THE DESCENT AND BURIAL
And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped
it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own
new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock.
S. Matt. XXVII, 59, 60.
It is meet in very truth to bless thee the Theotokos, the ever-blessed and all-immaculate and Mother of our God. Honoured above the Cherubim, incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim, thou who without stain gavest birth to God the Word, and art truly Mother of God, we magnify thee.
BYZANTINE.
he end had come--so it must have seemed to those who had loved and followed our Lord. As they came back from the burial, those of them who had remained true to the end, as they came out of their hiding places, those others who forsook Him and fled, they met in that "Upper Room" which was already consecrated by so many experiences. They came back from Joseph's Garden, S. John leading the blessed Mother, the Magdalen and the other Mary following, S. Peter came from whatever obscure corner he had found safety in. The other Apostles came one by one, a frightened, disheartened group, shame-faced and doubtful as to what might next befall them. The thing that to us seems strangest of all is that no one seems to have taken in the meaning of our Lord's words about His resurrection. Not even S. Mary herself appears to have seen any light through the surrounding darkness. I suppose that so much of what our Lord taught them was unintelligible until after the coming of the Holy Spirit that they rarely felt sure that they understood His meaning; and when the meaning was so unprecedented as that involved in His sayings about the resurrection we can understand that they should have been so little influenced by them.
S. Mary's grief would have been so deep, so overwhelming, that she would have been unable to think of the future at all save as a dreary waste of pain. She could only think that her Son who was all to her, was dead. She had stood by the Cross through all the agony of His dying: she had heard His last words. That final word to her had sunk very deep into her heart. She had once more felt His Body in her arms as it was taken down from the Cross; and she had followed to the place where was a Garden and a new tomb wherein man had never yet lain, there she had seen the Body placed and hastily cared for, as much as the shortness of the time on the Passover Eve would permit. And then she had gone away, not caring at all where she was taken, with but one thought monotonously beating in her brain,--He is dead, He is dead.
It would not be possible in such moments calmly to recall what He Himself had taught about death. Death for the moment would mean what it had always meant to religious people of her time and circle. What that was we have very clearly presented to us in the talk with Martha that our Lord had near the place where Lazarus lay dead. There is a fuller knowledge than we find explicit in the Old Testament, showing a growth in the understanding of the Revelation in the years that fall between the close of the Old Testament canon and the coming of our Lord. There is a belief in survival to be followed by resurrection at the last day. That would no doubt be St. Mary's belief about death. That is still the belief of many Christians to-day. "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." There are still many who think that they have accepted the full Revelation of God in Christ who have not appreciated the vast difference that the triumph of Christ over death has made for us here and now.
So we have no difficulty in understanding the gloom that fell on the Apostolic circle, accentuated as it was by the very vivid fear that at any moment they might hear the approaching feet of the Jewish and Roman officials and the knock of armed hands upon the door. What to do? How escape? Had they so utterly misunderstood and misinterpreted Christ that this is the natural outcome of His movement? Had they been the victims of foolish hopes and of a baseless ambition when they saw in Him the Christ, the one who should at this time restore again the Kingdom to Israel? They had persistently clung to this nationalistic interpretation of His work although He had never encouraged it; but it was the only meaning that they were able to see in it. And now all their expectations had collapsed, and they were left hopeless and leaderless to face the consequences of a series of acts that had ended in the death of their Master and would end, they knew not how, for them. Was it at all likely that the Jewish authorities having disposed of the leader in a dangerous movement would be content to let the followers go free? Would they not rather seek to wipe out the last traces of the movement in blood?
