Our Lord Jesus Christ “gave up all
that was His own – He gave Himself to His Father. He disclaimed any life which
did not belong to Him in virtue of His union with the eternal God” (F.D.
Maurice, Theological Essays (1853),
p. 166). According to the wisdom of men, it was nothing short of madness, as
His friends did not fail to point out (Mark
3,21). But the glory of the resurrection
made foolish the wisdom of the world.
The injunction of St. John “love not the world neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2,15), is directed by no means only at those whom we generally think of as worldlings. It is directed also at us who in our very Christianity, our very work for God, make room for the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of live, forgetting that we have nothing which we did not receive, forgetting that we live only as those who have first died with Christ, preferring the opinion of this world to the truth of God revealed when He raised His Son from the dead.
“This is
the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith” (1 John 5,3). As Christians we have to live and work in the
knowledge of that which is not apparent to our senses and which often contradicts
our human ideas of wisdom and achievement. For “in one sense it will be always
true that we shall toil in the night: true that the gathering of the Church
will be in the night: true that we shall be tempted to say within ourselves, we
have taken nothing.” We have therefore “to strive to learn and to work as
believing that sacrifice alone is fruitful” (Westcott, The
Revelation of the Risen Lord, p.
121 and 87). This will not mean that we shall grow slack or be content to leave
things as they are. The very opposite will follow. We shall work all the better
and all the harder if we are not worried about visible results, if we hand over
what we do to God in the knowledge that He will raise it up with Christ. It is
of the highest significance that St. Paul closes his great chapter on the resurrection
of the dead in 1 Corinthians with these words – “wherefore my beloved brethren,
be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch
as ye know that your labour is not vain in the Lord” (1 Cor 15,58). That is the victory which overcomes the world – the
faith which places all its confidence in the truth revealed to us when the
Crucified was raised up in glory.
(H.A. Williams, Jesus
and the Resurrection, p. 109-110)
