broke for them.  It was true then, that saying of Jesus, that He would rise again from the dead!  It was not some mysterious bit of teaching, the exact bearing of which they did not catch, but a literal fact!  And then while they still hesitated and doubted, while they still hid behind the closed doors, Jesus Himself came and stood in the midst with His message of peace.  It is often so, is it not?  While we are in perplexity and fear, while we think the next sound will be the knock of armed hands on the door, it is not the Jews that come, but Jesus with a message of peace.  Our fears are so pathetic, so pitiful; we meet life and death with so little of the understanding and the courage that our Lord’s promises ought to inspire in us!  We stand so shudderingly before the vision of death, are so much appalled by the thought of the grave!  We shudder and tremble as the hand of death is stretched out toward us and ours.  One is often tempted to ask as one hears people talking of death:  “Are these Christians?  Do they believe in immortality?  Have they heard the message of the first Easter morning, the angelic announcement of the resurrection of Christ?  Have they never found the peace of believing, the utter quiet of the spirit in the confidence of a certain hope which belongs to those who have grasped the meaning of the resurrection of the dead?” Here in Jerusalem in a few days the whole point of view is changed.  The frightened group of disciples is transformed by the resurrection experience into the group of glad and triumphant missionaries who will be ready when they are endowed with power from on high to go out and preach Jesus and the resurrection to the ends of the earth.

What in these first days the resurrection meant to them was no doubt just the return of Jesus.  He was with them once more, and they were going to take hope again in the old life, to resume the old mission which had been interrupted by the disaster of Calvary.  All other feeling would have been swallowed up in the mere joy of the recovery.  But it could not be many hours before it would be plain that if Jesus was restored to them He was restored with a difference.  A new element had entered their intercourse which was due to some subtle change that had passed upon Him.  We get the first note of it in that wonderful scene in Joseph’s Garden when the Lord appears to the Magdalen.  There is all the love and sympathy there had ever been; but when in response to her name uttered in the familiar voice the Magdalen throws herself at His Feet, there is a new word that marks a new phase in their relation:  “Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended.”