It is essential for us to realise the link there
is between Christ and the apostles. <...> If you read the
Gospels you will see that the apostles and the Lord Jesus Christ
were born and lived in the same area. Christ came to live in
Nazareth as a child; the apostles lived all about the place of
His abode. We know nothing about the early years of these men,
but if we think that Cana of Galilee was less than 4 miles away
from Nazareth, if we think that all the cities and all the
villages in which Peter and Andrew, John and James and others
lived were around the same place, we can imagine that they had
met and seen and heard the Lord Jesus Christ as a child, as a
youth.
We know nothing about the impact of His
personality growing harmoniously into the fullness of His human
stature, but links of personal knowledge and familiarity
existed. The disciples of John the Baptist, Andrew and John,
were the disciples of a cousin of the Lord. James was the
brother of John, Peter was the brother of Andrew. When they
first met Christ, they sought out their friends Nathanael and
Phillip. Even the words of Nathanael ‘Can anything good come out
of Nazareth?’ is not a mysterious saying. What would any one of
us say if he was told that God Himself had become man in a
village four miles away from his own village?
And then there is a whole process which we can
trace in the Gospels in which one can see how, gradually, the
disciples discover the Lord Jesus Christ, how He becomes
gradually more and more to them. And one day their relatedness
to Him is such that they could not leave Him even if they wanted
to. When most of Christ’s disciples abandoned Him the Lord said
to the Twelve: ‘Are you also going to go?’ And Peter answers:
‘Where should we go? Thou hast the word of eternal life’. This
relatedness between the disciples and Christ that began perhaps
in friendship, then in admiration grew to the relationship of
disciples and Master, on the way to Caesarea Philippi becomes a
recognition, proclaimed by one of them as a gift of God, of what
He truly is: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God’.
It is a relationship so deep, so perfect and
complete that they cannot leave Him even if terror comes upon
them. When Christ tells His disciples that He is going to
Bethany because Lazarus has died, His disciples say: ‘Are you
going back into Judaea? Were not the Jews about to kill you?’
And one of them says, ‘Let us go with Him and die with Him’. And
that one is Thomas, the one who so often is thought as a
doubter. No, he is not a doubter. He is ready to live and to die
with his Master, but he is not prepared credulously to receive
the news of Christ’s Resurrection with all its resurrecting
impact and life-giving power without being sure — because when
Christ died on the cross His disciples scattered, afraid, in
hiding, and yet, attached to Him with all the fibres of their
heart and mind and soul, they felt that life had gone out of the
world, life had gone out of their lives. That happens to us when
someone who is infinitely dear dies. Then we discover that
because this person has died everything which is shallow,
trivial, small, too small to be as great as life and death,
becomes irrelevant. We turn away from it, we become as great as
our perception of life and death can make us.
That is what happened to them, but then there
was no life, there was only crushing, destructive death. They
could no longer live because life had gone out of their lives,
but they could continue to exist. And all of a sudden they
discovered that Christ was alive and that they could live and,
more than this, that in a mysterious way because they had died
so deeply and completely through love and oneness with Him, they
could, through love and oneness — both His and theirs — be
alive, but alive with an unshaking certainty that no death can
deprive them of life any more, no kind of death; death was
defeated. This is what we sing at Easter, this is what we
proclaim as the Gospel. Life has triumphed, death has no power
over us. Our body has no power to kill us when it dies. This is
one of the essential witnesses of the apostles: not simply that
they are so faithful in their love for Christ that they are
prepared to die, but that they are so certain from inner
certainty, from the welling up of eternity within them, from the
victory within them of the life of Christ, that death is no
more. One can peacefully let go of temporariness, as St Paul
says. For him death does not mean divesting himself of temporary
life, it means to be clad with eternity, eternity fulfilled,
what it was incipiently, germinally, fighting for the fulfilment
in what he calls his body of corruption.
