Glorification

By Nathaniel Dandridge Pendleton
1941

Part VI
THE RESURRECTION

I.  THE LORD'S RESURRECTION BODY

When Mary Magdalene spoke to the angels, the one standing at the head and the other at the feet "where the body of Jesus had lain," saying, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him," she was looking for the body taken down from the cross.  She supposed that it had been removed from the sepulchre.   After giving utterance to her complaint, she "turned herself back and saw Jesus standing," but she knew Him not.   He spoke to her, but she supposed Him to be the gardener; "and again she said, Tell me where thou hast laid Him.  .  .  .  Jesus saith unto her, Mary.   She turned herself, and saith unto Him, Rabboni." (John 20: 11 - 16)  After this, He stood in the midst of His disciples and showed them His hands and His feet.   And later, at Bethany, He "lifted up His hands, and blessed them," and in so doing "He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven." (Luke 24: 50, 51)

The echo of Mary Magdalene's complaint remained in the hearts of the Lord's followers.  They saw Him no more.   Where was He?  Where was His Body, which appeared to them living after His crucifixion?  For it was His Body which they saw and not a spirit.  Two things they knew from their own experience, and later they were known from the Scripture: - When He vanished from their sight, He was "carried up into heaven," and also He (His Body) was still present with them in the world in the Holy Supper.  For had He not pronounced the bread of that Supper to be His Body, and the wine His Blood?  His Body, then, was in heaven, and yet it was also in the world.

These two ideas presented a certain difficulty, and led to many divergent views.   Some held that His presence in the world in the bread of the Supper was an actual bodily presence there; others, that it was a symbol of His spiritual presence, representative of Him as He was in heaven.   In the Revelation given to the New Church, the two ideas remain fundamental to all thought on the subject, and the series of doctrinal statements based on them reflect a certain apparent divergence.   The reconciliation lies deep in the revealed arcana.

On the one hand, the Writings insist on His personal, His bodily presence in the midst of the spiritual sun above the angelic heavens, and on the other, on the full and real presence of His Human in the Holy Supper.   Again, while insisting on His personal presence in the sun of heaven, they reiterate the fact that He rose with the whole Body which He had in the world, in this unlike any other man; and that by the whole body is meant that body, not only as to its ultimate senses, but also as to their recipient organs; and, as if to provide for no escape, it is added that He rose with that of the Body which decays in the grave.   This would seem to be determinative.   It would appear that that which decays in the tomb is none other than the material with which He was invested by birth.   Therefore He must be present in the midst of the spiritual sun above the angelic heaven in that very material body.   But this leads to an impossible conclusion; for that which is material cannot penetrate into the heavens, much less above them.   Besides, the doctrine is delivered with iterated emphasis that His Body, after glorification, was no longer a form receptive of life, but became Life itself; that is, it was no longer material.   For matter is not life, but death; it is a recipient of life, and should it become life, it would cease to be matter, under any definition of the term which will stand.

That this teaching leads in the right direction, is clear from the two sweeping statements in the Doctrine of the Lord, n. 35; the one positive, and the other negative; the one stating what the Body of the Lord was after glorification, and the other stating what it is not.  And when two statements of universal import are given together - the one positive and the other negative, having reference to the same thing, the subject becomes sharply defined, and doubt is eliminated.  The positive statement in the number referred to is, that the Body of the Lord after glorification was substantial; the negative statement is that His Body after glorification was not material.  This must indeed be conclusive, and we must therefore insist that the phrase "whole body which He had in the world," and with which He rose, must be interpreted in terms of the Divine Substantial, and hold that it will not allow of the material as being included in His Body - certainly not the material as such - not as matter, that lifeless product of the natural sun.  If He rose as to this, we can only conceive of it as so changed, so resolved, that nothing of it remained as matter.  But it will be well to recall that the true primitive of matter is not matter.  In other words, that out of which matter was originally made - by the natural sun process - was the spiritual, or what is the same, the substantial.  Resolve matter into its true primitive, then, and we have the substantial, - a word applied as descriptive of the Lord's Body after glorification.  And we may therefore conclude that decay in the tomb is the process of separating the substantial from the material.

