3. The resurrection is a present experience. We are so apt to^ think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp. But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. " I have not already attained," says St. Paul, " but I press on." It is possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise -^ from the dead to-day and attain to the resurrection.
The process is now going on. The spiritual body is silently being formed in the depths of our present inner existence. The thoughts, word^, and deeds of the present are all mysteriously contributing to its future manifestatioh and development. That clothing upon, as the Apostle speaks of the completion of the future body, is now being prepared for ; it will be beheld and realized when, as the same Apostle says, we shall " all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ." That final investiture of all souls according to the deeds done in the body is indisputably reserved for that last great day when, not man only, but the whole waiting creation, will be sharers in the long- promised restitution. The completion will be then, but the process within each one of us is going on now. Each day, perhaps, adds some lineament ; each deed some real, though unperceived, impress ; each habit some trace and configuration. Often are we
1 James Vaughan, Sermons, ii. 7.
2 T. G. Selby, The Alienated Crown, 289. EPH.-COL. — 23
354 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
permitted to trace even in the mortal and the perishable the holy outlines of that spiritual body which will be the wedding garment of the soul when the Lord returns again to His own, and all things become known. Do we not sometimes even in this life see faces in which we seem to ourselves to behold the light, as it were, of another world ; brows on which the very peace of God seems gently to rest; eyes, with their indefinable far-off look, which seem to be beholding Him who is invisible ? And, as we see this, do we not sometimes feel a vague consciousness that we are looking on what will be hereafter, and are merely catching glimpses of the power of the Lord's resurrection revealing itself behind the veil of the mortal and the perishable ?
^ Our life is like the life of a tree, which is always full of immediate apparent failure, which is always dropping back after each rich summer to the same bareness that it had last winter, which keeps no leaves or fruit, and stands again and again stripped of every sign of life that it has put forth, and which yet has gathered, as we see when we watch it with a larger eye — has gathered all those apparent failures into the success of one long, continuous growth ; has not lost the strength of those old summers, but gathered them into its own enlarged girth and sturdier strength. What seemed to perish and die has really been only grown in, and makes the mature life of, the noble tree. And so it is with our hopes and plans and endeavours and resolutions and thoughts, which seem to fade and perish, but which, if we have the Christian vitality about us, have been really grown in and make the new life, which is not merely a thing of the future but a thing of the present.^
4. The full consummation is in the future. It is plain enough that if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in us there is no term to its operations until our mortal bodies also are quickened by His Spirit that dwelleth in us. The ethical and spiritual resurrection in the present life finds its completion in the bodily resurrection in the future. It cannot be that the transformation wrought in a human life shall be complete until it has flowed outwards into and permeated the whole of manhood, body, soul, and spirit. The three measures of meal have each to be influenced before " the whole is leavened." If we duly consider the elements necessary to a perfect realization of the Divine ideal ^ Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the FnncipcU Festivals, 277.
PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 355
of humanity, we shall discern that redemption must have a gospel to bring to the body as well as to the spirit. Whatever has been devastated by sin must be healed by Jesus, It is not necessary to suppose that the body which dies is the body which rises again ; rather the Apostle's far-reaching series of antitheses between that which is sown and that which is raised leads us to think that the natural body, which has passed through corruption, and the particles of which have been gathered into many different com- binations, does not become the spiritual body. The person who dies is the person who lives through death, and who assumes the body of the resurrection; and it is a person, not the elements which make up the personality, who is spoken of as risen from the dead. The vesture may be different, but the wearer is the same.