Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

by Henry Latham

Chapter XIII. The Lessons Of The Resurrection.

When contemplating the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ, we have little attention to spare for the subordinate personages in the scene. The effects of these manifestations, in working changes in the hearts and minds of the witnesses, are put out of sight by the brilliancy and intrinsic grandeur of the manifestations themselves, and by the momentous character of their direct consequences, universally affecting mankind. But the transformation in temper, in views, and in habits of mind which converted the Apostles of the Gospels into the Apostles of the Acts—a transformation to me otherwise inexplicable—was consummated and clenched by the hours of hard trial and bitter anguish of that Sabbath day, when there was nothing to be done but to mourn and to wonder; as well as by the burst of gladness when the Risen Lord appeared to the eleven. Throughout all the Post-Resurrection [pg 438] interval, during which the Apostles felt that He was close by and might at any time appear—indeed that any stranger accosting them might turn out to be He—the changes which had been wrought were taking lasting hold.

The data for the history of that Passover season of a.d. 30 must have been furnished by the Apostles, yet we find in it scarcely any mention of themselves; all personal thought was driven from their minds; the narrators, like ourselves, had eyes for the Saviour alone.

From the hour of cockcrow on the Thursday night to the time when it “began to dawn toward the first day of the week” all that we hear of the Apostles, and that comes out incidentally, is that John stood at the foot of the Cross. There is not a word to explain their flight at Gethsemane, they do not tell us, that they stood in the crowd or followed to Golgotha; neither have we, what for my purpose would be invaluable, any word of how they passed that Sabbath day of enforced inaction, which—in accordance with our Lord's way of letting intervals of quiet alternate with times of stress and strain—followed on the violent perturbation and intense dismay of the Crucifixion.

The Apostles could not be perfected for the part that awaited them, unless they encountered some great desolation of soul. Acute suffering, which searches the innermost nature, works after the law which has become so trite to my readers, [pg 439] it gives to those who have. There are some who under its pangs learn that they possess a kind of strength of which they did not know, and find that when some, seemingly more robust, break down in trouble, resource and tenacity are still left in them. This kind of strength the Apostles possessed; they stood the test of being apparently forsaken and were the better for it. Each individual after the trial felt surer that he could rely on himself than he had been before, and each then knew for certain that he could rely on the rest.

They might, as soon as the Sabbath was over, have taken their northward journey, going every man to his own; and, as they did not feel safe where they were—for they had to close their doors for fear of the Jews—and must have been grievously bewildered, this is what some out of the eleven at any rate might have been expected to do. It is the steadfastness of the whole number that is so surprising.

The trial to which the Apostles were subjected, during those six and thirty hours, was excessively severe. They were left as sheep without a shepherd, with no rallying point, no organised rule; and not only were they in the deepest anguish, owing to their personal affection for their Master, but the lodestar of their lives, the hope of the Restoration of the Kingdom to Israel, seemed suddenly and totally withdrawn.

The Jewish notion of a Messiah, who would [pg 440] inaugurate a golden age of national glory and material enjoyment, was so engrained in the Israelite nature that only facts could drive it out. Our Lord never argues against it; if He beheld, in the course of coming events, a fact approaching, which would do more to dispel error than all the arguments in the world, this would explain His silence on these points. The awakening would not be without dangers. It is a perilous moment for a man, when the one dream, the one exalted hope, that has lifted him above selfish considerations is rudely dispelled; and God, whom he had thought to serve, seems to disregard him altogether.

Then self and the world say, “We told you so; now give yourself to us? Our votaries will be found to have taken the right road after all.” Of all the temptations that assailed the Apostles this was perhaps the direst; but their loyalty to their Master, born of nearly two years' daily fellowship, held fast. Even if He were gone they could be true to His memory still, and that was something left.

