This is certainly a very extraordinary saying of St. Paul—that he hopes to attain unto the resurrection from the dead. 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.
And thus the fundamental question of the Easter season is not: "Do I believe that people when they die shall rise again from the dead?" but it is "Have I risen from the dead {167} myself?" "Am I alive to-day, with any touch of the eternal life?" Mr. Ruskin describes a grim Scythian custom where, when the king died, he was set on his throne at the head of his table, and his vassals, instead of mourning for him, bowed before his corpse and feasted in his presence. That same ghastly scene is sometimes repeated now, and young men think they are sitting at a feast, when they are really sitting at a funeral, and believe themselves to be, as they say, "seeing life," when they are in reality looking upon the death of all that is true and fair. And on the other hand the most beautiful thing which is permitted for any one to see is the resurrection of a human soul from the dead, its deliverance from shame and sin, its passing from death into life. As the father of the prodigal said of his boy, he was dead and is alive again, and in that coming to his true self he attains, as surely as he ever can in any future world, unto the resurrection from the dead.
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LXVII
SIMON OF CYRENE
Luke xxiii. 20-26.
This Simon, the Cyrenian, was just a plain man, coming into town on his own business, and meeting at the gate this turbulent group surging out toward the place of crucifixion, with the malefactor in their midst. Suddenly Simon finds himself turned about in his own journey, swept back by the crowd with the cross of another man on his shoulder, and the humiliation forced upon him which there seemed no reason for him to bear.
How often that happens in many a life! You are going your own way, carrying your own load, and suddenly you are called on to take up some one else's burden,—a strange cross, a home responsibility, a business duty; and you find yourself turned square round in the road you meant to go. Your plan of life is interrupted by no fault of your own, and you are summoned to bear an undeserved and unexpected cross.
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And yet, how certain it is that this man of Cyrene came to look back on this interruption of his journey as the one thing he would not have missed? When others were remembering the wonderful career of Jesus, how often he must have said: "Yes, but I once had the unapproached privilege of bearing his cross for him. On one golden morning of my life I was permitted to share his suffering. I was called from all my own hopes and plans to take up this burden of another, and I did not let it drop. It seemed a grievous burden, but it has become my crowning joy. I did not know then, but I know now, that my day of humiliation was my day of highest blessedness.