And that continues to the end. During the Forty Days, the few sayings that have come to us have the same ring of authority, of dogmatic certainty. The result was that when the Apostles went out to teach they were equipped with a body of truth which they presented to the world in the same unhesitating way. Indeed, that is the only way in which the central truths of the Christian Faith can be presented. They are not the conclusions of argument, which may be taken up and argued over again to the end of the world,--they are the dicta of revelation. We either know them to be true because they have been revealed, or we do not know them to be true at all. They are mysteries, that is, truths beyond the possibility of human finding which have been made known to man by God Himself. They are the appropriate data of religion and what distinguishes it from philosophy. The presence of mystery in philosophy is annoying, and the aim is to get rid of it, but a religion without mystery is absurd. Religion deals with the fundamental relations between God and man and the light it brings us must be a supernatural light. Such a religion in its presentation naturally cut across the preconceptions of the traditionalists in Jerusalem to whom nothing new could be true, as across the preconceptions of the sophists of Athens, to whom nothing that was not new was interesting.
This dogmatic equipment was but one side, however, of the Apostolic training for their future work, a training to which the finishing touches, so to say, were put during the Forty Days. The other side of the training was the impression upon them of the Personality of our Lord, the effect of their close association with Him. This has an importance that dwarfs all other influences of the time; and we feel all through the Gospel that it was what our Lord himself counted upon in forming them for their mission. In the beginning "He chose twelve to be with Him," and their day by day association with Him was constantly changing their point of view and reforming their character. It was not the teaching, the explanation of parables, or the sight of the miracles; it was the silent effect of a personality that was in contact with them constantly and was constantly presenting to them an ideal of life, an ideal of absolute submission to the will of the Father and of utter consecration to the, mission that had been committed to Him.
We all know this silent pressure of life upon life. We have most of us, I suppose, experienced it either from our parents or from friends in later life; and we can through that experience of ours attempt the explanation of our Lord's influence on the Apostles. There were not only the hours of formal teaching--they, in a way, were perhaps the less important from our present point of view. We have more in mind the informal talks that would go on as they went from village to village in Galilee, or as they gathered about the door of some cottage in the evening or sat in the shelter of some grove during the noon-day heat. It was just talk arising naturally out of the incidents of the day, but it was always talk guided by Jesus--talk in which Jesus was constantly revealing Himself to them, impressing upon them His point of view, making plain his own judgment upon life. And when we turn to His formal teaching we realise how revolutionary was His point of view in regard to life, how He swept aside the customary conventions by which they were accustomed to guide life, and substituted the radical principles that they have left on record in the Sermon on the Mount for the perplexity of a world yet far from understanding them. Evidently the Apostles would find their accustomed values tossed aside and a wholly new set of values presented to them.
I suppose we find it difficult to appreciate how utterly revolutionary the Gospel teaching continually is, not because we have become accustomed to follow it, but because we have got used to hearing it and evacuating it of most of its meaning by clever glossing. It was thus that the teaching classes in Jerusalem avoided the pressure of Old Testament ideals by a facile system of interpretation which made "void the Word of God by their traditions." Human nature has not altered; and we succeed by the same method in making the Gospel of none effect. We are so well accustomed to do this that we lose the point and pungency of much of our Lord's teaching. But we know that the apostles did not. We know that they presented that teaching in all its sharpness to would-be disciples. It could not be otherwise with those who for three years had been in day by day intimacy with our Lord and had assimilated His point of view and his judgment on life.
One effect of their contact with our Lord in the days following the resurrection would be that whatever changes the passage to a new level of existence had wrought in Him, it had not changed either the tone of His teaching or the beauty and attractiveness of His Personality. The concluding charges that were given them, the great commission of proclaiming the Kingdom with which they were now definitely endued, the powers which were committed to them in the great words: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," would but confirm and strengthen all that had gone before in their experience of Him. The Jesus of the resurrection was no pale ghost returned from the grave, intermittently to appear to them to assure them of the fact of immortality. He was "the same Jesus" Whom they had known for three years, and whose return from the dead triumphant over the powers that had opposed Him, set quite plainly and definitely the seal of indisputable authority upon all the teaching and the example that had gone before. The period of their probation was over: The commission was theirs: It remained that they should abide in Jerusalem until they should be "endued with power from on high."
Proclaimed Queen and Mother of a God,
The Light of earth, the Sovereign of saints,
With pilgrim foot up tiring hills she trod,
And heavenly stile with handmaids' toil acquaints;
Her youth to age, her health to sick she lends;
Her heart to God, to neighbor hand she bends.
A Prince she is, and mightier Prince doth bear,
Yet pomp of princely train she would not have;
But doubtless, heavenly choirs attendant were,
Her Child from harm, herself from fall to save:
Word to the voice, song to the tune she brings,
The voice her word, the tune her ditty sings.
Eternal lights enclosèd in her breast
Shot out such piercing beams of burning love,
That when her voice her cousin's ears possessed
The force thereof did force her babe to move:
With secret signs the children greet each other;
But, open praise each leaveth to his mother.
Robert Southwell, S.J.
1560-1595.