So they would have thought, gathered in that Upper Room, while outside the Jewish authorities were keeping the Passover. What a Passover it was to them with this nightmare of a rebellion which threatened their whole place and power passed away. What mutual congratulations were theirs on the clever way in which the whole matter had been handled. There had been a moment when they were on the very point of failure, when Pilate was ready to let Jesus go free. That was their moment of greatest danger; and they took their courage in both hands and threw the challenge squarely in the face of the cowardly Governor: "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend!" The chief priests knew their man, and they carried their plan against him with a determined hand, declining to accept any compromise, anything less than the death of Jesus. Great was the rejoicing; hearty were the mutual congratulations in the official circles of Jerusalem. It had been long since they had celebrated so wonderful a Passover as that!
So limited, so mistaken, is the human outlook on life. They had but to await another night's passing and all would be changed. But in the meantime the position of the disciples was pitiful. They were in that state of dull, hopeless discouragement that is one of the most painful of human states. It is a state to which we who are Christians do from time to time fall victims with much less excuse. We are hopeless, we say and feel. We look at the future, at the problems with which we are fronted, and we see no ray of light, no suggestion of a solution. We have been robbed of what we most valued and life looks wholly blank to us. For those others there was this of excuse,--they did not know Jesus risen, they did not know the power of the resurrection life. For us there is no such excuse because we have a sure basis of hope in our knowledge of the meaning of the Lord.
Hope is one of the great trilogy of Christian Virtues, the gift to Christians of God the Holy Ghost. As Christians we have the virtue of hope, the question is whether we will excercise it or no. It is one of the many fruits of our being in a state of grace. Many blunder when they think of hope in that they confound it with an optimistic feeling about the future. We hear of hopeful persons and we know that by the description is meant persons who are confident "that everything will be all right," when there seems no ground at all for thinking so. They have a "buoyant temperament," by which I suppose is meant a temperament which soars above facts. That not very intelligent attitude has nothing to do with the Christian virtue of hope. Hope is born of our relation to God. It is the conviction: "God is on my side; I will not fear what man can do unto me." It is the serene and untroubled trust of one who knows that he is safe in the hands of God, and that his life is really ordered by the will and Providence of God.
This virtue, had they possessed it, would have carried the disciples through the crisis of our Lord's death. They had had sufficient experience of Him to know that they might utterly rely on Him in all the circumstances of their lives. He had always sustained them and carried them through all crises. They had often been puzzled by Him, no doubt; they had felt helpless to fathom much of His teaching, but they had slowly arrived at certain conclusions about Him which He Himself had confirmed. On that day at Caesarea Phillipi they had reached the conclusion of His Messiahship, a slumbering conviction had broken into flame and light in the great confession of S. Peter. The meaning of Messiahship was a part of their national religious tradition; and although in some important respects mistaken, they yet, one would think, have been led to perfect trust in our Lord when they acknowledged His Messianic claims. But death? They could not get over the apparent finality of death. But, again, perhaps we are not very far beyond this in our understanding of it. To us still death seems very final.
But it was just that sense of its finality--of its constituting a hopeless break in the continuity of existence--that our Lord was engaged in removing during these days which to them were days of hopelessness and despair. When they came to know what in these days was taking place; and when the Church guided by the Holy Spirit came to meditate upon the meaning of our Lord's action it would see death in a changed light. The sense of a cataclysmic disaster in death would pass and be replaced by a sense of the continuity of life. Hitherto attention had been concentrated on this world, and death had been a disappearence from this world, the stopping of worldly loves and interests. Presently death would be seen to be the translation of the human being to a new sphere of activities, but involving no cessation of consciousness or failure of personal activities. Men had thought, naturally enough in their lack of knowledge, of the effect of death on the survivors, of the break in their relations with the dead. Now death would be viewed from the point of view of the interests of the person who is dead; and it would emerge that he continued under different conditions, and in the end it would come to be seen that even in the relations of the survivors with the dead there was no necessary and absolute break, but that the new conditions of life made possible renewed intercourse under altered circumstances.
