If Christ be risen…
Since death has become such a stark reality this past year, thoughts of heaven have occupied my mind. The Good Lord lead me to the works of George MacDonald before Jan’s struggle with cancer. During that struggle and afterword his writing have been a constant refuge from darkness. Last night this was MacDonalds offerings on Jesus’ Resurrection and as a result ours.
MacDonald describes Mary’s encounter with our Risen Lord:
“Mary lingered weeping by the place which was not now even the grave of the beloved, so utterly had not only he but the signs of him vanished. As she wept, she stooped down into the sepulchre. There sat the angels in holy contemplation, one at the head, the other at the feet where the body of Jesus had lain. Peter nor John had beheld them: to the eyes of Mary as of the other women they were manifest. It is a lovely story that follows, full of marvel, as how should it not be?”
“Woman, why weepest thou?” said the angels.”
“Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him,” answered Mary, and turning away, tear-blinded, saw the gardener, as she thought.
“Woman, why weepest thou?” repeats the gardener.
“Whom seekest thou?”
Hopelessness had dulled every sense: not even a start at the sound of his voice!
“Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.”
“Mary!”
“Master!”
“Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.”
She had the first sight of him. It would almost seem that, arrested by her misery, he had delayed his ascent, and shown himself sooner than his first intent. “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended.” She was about to grasp him with the eager hands of reverent love: why did he refuse the touch?”
“Doubtless the tone of the words deprived them of any sting. Doubtless the self-respect of the woman was in no way wounded by the master’s recoil. For the rest, we know so little of the new conditions of his bodily nature, that nothing is ours beyond conjecture. It may be, for anything I know, that there were even physical reasons why she should not yet touch him; but my impression is that, after the hard work accomplished, and the form in which he had wrought and suffered resumed, he must have the Father’s embrace first, as after a long absence any man would seek first the arms of his dearest friend. It may well be objected to this notion, that he had never been absent from God—that in his heart he was at home with him continually. And yet the body with all its limitations, with all its partition-walls of separation, is God’s, and there must be some way in which even it can come into a willed relation with him to whom it is nearer even than to ourselves, for it is the offspring of his will, or as the prophets of old would say—the work of his hands. That which God has invented and made, which has its very origin in the depth of his thought, can surely come nigh to God. Therefore I think that in some way which we cannot understand, Jesus would now seek the presence of the Father; would, having done the work which he had given him to do, desire first of all to return in the body to him who had sent him by giving him a body. Hence although he might delay his return at the sound of the woman’s grief, he would rather she did not touch him first. If any one thinks this founded on too human a notion of the Saviour, I would only reply that I suspect a great part of our irreligion springs from our disbelief in the humanity of God. There lie endless undiscovered treasures of grace. After he had once ascended to the Father, he not only appeared to his disciples again and again, but their hands handled the word of life, and he ate in their presence. He had been to his Father, and had returned that they might know him lifted above the grave and all that region in which death has power; that as the elder brother, free of the oppressions of humanity, but fulfilled of its tenderness, he might show himself captain of their salvation. Upon the body he inhabited, death could no longer lay his hands, and from the vantage-ground he thus held, he could stretch down the arm of salvation to each and all.”
Excerpt From Miracles of Our Lord by George MacDonald
Further along in the same chapter MacDonald writes:
“If Christ be risen, then is the grave of humanity itself empty. We have risen with him, and death has henceforth no dominion over us. Of every dead man and woman it may be said: He—she—is not here, but is risen and gone before us. Ever since the Lord lay down in the tomb, and behold it was but a couch whence he arose refreshed, we may say of every brother: He is not dead but sleepeth. He too is alive and shall arise from his sleep.
The way to the tomb may be hard, as it was for him; but we who look on, see the hardness and not the help; we see the suffering but not the sustaining: that is known only to the dying and God. They can tell us little of this, and nothing of the glad safety beyond.”
“With any theory of the conditions of our resurrection, I have scarcely here to do. It is to me a matter of positively no interest whether or not, in any sense, the matter of our bodies shall be raised from the earth”…
“What seemed to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body itself, was in reality the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy. He was not there because he had risen.”
Excerpt From Miracles of Our Lord by George MacDonald
Since St. Mary Magdalene was the first to meet the risen Lord MacDonald had previously written about the Mary meeting the Risen Lord. See my amended post on St. Mary: