The Resurrection

A Symposium

We can never understand the utter desolation of Christ’s disciples during the days that lay betwixt Christ’s death and His resurrection. Our faith rests on centuries. We know that that grave was not even an interruption to the progress of His work, but was the straight road to His triumph and His glory. We know that it was the completion of the work of which the raising of the widow’s son and of Lazarus were but the beginnings. But these disciples did not know that. To them the inferior miracles by which He had redeemed others from the power of the grave, must have made His own captivity to it all the more stunning; and the thought which such miracles ending so must have left upon them, must have been something like this: “He saved others; Himself He cannot save.” And therefore we can never think ourselves fully back to that burst of strange, sudden thankfulness with which these weeping Marys found those two calm angels sitting like the cherubim over the mercy-seat, but overshadowing a better propitiation, and heard the words of my text: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.”

But yet, although the words before us, in the full depth and preciousness of their meaning, of course could only be once fulfilled, we may not only gather from them thoughts concerning that one death and resurrection, but we may likewise apply them, in a very permissible modification of meaning, to the present condition of all who have departed in His faith and fear; since for us, too, it is true that whenever we go to an open grave, sorrowing for those that we love, or oppressed with the burden of mortality in any shape, if our eyes are anointed, we can see there sitting the quiet angel forms; and if our ears be purged from the noise of earth, we can hear them saying to us, in regard to all that have gone away: “Why seek ye the living in these graves? They are not here; they are risen, as He said.” The thoughts are very old, brethren. God be thanked they are old! Perhaps to some they may come now with new power, because they come with new application to your own present condition. Perhaps to some they may sound very weak, and “words weaker than your grief will make grief more;” but such as they are, let us look at them for a moment or two together.