Religion
Spiritual fellowship
Martin Sullivan
Christian pulpits ring out every Sunday with reflections upon the life and ministry of Christ. His teaching is applied to modern situations and needs and yet not one of the preachers has met Christ in the flesh, heard him speak or watched him at work. This is not necessarily a crippling or gravely inhibiting loss. His disciples were very close to him day by day throughout his ministry and yet they frequently misun derstood him. At least that was true while they journeyed with him. Many who were close to him became enemies who finally destroyed him. All the followers of Christ have been obliged to walk by faith and not by sight, and that applies to the earliest of them, who were called upon to pass from fellowship with him in the flesh to fellowship with him in the spirit. It ought not to be any more difficult for us who have not enjoyed his bodily presence to enter into the same companionship with him. In the spiritual world it is not local proximity but moral and spiritual affinity which makes such a relationship possible. How can a modern Christian rise to this privilege? First he should learn to know the historic Christ. The Gospels do not attempt a biography of him, but they reveal his mind. What he was to his disciples, he will be to us and when he said during his earthly ministry he is saying now. To read the records, to try to grasp the meaning of the message as it was addressed to the community for which originally it was written, will reveal the words that are indeed spoken to us. Even if the reader is not a Christian this is an exercise that will enlighten him. Aided by a good commentary (and a host of them is available) he will find it possible to discover something of the historic Jesus and to enter into the mind of the early Christian community concerning him. We shall, thus find continual correspondence between his dealings with ourselves and his dealings with his disciples when he was on earth.
The greatest of all the Apostles never knew Christ or met him face to face. He did not regard this as a loss. On the contrary he wrote: "Hereafter we know no man after the flesh; even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him no more." He seems to hint that reliance upon the memory of a physical association with Jesus could have its disadvantages. Perhaps he had grown tired of hearing disciples telling him what he had missed and how much better off they were, because they could remember how he looked, the tone of his voice, and the kind of special relationship they bore to him. St Paul felt that such memories, however tender, have no direct religious value. He demands a life, not a memory. To know a person is not the same thing as to have seen him, and to enter into his mind does not demand he must be our contemporary.
And yet St Paul and all who stand in his spiritual succession would be the first to declare that Christ is our contemporary. If there is one sentence he wrote. which above all others stated what he believed and revealed the heart of his personal religion, it was his famous utterance, "I live, yet not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me." He did not hold to this belief because he had been told that Christ had died and risen again. He accepted that and proclaimed it, but his conversion was of a different kind. He declared unequivocally that he could look into his soul at any time and find Christ there, and actually feel his presence as a constraining power changing his whole life. By the time he had written some of his letters he could say he had known this experience for thirty years. To doubt it would have been to doubt his own existence and to consider that he had been in a dream for half his life. A modern Christian bears the same testimony. Unless he communes with a living power and not simply honours a dead hero, his religion is vain. It is In London now, not in Palestine two thousand years ago, that he becomes aware of the power of the living Christ.
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