Daily Reading for April 26 • Tuesday in Easter Week
The Resurrection of Christ could not be seen by man, for it was a resurrection into a world which no human senses could follow it. There are many powers in nature to which we can have no immediate outer testimony. We know their existence by their results. So it is with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We experience its power because He went into a world beyond our natural gaze. He has entered upon the exercise of powers whose influence we acknowledge, and from whose control none can escape.
We are not to think merely that He lived before in the region of the natural world, and is now passed over into the spiritual world. . . . He has done much more than this. He has elevated His material nature to be for evermore the instrument of spiritual action. . . . That which lay in the sepulcher is transformed and glorified. It is not that it shines with the light of the Divine presence within it. So it shone once at the Transfiguration. Now it has passed into the world of spirit-life, and it manifests itself in this lower world, not by subjecting itself to our natural senses, but by communicating to those to whom its manifestation is made the supernatural power of the Spirit by which alone it can be perceived, as by that power alone it can draw near.
The whole human being of our Lord Jesus was glorified by the Resurrection. There was no part of it left in the grave. All was transformed. The unction of the Divine presence filled the whole manhood, body and soul, with the renewed spiritual life which Adam’s sin had forfeited, and the union with Godhead was a better, closer union than Adam could claim. Adam lost the companionship of the Holy Ghost which filled his soul with spiritual life. Jesus being consubstantially united with the Godhead can have no part of His Being withdrawn from that Divine life. Whatever belongs to Him as a Person is, and must be, under the quickening influence of His Divinity. The law of His human life could suffer no violation. His human organism could not be maimed. All that He had assumed into vital connection with Himself He glorified, for that vitality was imperishable. His material nature was thus completely taken up into the condition of the spiritual life, and exempted from those conditions which fetter the created world.
From The Life Beyond the Grave: A Series of Meditations upon the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ by R. M. Benson SSJE (London, 1885).