It matters little whether the Lord’s resurrection was wrought by him or in him by the Father, since he says his works were given him by the Father and Jesus apart from the Father is inconceivable. It is natural that he who could call from the grave a body dead four days should have power to take again the body he himself laid down. I hold distinctly that he took again the same body in which he had walked the earth, suffered and died—not merely the same form—and appeared in it to his disciples to give them the final consolation of a visible presence before departing for a higher presence in the spirit of truth, no longer limited even by the highest forms of truth.
It is not surprising that records of such a marvel, resting on the testimony of men and women first bewildered with grief and then almost distracted by a gladness too great for the calm perfect observation needs, do not agree in every detail. All knew the Lord had indeed risen; what matter whether some saw one angel in the tomb or two? The first to come saw one angel outside and another inside; another later saw two inside; one record naturally says of them all that they saw two. I do not care to reconcile the reports, whose trifling disagreement is to me valuable for its truth to human nature, but suggest this arrangement to anyone anxious to understand them. Finding the tomb empty, Mary Magdalene, not seeing or heeding the angel, left her companions and ran to the chief of the disciples to share the agony of this final loss, and returned with Peter and John to the grave, from which her companions, having seen and spoken with the angels outside and inside, had gone to find their friends. Peter and John, seeing only the folded garments of desertion, went home; but Mary lingered weeping by the place that was not now even the grave of the beloved, so utterly had he and the signs of him vanished. As she wept she stooped into the sepulchre, and there sat the angels in holy contemplation, one at the head and one at the feet where Jesus had lain; Peter and John had not seen them; to Mary they were manifest.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” said the angels. “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” answered Mary, and turning away, tear-blinded, she saw, as she thought, the gardener.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” repeats the gardener. “Whom do you seek?”
Hopelessness had dulled every sense: not even a start at the sound of his voice!
“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him.”
“Mary!” “Master!”
“Do not touch me; for I have not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.”
She was first to see him; arrested by her misery, he seems to have delayed his ascent and appeared sooner than intended. She was about to grasp him with the eager hands of reverent love: why did he refuse the touch?
We know so little of the new conditions of his bodily nature that all is conjecture; there may even have been physical reasons she should not yet touch him, but my impression is that, the hard work done and the form in which he had wrought and suffered resumed, he must have the Father’s embrace first, as after a long absence a man seeks first the arms of his dearest friend. Though he was never absent from God in heart, the body, with all its partition-walls, is God’s too, the work of his hands, and some way there must be for even it to come into willed relation with him. So I think Jesus, his work done, would desire first of all to return in the body to him who sent him by giving him a body, and so, though he might delay at the sound of her grief, would rather she not touch him first. If anyone thinks this too human a notion of the Saviour, I suspect a great part of our irreligion springs from disbelief in the humanity of God, in which lie endless undiscovered treasures of grace. After he had once ascended to the Father, he appeared to his disciples again and again, their hands handled the word of life, and he ate in their presence. He had been to his Father and returned so that they might know him lifted above the grave, an elder brother free of humanity’s oppressions but full of its tenderness, captain of their salvation; death could no longer touch his body, and from that vantage-ground he could reach down salvation to each and all.
Note that this glorified body appeared and disappeared at its owner’s will, and it seems other matter yielded to it and space itself was in some degree subject to it. If a man says he cannot believe it, I can; if he asks how it could be, I can only point to the region where it may be possible: the borderland where thought and matter meet, where all marvels and miracles are generated. The wisdom of this world can believe matter generates mind; what seems to me the wisdom from above can believe mind generates matter, matter being only manifest mind. Then matter may well be subject to mind, and much more, if Jesus is the Son of God, must his own body be subject to his will. I doubt whether any man’s condition is perfect before the body he inhabits is wholly obedient to his will—before, through his absolute obedience to the Father, the realm of his own rule is perfectly put under him.
It may be objected that this is credible of a glorified body, but hard to believe of the body that suffered and died on the cross becoming thus plastic to the indwelling spirit. But I do not see why what was born of the Father’s spirit should not be so interpenetrated and possessed by the Son’s spirit that, losing none of its former faculties, it gains many added gifts of obedience, among them those indicated in this narrative.
Why was this miracle needful? Perhaps, for one thing, that men should not limit him, or themselves in him, to the known forms of humanity; and for another, that they might have the best hope of a life beyond the grave, their instinctive desires thus infinitely developed and assured. I suspect, however, that it followed simply as the natural consequence of all that preceded.
If Christ is risen, the grave of humanity itself is empty. We have risen with him, and death has no dominion over us. Of every dead man and woman it may be said: not here, but risen and gone before us. Ever since the Lord lay down in the tomb and it proved only a couch from which he rose refreshed, we may say of every brother: he is not dead but sleeps, and shall arise from his sleep.
The way to the tomb may be hard, as it was for him, but onlookers see the hardness and not the help, the suffering and not the sustaining. That is known only to the dying and God; they can tell us little of it, and nothing of the glad safety beyond.
I have scarcely to do here with theories of the conditions of our resurrection; it is no concern of mine whether the matter of our bodies shall be raised from the earth. It is enough that we shall have forms capable of revealing ourselves and bringing us into contact with God’s other works—forms in which the idea, so blurred and broken in these, will be carried out: so like that friends will not doubt the identity for a moment, so unlike that tears of recognition will be all for joy in the gain and gratitude for the loss. Not to believe in mutual recognition beyond seems to me a far more reprehensible unbelief than unbelief in the resurrection itself. I can understand a man’s not believing in any life after death; I confess that though probabilities are for it, appearances are against it. But that anyone should believe in the resurrection of the very same body of Jesus, who took pains that his friends recognize him in it, as the one ground of hope for their own rising, and yet not believe that friend will embrace friend in the mansions prepared for them, astounds me. Such a shadowy resumption of life is unworthy of the name of resurrection; the grave would then be victorious not only over the body and all that made life precious but over the soul, blind and deaf to what, through loveliest memories, would have added a new song to the Father’s praises and a new glow to a love that needed only that to be perfect. I am ashamed even to combat such an essential falsehood; only because a weak soul here and there is paralysed by it, and sympathy must not be swallowed up even by righteous disdain, is more than contemptuous denial needed.
What seemed to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body, was really the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy. He was not there because he had risen.