THE disciples had fled at Jesus’ arrest. They were utterly dispersed. Simon had persisted for a while ; but he also had fled. The only followers who had been present at the Crucifixion had been women; and they had stood far away. They were Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James the younger and Joses, and Salome; they had followed Jesus in Galilee, and from Galilee to Jerusalem : there were other women also.
Jesus had died at three o’clock. The two Marys waited and watched, not daring to approach. At about an hour before sunset, when the Sabbath and the Sabbath obligations would begin, they saw a man whom they did not know come to the cross, bearing a linen sheet With the help of the centurion and the soldiers he took down the body of Jesus, wrapped it hurriedly in the linen sheet he had brought, and carried it away to a rock tomb [ p. 366 ] near by. From afar they saw him enter the hole in the rock, then emerge without his burden. Then he rolled a heavy stone against the door, and hastened away. The two women did not dare to draw near, for the soldiers were still standing guard by the crucified thieves. They tried to mark the grave, and themselves hurried away. Their dead Master might do as he would with the Sabbath; but not they.
The unknown man whom they had seen thus hastily burying Jesus was one Joseph of Arimathea. He was a member of the Sanhedrin and a man of substance; and he was a pious Jew. The legend that he was a secret disciple of Jesus rests upon no stronger foundation than an attempt by the later evangelists to elaborate the bare story of Mark “He expected the Kingdom of God,” says Mark, So did many Jews, but not as Jesus had expected it, nor now through Jesus’ sacrifice. Had Joseph indeed been the secret disciple of Jesus he would not have buried his master without anointing him. The author of the fourth Gospel knew this and invented the story of Joseph and Nicodemus bringing with them a hundredweight of myrrh and aloes, and “wrapping up the body of [ p. 367 ] Jesus in the spices and in bandages according to the Jewish custom of burial.”
Had Joseph indeed done that, the two Marys, who were the witnesses of his action, would not have risen early on Sunday to buy spices and embalm Jesus. What they bravely resolved to do would have been done already. Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus hurriedly and roughly, as the story of Mark clearly shows. The other accounts are palpably attempts to construct a more edifying narrative. Joseph seems to have behaved simply as a pious member of the Sanhedrin, who was anxious to obey the Law of Deuteronomy :
“If a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him that day.”
Nor is it possible to say whether, in asking Pilate for Jesus’ body and burying it, he was moved by pious scruples of his own or was acting on behalf of the Sanhedrin.
It was because they saw that Jesus had been thus rudely buried that the women resolved to buy spices at the streak of dawn on Sunday and do their tender offices. It was a brave resolve. Known followers [ p. 368 ] of the crucified prophet would have had short shrift The Galilean disciples had all fled before the storm. Probably not one of them remained in angry Jerusalem.
On the morning of the Sunday, then, they went fearfully out to the place where they had marked the rock tomb. And as they went they wondered how they would be able to move the stone. They had not dared to ask anyone to help them, for they were engaged on a dangerous and unlawful errand. When they reached the tomb they were astonished and alarmed to see that the stone was rolled away and the door open. They crept inside. Their hearts dropped a beat: before them stood a young man. They had mistaken the tomb and their errand had been discovered.
“Do not be afraid,” he called, as they turned and fled. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here: that is the place where he was laid. . . .”
But they stayed to hear no more. They told no one of their adventure. There was no one for them to tell. The Galilean disciples had fled from Jerusalem, back to their native land.
The women also now returned forlorn to Galilee, [ p. 369 ] disappointed of their hope of doing the last piety to their Master. There the disciples, ashamed of their cowardice, foregathered again. Whether the women told Simon first of their adventure at the tomb, or whether Simon first had his experience of Jesus’ continued existence, it is impossible to say. Nor can we tell how long it was before Simon had his experience. But when he was convinced that his Master still lived and that he had seen him, the women remembered what they had done at the tomb and what the young man had told them there : but they remembered it with a difference. The young man had told that Jesus was risen ; nay more, he had told them expressly to tell the disciples—Simon particularly—that Jesus would go before them into Galilee; there would they see him._ It was not hard to prophesy so much, now that Simon had seen him.