Our Lord, the disciples learned not long after, during these days went to preach to the spirits in prison, which the thought of the Church has interpreted to mean that He carried the news of the Redemption He had wrought through His dying, to the place of the dead, to the region where the souls of the faithful were patiently waiting the time of their perfecting. The doors of the heavenly world could not be opened till the time when He by His Cross and Passion, by His death and resurrection, opened them. The Heads of the Gates could not be lifted till they were lifted for the entrance of the King of Glory. But once lifted they were lifted forever; and when He ascended up on high He led His troop of captives redeemed from the bondage of death and hell.
It is through these lifted Gates that the companies of the sanctified have been streaming ever since; and the difference that has been made in our view of death has been immense. If we have the faith of a Christian death has been transformed. There remains, of course, the natural grief which is ours when we part from those whom we love. This grief is natural and holy as it is in fact an expression of our love. It is not rebellion against the will of God, but is the expression of a feeling wherewith God has endowed us. But there is no longer in it the sting of hopelessness that we find, for instance, in the inscriptions on pagan tombs, nay, on tombs still, though created by Christians and found in Christian cemeteries. Rather it is the expression of a love which is learning to exercise itself under new conditions. We do not find it possible to reverse all our habits in a moment; and the new relation with the dead is one to which we have to learn to accustom ourselves. I remember a case where a mother and a son had never been separated for more than a day at a time, though he was far on in manhood. There came a time of indeterminate separation and the mother's grief was intense notwithstanding that there was no thought of a permanent separation. It took some time for her to accustom herself to the new mode of communication by letter. It is not far otherwise in death; it takes some time for us to accustom ourselves to the new mode of intercourse through prayer, but we succeed, and the new intercourse is very real and very precious. In a sense, too, it is a nearer, more intimate intercourse. It lacks the homely, daily touches, no doubt; but in compensation it reveals to us the spiritual values in life. We speedily learn, we learn almost by a spiritual instinct, what are the common grounds on which we can now meet. By our intercourse with our dead we get a new grasp on the truth of our common life in Christ: it is in and through Him that all our converse is now mediated. We have little difficulty in knowing what are the thoughts and interests which may be shared under the new conditions in which we find ourselves. Our perception of spiritual interests and spiritual values grows and deepens, and our communion with our dead becomes an indication of the extent of our own spiritual growth.
There come times in the spiritual experience of most of us when we seem to have got to the end. There is a deepening sense of failure which is not, when we analyse it, so much a failure in this or that detail, as a general sense of the futility of the life of the Church as expressed in our individual lives. It came to those primitive congregations, you remember, to which S. Peter was writing; "Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation." It is the weariness of continuous effort from which we conclude that we are getting quite insufficient results.
No doubt that is true. The results are never what we expect, possibly because the effort is never what we imagine it to be. We continually underestimate the opposing force of evil, the difficulty of dealing with a humanity which falls so easily under the slightest temptation. It is not that sinners decline to hear the Word of God, but that those who profess themselves to be the servants of God, and who in fact intend to be such, are so lamentably weak and ineffective. We think of the effort of God in the Incarnation; we have been following that effort in some detail through the Passion. We are surprised, shocked, disheartened by the spectacle of the hatred that innocence stirs up, at the lengths men will go when they see their personal ends threatened. We are horrified by Caiphas, Pilate, Herod. But is that the really horrifying thing about the Passion of our Lord? To me the supreme example of human incomprehension is that all the disciples forsook Him and fled, that He was left to die almost alone. There we get the most disheartening failure in the tragedy.
For we expect the antagonism of the world, especially that part of the world that has seen and rejected Christ. There we find Satanic activities. One of the outstanding features of the literature of to-day in the Western world, the world that had known from childhood the story of Jesus, is its utter hatred of Christianity; its revolt from all that Christianity stands for. This is markedly true in regard to the Christian teaching in the matter of purity. The contemporary English novel is perhaps the vilest thing that has yet appeared on this earth. There have been plenty of unclean books written in the course of the world's history--we have only to recall the literature of the Renaissance--but for the most part they have been written in careless or boastful disregard of moral sanctions which they still regarded as existing; but the novel of the present is an immoral propaganda--it is deliberately and of malice immoral, not out of careless levity, but out of deliberate intention. You do not feel that the modern author is just describing immoral actions which grow out of his story, but that he is constructing his story for the purpose of propagating immoral theory. He hates the whole teaching of the Christian Religion in the matter of purity. He has thrown it overboard on the ground that it is an "unnatural" restraint. To those who have studied the development of thought since the Renaissance there is nothing surprising in this.
