perpetual tenderness, and hear Him saying: 'I am ... the Living One,
and I became dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.'

These forty days assure us of the narrow limits of the power of
death. Love lives through death, memory lives through it. Christ has
lived through it and comes up from the grave, serene and tender, with
unruffled peace, with all the old tones of tenderness in the voice
that said 'Mary!' So may we be sure that through death and after it
we shall live and be ourselves. We, too, shall show ourselves alive
after we have experienced the superficial change of death.

III. The change in Christ's relations to the disciples and to the
world. 'Appearing unto them by the space of forty days.'

The words mark a contrast to Christ's former constant intercourse
with the disciples. This is occasional; He appears at intervals
during the forty days. He comes amongst them and disappears. He is
seen again in the morning light by the lake-side and goes away. He
tells them to come and meet Him in Galilee. That intermittent
presence prepared the disciples for His departure. It was painful and
educative. It carried out His own word, 'And now I am no more in the
world.'

We observe in the disciples traces of a deeper awe. They say little.
'Master!' 'My Lord and my God!' 'None durst ask Him, Who art Thou?'
Even Peter ventures only on 'Lord, Thou knowest all things,' and on
one flash of the old familiarity: 'What shall this man do?' John, who
recalls very touchingly, in that appendix to his Gospel, the blessed
time when he leaned on Jesus' breast at supper, now only humbly
follows, while the others sit still and awed, by that strange fire on