It was important that the disciples should think of the risen Body which appeared to them, not as a spirit, but even as the very body which they had before known.  For they were "affrighted"  - at a spirit; nor could they understand that spirit which, in truth, He was.  They could not perceive the spirit as substantial, because of their ignorance and their superstition.  To them it was the same Body; and indeed it was so, with the exception of its material clothing.  It was the identical Body which appeared to them at the transfiguration.  It was "that whole Body" which He had in the world, parted from its material or Mary vestment.  Thus they saw Him after the resurrection, when they identified Him by sight and touch, even as matter touches matter.  And yet they noted a marvel indicative of a difference.  They saw, as with amazement, His Body come to them passing through closed doors.  With a material body such as He formerly possessed, this would have been impossible; and so the Writings observe that "as His Body was no longer material, but Divine substantial, He came unto His disciples when the doors were shut." (Doct.  of Lord 35. )

It is important at this point to remember that the substantial is not a refined material - not a material so fine as to penetrate and thus pass through a closed door.  The solution does not lie in that direction.  We may be disposed to follow this mistaken line of thought, because of the statement that the substantial is the primitive of the material, and being such a primitive, stands as the smallest units of spacial matter, and as such may penetrate all gross matter.  But it is not so.  The substantial stands, as it were, over against the material - in a realm as if apart - yet everywhere related to the material by the intimacy of correspondence.  This substantial is not a spacial quality - but is a form of life - a form of love and wisdom in use.  Its conversion into material by the solar process deprives it of life, of love and wisdom, leaving as the result of the process a dead mass, capable only of external or local motion, and having three fixed dimensions.

While, then, the substantial is indeed the true primitive of matter, it is not a primitive to be conceived of as a small spacial unit, or even the smallest of spacial units.  These smallest of matter are the natural sun entities, from which the life of love and wisdom has been expressed.  These, in all their degrees of formation and composition, were eliminated from the Body of the Lord by glorification.  Besides, that there was no penetration of the door as by a subtly constructed body of material properties, comes clearly to view when it is known that, on this occasion of His appearing to His disciples and seeming to pass through the door, what really happened was that their spiritual eyes were opened, with which eyes alone could they see the Divine substantial Body of the Lord.

It is thus related in the T. C. R. 793: "The Lord Himself showed, by touch and by eating, that He was a man, and yet became invisible to the eyes of His disciples.  Who is insane as not to acknowledge that, although invisible, He was just as much a man?  He was seen because the eyes of the spirit were opened with them who saw Him; and when these are opened, the things that are in the spiritual world appear as clearly as those which are in the natural world."

When, therefore, the disciples saw Him come through the closed door, when He showed them His hands and his feet, when Thomas thrust his hand into His side, their spiritual eyes were open, and the Body seen was not the material but the Divine substantial Body.  Clearly this must have been that "whole Body" which was His when in the world.  And yet, what of the statement, "a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have?"  Evidently the "flesh and bones" were not material but substantial - and as certainly a spirit, such as the disciples thought of, had not flesh and bones.  But the subject is not to be so readily disposed of.  The Writings say that the Lord intended by these words to announce to the disciples, and to all the world, that He was no longer in a Divine Angelic form only, but was now a Divine Man having a proprium of His own; that while other men are resurrected only as to the spirit, He arose with the Body.  And by this we understand the lower degrees of life - even with that degree of bodily life which with man is dispersed in the grave, and which is not a part of the spirit - man proper.  In other words, while all spirits have a substantial body in the other life, the Divine substantial Body of the Lord is of lower extension and deeper reach than that of the substantial bodies of spirits, extending indeed to, and including in itself, the life of the body materia which with men is dispersed.

A difficulty has arisen, perhaps, from not distinguishing between the substantial bodies of spirits and that material formation called the limbus, which continues to live after death; and as well from the conclusion that, as the limbus is the spirit's material ultimate, therefore the Lord must have had a limbus of material formation of even deeper reach into nature than that pertaining to spirits.  Here, it may be, there is a wrong turning of thought.  If we grant to the Lord a more ultimate material limbus than that pertaining to spirits, we shall inevitably be under the necessity of conceiving a Divine material Body for Him, and this is forbidden.  His body is spoken of as Divine Natural, but never as material.  The difference is fundamental.