One lesson, which the Apostles could hardly help learning, would arise, in this way, out of the discomfiture of their hopes. They might ask themselves, on what this confident expectation of theirs, of a Messianic kingdom, rested by way of grounds. They would have to own that Christ had never spoken of it, but, indeed, had often given hints of what had really come to pass—hints which [pg 441] they had always quickly brushed aside. They had believed in this material Kingdom because everybody around them had done so. They had not formed any notion about it of their own selves; no movement of their own minds had gone towards forming the belief. They had imbibed it and that was all. Hence finding themselves deceived by trusting to a popular belief, there may have arisen in them a healthy mistrust of positiveness about the ways of God. Again, their disappointment might put them in a better direction for finding their way. “Some hope,” they might say, “assuredly Christ did hold out to us,” and the search after this hope might lead them to recollect that latterly they had heard little from Him of the Kingdom, and much of the future Life; He had told them that because He lived they should live also; and the conception of a Kingdom, not of this world, might arise in their minds, and take the place of that of the expected Supremacy of Israel, which was dissolving out of sight.

Another effect of their affliction was that it drew them closer together. When a family, is orphaned by a heavy blow, what they first feel may be helplessness, but soon follows the feeling that they must cling together and be true to one another, and each in his degree supply the help that is lost. Soon the elder brothers, if there is good in them, learn what duty is, and this new responsibility draws capacity out. Now the [pg 442] Apostles stood in the position of elder brethren to all the family of Christ's disciples.

It is a striking feature of the change worked in the Apostles, that, after the Resurrection, all thoughts of self disappeared. The Apostles, as the History shews us, had been originally no less prone to wrangle as to “which should be greatest” than the average of men. We find in the Gospel the self-regard that we might naturally expect: sometimes it is of a healthy sort, as when Peter says, “We have left all and followed thee;” and sometimes it is unhealthy, like that soreness on points of precedence, which we mark even just before the Last Supper; but in the Acts we find among the Apostles no trace of self-regard at all. The history in our hands will account for this change satisfactorily enough; for these men were called to a Work, so transcending all human interests, so absolute, that it would leave no room for any personal thought in their souls. They were to be fellow-workers with the living God. What could be the worth of the difference between this office or dignity in God's service and that, compared with being counted worthy to take a conscious part in God's service at all? Some powerful impression must have been employed to bring about such a moral change as this; and what could better account for such an impression, than to have witnessed Christ upon the Cross? How could they, the servants, cavil about social consideration or dignity, when their [pg 443] Master had spurned all dignity and cast away all that common men hold dear, and that too, when by speaking a word, all that earth could bestow might have been His. Lastly, the sense that Christ was present with them and knew their hearts, was made so real and effectual by the Post-Resurrection intercourse, that it afterwards dominated their lives. This feeling would still the disposition to rivalry, if any such lingered in their hearts; for, being convinced that their Master knew what went on in them, they would know that He grieved over anything that was wrong, as He had done when He was by their side; and they would shrink from causing Him pain.

The story of the Apostles is unique in History in another way. No one of them endeavoured to draw a following about himself, or to claim succession to the Master's place. Little differences of view and little disagreements as to the course to be followed now and then there were; if, indeed, our records did not speak of such we should suspect that something was kept back. We have cases enough of causes passed on to a company of successors from the dying leaders' hands, but in no instance, that I recollect, have these successors remained united as the Apostles did (p. [414]). Monarchs have sometimes left empires in trust to their generals, whose quarrels have finally torn them to bits. Philosophers have left their systems or their discoveries to their favourite pupils, who, taking [pg 444] hold of them by different ends, have set up new philosophies of their own. Kingly dynasties and political parties have bequeathed causes claiming to be sanctioned by Divine right, or to embody immutable principles, and the inheritors have so fallen out over points of policy, that the broad principle, broken up into branching channels, has lost its momentum and disappeared in the sands.

I pass on to the lessons which our History of the Resurrection conveys. The different narratives relate our Lord's appearances, with differing circumstances of persons and place. Herein I find that loophole for disbelief which may be discovered in every miraculous manifestation of our Lord. If the fact of our Lord's Resurrection had been so attested that no sane person could doubt of the fact; if He had appeared in public, and appalled Pilate on his judgment seat or Herod on his throne, then—strange as it may appear—by the very fact of the historical certainty being thus established, the moral significance of the Resurrection would be impaired, for the acceptance of it would be independent of that which I have so often said is essential to religious belief, the concurrence of the free human will.

