"Woman, why weepest thou?" repeats the gardener.

"Whom seekest thou?"

Hopelessness had dulled every sense: not even a start at the sound of his voice!

"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."

She had the first sight of him. It would almost seem that, arrested by her misery, he had delayed his ascent, and shown himself sooner than his first intent. "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended." She was about to grasp him with the eager hands of reverent love: why did he refuse the touch?

Doubtless the tone of the words deprived them of any sting. Doubtless the self-respect of the woman was in no way wounded by the master's recoil. For the rest, we know so little of the new conditions of his bodily nature, that nothing is ours beyond conjecture. It may be, for anything I know, that there were even physical reasons why she should not yet touch him; but my impression is that, after the hard work accomplished, and the form in which he had wrought and suffered resumed, he must have the Father's embrace first, as after a long absence any man would seek first the arms of his dearest friend. It may well be objected to this notion, that he had never been absent from God—that in his heart he was at home with him continually. And yet the body with all its limitations, with all its partition-walls of separation, is God's, and there must be some way in which even it can come into a willed relation with him to whom it is nearer even than to ourselves, for it is the offspring of his will, or as the prophets of old would say—the work of his hands. That which God has invented and made, which has its very origin in the depth of his thought, can surely come nigh to God. Therefore I think that in some way which we cannot understand, Jesus would now seek the presence of the Father; would, having done the work which he had given him to do, desire first of all to return in the body to him who had sent him by giving him a body. Hence although he might delay his return at the sound of the woman's grief, he would rather she did not touch him first. If any one thinks this founded on too human a notion of the Saviour, I would only reply that I suspect a great part of our irreligion springs from our disbelief in the humanity of God. There lie endless undiscovered treasures of grace. After he had once ascended to the Father, he not only appeared to his disciples again and again, but their hands handled the word of life, and he ate in their presence. He had been to his Father, and had returned that they might know him lifted above the grave and all that region in which death has power; that as the elder brother, free of the oppressions of humanity, but fulfilled of its tenderness, he might show himself captain of their salvation. Upon the body he inhabited, death could no longer lay his hands, and from the vantage-ground he thus held, he could stretch down the arm of salvation to each and all.

For in regard of this glorified body of Jesus, we must note that it appeared and disappeared at the will of its owner; and it would seem also that other matter yielded and gave it way; yes, even that space itself was in some degree subjected to it. Upon the first of these, the record is clear. If any man say he cannot believe it, my only answer is that I can. If he ask how it could be, the nearest I can approach to an answer is to indicate the region in which it may be possible: the border-land where thought and matter meet is the region where all marvels and miracles are generated. The wisdom of this world can believe that matter generates mind: what seems to me the wisdom from above can believe that mind generates matter—that matter is but the manifest mind. On this supposition matter may well be subject to mind; much more, if Jesus be the Son of God, his own body must be subject to his will. I doubt, indeed, if the condition of any man is perfect before the body he inhabits is altogether obedient to his will—before, through his own absolute obedience to the Father, the realm of his own rule is put under him perfectly.

It may be objected that although this might be credible of the glorified body of even the human resurrection, it is hard to believe that the body which suffered and died on the cross could become thus plastic to the will of the indwelling spirit. But I do not see why that which was born of the spirit of the Father, should not be so inter-penetrated and possessed by the spirit of the Son, that, without the loss of one of its former faculties, it should be endowed with many added gifts of obedience; amongst the rest such as are indicated in the narrative before us.

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 the best hope might be given them of a life beyond the grave; that their instinctive desires in that direction might thus be infinitely developed and assured. I suspect, however, that it followed just as the natural consequence of all that preceded.

If Christ be risen, then is the grave of humanity itself empty. We have risen with him, and death has henceforth no dominion over us. Of every dead man and woman it may be said: He—she—is not here, but is risen and gone before us. Ever since the Lord lay down in the tomb, and behold it was but a couch whence he arose refreshed, we may say of every brother: He is not dead but sleepeth. He too is alive and shall arise from his sleep.

The way to the tomb may be hard, as it was for him; but we who look on, see the hardness and not the help; we see the suffering but not the sustaining: that is known only to the dying and God. They can tell us little of this, and nothing of the glad safety beyond.

