The Meaning of Easter Morning

I have now completed the attempt which was the purpose of these volumes. I have tried to trace the process as delineated by the Gospel narrative, whereby Incarnate Love sought by a lifelong surrender to compensate the Father for a world’s lovelessness. The last hour of that lifelong surrender opened and closed in Calvary. The words ‘It is finished! ’ mark in the soul of Jesus the sense of a completed process. He has yielded up His will to the Father from dawn to dark. That expiatory offering of His soul which was begun in the morning has been continued without intermission, and perfected at eventide.

I have no right to prolong this book beyond what the Gospel narrative declares to be the last note of biographical development. I know there are many scenes of the Life which still remain; but they are not scenes of development. I do not say that some day I may not write a book on the Portrait of the Resurrection Christ; it is a subject of great interest and of profound importance. But should I do so, it will not be a third volume of the present work, but a new work. The expiatory sacrifice of Jesus was finished on Calvary. Easter Morning added nothing to its completeness. So far as the surrender of Jesus is concerned, Calvary is a climax; greater love hath no man than this! The surrender of will, conceived in the aspirations of childhood, begun in the temptations of the wilderness, deepened in the sympathy with man, tested by the threatened failure of His fondest dreams, is crowned and culminated by His words on the cross, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit! ’

Here, then, is the fitting place to pause. There can be no grander spot in which to drop the curtain. It is a spot not of defeat but of glory. The Form on which our eye gazes is a conqueror’s form. It is the figure of One who has seen the travail of his own soul, and is satisfied with the retrospect, who has vanquished His last peril, and need fear no more. The development of the work of Jesus is complete on Calvary. But it remains for us to ask two questions bearing on the relation of the Old Picture to the New. We will take the one in the present, and the other in the following chapter.

And first. Why do the scenes in the great gallery not pause at Calvary? If the development of Jesus is complete, why extend the picture? Why is it that when next we stand as artistic spectators we stand before a new scene? Why is it that, two days after that preternatural darkness, the Portrait of Jesus glitters in the sun? Surely in the mind of the artist there must have lurked a sense that the original Picture was, after all, incomplete — after all, unfinished!

And the mind of the artist judged rightly. I, too, hold that the Cross of Calvary leaves a want unsupplied; all I say is that the want did not lie in the development of Jesus. On

Calvary the work of Jesus is complete, finished, perfect in all its parts; but there is still some thing wanting to the Picture. What is that desideratum? What is that missing link which the narrative of the Resurrection supplies? That is the question which now presses upon us, and it is a question of deep interest. ‘The power of Christ’s Resurrection, has become a proverbial phrase. The man who first uttered it stood very near the Portrait; he occupied the front seat in the gallery; he had a perfect view. I should like to know what to this man, Paul, was the secret of the power he speaks of. I think I should be disposed to take his word for it, since he gazed from a distance so near. I am not speaking of him as a witness to the fact; that is a question for the apologists. But I should like to know wherein to Paul lay the power of Christ’s resurrection. And this I can know, for he has told me. Let us consider his testimony.

Now, in looking into the mind of Paul, we find something which at first sight surprises us. We should have expected that the value to him of the Resurrection Portrait would have been its revelation of Christ’s greatness. Strange to say, that is not his view. The revelation of Christ’s greatness is to him a thing already accomplished and needing no proof from Easter Morning. Nay, Paul is not afraid to invert the order. So far from regarding Christ’s resurrection as a proof of His greatness, he regards our sense of His greatness as a proof of His resurrection. In that remarkable passage of I Cor. xv., in which he defends the gospel of Easter Day, he says that if the immortality of man be untrue, there would follow five impossible consequences. The first and foremost of these is the striking statement, ‘If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen.’ In other words, what he says is this: ‘If the soul be not immortal, there will follow the impossible consequence that Christ is dead — that the life in whom our aspiration reposes has become a thing, a clod of the valley. Deny immortality, and you commit the mental contradiction of denying the eternity of Jesus. Arc you able to associate Jesus with death! Is it not to you a contradiction in terms! Is not the very statement “Christ is dead” the putting together of two incongruous things — the union of perfect life and blank nothingness! When one says “Christ is dead,” you instinctively cry, “Impossible! if He be dead, then death cannot mean what / call dying.” ’

