throw up a wall between us and the risen One. It is not the Shepherd
The instrument was now more perfectly tuned, and fitted both for
containing and giving forth new measures of love. The love of the risen life
is the largest and highest of all. It is of this love that we are made partakers;
a love beyond all that is earthly and human; a love that passeth knowledge.
4. The sympathies of the risen life. Resurrection does not form a gulf or
throw up a wall between us and the risen One. It is not the Shepherd
withdrawing from His flock to some inaccessible height. It is the filling up
of every gulf, the throwing down of every wall; it is the Shepherd bringing
Himself into closer and fuller sympathy with His flock. True, they are evil,
and He is good; they are earthly, and He is heavenly. But that which
resurrection laid aside was not anything of true humanity. It was but the
sinless infirmities which weighed down His true humanity, and kept its
sympathies from coming out into full development and play. The risen life,
then, is the life of truest and largest sympathy. In its perfection there is the
perfection of sympathy, the development of the full round of fellow-feeling
existing in the being of the Word made flesh.
5. The affinities of the risen life. The resurrection breaks no bounds save
those of mortality. It is the strengthening, not the weakening, of the links
that fasten the Son of God to us, and us to the Son of God. Resurrection ties
are the strongest of all. The risen life of Christ alters none of the affinities
between Himself and His saints; it has not lessened the number of the points
at which we come in contact with Him; it has not made Him less human,
nor stopped certain channels of communication between us and Him. His
immortality has not unlinked Him from those who are still in the flesh. His
risen life has not shaken or loosened the relationship He bears to the
unrisen. All that He was before, He is still, with something superadded of
new love, new power, new perfection, new glory. The difference between