How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection
The accounts of the Resurrection show us what we should and should not expect from the Gospels.
The accounts of the Resurrection show us what we should and should not expect from the Gospels.
Editor’s Notes
Fr Coleridge’s work did not just include commentary on the Gospels, but also their harmonisation.
In his two-volume work The Life of our Life – the same title as that which is given to his much longer series of the life of Our Lord – he deals with the harmonistic questions with great clarity, and sometimes even ingenuity.
The Resurrection is one area in which such ingenuity is needed. In this mini-series, we will present Chapters X and XI of Volume II, along with our own ordering of his harmony.
In this first part, he sets out the nature of the problems we face, and draws out what this actually shows us about the Gospels as documents of the Church.
The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord
The Life of our Life, Vol. II
Chapter X
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1876
Notices of this time scanty
In no part of the Gospel history is it more essential to keep in view the character of the records before us than in that which relates to the Resurrection of our Lord, and the forty days during which He remained upon earth before His Ascension.
Unless we understand the limits of the undertaking, so to speak, of the Evangelists, the ends which they had before them and the relation in which they place themselves to the great truths with which this part of the history is concerned, we shall certainly be disappointed in what they have done for us.
They will seem to have left us scanty and disconnected notices, relating rather to what is accidental and secondary than to central truths and matters of primary interest, and we shall be inclined to wonder, as many who consider the faith of Christians to rest upon literary and documentary evidence alone have wondered, how it is that so little of formal and demonstrative argument is furnished us for the greatest and most vital of all those acts of our Lord which are proposed to us as the foundations of our faith. For this pre-eminence can hardly be denied to the great truth of the Resurrection.
Disappointing to contemplatives
We are not only in danger of finding undue fault with the Evangelical records considered as historical evidences.
The devout contemplative soul may also complain that, whereas in the other portions of their narratives the Evangelists keep our Lord ever before us as the central figure in the picture—so central and prominent that all others are not merely subordinate to Him, but are actually, so to say, dwarfed by the extent to which He fills the eye—now, that we come to the moment of His triumph, to the gathering in, as it were, of the harvest for which His life and sufferings were the seed-time, He is almost withdrawn from our sight save for occasional visits and manifestations, which do not fill up a tithe even of the short space of time during which we know that He was on earth after He had risen from the dead.
Souls such as those of which we speak delight to accompany our Lord in thought from the moment at which His Blessed Soul was breathed out into the hands of His Father. They love to trace, as far may be, His steps as He went down—without His Sacred Body, which lay in the sepulchre for the appointed time—to the myriads of spirits who had passed out of this life in grace and faith, the patriarchs and prophets and saints of all ages, who, under whatever dispensation and law, had been redeemed by virtue of the Precious Blood which He had now shed upon the Cross.
They love to contemplate the welcome and joy in Limbus, the deliverance which His approach wrought in Purgatory, the acknowledgment of His Empire even in the utterly miserable regions of Hell. Again, they would like to have been told by the Evangelists how the Sacred Body, which had remained in the grave united to the Divinity, was reanimated on Easter morning by His ineffably glorious Soul, and how it issued through the stone which had been rolled to the door of the sepulchre, as it had before left the womb of Mary.
It would have delighted them if St. Luke, who has told us so much of the first months and years of our Lord’s existence, in the womb and in the arms of our Blessed Lady, had been commissioned to speak of the first interview between our Lord and His Mother a few moments after His Resurrection, or if St. John, who was now charged with a filial attendance upon her, had been allowed to speak of that communing between Him and her which Christian instincts naturally lead us to consider as the greatest occupation of our Lord during the forty days, when He was also engaged in comforting His friends or in instructing and confirming His Apostles for the great work which was now placed in their hands.
But all such desires must as yet be unsatisfied.
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