Touch Me Not

Preached on 04-08-01

"TOUCH ME NOT"

A Sermon by the Rev. Patrick A. Rose

"Jesus said to her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father." (Jn. 20:17)

EVERYTHING OF THE CHURCH centers upon the Lord's resurrection from the sepulcher. When the Lord rose on the first Easter morning, He had, we are taught, "completely united the Divine Essence to the Human Essence, and the Human to the Divine" (AC 2921:6). This union is the very soul and life of all that the church stands for, and all that the church is. Indeed, we read in the Arcana that "the very essential of the church is the acknowledgment of the union of the Divine itself in the Lord's Human." (AC 10370). The acknowledgment of this union, must, we are told, be "in each and all things of worship" (ibid.). It is at the very heart of the Word itself. In its deepest sense, all things of the Word treat of this union.

Why is this? It is because upon it depends everything of salvation. As we read further in the Arcana, "the salvation of the human race depends solely upon this union. Moreover, the Lord came into the world for the sake of effecting this union" (ibid.).

Think what this means. It means that if the Lord had not glorified His Human, it would be completely impossible for anybody in this world to go to heaven. It would be completely impossible for us to be lifted up from the misery of evil, into the light and joy of eternal life.

It is because of this that, when, during this Easter season, we celebrate His triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and when we celebrate His resurrection from the sepulchre, we are not simply celebrating an historical event. We are celebrating the Lord's salvation. We are celebrating the fact that we can be saved, that the Lord loves us, and reached down to us to lead us into His heavenly kingdom. The Lord's resurrection is a universal event. It affected all who had lived before that time, and all who would be born thereafter. Indeed, it is said that "the glorification and resurrection of the Lord as to His Human is the source of all salvation" (AC 7828).

This was the purpose of the Lord's birth into the world. It was the purpose of the whole process of the glorification. All that the Lord did, all that He underwent, and all that He accomplished, had one single end. He came that He might save and be conjoined with the human race. This was, is, and always will be the one single purpose of the Divine love. We read "that in the union of Himself with the Father, the Lord had in view the conjunction of Himself with the human race, and that He had this at heart, because it was His love" (AC 2034:2).

When the Lord was born into the world, He assumed a human so that He could be immediately present with us on the natural plane. He then gradually, throughout His life, rejected all that was impure, and so glorified this Human; He made it Divine. He filled it completely with His Divinity so that He might be fully and completely present with mankind. And so, however low a person might be, however natural he might be, the Lord is, in His Divine Human, immediately present with that person, present with the fullness of His Divine power. If we but turn to the Lord, then He can save us. He can lift us up out of ourselves, and bring us to Himself in heaven.

It is because of this that the story of Easter involves not only the resurrection of the Lord from the sepulcher, but also the resurrection into heaven of those who love, trust and obey the Lord. As the Lord said after He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Me" (Jn. 12:32). Indeed, after the Lord's resurrection He formed a new heaven, a spiritual heaven, and into this heaven He raised all those in good who had lived since the time of the flood. So it was that on that first Easter morning, not only did the Lord Himself rise triumphant, but so too did multitudes of good spirits as they were raised by the power of the Lord, into heaven itself.

At the same time another resurrection was beginning to occur. Amongst the Lord's followers here on earth, it was gradually beginning to dawn on them who the Lord really was. They began to see that He was fully and completely Divine. A true idea of the Lord was arising -- was being resurrected -- in their minds, that idea upon which the church here on earth would be founded. But it was at first a slow process. We need to realize that even on Palm Sunday -- even when the Lord rode triumphant into Jerusalem -- even then the disciples didn't really understand who the Lord was. As we read in our first lesson, "These things understood not His disciples at the first" (Jn.12:16). They had no real conception that the Lord rode into Jerusalem as a King to show that He was the King of the Universe. Only after His resurrection, and then only gradually, would the Lord's followers accept the wonderful truth of who He really was.

This is why the followers of the Lord at first doubted the resurrection. Though the Lord had clearly told them that He would rise again, they at first refused to believe that this had actually happened. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene. At first she did not even recognize Him. Only after He spoke her name did she recognize Him. Then, when she went and told the disciples, they did not believe her. They could not believe that she could have see the Lord. Finally, the Lord appeared to the disciples themselves. But even after this, one of them, Thomas, who was not there when Jesus appeared, said that he would not accept what the others told him until he himself had not only seen the Lord, but had also seen and touched the very wounds the Lord had suffered on the cross.