Although, as to the occasions and circumstances of the appearances, we find in the different accounts rather more than their customary diversity; yet in the nature of the appearances the agreement is so singular, and the conception [pg 445] involved is so unexampled, that it is impossible for different writers to have lighted at the same time on the idea, and I can find no explanation for the phenomena, except by supposing that the picture was taken from life. The appearances themselves, as we should expect from their nature, leave on the mental retina an impression indelible and distinct; but the traditions about when and how they occurred, undergo variation as they pass from mouth to mouth.

The character of our Lord's appearances, in all the Gospels, is alike. Most commonly He is not recognised at first, and does not appear in His own form, when other than disciples are by; only to those, who had already mastered the words of eternal life, was it given to see Him Risen from the dead. He comes men know not how, when they are sitting with fastened doors He appears in the midst; He goes they know not where, and the disciples who beforetime were so full of curiosity, do not venture to ask whither He goes or where He abides. But, what bears most of all on my subject, is the mode in which our Lord assuages that dread of a disembodied spirit, which would have paralysed the Apostles' minds. This terror, reasonable or not, certainly existed, and Christ always deals with the fact He finds.

There were lessons still to be taught and for the right learning of them it was needful that the old confidence between Master and learners should [pg 446] still subsist. Could the disciples have listened to the Lord, as their old Master, receiving his direction to go back to Jerusalem and tarry there till they were “endued with power;”—could they have rested gladly on the assurance that He would appear and help them in any need that came, if they had regarded Him as a spectre belonging to another world?

In order to calm their instinctive terror of a spirit, and be again in some degree what He had been on the Lake shore of Galilee, it was necessary for our Lord to assure the Apostles that He had a body even as they. The deep doctrinal significance of this lies beyond the limited purpose of my book, but the point which is within my range—the effect on the Apostles themselves of the conviction of our Lord's existence in the body—is important and full of instruction. It was essential that confidence should be restored, and the course actually adopted did restore it in a wonderful way. Men thought that a spirit might be seen and heard but only a body could be felt. Our Lord therefore at once appeals to touch—He eats and drinks before them. He tells them that He has flesh and bones. He suffers them to “handle Him and see.” To this corporal presence as a crowning fact St John recurs, saying “That which we beheld and our hands handled;”[331] and St Peter says

“Him God raised up the third day, and gave him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.”[332]

Our Lord would not Himself establish a visible Church. I have amply set out, p. [236], the difficulties that would have ensued if He had so done; but it was essential that the Apostles should receive some indication—though only so much as was essential to the lines upon which they were to build; and this being a matter of human cognisance was to be given by Christ in His human guise. A phantom, or a voice from Heaven, would have seemed an agency of a different order from the intervention of the Son of Man.

Here I will stop for a moment, to consider these narratives of the Resurrection under a purely literary point of view. These accounts present us with the same general aspect of the risen Lord, and they remain true to the primary conception in unnoticeable points of detail such as no one would have introduced out of purposed imitation. Inasmuch as we cannot suppose that the same wondrous creation of fancy presented itself to different writers at the same time, we are driven to suppose, either that the accounts relate actual facts, as Christians generally believe; or else that they were imagined by one person who disseminated the story. But who this writer can have been [pg 448] is not only a mystery but a mystery embodying almost a miracle, for here we have a genius compared with whom—in point of dealing naturally with the supernatural—Shakespeare is thrown into the shade; and further this genius, we must suppose, never invented or wrote anything else in that particular line in which he so wondrously surpassed the rest of mankind. The Orientals delighted in tales. Did they suffer the greatest imaginative genius of the world to live and die unknown?

There was nothing in Literature to furnish a hint for the portraiture of the risen Lord; the idea of the Resurrection body must have been due to one man's imagination and have been presented with extraordinary literary skill at a time when imaginative narration was wholly unknown. The writers of the age in which the Gospels appeared could set down events and record colloquies, and depict living personalities with truth and force; but they were no more capable of conceiving a character, of making him act, and putting into his mouth words which should seem to be his own; or of imagining a new supernatural phenomenon, and keeping their account always true to itself; than they were of conceiving the vibrations of an elastic medium. That this phenomenon also, exactly met the requirements of a most singular condition of things adds greatly to the wonder, but in another way.

