We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which is distinguishable from our experience of communion with God; we respond through Jesus to God.  But if our God be the God of Jesus, we cannot think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellowship with Him.  His God would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the fellowship between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with the Other.  It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that “our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.”  In communion with God we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him.  They are ours in God; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of our life with God, is ours in His and our Father.

We have already passed over into the division of our subject which we called the Christ of reflection.  All experience contains an intellectual element, and we never experience “facts” apart from the ideas in which we represent them to ourselves.  But there is a further mental process when we attempt to combine what we think we have experienced in some relationship with all else that we know, and reach a unified view of existence.  For example, when Paul took the gospel out of its local setting in Palestine, and carried it into the Roman world, he had to interpret the figure of Jesus to set it in the minds of men who thought in terms very different from those of the fishermen of Galilee or the scribes at Jerusalem.  Similarly John, who wrote his gospel for Gentile readers, could not introduce Jesus to them as the Messiah, and catch their interest; he took an idea, as common in the thought of that day as Evolution is in our own—­the Logos or Word, in whom God expresses Himself and through whom He acts upon the world—­and used that as a point of contact with the minds of his readers.  We have to connect the Christ of our experience with our thought of God and of the universe.  Three chief questions suggest themselves to us:  How shall we picture Jesus’ present life?  How shall we account for His singular personality?  How shall we conceive the union in Him of the Divine and the human, which we have discovered?

The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no longer with them in the flesh.  When a cloud received Him out of their sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with God and with them.  They used their current symbol for God—­the Most High enthroned above His world—­and they pictured Jesus as seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Or they took some vivid metaphor of personal friendship—­a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat with them—­and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience.  These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God’s life and ours.  While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.