Paul, then, does not regard the resurrection of Jesus in the light of a personal reward miraculously enhancing His glory. He looks upon it as the inevitable result of a glory already existing. It was not an immortality conferred’, it was an immortality emerging. He says elsewhere in so many words that the immortal life of Jesus was the life He bore about in His dying body. He was not immortal because He rose; He rose because He was immortal. The Resurrection was not a root but a flower. The root lay in the Christ of Calvary — the Christ who could suffer and still be strong. The secret of His immortality was not the rolling away of the sepulchral stone; it was the holiness that sustained the wilderness and the cross. Easter was not a miraculous intervention on behalf of Jesus; the miracle would have been His continuing under the power of death. Had there been no resurrection, Christ would have been dead — there would have been a violation of spiritual law. The rolling away of the stone prevented a miracle; it restored the order of nature; it re-established the harmony between life and its environment.

One of the dearest disciples and closest companions of Paul has given direct expression to the idea that the Resurrection was no miracle. I allude to the earliest of ecclesiastical historians — the writer of the Acts. Speaking of the rising of Jesus, he uses the remarkable words: ‘Having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be holden of it.’ What he really means to say is that to accomplish the rising of the Son of Man no new force had to be added to those already existing. It was not required that Jesus should be made immortal. Jesus was already immortal. Even at His hour of death there was an incongruity between Him and death. His death was a miracle; it was quite impossible that it should be a perpetuated miracle. Something must intervene to restore the broken balance of nature. Jesus had in Him the root of immortality — something which made it inconceivable that His flesh should see corruption. That thing was holiness. His purity of heart demanded that He should see Godp and not corruption. The secret of His immortality was in Himself, not in His resurrection. He loosed the pains of death because He was Himself stronger than death. That strength is our hope of glory. Easter is merely a manifestation of that strength — an effect of it, a result of it. Christ is, in the deepest sense, the cause of His own rising; in Christ, and not in His rising, lies our vision of immortality.

According, then, to the earliest view of the subject, the value of Easter Morning does not lie in wreathing Jesus with the crown of immortality. It does not so wreath Him; He was wreathed with that crown long before. I may remark in passing that my individual impression has always coincided with this early view. Believing, as I do, in the manifestation of Jesus after death, I believe it on other grounds than the revealing of His immortality. To me His immortality needs no such revelation. As I stand in the great gallery and read the Face of Jesus, as I mark the expressions of that Face through all the scenes from Galilee to Calvary, I feel that He is already immortal. I feel, so far as my sense of His immortality is concerned, that I need no testimony from the open grave. It would not disconcert me, on this point, if a new and earlier Bible were found which closed its record at the Cross of Calvary. I should still feel that in this Portrait of the Son of Man I had the highest possible evidence of the existence of a soul invulnerable by death. I am impressed that here is a Life which is going to His Father, which is bound for heaven, which has already obtained a key to open the golden gate. I feel that this soul, at least, is the accepted of the Lord — that, whatever be the state of others, this Man, at all events, has passed the flaming sword of the Cherubim and planted His feet in the Paradise of God.

I agree, then, with Paul and with the early Church generally, that the opening of the grave was no addition to the majesty of Jesus. The value of the open sepulchre to Jesus does not lie in any increase of His personal glory. Where, then, does it lie; what is the meaning of Easter Morning? Let us stand again in the gallery beside the man in front of the Picture; let us once more ask Paul. He has had his eye on both the night and the morning aspect of the Portrait. He has studied it amid the shadows; he has studied it in the roseate hours. He has brought to the study a combination of faculties unequalled among his contemporaries. He has been on both sides of the Christian controversy; he has been on many sides of Christian experience. He has been a man of large nature. He has been a Roman to the Romans, a Greek to the Corinthians, a Celt to the Galatians. His opinion will be worth having, and it will bet an impartial opinion; let us ask Paul.