With any theory of the conditions of our resurrection, I have scarcely here to do. It is to me a matter of positively no interest whether or not, in any sense, the matter of our bodies shall be raised from the earth. It is enough that we shall possess forms capable of revealing ourselves and of bringing us into contact with God's other works; forms in which the idea, so blurred and broken in these, shall be carried out—remaining so like, that friends shall doubt not a moment of the identity, becoming so unlike, that the tears of recognition shall be all for the joy of the gain and the gratitude of the loss. Not to believe in mutual recognition beyond, seems to me a far more reprehensible unbelief than that in the resurrection itself. I can well understand how a man should not believe in any life after death. I will confess that although probabilities are for it, appearances are against it. But that a man, still more a woman, should believe in the resurrection of the very same body of Jesus, who took pains that his friends should recognize him therein; that they should regard his resurrection as their one ground for the hope of their own uprising, and yet not believe that friend shall embrace friend in the mansions prepared for them, is to me astounding. Such a shadowy resumption of life I should count unworthy of the name of resurrection. Then indeed would the grave be victorious, not alone over the body, not alone over all which made the life of this world precious and by which we arose towards the divine—but so far victorious over the soul that henceforth it should be blind and deaf to what in virtue of loveliest memories would have added a new song to the praises of the Father, a new glow to the love that had wanted but that to make it perfect. In truth I am ashamed of even combating such an essential falsehood. Were it not that here and there a weak soul is paralysed by the presence of the monstrous lie, and we dare not allow sympathy to be swallowed up of even righteous disdain, a contemptuous denial would be enough.

What seemed to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body itself, was in reality the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy. He was not there because he had risen.



XII. THE TRANSFIGURATION.

I have judged it fitting to close this series of meditations with some thoughts on the Transfiguration, believing the story to be as it were a window through which we gain a momentary glimpse of the region whence all miracles appear—a glimpse vague and dark for all the transfiguring light, for God himself is "by abundant clarity invisible." In the story we find a marvellous change, a lovely miracle, pass upon the form itself whence the miracles flowed, as if the pent-up grace wrought mightily upon the earthen vessel which contained it.

Our Lord would seem to have repeatedly sought some hill at eventide for the solitude such a place alone could afford him. It must often have been impossible for him to find any other chamber in which to hold communion with his Father undisturbed. This, I think, was one of such occasions. He took with him the favoured three, whom also he took apart from the rest in the garden of Gethsemane, to retire even from them a little, that he might be alone with the Father, yet know that his brothers were near him—the ocean of human need thus drawn upwards in an apex of perfect prayer towards the throne of the Father.

I think this, his one only material show, if we except the entry into Jerusalem upon the ass, took place in the night. Then the son of Joseph the carpenter was crowned, not his head only with a crown placed thereon from without, but his whole person with a crown of light born in him and passing out from him. According to St Luke he went up the mountain to pray, "but Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep." St Luke also says that "on the next day, when they were come down from the mountain," that miracle was performed which St Matthew and St Mark represent as done immediately on the descent. From this it appears more than likely that the night was spent upon the mountain.

St Luke says that "the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering." St Matthew says, "His face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light." St Mark says, "His raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them." St Luke is alone in telling us that it was while he prayed that this change passed upon him. He became outwardly glorious from inward communion with his Father. But we shall not attain to the might of the meaning, if we do not see what was the more immediate subject of his prayer. It is, I think, indicated in the fact, also recorded by St Luke, that the talk of his heavenly visitors was "of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." Associate with this the fact that his talk with his disciples, as they came down the mountain, pointed in the same direction, and that all open report of the vision was to be withheld until he should have risen from the dead, and it will appear most likely that the master, oppressed with the thought of that which now drew very nigh, sought the comfort and sympathy of his Father, praying in the prospect of his decease. Let us observe then how, in heaving off the weight of this awful shadow by prayer, he did not grow calm and resigned alone, if he were ever other than such, but his faith broke forth so triumphant over the fear, that it shone from him in physical light. Every cloud of sorrow or dread, touched with such a power of illumination, is itself changed into a glory. The radiance goes hand in hand with the coming decay and the three days' victory of death. It is as a foretaste of his resurrection, a putting on of his new glorified body for a moment while he was yet in the old body and the awful shadow yet between. It may be to something like this as taking place in other men that the apostle refers when he says: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." That coming death was to be but as the overshadowing cloud, from which the glory should break anew and for ever. The transfiguration then was the divine defiance of the coming darkness.

