James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Luke 24:5-6
THE APPEAL OF EASTER
‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.’
There is a tone of gentle remonstrance in these words of protest against an unseasonable sadness on the day of earth’s greatest joy. ‘O ye of little faith,’ the angels would seem to say, ‘less faith than love, more dutiful than understanding, why come ye to anoint His body on the third day?’
I. Love surviving death.—And yet, remonstrate as they might, we feel that the angels recognised that these women were seeking our Blessed Lord along a track which eventually would bring them right. Even many sins are forgiven to the much-loving. Their love had survived death; it would rally itself once more on hope, and mount up into a perfected faith. For these holy women had grasped that which is of the essence of true religion. For religion is not a mere pondering over slowly yielding evidence to reach a measure of certainty which shall at least remain until stronger evidence oversets it. Religion is not a mere cord of obligation which binds us to a great and invisible Lord. Religion is a devotion to a Person.
II. Beyond the grave.—‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ All life has reference to that which is the other side of the grave. So the ancestors of their race had gone forth declaring plainly that they sought a better country, that is a heavenly.
III. A life to be lived.—We seem to be more and more drifting into the idea that Christianity is a system to be intellectually accepted more than a life to be lived. But if you want to find the risen Christ you must know Him before you know the power of His resurrection. But we indignantly repudiate the idea that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is only the necessary immortality of a great Man, that He is alive as other great ones are alive, in influence, in memory, in spiritual Presence. This is not what we mean by the resurrection, this is not what St. Paul preached at Athens amidst the ill-concealed ridicule of his hearers. This is not what he preached before Festus, who thought him mad for his pains. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave may be accepted or denied, but no self-respecting Christian will stay for one moment to accept a travesty of that glorious doctrine, which is at once an insult to the understanding and a menace to the faith of those who have lived and grown in the strength and nurture of the Catholic faith. The living Christ, that is Whom we seek. And to have found the living Christ is to find Him in death and beyond death. ‘I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death.’
IV. The living Christ.—If you would know Jesus and the power of His resurrection, you must find the living Christ. It is only too true that the ordinary forms of religion, the common setting of our life, may be but the tomb where Christ is not. If Lent has taught us anything it has taught us this, that a good deal of the doubts that vex us, and the disappointments which pull us back, do not come from a weakness in our religion, but from a weakness in ourselves. How can we hope to find joy and peace in believing, if we have never really made proof of our religion? Nothing is so insipid as a religion which is a mere form, and nothing so dangerous as religious professions which are not based on sincerity and truth.
Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
‘What evidence would satisfy you as to the truth of our Lord’s resurrection? If it could be proved to a certainty that without fraud, actual or literary, the grave of Jesus Christ was found empty on the first Easter Day, if you could satisfy yourself without any doubt whatever as to the credibility of the witnesses who saw and asserted this fact, to which St. Paul himself testified with such emphasis in his sermon at Antioch, would you be satisfied? Would not the restless, suspicious mind go off elsewhere on other difficulties and demand other evidence? As a matter of fact, the empty grave was not the cause of the disciples’ faith. The fact of the empty grave created no belief in the resurrection in the case either of St. Mary Magdalene, or of the other women, or of St. Peter. The Easter faith did not really spring from the empty grave, but from the self-manifestation of the risen Lord.
THE APOSTLES AT HOME
‘And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.’
Idle tales! It is a contemptuous word, such as a very superior person would use. It seems to say, ‘Hysterical women are apt to see angels. And what they say cannot be true, because it is contrary to the most elementary experience, that a dead body should rise again, and that a body buried under such conditions should escape from the tomb.’ A risen Lord, an empty tomb! They were both impossible. It was pure nonsense. And yet the women were right, and the absurd and the impossible had to be corrected by fact.
I. What did it mean—the Apostles at home on Easter morning, repudiating the realisation of what they had hoped for and the embodiment of the unseen which they had been led to expect? Nonsense—idle tales; these are ugly words on Easter morning. It meant that, for the moment, they had failed in devotion to our Lord’s Person. Note well who they were whose simple faith had been rewarded by a wondrous revelation, which a colder reason would seek to repudiate.
II. What did it mean, once more—the Apostles at home on Easter morning?—It meant that for the moment their faith had broken down. It was a supreme moment when the tottering child had to take his first step alone, and did not see the tender hand ready stretched out to catch his fall. It was the beginning of their life’s work—to walk by faith and not by sight, and they were not ready to begin; and, as we have already seen, the next step was harder, because a longer distance now intervened. It is a mistake to miss rungs out of the ladder of life anywhere; it always means a harder effort afterwards, sometimes a wrench. See what it meant to St. Thomas to lose the whole of Easter Day.
III. There would be many mornings like the dark dawn of that first Easter, when all they would have to act upon would be a treasured precept or a half-forgotten command. A morning would be coming to St. James when he would have to ask himself, Is it worth while to lay down my life in the vindication of a lost cause? when He would have to summon all his faith to mount the throne of martyrdom set on the right hand of his crucified King. A day would be coming to St. Peter when in the still night, with soldiers sleeping each side of him, he would have to act on what he had been told, to prepare for a road which he had never traversed before, and to gird himself for a journey against which flesh and blood rebelled. One by one they would have to learn to live in the minority, to be on the unpopular side, to be suspected and scorned by the religious world, and oppressed by the political rulers of its prosperity. One by one they most of them must go before their time, and endure as seeing Him Who is invisible.
Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
‘Let Magdalene come out to-day and say what she has seen. Let the other Mary come forth and say why she went thus early to the grave. Let Joanna tell us why she found a joy in ministering to Christ of her substance so great that she, too, comes to wait on Him in life or death, and finds the reward which He has ever promised to a generous faith. This is a side of Easter which appeals to every one. While Jews say He cannot, and Pilate says He shall not, and Apostles fear He may not rise, here is our place beside the tomb. We do not in the least need evidence or confirmation or defence. The Jews do not stop us; Pilate cannot coerce us, nor friends damp our ardour. Our godparents did not say for us, and we did not say for ourselves, when we accepted the Creed, “all this I steadfastly believe subject to whatever historical revisions may await it in the future.” We, too, have a school of trained research. We know Him in Whom we have believed. He has never failed us yet; His word has always come true. We have been with Him on the mountain side, and He has taught us. We have been with Him when the ship of the Church seemed whelmed beneath the waves, and He has stilled for us the tumult. We have knelt before Him in the upper room, and He has given Himself to us, with His own Hand, in mystic Eucharist. We have stood beneath His Cross and seen Him pass into the dark valley of the shadow of death, and here we are with Him on Easter morning. You say the Body has been stolen; you say we have dreamed it; you say our words are idle tales—nonsense; you deny us the testimony of our eyes, as a blind man might refuse to believe there was a sun.’