If For the Apostles, the resurrection of Jesus meant that He who had claimed to be the destined Son of Man had been ap- proved, justified, and glorified by the Father, according to the rule by which resurrection is the established and almost natural consequence and proof of justice. What they had doubted was His claim to be the Christ ; not the possibility of His resurrection. When He rose, their trust in Him, in their own redemption with and through Him, in His whole Gospel of the coming Kingdom and His own place in it, was confirmed and verified, not by an exceptional but by a regular occurrence. Eesurrection is the fruit of righteousness, and a tree is known by its fruit.2
8. What was miraculous about Jesus' resurrection was not that God raised Him from the dead, but that He was raised before the last great day, and that He should be seen by men, and recognized in His transitional or intermediate state between earth and heaven. The visibility on earth of the risen Lord, before He ascended to His Father and ours, was exceptional, out of the common course, or miraculous.
Tf If you should see a tree break into blossom in the month of June, and the next morning find the fruit already ripe upon the bough, you would say, That is extraordinary ! It is not indeed contrary to the nature of the tree that fruit should ripen on the bough, yet contrary to all our experience of growth that
1 R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, 159.
2 G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 140.
464 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
the fruit should ripen in a summer's day. That fruit would be a miracle upon that tree ; yet not in itself contrary to the nature of the tree, but only to its ordinary conditions of fructification. The fruit itself would be perfectly natural, only the method of its growth would be extraordinary. And it would not be impossible to conceive an enhancement, or quickening, of nature's forces which might cause a plant to break into fruitfulness contrary to our experience of its usual times and seasons. Some- what so, in the view we are now trying to win, is Jesus' resurrection a first-fruit of the tree of life ; — not in itself contrary to the law of life, but in its manner and time out of the common order. In the miracle of His resurrection we have only to think of God's quickening, or anticipating, by His power the course of nature, not as violating any real principle of it.1
The yearly miracle of spring,
Of budding tree and blooming flower,
Which Nature's feathered laureates sing In my cold ear from hour to hour,
Spreads all its wonders round my feet;
And every wakeful sense is fed On thoughts that o'er and o'er repeat,
" The Resurrection of the Dead ! "
If these half vital things have force
To break the spell which winter weaves,
To wake, and clothe the wrinkled corse In the full life of shining leaves ; .
i Shall I sit down in vague despair,
And marvel if the nobler soul We laid in earth shall ever dare To wake to life, and backward roll
. The sealing stone, and striding out,
\ Claim its eternity, and head
Creation once again, and shout, " The Resurrection of the Dead " ? 2
II.
The Power of the Eesurrection.
1. Have we yet entered into the grandeur and depth of St. Paul's teaching about the Eesurrection ? What is his teaching ?
1 Newman Smyth. * George Henry Boker.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 465
(1) St. Paul insists that Jesus Christ did actually rise from the dead and appeared to him, to Cephas, to the Twelve, to five hundred brethren, to all the Apostles, to James ; and he infers that the appearance was of one and the same character throughout. It was no vision — in the popular sense of that word — still less an hallucination that they experienced, but a direct impression made by a living and active Person.
(2) He asserts consistently that no substantial difference exists between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that of His followers. His was the pattern of theirs, and they can but look for a risen life such as His was. He was the first-fruits, the first-born among many brethren. Where He is, there shall also His servant be.
(3) Hence St. Paul had but a single answer to the double question : " With what body did Christ rise ? " and " With what body do Christians come from death ? " He tells a parable, the meaning of which cannot be evaded. We sow seed in the ground. It contains in itself the principle of life ; it casts off its first body and takes another. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The earthly body is laid in the grave of life. It, too, contains an unseen principle of life. That life, too, casts off the old and natural body, and takes another, a glorified and spiritual body. The body which is spiritual is that which is suited to the spirit world, as the natural body was fitted for a material world. The spiritual is not the natural sublimated, however, but a new creation. Flesh and blood cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The natural body, with all the atoms composing it, belongs to the present natural order. A spiritual environment demands a spiritual body. And spirit is not atomic — or at any rate, St. Paul assumes that it is not.