgment of which we are apt to decline the evidence until the cataclysm reveals the final scene. But every society, every individual life, is being judged through the whole course of its existence, and there is no need that either society or individual should be blind to the fact that such a judgment is taking place. There is no failure of God. There is a failure on our part to understand the works of God.
We may very well consider the problem an individual one and ask ourselves what ground of hope we have. On the basis of our present effort can we, ought we, to have more than we have? The spiritual life is not an accident that befalls certain people; it is an art that is acquired by such persons as are interested in it. It is attained through the careful training and exercise of the faculties wherewith we have been endowed. The answer to our question is itself a perfectly simple one, as simple as would be the answer to the question: "Do you speak French?" We speak French if we have taken the trouble to learn French; and we have gained results in the way of spiritual development and culture if we have taken the trouble to do so. I do not know why we should expect results on any other ground than that.
But certain persons say: "I have tried, and have not attained any results." Well, I should want to know what the trying means in that case. It is well for a person who aspires to spiritual culture to think of his past history. What sort of character-development has so far been going on? Commonly it happens that there has been no spiritual effort that is worth thinking about; but that does not mean that nothing spiritual has been happening. It means on the contrary that there has been going on a spiritual atrophy, the spiritual powers have been without exercise and will be difficult to arouse to activity. In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which we have already formed, a period in which unused and immature spiritual powers must be roused to action and disciplined to use. The simplest illustration of this is the difficulty experienced by the enthusiastic beginner in holding the attention fixed on spiritual acts such as the various forms of prayer. In all such attempts at spiritual activity there will be the constant drag of old habits, the recurrence of states of mind and imagination that had become habitual. These hindrances can be overcome, but only by steady and rather tedious labour. They call for the display of the virtue of patience which is not one of the virtues characteristic of spiritual immaturity. Hence reaction and the feeling that one is not getting on, the feeling that we have quite possibly made a mistake about the whole matter.
This is the place for the exercise of hope; and hope will come if we look away from our not very encouraging acquirement to the ground that we have for expecting any acquirement at all. If we ask: "Why hope?" we shall see that our basis of hope is not in ourselves at all but in God. We hope because of the promises of God, because of His will for us as revealed in His Son. "He loved us and gave Himself for us"; and that giving will not be in vain. "He gave Himself for me," I tell myself, "and therefore I am justified in my expectation of spiritual success." So one tries to learn from the present failure as it seems; so one repents and pushes on; so one learns that it is through tenacity of purpose that one attains results.
And again: I am sustained by hope because I see that the results that I covet are not imaginary. They exist. I see them in operation all about me. I learn of them as I study the lives of other Christians past and present. They are reality not theory, fact not dream. And what has been so richly and abundantly the outcome of spiritual living in others must be within my own reach. The results they attained were not miraculous gifts, but they were the working of God the Holy Spirit in lives yielded to Him and co-operating with Him.
Once more: is it not true that after a period of honest labour I do find results? Perhaps not all that I would like but all that I am justified in expecting from the energy I have spent? I do not believe that any one can look back over a year's honest labour and not see that the labour has born fruit.
In any case the fact that we do not see just what we are looking for does not mean that no spiritual work is going on. It may seem that our Lord is silent and that to our cries there is no voice nor any that answers; but that may mean that we are looking in the wrong place or listening for the wrong word. The disciples looked that the outcome of our Lord's life should be that the Kingdom should be restored to Israel; and when they turned away from the tomb in Joseph's Garden they felt that what they had looked for and prayed for was hopeless of accomplishment. But the important point was not their vision of the Kingdom at all, but that they had yielded themselves to our Lord and become His disciples and lovers. This is not what they intended to do, but it is what actually had happened: and when the grave yielded up the dead Whom they thought that they had lost forever, Jesus came back with a mission for them that was infinitely wider than their dream: the mission of founding not the old Kingdom of David, but the Kingdom of David's Son. All their aspirations and prayers were fulfilled by being transcended, and they found themselves in a position vastly more important than had been reached even in their dreams.
Something like that not infrequently happens in our experience. We conceive a spiritual ambition and work for a spiritual end, and seem always to miss it; and then the day comes when God reveals to us what He has been doing, and we find that through the very discipline of our failure we have been being prepared for a success of which we had not thought: and when we raise our eyes from the path we thought so toilsome and uninteresting, it is to find ourselves at the very gate of the City of God. It will be with us as with the Apostles who in the darkest hour of their imagined failure, when they were gathered together in hiding from the Jews were startled by the appearence among them of the risen Jesus, and were filled with the unutterable joy of His message of peace.
"His body is wrappèd all in woe,Hand and foot He may not go.Thy Son, Lady, that thou lovest soNaked is nailed upon a tree."The Blessèd Body that thou hast born,To save mankind that was forlorn,His body, Lady, the Jews have torn,And hurt His Head, as ye may see."When John his tale began to tellMary would not longer dwellBut hied her fast unto that hillWhere she might her own Son see."My sweete Son, Thou art me dear,Oh why have men hanged thee here?Thy head is closed with a brier,O why have men so done to Thee?""John, this woman I thee betake;Keep My Mother for My sake.On Rood I hang for mannes sakeFor sinful men as thou may see."This game alone I have to play,For sinful souls that are to die.Not one man goeth by the wayThat on my pains will look and see."Father, my soul I thee betake,My body dieth for mannes sake;To hell I go withouten wake,Mannes soul to maken free".Pray we all that Blessed SonThat He help us when may no manAnd bring to bliss each everyoneAmen, amen, amen for Charity.Early English Lyrics, p. 146.From an MS. in the Sloane collection.
And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted; yeseek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: heis risen; he is not here.S. Mark XVI, 6.
And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted; yeseek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: heis 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.
hatever 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 areweaffected? 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."