Religion
Post Resurrection
Martin Sullivan
An interesting point arises from the post-Resurrection narratives in the New Testament. When Christ rose from the dead the stone which closed the opening to the tomb was found to be rolled away. And yet the very same evening of that day He appeared to His disciples in their familiar meeting place by suddenly passing through closed doors. On Easter morning He forbade Mary Magdalene as she encountered Him in the garden to touch Him. A week later He was inviting the uncertain Thomas to poke his fingers into the print of the nails and explore the wound in His side. For six weeks (forty days) He appeared and disappeared at will.
There were long periods when no one reports having seen Him. The Acts of the Apostles records an inrush of the Holy Spirit which was accompanied by a commotion of the elements, tongues of fire, a rushing mighty wind and a babel of languages. The Fourth Gospel gently tells us that Christ breathed on His disciples with the calm words, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost'. There are those who claim that what we call the Resurrection, the Ascension and Pentecost were simultaneous actions, all taking place on Easter morning and separated by arbitrary temporal interruptions. So, Christ's appearances to His disciples after His Resurrection were in fact post-Ascension appearances. Men were not encountering a resuscitated corpse. They were meeting with the Spirit of Christ, revealed in an identifiable form which earthly men could perceive and with whom in personal terms they could communicate. But the truth is that the ascended Christ and the Holy Ghost are one, and Christ did not intend us to draw any distinction between them.
indeed His teaching is that the indwelling spirit is a continuation of the Incarnation. His earthly departure was not a loss to His friends. On the contrary it was an incomparable gain. The office of of the Holy Ghost is to continue and extend the earthly ministry to remotest bounds and even beyond them. The Kingdom of the Spirit does not supplant, or follow, the Kingdom of the Son. It is the Kingdom of the Son.
Such reflections have certain practical implications but one in particular will bear emphasis. The cult of 'Jesus worship, a natural' outgrowth of a certain kind of piety is not only foreign to the doctrine but actually inimical to it. We do not pray to Jesus of Nazareth, but to:`the Spirit of Jesus' as the Acts of the Apostles puts it. Prayers which are addressed to Jesus as if He were a familiar contemporary who has managed to do rather better than the rest of us, rob Him of His sovereign righteousness. On the other hand a recognition of Him in the awesome credal terms as the 'Second Person of the Trinity,' do not remove Him from our midst to soine unknown celestial abode. 'Christ in me,' is not a violent metaphor, indeed it is not a metaphor at all, but it is meaningless if we reduce His person to that of a Galilean prophet, anchored to one time and place. "Lo I am with you always," is the promise of His spirit to be as close to us as He was to klis disciples in the flesh.
Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul's
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