This new thing in our Lord which held them back with a new word that they had never experienced before must have become plainer each day.  S. Mary feels no less love in her Son restored to her from; the grave, but she does not find just the same freedom of approach.  S. John could no longer think of leaning on His Heart at supper as before.  Jesus was the same as before.  There was the same thoughtful sympathy; the same tender love; but it is now mediated through a nature that has undergone some profound change in the days between death and resurrection.  The humanity has acquired new powers, the spirit is obviously more in control of the body.  Our Lord appeared and disappeared abruptly.  His control over matter was absolute.  And in His intercourse with the disciples there was a difference.  He did not linger with them but appeared briefly from time to time as though He were but a passing visitor to the world.  There were no longer the confidential talks in the fading light after the day’s work and teaching was over.  There was no longer the common meal with its intimacy and friendliness.  There was, and this was a striking change, no longer any attempt to approach those outside the apostolic circle, no demonstration of His resurrection to the world that had, as it thought, safely disposed of Him.  He came for brief times and with brief messages, short, pregnant instructions, filled with meaning for the future into which they are soon to enter.

What did it mean, this resurrection of Jesus?  It meant the demonstration of the continuity of our nature in our Lord.  The Son of God took upon Him our nature and lived and died in that nature.  Our pressing question is, what difference has that made to us?  How are we affected?  Has humanity been permanently affected by the resumption of it by God in the resurrection?  If the assumption of humanity by our Lord was but a passing assumption; if He took flesh for a certain purpose, and that purpose fulfilled, laid it aside, and once more assumed His pre-incarnate state, we should have difficulty in seeing that our humanity was deeply affected by the Incarnation.  There would have been exhibited a perfect human life, but what would have been left at the end of that life would have been just the story of it, a thing wholly of the past.  It is not much better if it is assumed that the meaning of the resurrection is the revelation of the immortality of the human spirit, that in fact the resurrection means that the soul of Jesus is now in the world of the spirit, but that His Body returned to the dust.  We are not very much interested in the bare fact of survival.  What interests us is the mode of survival, the conditions under which we survive.  We are interested, that is to say, in our survival as human beings and not in our survival as something else—­souls.