If the Christian records had been thrown aside and forgotten, while the world, passing on its way, reached a mental culture such as we now possess; and then, in some exploration, the Gospels had been brought to light: would they not have been regarded by the critics of that day as wholly anomalous, and as refusing to fit in with any theory of the growth and progress of the literary faculty in mankind? The surprise caused by the discovery would have been like that of excavators at Mycenae, if they had found a watch in the treasury of Agamemnon. This aspect of the matter belongs to the realm of critical literature rather than to mine, and I only note it for a hint. The literary aspect of the History of the Resurrection has yet to be written; it would be curious to see it treated from the point of view of one, who, shut out from a knowledge of the religious history of mankind, lighted on it as a mere literary treasure.

There is one point on which I cannot forbear to touch. Our Lord never mentions His persecutors, He never touches on the past. The apparition of a legend usually either reveals a burning secret, or embodies resentment for the past; frequently it personifies hatred or foretells destruction, and its fateful whispers make the blood of enemies run cold. But in all the utterances of the Risen Lord not a word is said of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, not a [pg 450] syllable is breathed of the treason of Judas, or of the persistent malice of the scribes. There is an ineffable grandeur—so unconscious that we may fail to mark it—in the utter oblivion that is passed on the foes who had beset the path of the Son of Man. He no more resents the ills that men had wrought Him on His way through life, than the traveller, who has reached his home, resents the insect plague of the desert or the tempests he has met with at sea. The past is lost to sight, and our Lord displays but one thought and one interest, and that is for the disciples and their work. He has now done with the rest of the world and He belongs wholly to them. He is lifted above all human contention into that serene atmosphere, which we feel ourselves to be breathing, when, reading the story, we seem to find ourselves in the presence of the Risen Lord.

I will now quote St Paul's account of the chief occasions when our Lord appeared; but I can only discuss one or two points of the History.

“And that he appeared to Cephas; then to the twelve; then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep; then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; and last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to me also.”[333]

I take the view, that within a few days of the [pg 451] Resurrection, the Apostles, by our Lord's command, returned to Galilee. If the Resurrection had been immediately followed by a time of agitation—one of persecution for instance—so that the Apostles could not have let their minds dwell on what had happened, the lessons of that period would have been soon effaced; but our Lord, as we have seen, is ever careful to provide seasonable opportunity for reflection, and it was not likely that He would suffer it to be wanting now.

The Apostles in Galilee, engaging again in their old callings, would have leisure to review, not only the last few days, but the whole of the two eventful years since they had been called from their work to follow Christ. It was probably here in Galilee that the Apostles received a command to return to Jerusalem; for we cannot account for the presence there of all the eleven, at the time of the Ascension, together with the mother and brethren of our Lord, except by special direction of our Lord. They would not, without some injunction, have remained at Jerusalem after the Resurrection,[334] neither would they have gone up thither for Pentecost, having been so lately at the Passover. Whether the appearance to the “five hundred brethren at once”[335] be, as I think it was, identical with that on the mountain in Galilee recorded in St Matthew's Gospel, c. xxviii., v. 16, is a matter of discussion.

But where else, except in Galilee could five hundred disciples have been got together? It could not have been at Jerusalem, at the Ascension, because the brethren there only numbered one hundred and twenty souls.[336] St Matthew, it is true, only speaks of the eleven disciples as going “into Galilee unto the mountain,” but others must have been present because we are told that “some doubted,” and the eleven would not have doubted. This admission shews that when the writer drew up his account, he felt no eagerness to strengthen the evidence for the Resurrection; and that He had no fear of its being disbelieved by those for whom he wrote. The eagerness that St Matthew does shew is to find instances of the fulfilment of Scripture, not to support his statements of fact. It seems to me likely, that, in Galilee, among His earliest followers, our Lord should have appeared more publicly than He did elsewhere; here only could He find a body of believers who should serve as witnesses, and, inasmuch as among these five hundred, there must have been men in different states of belief, it falls in with our Lord's way, so often noted, that He should appear in a form, not indisputably recognisable at once and by all, but with His aspect so changed, by some glorification perhaps, that those who were half-hearted in their belief might remain in doubt or disbelief if they chose; while the faithful and [pg 453] loving would be in no uncertainty about their Master's lineaments and voice.