How long was it before the disciples took heart and returned to Jerusalem, where, the example of Jesus had taught them, the victory of the new faith must be won? We do not know, A whole pregnant chapter of the history of the early Church had to be sacrificed to cover the traces of the disciples’ own defection and despair. It was deemed [ p. 370 ] necessary to represent that the disciples had expected the death of Jesus, and his resurrection on the third day, "according to the Scriptures, 77 just as it was deemed necessary that Jesus should have foretold these things; it was therefore necessary to conceal all traces of that despairing flight to Galilee. In Luke’s Gospel and his Acts we can see the process of expurgation visibly at work. The disciples according to the new orthodoxy, never left Jerusalem. Doctrine was transmuting history.
But the only impregnable doctrine is history. To history belongs the reality of Simon’s experience of the continued existence of Jesus. It was real and it was decisive ; as Paul’s also was real and decisive. Paul’s is the earliest evidence we have for the Resurrection; and Paul’s language in the fifteenth chapter of Corinthians shows that he considered Peter’s vision to have been of precisely the same kind as his own, and further that he himself did not believe in a resurrection of the physical body (“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God”), but in a resurrection into a spiritual body. And, since Paul received his doctrine [ p. 371 ] from Peter, we need not doubt that Paul’s conviction was Peter’s own.
The conviction of the continued life of Jesus in a “spiritual body,” reached first by Simon Peter in Galilee, is the reality behind the conflicting and mutually destructive stories of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Of the reality of this conviction, of the reality of the experience that created this conviction, we cannot doubt. The great Christian Church was built not on a lie, but on a truth. Nor can we doubt that this experience of Peter, like the later experience of Paul, was the experience of an objective presence. Peter was not the victim of an hallucination, nor Paul the dupe of an illusion. That our intellects cannot conceive the nature of an objective presence which is not physical, or that a “spiritual body” remains for our minds a contradiction in terms, is only evidence that our minds are still inadequate to reality.
The spiritual body of Jesus exists and is immortal. Some make their life-giving contact with it through the Eucharist; for others that contact is impossible. But they, through the effort of making the earthly life of Jesus real to themselves, find their souls possessed by love and veneration for the [ p. 372 ] Prince of men. A fount of living water is unsealed in them.
And it may be that this, and this alone, is the great Christian experience, ultimate and eternal, though our ways to it must be our own. Of those ways, we may say this, that if they shall truly bring us to the Jesus who is eternal, they must be ways jyhich do not compel us to make sacrifice of aught we truly believe, and know, and are. "* Of one thing we may be certain : that Jesus would rather be denied by a true man than professed by a liar. He would not have us less than men ; and we shall lose nothing by remaining men, of our own century and our own country. At the last we shall greatly gain. We shall look like men, on the man Jesus. He will stand our scrutiny. Keep we our heads as high as we can, they shall be bowed at the last. And, without abating one jot of what we truly believe and know and are, we shall, with absolute sincerity, make the words of the great doctor of the English Church our own:
“ ‘Look upon him, till he look back upon us again.’ For so he will.
“And if we ask, how shall we know when Christ doth thus respect us? Then truly, when fixing both [ p. 373 ] the eyes of our meditation ‘upon him that was pierced’—as it were with one eye upon the grief, the other upon the love wherewith he was pierced, we find by both, or one of these, some motion of grace arise in our hearts, the consideration of his grief piercing our hearts with sorrow, the consideration of his love piercing our hearts with mutual love again.
“These have been felt at this looking on, and these will be felt. It may be, at the first, imperfectly, but after with deeper impression ; and that of some, with such as nemo scit, ‘none knoweth,’ but him that hath felt them.”
THE END