» R. D. B. Rawnsley.
404 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE
II.
A Day of Rejoicing.
1. The joy of Easter is the joy of a great certainty. The resurrection of our Saviour is the fact which makes an intelligent Christian certain of the truth of his creed. The Apostles entered on their work with one conviction, prominent beyond all others. It was that the truth of Christianity, and its claim upon the minds and hearts of men, depended mainly upon the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead.^ Within a few weeks of the occurrence, and amidst 'a population passionately interested in denying the truth of what they said, they took every opportunity of virtually saying, " Christianity is true ; it is true because Christ has risen from death." They could not have ventured to do tliis unless they had been sure of the fact upon which they were so ready to risk everything, even life itself ; sure, with that sort of certainty which comes from actual experience.
^ To my mind, the spiritual miracle of the Crucifixion was an infinitely greater miracle than the physical miracle of the Eesurrection — a much more impressive evidence of the actual mingling of the Divine with the human. It is strange that a world which can accept heartily the one should find it so difficult, and in some cases so impossible, to accept the other. This implies, I think, that what it does accept it accepts without any true insight into the wonder and majesty of the personal manifestation the reality of which it professes to recognize. Certainly ours is a superstitious age, though superstitious rather in the excess of its respect for the physical energies of the universe, than in the excess of its respect for the spiritual.^
2. It is always very difficult to realize any great joy or great sorrow. We cannot realize it by wishing to do so. What brings joys and sorrows of this world home to us is their circumstances and accompaniments. When a friend dies, we cannot at first believe him taken from us; we cannot believe ourselves to be in any new place when we are just come to it. When we are told a thing, we assent to it, we do not doubt it, but we do not feel it to be true, we do not understand it as a fact which must take up a position
'■ R. H. Mutton, Aspects of Bcligiom and Hcientific Thought, 168.
PSALM cxviii. 24 405
or station in our thoughts, and must be acted from and acted towards, must be dealt with as existing : that is, we do not reahze it. It cannot be denied that we have much to do, very much, before we rise to the understanding of our new nature and its privileges, and learn to rejoice and be glad in the day which the Lord hath made; "the eyes of your understanding being enlightened that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places."
/,^ Unbelief once wrote at the entrance of a cemetery the word " Fuerunt," " They have been." Faith always writes over the gate of a churchyard, " I am the Eesurrection and the Life." ToJ unbelief the dead are but memories ; memories of "beings who have ceased to be. To faith the dead are living, working, praying friends, whom nothing but the dulness of sense hides from sight.^
3. The joy of Easter is the joy of a great reaction : a reaction from anxiety and sorrow. So it was at the time of Christ's resurrection. The Apostles had been crushed by the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. They had trusted that it was "he which should have redeemed Israel." Their disappointment, their despondency, their anguish were exactly proportioned to their earlier hopes. When He was in His grave, all seemed over ; and when He appeared, first to one, and then to another, on the day of His resurrection, they could not keep their feelings of welcome and delight — traversed though these were by a sense of wondering awe — within anything lil^e bounds. It was a change from dark- ness to light, from fear to hope, from death to endless life, for the world at large. Those who first felt it, and rejoiced, are long since gathered to their rest ; but others came after them, to whom it was just as really a cause of joy as to the women who were early at the tomb ; and to us at this present time, separated by nineteen hundred years from the Apostles and followers of the risen Son of God, His rising again is quite as much a matter to encourage us to triumphant faith, to comfort us in trouble and in death, as it was to them.
^ H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Faul's, 178
4o6 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE
^ Finding that one of his children had been greatly shocked and overcome by the first sight of death, he tenderly endeavoured to remove the feeling which had been awakened, and opening a Bible, pointed to the words, " Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." Nothing, he said, to his mind, afforded us such comfort when shrinking from the outward accompaniments of death, — the grave, the grave- clothes, the loneliness, — as the thought that all these had been around our Lord Himself, round Him who died, and is now alive for evermore.^