The appearance “to James” which is related by St Paul alone, is important, and calls for special notice.

There are three persons called “James” in the sacred books, and there may be a question which of these it is of whom St Paul speaks. I am of opinion that it is James the brother of our Lord. The Corinthians, to whom St Paul is writing, would hardly know of any other; he was the head of the church at Jerusalem and when Paul speaks of “James” simply, as in Galatians ii. 9, 12, he means always the brother of the Lord. “James, the son of Zebedee,” Acts xii. 2, is designated “the brother of John” for distinction's sake, and of James the son of Alphaeus we never hear. Every disciple however in the Church at Corinth had heard of James, the “pillar” of the Church at Jerusalem.[337]

Nothing is heard of our Lord's brethren during the week of the Passion; possibly, they were not in Jerusalem, but, from the Acts, as has been just said, we find that they were present there at the time of the Ascension.

“These all with one accord continued steadfastly in [pg 454] prayer, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.” Acts i. 14.

This adhesion of the brethren falls in with the supposition that our Lord appeared to His brother James after the Resurrection in Galilee. It was natural that James and the younger brethren should have found difficulty in comprehending that their elder brother, who had played among them as a child was of a nature essentially different from their own; and that this exceptional hindrance to belief should be counterpoised by an exceptional, but not absolutely decisive, revelation is what we might expect. It is not inconsistent with our Lord's treatment of doubt; for the difficulty arose out of circumstances and not from adverse will. Of James, our Lord may have felt sure; and Joses and Jude and Simon,[338] no one of whom could have been much over thirty years of age, while one or two of them must have been quite young men, may have been brought to full discipleship by what they heard from James.

From what St Paul says, “Am I not an Apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?”[339] it seems likely that to have beheld the Risen Lord was held to be a condition of the status of an Apostle. St Paul must have meant “seen the Risen Jesus,” for to have cast eyes on the bodily presence of Jesus, as He journeyed and taught, would have been a distinction shared with thousands.

Without some recognition of James by our Lord, such as is related by St Paul, it is hard to account for his being placed at the head of the Church. We hear of no election or form of appointment, but we find him in this position about ten years after this time. It would have been at variance with our Lord's repeated injunctions to the Apostles not to seek authority one over the other, if the primacy had been made a matter of contest.[340]

Organisation and graduation of authority grew up in the Church, not after any plan settled and declared, but as the need of it arose. It agreed in this respect with the history of those human institutions that have proved the most enduring. In this, as in all matters, our Lord, wherever it was possible, left His followers free; not but what, when these same followers turned to their Master and prayed for guidance, as in the election of Matthias, they found in their hearts an answer positive and plain.

St Peter, in the earliest days of the Church, stands forth as the foremost personage; but this influence rests on personal qualities and not on any formal appointment. He, as I have said (pp. [248], [344]), was the man of action, the person who in every juncture addressed himself at once to the question, [pg 456] “What is to be done?” It was Peter, who took immediate steps to fill up the vacancy which the apostacy of Judas had left. He was the speaker on the day of Pentecost, and he it was who in the case of Ananias sternly repressed falsehood unto God. But the impetuosity of Peter, and his disposition to give himself up completely to the impression of the moment, though it served well to carry forward a great movement at its outset, may have made him ill adapted for the ruler of an infant Church, in which discordant elements had to be welded into one; while the well-poised judgment of James the Just[341] and his practical sense fitted him particularly for this kind of rule. That this admirable selection, this putting of each in his right place, should have come about without dispute; and that those who had “borne the burden and heat of the day” should have admitted to equality—or something more—in outward dignity, one who was “of the eleventh hour,” bears out what I have said of the phenomenal subordination of self displayed by the Apostles. It shews that outward dignity and authority—that which I have taken to be the “false mammon” of the parable—was as nothing in their eyes compared to the true riches, the priceless feeling that their work great or small, as men might count it, was all done for God and all accepted by God.