PART TWO CHAPTER XXI THE FORTY DAYS To whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. Acts 1, 3. Open unto us the door of thy loving kindness, O blessed Mother of God; we have set our hope on thee, may we not be disappointed, but through thee may we be delivered from adversity, for thou art the saving help of all Christian people. O Mother of God, thou who art a deep well of infinite mercy, bestow upon us thy compassion; look upon thy people who have sinned, and continue to make manifest thy power. For thee do we trust, and to thee do we cry, Hail! even as of old did Gabriel, the chief of the angelic hosts. RUSSIAN. HESE Forty Days that intervened between our been utterly bewildering in the experience of the Apostles. Our Lord was once more with them; He had come back from the grave; that would have been the central experience. But in His intercourse with them He was so changed, the same and yet with a vast difference. We think of the perplexed group of the disciples gathered in the familiar place, going over the recent facts and trying to adjust themselves to them. Just what is the difference that death and resurrection have made, we hear them discussing. Is it that He appears and disappears so strangely, not coming any longer to be with them in the old way, with the old familiar intercourse? There is obviously no failure in Himself, no decline in love; but there is a decline in intimacy. They themselves feel a strange awe in His presence such as they had not been accustomed to feel in the past. They feel too that this restrained intercourse is but temporary, that at any moment it may end. The instructions He is giving them are so obviously final instructions, fitting them for a future in which He will not be with them. Amid all this perplexity we try to see Our Lady and to get at her mind. She was no doubt in the small group eagerly waiting our Lord's coming, dreading each time He left them that He would re turn no more. One thinks of her as less bewildered than the others because her interest was more concentrated. She had no problems to work out, no perplexities to absorb her; she had simply to love. Life to her was just love-love of the Son Whom she had brought forth and Whom she had followed so far. She lived in His appearings; and between them she lived in remembrance of them. One does not think of her as dwelling very much on what He says, but as dwelling upon Him. The thought of Him absorbs her. She has passed into that relation to our Lord that in the years to come many souls will strive to acquire the state of absorbed contemplation, the state in which all things else for the time recede and one is alone with God. God so fills the soul that there is room there for nothing else. For the Apostles these were days of immense importance as days in which they were compelled to reconstruct their whole view of the meeting of our Lord's mission and of their relation to it. They came to these days with their settled notion about the renewed Kingdom of Israel and of our Lord's reign on earth which His teaching hitherto had not been able to expel; but now they are compelled to see that the Kingdom of God of which they are to be the missionaries is a Kingdom in another sense than they had so far conceived it. It differs vastly from their dream of an Israelite empire. It is no doubt true that this mental revolution is of slow operation, and that even when certain truths are grasped it will still take time to grasp them in all their implications. For long their Judaism will impede their full understanding of the meaning of the Kingdom of God. It will be years before they can see that it is a non-Jewish fact and that other nations will stand on an equality with them. But they will by the end of the Forty Days have grasped the fact that they are not engaged in a secular revolution and are not entering on a career of worldly power. They will be ready for their active ministry after Pentecost, a ministry of spiritual initiation into the Kingdom of God. When in response to their preaching men asked the question: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" They were ready with their answer: "Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." So the Forty Days were filled with new meanings emerging from the old teaching, of suddenly grasped significance in some saying of our Lord that they had assumed that they understood but in reality had attributed little meaning to. It is one of the striking things about our relation to spiritual truth that we can go on for long thinking that we are attaching a meaning to something which in fact, it turns out, has meant almost nothing to us. Some day a phrase which we have often read or repeated suddenly is lighted up with a significance we had never dreamed of. We have long been looking some truth in the face, but in fact it has never laid hold of us; we have made no inferences from it, deduced no necessity of action, till on a day the significance of it emerges |