Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

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.