'To whom also He shewed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.'--ACTS i. 3.
The forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension have distinctly marked characteristics. They are unlike to the period before them in many respects, but completely similar in others; they have a preparatory character throughout; they all bear on the future work of the disciples, and hearten them for the time when they should be left alone.
The words of the text give us their leading features. They bring out--
1. Their evidential value, as confirming the fact of the Resurrection.
'He showed Himself alive after His passion by ... proofs.'
By sight, repeated, to individuals, to companies, to Mary in her solitary sadness, to Peter the penitent, to the two on the road to Emmaus. At all hours: in the evening when the doors were shut; in the morning; in grey twilight; in daytime on the road. At many places--in houses, out of doors.
The signs of true corporeity--the sight, the eating.
The signs of bodily identity,--'Reach hither thy hand.' 'He showed them His hands and His side.'
Was this the glorified body?
The affirmative answer is usually rested on the facts that He was not known by Mary or the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and that He came into the upper room when the doors were shut. But the force of these facts is broken by remembering that Mary saw nothing about Him unlike other men, but supposed Him to be the gardener--which puts the idea of a glorified body out of the question, and leaves us to suppose that she was full of weeping indifference to any one.
Then as to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Luke carefully tells us that the reason why they did not know Him was _in them_ and not in Him--that it was 'because their eyes were holden,' not because His body was changed.
And as to His coming when the doors were shut, why should not that be like the other miracles, when 'He conveyed Himself away, a multitude being in the place,' and when He walked on the waters?
There cannot then be anything decidedly built on these facts, and the considerations on the other side are very strong. Surely the whole drift of the narrative goes in the direction of representing Christ's 'glory' as beginning with His Ascension, and consequently the 'body of His glory' as being then assumed. Further, the argument of 1 Cor. xv. goes on the assumption that 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,' that is, that the material corporeity is incongruous with, and incapable of entrance into, the conditions of that future life, and, by parity of reasoning, that the spiritual body, which is to be conformed to the body of Christ's glory, is incongruous with, and incapable of entrance into, the conditions of this earthly life. As is the environment, so must be the 'body' that is at home in it.
Further, the facts of our Lord's eating and drinking after His Resurrection are not easily reconcilable with the contention that He was then invested with the glorified body.
We must, then, think of transfiguration, rather than of resurrection only, as the way by which He passed into the heavens. He 'slept' but woke, and, as He ascended, was 'changed.'
II. The renewal of the old bond by the tokens of His unchanged disposition.
Recall the many beautiful links with the past: the message to Peter; that to Mary; 'Tell My brethren,' 'He was known in breaking of bread,' 'Peace be with you!' (repetition from John xvii.), the miraculous draught of fishes, and the meal and conversation afterwards, recalling the miracle at the beginning of the closer association of the four Apostles of the first rank with their Lord. The forty days revealed the old heart, the old tenderness. He remembers all the past. He sends a message to the penitent; He renews to the faithful the former gift of 'peace.'