But what does still surprise those who are as yet capable of being surprised is the light way in which the mass of Christians take their religion. Occasionally, in moments of frankness, they admit that they are not getting anything out of it; but it is harder to get them to admit that the reason is that they are not putting anything into it. You do not expect to get returns from a business into which you are putting no capital, and you have no right to expect returns from a religion into which you are putting no energy. What is meant by that is that those Christians who are keeping the minimum routine of Christianity, who are going to High Mass on Sunday (or perhaps only to low Mass) and then making the rest of the day a time of self-indulgence and pleasure; who make their communions but rarely; who do not go to confession, or go only at Easter; who are giving no active support to the work of the Gospel as represented in parish and diocese have no right to be surprised if they find that they do not seem to get any results from their religion; that it is often rather a bore to do even so much as they do, and that they see no point in permitting it further to interfere with their customary amusements and avocations. I do not know what such persons expect from their religion, but I am sure that they will be disappointed if they are expecting any spiritual result. Naturally, they will be disappointed if they look in themselves for any evidence of the virtue of hope. The most that can be looked for under the circumstances is that mockery of hope, presumption.
We are not to be discouraged in our estimate of the Christian Religion by this which seems to be the failure of God. We are not to echo the cry: "Since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." S. Peter pointed out to those pessimists that all things do not continue the same, that there are times of crisis which are the judgments of God. Such a judgment was that of old which swept the wickedness of the world away, "whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." He goes on to state that the present order likewise will issue in judgment: "The heavens and the earth which are now ... are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." What renders men hopeless is the feeling of God's inactivity; but this declaration of impending judgment certifies the active interest of God. God's dealing with the world is a perpetual judgment of which we are apt to decline the evidence until the cataclysm reveals the final scene. But every society, every individual life, is being judged through the whole course of its existence, and there is no need that either society or individual should be blind to the fact that such a judgment is taking place. There is no failure of God. There is a failure on our part to understand the works of God.
We may very well consider the problem an individual one and ask ourselves what ground of hope we have. On the basis of our present effort can we, ought we, to have more than we have? The spiritual life is not an accident that befalls certain people; it is an art that is acquired by such persons as are interested in it. It is attained through the careful training and exercise of the faculties wherewith we have been endowed. The answer to our question is itself a perfectly simple one, as simple as would be the answer to the question: "Do you speak French?" We speak French if we have taken the trouble to learn French; and we have gained results in the way of spiritual development and culture if we have taken the trouble to do so. I do not know why we should expect results on any other ground than that.
But certain persons say: "I have tried, and have not attained any results." Well, I should want to know what the trying means in that case. It is well for a person who aspires to spiritual culture to think of his past history. What sort of character-development has so far been going on? Commonly it happens that there has been no spiritual effort that is worth thinking about; but that does not mean that nothing spiritual has been happening. It means on the contrary that there has been going on a spiritual atrophy, the spiritual powers have been without exercise and will be difficult to arouse to activity. In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which we have already formed, a period in which unused and immature spiritual powers must be roused to action and disciplined to use. The simplest illustration of this is the difficulty experienced by the enthusiastic beginner in holding the attention fixed on spiritual acts such as the various forms of prayer. In all such attempts at spiritual activity there will be the constant drag of old habits, the recurrence of states of mind and imagination that had become habitual. These hindrances can be overcome, but only by steady and rather tedious labour. They call for the display of the virtue of patience which is not one of the virtues characteristic of spiritual immaturity. Hence reaction and the feeling that one is not getting on, the feeling that we have quite possibly made a mistake about the whole matter.