The Lord had indeed risen, but only gradually, and with extreme reluctance, did His followers acknowledge this resurrection. Such blindness and reluctance, though, were not unique to the people of that time. In a way, all of us are blind and reluctant when it comes to accepting the Lord's resurrection. Each of us, in a way, has a tendency to reject the full implications of the Lord's resurrection. He rose from the grave as our Savior, our Redeemer, our King. And yet, within our hearts we are reluctant to turn to Him. We are reluctant to follow Him and obey Him, and so we resist the Lord's efforts to use His power to lift us up out of evil and falsity. We want to stay where we are. And to the degree that we do not follow the Lord in the way we live, to that degree we do not fully accept His resurrection.

When the Lord rose from the sepulcher, He rose with the fullness of Divine power. This is something we believe and acknowledge in our minds. And yet at the same time the full acknowledgement of the Lord's Divine power comes only as we experience it. It is only as we live the Lord's teachings, and it is only as we are regenerated by the Lord, that we come to see, see from the very bottom of our hearts, that all salvation, and all power, are from Him alone. Before this, there is a part of us that continues to be reluctant to accept fully the Divinity of the Lord.

This is why there was, amongst the Lord's followers, such skepticism when it came to accepting that the Lord had risen from the grave. This is why some of them failed to recognize the Lord even after they saw Him.

This was what happened when the Lord first appeared after His resurrection -- to a woman called Mary Magdalene. On the first Easter morning, we are told, Mary was standing outside the sepulcher, weeping. She then looked inside, and she saw two angels, sitting at the head and foot of where the Lord had lain. Then turning around, she saw a man standing outside the sepulcher. He asked her why she was crying, and who it was she was looking for. Mary Magdalene assumed it was the man who supervised the cemetery. She asked him where he had put the Lord's body. Then the Lord said her name. "Mary." Immediately she recognized the Lord. "Rabboni," she said. "My Master." She reached out to touch the Lord. The Lord told her not to do so. "Touch Me not," He said, "for I am not yet ascended to My Father" (Jn. 20:17).

Now just why the Lord said this to Mary is not completely clear. It seems as if the Lord was saying that at that point He was not yet fully glorified, not fully united with the Divine, which is what is meant by "ascending to the Father" (see AE 899:14). Indeed, one passage in the Writings seems to indicate that Mary was talking to the Lord at a point before He had fully risen and left the sepulcher, and so before He had completed the glorification of His Human (Ath. 161).

Whether or not the glorification was absolutely complete at this point, one thing is indeed clear. As far as Mary's mind was concerned, the Lord had not yet fully ascended to the Father. In her mind He was not yet fully glorified. Consider her state of mind. She is weeping. She thinks that the Lord is dead. When she sees the Lord, she doesn't even recognize Him. She thinks that this man has taken away the Lord's body. Her chief concern is to find the body, and carry it away to safety.

There is a strange blindness and a strange irony portrayed here. The Lord is alive, and yet Mary is trying to find His body so that she can give Him a proper burial. The Lord is standing right in front of her, and yet she asks Him to help her find the body.

Mary's blindness is a reflection of that spiritual blindness which exists in a person's mind before he is fully regenerated. In the Arcana it is said that "Those who are being regenerated and being made spiritual are in the greatest obscurity as to truth. . . . The primary cause of this is that . . . [they] do not know what good is; and even if they should know, still they do not believe from the heart; and so long as good is in obscurity with them, so long is truth, for all truth is from good" (Ath. 161). This passage is not talking about a completely evil and unregenerate person. It is talking about somebody who is being regenerated, somebody who is on the way to heaven. And yet even such a person -- even somebody on the way to heaven -- doesn't fully recognize the truth, because, it is said, he doesn't yet fully understand what good actually is.