Let us now speculate for a moment upon the relation of the spiritual and physical manifested in it. He became, I repeat, outwardly glorious from inward communion with his Father. In like circumstance, the face of Moses shone marvellously. And what wonder? What should make a man's face shine, if not the presence of the Holy? if not communion with the Father of his spirit? In the transfiguration of Jesus we have, I think, just the perfect outcome of those natural results of which we have the first signs in Moses—the full daylight, of which his shining face was as the dawn. Thus, like the other miracles, I regard it as simply a rare manifestation of the perfect working of nature. Who knows not that in moments of lofty emotion, in which self is for the time forgotten, the eyes shine, and the face is so transfigured that we are doubtful whether it be not in a degree absolutely luminous! I say once more, in the Lord we find the perfecting of all the dull hunts of precious things which common humanity affords us. If so, what a glory must await every lowliest believer, since the communion of our elder brother with his Father and our Father, a communion for whose perfecting in us he came, caused not only his face to shine, but the dull garments he wore to become white as snow through the potency of the permeating light issuing from his whole person! The outer man shone with the delight of the inner man—for his Father was with him—so that even his garments shared in the glory. Such is what the presence of the Father will do for every man. May I not add that the shining of the garments is a type of the glorification of everything human when brought into its true relations by and with the present God?

Keeping the same point of view, I turn now to the resurrection with which the whole fact is so closely associated:—I think the virtue of divine presence which thus broke in light from the body of Jesus, is the same by which his risen body, half molten in power, was rendered plastic to the will of the indwelling spirit. What if this light were the healing agent of the bodies of men, as the deeper other light from which it sprung is the healing agent of themselves? Are not the most powerful of the rays of light invisible to our vision?

Some will object that this is a too material view of life and its facts. I answer that the question is whether I use the material to interpret the spiritual, as I think I do, or to account for it, as I know I do not. In my theory, the spiritual both explains and accounts for the material.

If the notions we have of what we may call material light render it the only fitting image to express the invisible Truth, the being of God, there must be some closest tie between them—not of connection only, but of unity. Such a fitness could not exist without such connection; except, indeed, there were one god of the Natural and another of the Supernatural, who yet were brothers, and thought in similar modes, and the one had to supplement the work of the other. The essential truth of God it must be that creates its own visual image in the sun that enlightens the world: when man who is the image of God is filled with the presence of the eternal, he too, in virtue of his divine nature thus for the moment ripened to glory, radiates light from his very person. Where, when, or how the inner spiritual light passes into or generates outward physical light, who can tell? This border-land, this touching of what we call mind and matter, is the region of miracles—of material creation, I might have said, which is the great—suspect, the only miracle. But if matter be the outcome of spirit, and body and soul be one man, then, if the soul be radiant of truth, what can the body do but shine?

I conjecture then, that truth, which is light in the soul, might not only cast out disease, which is darkness in the body, but change that body even, without the intervention of death, into the likeness of the body of Jesus, capable of all that could be demanded of it. Except by violence I do not think the body of Jesus could have died. No physiologist can tell why man should die. I think a perfect soul would be capable of keeping its body alive. An imperfect one cannot fill it with light in every part—cannot thoroughly inform the brute matter with life. The transfiguration of Jesus was but the visible outbreak of a life so strong as to be life-giving, life-restoring. The flesh it could melt away and evermore renew. Such a body might well walk upon the stormiest waters. A body thus responsive to and interpenetrative of light, which is the visible life, could have no sentence of death in it. It would never have died.

But I find myself in regions where I dare tread no further for the darkness of ignorance. I see many glimmers: they are too formless and uncertain.

When or how the light died away, we are not told. My own fancy is that it went on shining but paling all the night upon the lonely mount, to vanish in the dawn of the new day. When he came down from the mountain the virtue that dwelt in him went forth no more in light to the eyes, but in healing to the poor torn frame of the epileptic boy. So he vanished at last from the eyes of his friends, only to draw nearer—with a more intense and healing presence—to their hearts and minds.

Even so come, Lord Jesus.

THE END