This is the place for the exercise of hope; and hope will come if we look away from our not very encouraging acquirement to the ground that we have for expecting any acquirement at all. If we ask: "Why hope?" we shall see that our basis of hope is not in ourselves at all but in God. We hope because of the promises of God, because of His will for us as revealed in His Son. "He loved us and gave Himself for us"; and that giving will not be in vain. "He gave Himself for me," I tell myself, "and therefore I am justified in my expectation of spiritual success." So one tries to learn from the present failure as it seems; so one repents and pushes on; so one learns that it is through tenacity of purpose that one attains results.
And again: I am sustained by hope because I see that the results that I covet are not imaginary. They exist. I see them in operation all about me. I learn of them as I study the lives of other Christians past and present. They are reality not theory, fact not dream. And what has been so richly and abundantly the outcome of spiritual living in others must be within my own reach. The results they attained were not miraculous gifts, but they were the working of God the Holy Spirit in lives yielded to Him and co-operating with Him.
Once more: is it not true that after a period of honest labour I do find results? Perhaps not all that I would like but all that I am justified in expecting from the energy I have spent? I do not believe that any one can look back over a year's honest labour and not see that the labour has born fruit.
In any case the fact that we do not see just what we are looking for does not mean that no spiritual work is going on. It may seem that our Lord is silent and that to our cries there is no voice nor any that answers; but that may mean that we are looking in the wrong place or listening for the wrong word. The disciples looked that the outcome of our Lord's life should be that the Kingdom should be restored to Israel; and when they turned away from the tomb in Joseph's Garden they felt that what they had looked for and prayed for was hopeless of accomplishment. But the important point was not their vision of the Kingdom at all, but that they had yielded themselves to our Lord and become His disciples and lovers. This is not what they intended to do, but it is what actually had happened: and when the grave yielded up the dead Whom they thought that they had lost forever, Jesus came back with a mission for them that was infinitely wider than their dream: the mission of founding not the old Kingdom of David, but the Kingdom of David's Son. All their aspirations and prayers were fulfilled by being transcended, and they found themselves in a position vastly more important than had been reached even in their dreams.
Something like that not infrequently happens in our experience. We conceive a spiritual ambition and work for a spiritual end, and seem always to miss it; and then the day comes when God reveals to us what He has been doing, and we find that through the very discipline of our failure we have been being prepared for a success of which we had not thought: and when we raise our eyes from the path we thought so toilsome and uninteresting, it is to find ourselves at the very gate of the City of God. It will be with us as with the Apostles who in the darkest hour of their imagined failure, when they were gathered together in hiding from the Jews were startled by the appearence among them of the risen Jesus, and were filled with the unutterable joy of His message of peace.
"His body is wrappèd all in woe,
Hand and foot He may not go.
Thy Son, Lady, that thou lovest so
Naked is nailed upon a tree.
"The Blessèd Body that thou hast born,
To save mankind that was forlorn,
His body, Lady, the Jews have torn,
And hurt His Head, as ye may see."
When John his tale began to tell
Mary would not longer dwell
But hied her fast unto that hill
Where she might her own Son see.
"My sweete Son, Thou art me dear,
Oh why have men hanged thee here?
Thy head is closed with a brier,
O why have men so done to Thee?"
"John, this woman I thee betake;
Keep My Mother for My sake.
On Rood I hang for mannes sake
For sinful men as thou may see.
"This game alone I have to play,
For sinful souls that are to die.
Not one man goeth by the way
That on my pains will look and see.
"Father, my soul I thee betake,
My body dieth for mannes sake;
To hell I go withouten wake,
Mannes soul to maken free".
Pray we all that Blessed Son
That He help us when may no man
And bring to bliss each everyone
Amen, amen, amen for Charity.
Early English Lyrics, p. 146.
From an MS. in the Sloane collection.