A contemporary artist has painted Mary and Jesus standing in the garden Easter morning. They are sad of countenance, with drooping heads and limply hanging arms. He has given his painting the title, Touch Me Not.

The artist has chosen a scriptural theme. He has used biblical characters. He even has a text for a title. He has handled his subject reverently with feeling. Yet, to my way of thinking, he has chosen the wrong emotional frame.

For this text, Touch Me Not, is no biblical parroting of some such sentiment as Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. It is not re-wording of Dante’s inscription for the gates of Hades: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” “Touch me not is a proclamation in Holy Scripture not of tragedy, but of triumph. It is not a rejection and prohibition of fellowship, but part of an invitation to communion on a higher, more intimate and imperishable plane.

Look carefully at this narrative which C. H. Dodd calls, “the most humanly moving of all the stories of the risen Christ.” Mary Magdalene lingers by the empty tomb. The other women and the disciples who had come early and found the sepulchre empty have raced away. The horror of the appalling grave robbery had put them to flight. But Mary’s depth of grief and sense of loss have stunned her to all other sensations. Her attention and emotions are fixed on that dear, dead broken body which she cannot find. When the angels in the tomb ask her: “Why are you weeping?” she, with no noticeable surprise at their presence, says: “Because they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid Him.” Then when Jesus, from behind, asks her the same question: “Woman, why are you weeping? Who do you seek?” Thinking it is the gardener, with her attention still fixed on that dear friend’s form, she says: “Sir, if you have taken Him, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”

Then, Jesus, as if to awaken a sleep-walker, or to shake to reality one preoccupied with thoughts far away, pronounced her name as in love and tenderness He had spoken it so often before. “O, Teacher,” she cried, as her spirit leaped up that vast, deepest chasm in all the universe from the lowest, darkest valley of human grief to the highest, sun-splashed peak of human joy, “O, Teacher!” Then as she lunged forward to grasp His knees in a warm embrace, came the strange remark: “Do not touch me,” or as the original has it: “Do not cling to me.”

But Jesus is not rebuffing Mary. He is not saying this is the end of all. He is yet with her. He is talking to her in tones of love and understanding. He is simply saying that their relationship continues in spite of death, but the fact of death has changed somewhat the nature of their fellowship. “You must not cling to me, Mary.”

Is not the best and more enduring part of every human relationship the spiritual part? There is more intimacy, more understanding, more abiding joy in a truly spiritual relationship than a mere physical proximity, in visual and tangible propinquity. Sometimes it happens that a husband and wife find they haven’t much to hold them together after their hair has turned to silver, or come out. But others find the beauty and joy of their relationship increasing with the years and instead of growing apart, they grow more and more together.

Between David Livingstone and his father, there was a deep understanding and a strong spiritual bond. Though separated for years in time and by thousands of miles of land and sea, they preserved an amazing closeness. George Seaver, in his biography, describes their last night together before David left for his missionary journeys. Late into the night they talked over the prospect of Christian missions. They agreed that the time would come when rich men and great men would think it an honor to support whole stations of missionaries, instead of spending their money on hounds and horses.

They were up at five the next morning, had family prayers, said farewells, and his father tramped the familiar road to Glasgow with David and there bid him goodbye. Sixteen years later, on his way home and wanting nothing so much as another family reunion, David Livingstone heard when he reached Cairo of his father’s death. The old man had lived long enough to hear from Capetown the tumult of acclaim that greeted his son’s tremendous achievement, and had earnestly hoped to be spared long enough to see once again the son of whom he was so proud.

“You wished so much to see David,” said one of his daughters, as his life was ebbing away.

“Aye, very much, very much; but the will of the Lord be done,” was his reply. Then after an interval of silence:

“But I think I’ll know whatever is worth knowing about him. When you see him, tell him I think so!”

The spiritual bond is the significant one. When there is recognition and understanding there, that’s the ultimate.

Every reader of the resurrection narratives must be impressed with the striking similarities. In every instance, the risen Lord is revealed only to those who knew and loved and believed in Him prior to the crucifixion. There is no record that Pilate or Herod or Caiphas saw Christ risen from the dead.

Then, too, in each appearance the resurrected Lord is not easily recognizable. Mary first mistook Him for the gardener. The travelers to Emmaus, though they walked the way with Him, for a time did not know it was He. Peter and the disciples fishing saw Him on the lakeshore and heard Him call, but didn’t know who it was. In each instance, there was something changed, transformed, difficult to recognize about the risen, glorified Lord.

Then there is this, too, in every instance when recognition finally dawns, it is a spiritual characteristic from the Jesus of history that sparks recognition. Upon Mary in the garden realization dawns when she hears her name spoken in the old familiar tones of love and acceptance. Emmaus travelers became aware of their fellow travelers identity when they observed the reverent way He laid hold of the common things of life and blessed and broke the bread. Thomas acknowledges the reality of the resurrected Christ not when He touches and feels, but when He has before Him again the old familiar patience of His Lord with the honest doubters problems and Christ’s courage to probe anywhere to get to truth. And to Peter, in the boat, recognition comes when he beholds what miracles are wrought in life when men are obedient to His word, even to the casting of the net on the other side of the ship.

All spiritual, you see — spiritual. That’s how Christ revealed Himself then to those who loved Him: “No, Mary, not by touching. Do not cling to me.” And now? Schweitzer says that still Christ comes as one unknown, as of old He came to the disciples by the lakeside. He speaks still the same word: “Follow me.” He sets us to the tasks that He must perform in our time. And to as many as obey, in the trials, sufferings and hardships they shall pass through in His fellowship, they shall in their own experience know who He is.

And it is on the basis of the enduring quality of these spiritual realities that dwelt first in Christ and then by faith in us that we have hope for immortality and fellowship with Christ now and forever.

Is it too difficult for us to believe that we are immortal? That this personality, this soul, this conscious existence we know as “I” should survive the experience of death and live on knowingly beyond the grave?

Wernher Von Braun, top missile man for the U. S., testifies that his scientific experience teaches him: “that nature does not know extinction. It only knows transformation. Science tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace.” . . . So, affirms Von Braun: “if God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of his universe, doesn’t it make sense to assume that He applies it also to the masterpiece of His creation — the human soul? I think it does. I believe in man’s immortality.”

Yes, and the Christian gospel proclaims the nature of that transformation to another recognizable body. St. Paul says that it will be like Christ’s transformation, and it will be to a spiritual body. It is not the same body. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of heaven. The same touching and tasting and smelling will not remain. The finest spiritual qualities, though, of the personality rather than being brought ultimately to decay and extinction, grow more and more glorious.

Dr. Arthur Compton, the physicist, says that he is appalled by the thought of the vast waste there would be in the universe if there were no conscious existence, no continuation of personality beyond the grave: “It takes a whole lifetime to build the character of a noble man,” says Arthur Compton. “The exercise of the discipline of youth, the pains and pleasures of reality, the loneliness and tranquility of age. These make up the fire through which we must press to bring out the gold in the soul. Having been thus perfected, what shall nature do with him? Annihilate him? What infinite waste.”

And then there are those poor mistakes and failures and broken things that most of us are. The Widow of Eye Street, in Masefield’s poem, went to witness the execution of her son. Poor wretched woman, as she watched and felt her heart break, prayed, and as she prayed she spoke of her hope of eternal life as “the peace for broken things too broke to mend.” There was no mending anything on earth for her son. Only the eternal God can deal with things too broke to mend.”

“Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him. There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”