The limbus of spirits, taken as it is from the purests of sub-solar material in the bloods of the human organism for the purpose of fixing - rendering stable - the finite spirit, is by virtue of its need and function material.  We perceive this necessity in the case of the individual spirits of finite man, for they need such a border of matter to give their finite forms fixation and permanence.  It is true that a certain sort of parallel may here be drawn between the limbus of spirits and the totality of creation in its relation to the Lord, whereby the Infinite receives as it were a certain fixation within the fields of creation.  But the totality of creation, while in a sense it embodies Him, is rather to Him as a garment.  Certainly creation is neither in the whole or part that Divine substantial Body of His resurrection.  This, as said, was not material, and in ascending it passed out of the world and up through the heavens to the plane of the spiritual sun, and that sun is now but a derivative from His resurrection Body.

That sun, the first of creation's initiament, where and whence is the first of finition, is now a sphere of life and light, of love and wisdom, emanating from His resurrection Body.  That sun, the topmost pinnacle of all that which may be regarded as creation, emanates as a sphere from His Body; and yet His Body, and with it the spiritual sun sphere, parallels the whole of creation from its heights to its depths.  His Body is the final buttress of all things in heaven above and in earth below.  It is the First and the Last, and as such, the inmost and most ultimate - not ultimate in the way of the lifeless forms of nature, but ultimate in the sense that those forms are sustained by it, not only inmostly from within, but also supported by it externally, or from without - by comparison, even as the units of the physical body of man are supported by the pressure of the ether round about them, or as the mass of man's body is supported by the pressure of the air about it.  In this respect the air is more ultimate than man's body, and even so are all things sustained from within and supported from without by the Divine substantial, the resurrection Body of the Lord.  As it stands in the midst of the spiritual sun, giving forth from itself the substance of that sun, we may see it as having extension down and along the line with all the descending forms of creation to the last, and as the very life of them all.  Seen from the bottom of the scale and seen as a form of life co-acting with the ultimates of nature, the Divine substantial is far more ultimated than the primes of the Spiritual sun for instance; but even in the lowest nature that substantial is life, and nothing but life.  And as life, it is one with - purely continuous with - the life in the heights of creation's scale.

In a most universal sense we must perceive three degrees of things: 1. The Infinite Divine-Substance in Itself - The Lord - His resurrection Body.  2. The spiritual sun - the first of finition and its direct derivatives, of which the heavens are made, called spiritual substance, having in it from the Lord a derivation of His life, of His love, and of His Wisdom.  But this spiritual substance is not the Lord, for it has not life in itself.  3. Matter - spacial - dead, possessing only local motion; of this the earths are made.  The Lord's resurrection Body is neither of the matter of the earths nor yet of that derivative substance called spiritual.  In no sense is it create.

A thousand times we are told that the spiritual sun is the Lord, and then we are solemnly warned not to regard it as the Lord.  The spiritual sun is the Lord in that it is a manifestation of Him, and of Him alone.  But the composition substance of that sun is not His own very substance.  It is a derivative - the first, but none the less a derivative - and as such, a reception vessel of finite formation.  It is full of love and wisdom, but of love and wisdom derived, in finite forms - a proximate vestment of His Body - a sphere of love and wisdom in use issuing from His Body - separated therefrom.  Such is the spiritual sun in its substance.  Considered as such, it stands apart from the flesh and bone of His Divine Body.  How much more removed is that third - that dead matter - from which all life of love and wisdom has departed!

So then, His resurrection Body is not material, nor is it even of the spiritual sun substance.  It is the Divine Substantial, - Life, Love and Wisdom in Itself.  As such, it is inmostly present everywhere; as such, it is received by man in the Holy Supper.

Can that which is above, within the spiritual sun, be seen?  Is this, His resurrection Body, visible?  Aye, when the angels look, they behold that sun, and on occasions the brightness of its rays are turned aside and the Man in the midst of it is seen.  Many who knew Him on earth, seeing Him, confessed that it was the Lord Himself.  It was so the disciples saw Him at the transfiguration.  This Divine Vision has been defined as an appearance seen according to the state of the beholders; and so it was.  But everything seen in heaven or on earth is an appearance according to state.  That is, every such thing is seen by a sense reaction, and this reaction is at all times and everywhere according to the state of the sensing organ.  But none the less the things are seen.  Even so the Lord was seen by the most interior and true sight possible to man or angel; and when so seen, He was there present a Man, and He was the same Man when not seen.  Unless He himself had been there, they could not have seen Him.  With His blessing and calling by name, as He called Mary Magdalene on that Easter morn, all may see Him.  But it is not with the eyes of the body, for they are dead, but with the eyes of the spirit.  Eyes made of the substance of the spiritual sun alone can see that which is in the midst of that sun - the eyes of love and wisdom.