This is what we are like before we are regenerated. Of course, if we are indeed on the way to heaven, then in one sense we do know what is true, and we do have a knowledge, and indeed a feeling, of what is good. But still, at the very center, there is something missing. However much we may think we believe in the Lord as the source of all that is good and true, part of us still fails to accept this. We still have this feeling that the good we have is our own, rather than the Lord's. And we still feel that in some way we see the truth all by ourselves, rather than being given to see it from above. The fact is, of course, that all that is good and true within us comes from the Lord alone. None of it originates within ourselves. The Lord is the source of all good and truth. And yet there is still something of self involved in our relationship with the Lord, and we are still reluctant to fully let go of the idea that in some way we can save ourselves by our own efforts. We fail to realize just how dependent we really are upon the salvation of the Lord. We fail to fully grasp the need to give up all sense of pride in our own accomplishments.

Now we cannot know the spiritual state of Mary Magdalene. It does appears that she was a good woman. The Lord had cast seven demons out of her, and she had become a faithful follower. On Easter morning, though, she fails to recognize Him. Indeed, she sees Him simply as someone who can help her find the body, so that she herself can bury it. And indeed there is a sense in which all who are regenerating seek to bury the Lord by themselves.

Now to bury the Lord does not here represent something sinister or evil. In the Word, burial generally represents resurrection and salvation: death and burial are, after all, the gateway to eternal life. Mary's trying to take the Lord's body away for burial is a reflection of the way in which the regenerating man tries, by his own power, to raise up within his mind those goods and truths which are properly the Lord's. He thinks in some sense he can save himself. Indeed, he thinks that in some way he himself can raise the Lord up within his mind.

And yet as long as we continue to imagine that we can save ourselves, and as long as we are reluctant to accept that all good and truth, and all salvation, are from the Lord alone, then we still do not fully recognize the Lord. We may know Him, pray to Him, and even love Him in our own way. But we do not yet fully accept Him as our one and only Savior. And so Mary did not recognize the Lord, even when He stood right in front of her.

As we walk along the path of regeneration, we still, for a very long time indeed, retain something of a sense of pride -- pride in our own strength, our own power, our own righteousness. Indeed, we imagine that if we were to lose this completely, we could never be happy. And yet the exact opposite is true. Until this sense of pride dies, until it is rejected, we can never be fully happy. As we read in the Apocalypse Explained, "man, . . . that he may rise again, must die both as to the body and as to his proprium, which is in itself infernal; for unless both of these die, he does not have the life of heaven" (Ath. 161).

If we are to one day enter upon eternal happiness, then our bodies must die. We must leave behind the things of this world, things we tend to love so very much. But we must also die in another way. We must also die as to our propriums, that is, as to those evils we have made our own. We must leave behind all sense of pride, and any feeling of attachment to our own favorite evils. Then, and only then, can the Lord raise us up fully into the happiness of heaven. Then, as this happens, the Lord Himself can be raised up within our minds.

When Mary recognized the Lord, He told her not to touch Him. He had not yet ascended to the Father. Though Mary now recognized the Lord, she did not really understand what had happened, and how He had changed. She wanted to touch Him, to hold onto her old idea of the Lord. She didn't want to let go. She didn't want anything to change. But when we finally come to recognize the Lord for what He really is -- as our one and only Lord and Savior -- then He is completely transformed within us. He is no longer simply a teacher, or "Rabboni," as Mary called Him. He is not simply the one who guides us and helps us as we attempt to save ourselves. He is our Savior. We do not save ourselves. Only the Lord can save us. Once we see this, then within our own minds the Lord is resurrected. He rises from the darkness and obscurity of our minds -- from the darkness of the sepulcher -- and causes spiritual light to shine within us.

Now of course we ourselves must make the effort to shun what is evil. We ourselves must make the effort to acquire truth from the Word. This is the freedom the Lord has given us. As we do these things, though, it is inevitable that something of pride is involved. It is difficult to shun evil without some sense of pride in having shunned it. But gradually the Lord leads us -- and leads us to see, finally, and beyond any doubt whatsoever, that all that we have done in the way of good, and all that we have learnt in the way of truth, is of the Lord alone. We have the power to do these things only because the Lord gives us this power. In the end we realize that by ourselves, left to ourselves, we would be nothing at all.

And this realization is the very beginning of heavenly happiness. Once we forget ourselves, we can then turn with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our strength, to the Lord alone. We can place our complete trust in Him. We can give ourselves over to Him completely. He becomes our one and only Savior and Lord. He is risen within our minds. Jesus Christ becomes our Lord and our Savior.

Amen.