In deserts of the Holy Land I strayed,
Where Christ once lived, but seems to live no more,
On Lebanon my lonely home I made,
I heard the wind among the cedars roar,
» T. T. Mirnger, Th^ Freedom of Faith, 285.
ST. JOHN XI. 25, 26 473
And saw, far off, the Great Sea's solemn shore: " But 'tis a dreary wilderness," I said, Now the prophetic spirit hence has fled: Then, from a convent in the vale, I heard, Slow-chanted forth, the everlasting Word, Saving " I am he that liveth, and was dead. And lo ! I am alive for evermore." Then forth upon my pilgrimage I fare, Eesolved to find and praise Him everywhere.^
(2) In essence. — And so we come to the second chief thought suggested by the words : " I am." The resurrection and the life are not simply through Christ but in Christ. " I am," He said — not I promise, or I bring, or I accomplish — **I am the resurrec- tion, and the life." And when we fix our attention upon the words from this point of view, we see at once that they include deeper mysteries than we can at present fathom, that they open out glimpses of some more sublime form of being than we can at present apprehend, that they gather up in one final utterance to the world what had been said before darkly and partially of the union of the believer with his Lord and of the consequences which proceed from it. But though we can perhaps do no more, it is well that we should at least devoutly recognize that we do stand here in the face of a great mystery, which if indistinct from excess of glory, yet even now ennobles, consecrates, transfigures life; which does even now help us to feel where is the answer to difficulties which our own age has first been called to meet ; which gives a vital reality to much of the language of Holy Scripture that we are tempted to treat as purely metaphorical
•f Whenever the Lord says, " I am," He speaks as ideal Man, as the Life, holding the power of Self-manitestatiom What we see in Him is potentially in us, or we could not see it in Him, We may say we are what He is, because He is the representative of the true Man in every man. By His Incarnation this was brought into our consciousness. All are in Him by virtue of their Being, but He makes us aware of what we are. He who comes iuto this external relationship with us is He who is also the substance of our Being. He is the expression of the hidden Being of all, and the Promise also that each shall rise into the full consciousness of their Being, and be able to say, as did Jesus when on earth : " I and the Father are One Thino-." 2
o 1 J. Gostick. « E. W. Corbet, L^Ucrs/rom a Ifystie of the Present Day, IIL
474 THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
2. " I am the resurrection" — Christ is the Eesurrection inasmuch as He rose again from the dead, and, further, because He has the power to raise us up also.
(1) Christ Himself died and rose again. He alone is the true pattern of the resurrection, "the Firstborn," as St. Paul and St. John style Him, " out of the dead." In this highest sense He not only effects but He is the Eesurrection. He was this imvardly, in His own spirit and consciousness. Jesus described Himself, while on earth in mortal flesh, as " the Son of man which is in heaven." His eye pierced the veils of sense. The Father was in Him and He in the Father. But outwardly, as well as inwardly, Christ is the pattern of our risen life. Dying a little while after He uttered these words, Jesus Christ appeared to His disciples an embodied resurrection, as if made man over again and more worthily. Firstborn of the " sons of the resurrection." He was the same, yet mysteriously and loftily transformed.
^ We all know the effects of the Eenaissance upon the modern world. Eenaissance is re-birth, regeneration, resurrection if you like. The intellectual forces of the Middle Ages had spent themselves ; the greater part of Europe was lying in a sleep which might almost be described as death. But when Constantinople was captured by the Turks, many Greek scholars who had been working there had to flee to the shores of Italy, bringing with them Homer and Sophocles, Aristotle and Plato, the forgotten science and art and scholarship of the ancient world. And almost at the same time a new world of unexplored territory was revealed by explorers like Cabot and Columbus. And the result was the awakening of Europe from its death-Like sleep, and the stirring of a new life that is not exhausted yet. These men, exiled scholars and brave explorers, were the Eenaissance; they were the resurrection and the life of European learning, because it was through them and their labours that the quickening came. Now, what these men did intellectually for Europe at one period, Christ came to do morally and spiritually for the world for all time.^
(2) But Christ not only died and rose again; He has the power, in the fullest sense of the word, to make us do likewise. " Though he die," He says, " yet shall he live."