And, indeed, when we get the answer we are struck with its impartiality. Paul had never seen the earthly Jesus; he had been disparaged because he had never seen Him. He had every temptation to undervalue the expiating work of Galilee and Jerusalem, every temptation to exalt a new and mystical Christ on the Resurrection Heights of Olivet. Does he yield to that temptation? On the contrary, he says that the glory of Easter Morning is simply that it endorsed that expiating work which with his outward eyes he had never seen. He describes the value of Christ’s resurrection in the memorable words, ‘He was raised for our justification.’

What does he mean by that? What do you mean by using a similar expression in common life? When do you say, ‘You see I have been justified in what I did ‘? It is when something has happened which proves you to have been right. Now, that is precisely what Paul means. He says: ‘You have taken this man for your Messiah — your sin-bearer. You have accepted him as the Mediator between you and your

VOL. II. Y

Father. There were many things that seemed to mock your choice. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He seemed to tread a path of silence, a path of obscurity, a path the reverse of that prescribed for your national Messiah. But here at last there has come the Father’s audible “Amen “! Here at last you are proved to have been right! Your choice has been justified. There has come a flash from the sky, a voice from the silence. The curtain of death has been rent into fragments, and you have been allowed to see what is already known in heaven — that this finished Life is accepted as the Expiation for human sin.’

With Paul, then, I regard Easter Morning as the Father’s audible ‘Amen ’ to the work of Jesus. It was the only audible * Amen ’ which had yet been uttered. Amid all the wonders of the Galilean and Jerusalem ministries there had been one desideratum; there had been no voice from the Father to the world. There had been voices to Jesus — intimations that with

His personal life the Father was well pleased; but there had been no voice addressed to the ear of the world. Gethsemane’s message had, indeed, been one of good tidings for man; but it had been spoken in the ear of Jesus alone, and life had been too short to enable Him to reveal it. What more fitting than that it should be revealed after life had closed! Easter Morning sent a sunbeam of heaven over every inch of that gallery which held the Portrait of Jesus. To all the admirers of that Portrait it breathed a voice of welcome, admitting them as students of the Great Academy. That is the meaning, that is the glory, of Easter Morning. It is the one voice that says to the world, ‘Through this Beloved Son the Father is pleased with you, Why is it that we centre in the resurrection of Christ rather than in the resurrection of Lazarusl The latter was equally an exhibition of power, and it could have been corroborated by a larger multitude; why does Christ ’s rising bear the glory? It is because the resurrection of Christ is what the resurrection of Lazarus does not profess to be — a message of reconciliation. It is because what we seek from any Easter Morning is not a mere declaration that we are immortal, but a declaration that we are immortal children of God. We want to know, not merely that we are freed from death, but that we are accepted ’ in the Beloved.’ Lazarus perpetuated in his grave-clothes would, after all, be a sorry gain. The bells of Bethany may ring the message, ‘Live for ever! ’ but the bells of Easter Morning ring a message nobler still, ‘All hail! ’

TOEHOLD us in Christ, O Father; accept -L-* us in Thy Beloved! See in Him the finished picture of ourselves! Thou hast been working as the artist works — striving to perfect each portrait of each human soul. In all the gallery there is only one that has responded to Thy touch — only one that is altogether lovely. But that One has shown the possibility for all. Behold us in Him! See in Him what we might be! When our humanity reveals its blemishes, when Thou art tempted to turn Thine eyes from us in artistic despair, let this one Face shine before Thee! Let His beauty be Thy hope for me Let His purity be Thy dream of me! Let His sacrifice be Thy prophecy of me! Behold in Him the possibilities of Thy Spirit in Man! He is the first rose of our summer, and as yet He is all alone. But when Thou gazest on Him Thou seest in Thy heart the roses which are not yet in Thy garden. Keep my roses in Thy heart, O Lord; let them bloom already there Ere ever they are rooted and grounded in the soil, ere ever they have opened their petals to the day, ere ever they are warmed by the sunshine or watered by the rain, look upon my roses as risen with Jesus! Create within Thy thought each plant before it grows; and let the light which nourishes Thine ideal garden be the beauty of the Son of Man!