It is even so; for there are the shroud, and the napkin, and the heavenly
watchers; and when he awoke, and cast off his grave-clothes, the
earthquake was felt in the city, and jarred the gates of hell. “The Hind
of the morning” is up earlier than any of his pursuers, “leaping upon the
mountains, and skipping upon the hills.” He is seen first with Mary at
the tomb; then with the disciples in Jerusalem; then with two of them on
the way to Emmaus; then going before his brethren into Galilee; and
finally, leaping from the top of Olivet to the hills of Paradise; fleeing
away to “the mountains of spices,” where he shall never more be hunted by
the black prince and his hounds.
Christ is perfect master of gravitation, and all the laws of nature are
obedient to his will. Once he walked upon the water, as if it were
marble beneath his feet; and now, as he stands blessing his people, the
glorious form so recently nailed to the cross, and still more recently
cold in the grave, begins to ascend like “the living creature” in
Ezekiel’s vision, “lifted up from the earth,” till nearly out of sight;
when “the chariots of God, even thousands of angels,” receive him, and
haste to the celestial city, waking the thrones of eternity with this
jubilant chorus—“Lift up your heads, O ye gates! and be ye lifted up, ye
everlasting doors! and the King of glory shall come in!”
Christ might have rode in a chariot of fire all the way from Bethlehem to
Calvary; but he preferred riding in a chariot of mercy, whose lining was
crimson, and whose ornament the malefactor’s cross. How rapidly rolled
his wheels over the hills and the plains of Palestine, gathering up
everywhere the children of affliction, and scattering blessings like the
beams of the morning! Now we find him in Cana of Galilee, turning water
into wine; then treading the waves of the sea, and hushing the roar of
the tempest; then delivering the demoniac of Gadara from the fury of a
legion of fiends; then healing the nobleman’s son at Capernaum; raising
the daughter of Jairus, and the young man of Nain; writing upon the grave
at Bethany—“I am the resurrection and the life;” curing the invalid at
the pool of Bethesda; feeding the five thousand in the wilderness;
preaching to the woman by Jacob’s well; acquitting the adulteress, and
shaming her accusers; and exercising everywhere, in all his travels, the
three offices of Physician, Prophet, and Saviour, as he drove on toward
the place of skulls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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