Did not Christ then really die, and do we not all die, even if we believe in Him ? In one sense Christ did die. He suffered 1 J. M. E. Ross, The Self-Portraiture of Jesus^ 183.
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this housing of the soul to be torn away, the tabernacle to be taken down, but He will not call it death. It does not touch the life ; that flows on, an unbroken current, and rises into greater fulness. And so Christ says that those who believe in Him, and die in this sense, do not really die ; though dead, they live.
Physical death is not the termination of human life. The grim fact touches only the surface life, and has nothing to do with the essential, personal being. He that believes on Jesus, and he only, truly lives, and his union with Jesus secures his possession of that eternal life, which victoriously persists through the apparent, superficial change which men call death. Nothing dies but the death which surrounds the faithful soul. For it to die is to live more fully, more triumphantly, more blessedly. So though the act of physical death remains, its whole character is changed.
^ The grave of Albrecht Dilrer, the great painter, is in the cemetery of his native city, Nuremberg. On his tombstone they have put the word Emigravit — he has emigrated.
I do hear From the revolving year A voice which cries: "All dies;
Lo, how all dies! 0 seer, And all things too arise: All dies, and all is born; But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the Perfect Morn." ^
3. I am the life. — There is more in our Lord's words than a mere guarantee to His people of a life of some sort beyond the grave. To Christ and His Apostles, life is not a matter of mere duration ; in their rich and inspiring conception the thought of quality is far more prominent than the thought of duration. God had created mankind for life — the life that is life indeed. But man had, in a most real sense, chosen death instead of life, and had made of his world a sepulchre. And now into this world of death there came this Saviour sent down from God, trampling death in all its forms under foot from the beginning of His victorious career.
It marked a new epoch in the faith in immortality when the 1 Francis Thompson, "The Night of Forebeing."
476 THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
Son of Man stood in the midst of men and said : " I am the resurrection, and the life ; he that belie veth on me, though he die, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die." And did He not prove the mighty utterance? Whatever He touched received life. He touched dead eyes, and they saw. He touched dead ears, and they heard. He touched the fatal disease, and life sprang back into the distempered veins. He touched the dead body on the bier, and it awakened from the sleep of death. He went into the grave Himself, and with resurrection power left it empty on the third day.
ii. Whosoever liveth and believeth. Christ, being the life, promises that " whosoever liveth . . . shall never die."
1. Whosoever liveth. — We must be alive in order to know what deathlessness is. We must begin to live as a soul, and not as an animal, if we want to be rid of the fear of death and the doubt of immortality. The way out of the doubts and fears which oppress us is not altogether by the gate of knowledge or of logic, but by the avenues of the spirit. To those who already share the Divine life the terrors of death are abolished. Its inevitable wrench to the spirit is mostly overcome, and its change no more than from life to life. If we are acquainted with our soul, if we have learned to live already with the immortal part of us, and to take pleasure in the things that minister to the life of that part of us, we shall not deem it such a lonesome, blank, and unbearable thing to go away with our own self, our real self, even out of this body into some other. But we must be something more than "dead in trespasses and sins," something more than choked with "the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches," before this thought can be realized in us. He whose real life consists not " in the abundance of the things which he possesseth " ; he whose spirit is sustained and fed by streams of love; he who lives in faith on all the Divine things; he who works out his faith in pure conduct, exalted aims, unselfish purposes, affectionate service to others, — that man does not die in death. Death only sets free for larger activity the soul which has already begun its undying developments.
T[ To live is not to be gay or idle or restless. Frivolity,
ST. JOHN XI. 25, 26 477
inacti^aty, and aimlessness seem equally remote from the true idea of living I should say that we live only so far as we cultivate all our faculties, and improve all our advantages for God's glory. The means of living will then be our own en- dowments, whether of talent or influence ; the aim of living, the good of men ; the motive of living, the love of God. I do not say that these ideas are to enter prominently into every detail of life, any more than that in every movement we must be distinctly conscious of the vital principle physically ; but just as this must necessarily exist before we can take one step, so the whole groundwork of our inner life must be these feelings to which I have alluded.^