PHILIPPIANS III. 10, II 351
If yet below the blossom grow,
Then earth is holy yet: But if it bloom forgotten, woe
To those who dare forget !
No flower so healing and so sweet
Expands beneath the skies; Unknown in Eden, there unmeet;
Its name ? Self-sacrifice ! The very name we scarce can frame
And yet that flower's dark root The monsters of the wild might tame
And heaven is in its fruit.
Alas ! what murmur spreads around ?
The news thereof hath been : But now no more the man is found
Whose eyes that flower have seen: Then nobles all ! leave court and hall,
And search the wide world o'er: For whoso finds this Sancgreall,
Stands crowned for evermore.^
IV.
Attaining to the Eesukrection.
1. When he says, "If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead," St. Paul does not express doubt as to his actually attaining to it. What he expresses is wonder, and awe, and joy before the grandeur of such a prospect, and the feeling how alone such a joyful grandeur is to be reached, which is only through fellowship in the sufferings of Christ, and by being con- formed unto His death. Perhaps we should think of it in this way. Christ, in that He died, died unto sin. His death was for sin, unto sin. But He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. When He died to sin, His connexion with sin was over. And He rose by virtue of His own native life. He could not be holden of death. His dying was, one might say, a special thing ; it was unnatural. His rising was natural, it was a rebound ; it was the life in Him asserting itself.
^ Aubrey de Vere.
352 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
And 80 the believer, having died to sin, having in death put it away, rises in virtue of his new life. "The body, indeed, is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness," Being conformed to Christ in death, we attain unto the resurrec- tion of the dead. Sin is altogether put off, and the spirit of life asserts itself, and draws the body to itself.
/ 2, It is an identification in will and in life. If Christ has so identified Himself with us as to make His life strictly, and in all aspects of it, a true representation of human life ; if when I look on Christ I can say, " That is the ideal, the model of every true man's life," then it follows, undoubtedly, that whatever step Christ has taken, I shall be justified in feeling that that also belongs to my existence and is mine, as a follower of my Lord and Saviour. Or to put it in another light; if Christ, in His life here, has shown me the life I am to live — the life I shall live, as one of His disciples; and if then His resurrection is a necessary sequel to His life, my resurrection is, for the same reason, an equally neces- sary sequel to my life; the conclusion then assumes a moral certainty.
This is just how the Apostles all regarded it. They had so intense a feeling of the identity of life in Christ and in us — of the fact that Christ had been the true Man, living the true human life — of the fact that Christianity meant nothing less than entering into that life in every aspect and particular of it, that they would not have understood Christ's being anything that they might not ; that Christ having won and attained any good was a morally certain reason for their sharing the same. Moreover the resurrec- tion of Christ was to them the sequel, the moral necessity, of His life. To have lived Christ's life, and not to rise from death, v^ppeared to them an impossibility.
^ Conceive a man's dead body lying horizontally on the ground. Conceive that by some imparted power, the head of that body be- gins to move, to rise, to assume a perpendicular position, to raise itself on the earth, to mount, to ascend. It is clear that as the head does this, all the limbs, following its motions, necessarily do the same, in their proper order. They rise; they are upright; they mount ; they soar. Just so it is with the rising Saviour. His people are drawn by Him, with an attraction stronger than all the laws and affinities of the material world. They are held
PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 353
to Him by fibres and strong cords, faster than the ligaments of our physical frame. And so, if you only be " in Christ " you are risen : you cannot choose but rise. It is in your unity with Christ. It is part of your identity with the Head in which you live. It is " the power of his resurrection." ^
^ The same flood of sunshine which frees the Ehone from its glacier-prison opens the bloom in the cleft of the rock that smiles like a babe just refreshed with sleep. And the same tide of power which unlocked the sealed tomb where Jesus lay opens the pitiless heart of the persecutor and brings the vernal tenderness of the evangel into the quiet life of Lydia. We are planted in the like- ness of the resurrection, and the elemental correspondence which is to issue in glorified sonship must assert itself within us more and more.2