That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of himself,—not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled his heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,—he mourned for those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
It seems plain—so far as anything can be plain in the details of the story—that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen? Still—so spoke his victorious faith—God's cause would triumph. And it would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for any event. "Be prepared—you who are to me brothers and sisters and mother—be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"
Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a mass of greed, formality, worldliness.
A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one stone be left upon another."
His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. He goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade. This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they speedily bring about his ruin.
The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At the supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity. "This bread is my body." "This wine is my blood." "I give myself for you."
The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his ardent faith met full the stern actuality. God was not to interfere, defeat and death were before him. All was hidden, save a fate which rose upon his imagination in dark terror. "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!" Then comes the victory of absolute self-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done."
The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor. But the birth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in which Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary. In a spiritual sense the mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was forgiven because she loved much. The faith that sent the disciples forth to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but living, not a memory but a perpetual presence. That conviction first flashed into the heart of Mary. It was born of a love stronger than death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior. It sprang up in a mind simple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt and what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of the outward world. It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body. It crystallized instantly into a story of outward fact. It communicated itself by sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts. They too saw the heavenly vision. Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone of the new society. About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial personalities. But the initial fact was the heart's conviction—Jesus lives! Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold underworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward him in that divine and eternal life.
To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus' resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them. Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. In the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and mingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging conception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through it all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympathetic disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and victory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe and triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all this emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. His words were true,—he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone to the underworld, he will live again. "Will,"—nay, is he not here with us now? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? And first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily image. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a little time—for "forty days"—the electric air seems often to body forth that luminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter and foundation of the little society.