Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 76
? 76 was so near. ’ ‘Perhaps he had found a gardener’s mantle which was dirty and ugly. ’ When she (Mary) does not recognise him he says imploringly: ‘Mary,’ a single word. But it shows his helplessness and loneliness. Then she will recognise him, she will kiss his hands; but he says: ‘Don’t touch me. ’ He was so aching all over from his wounds that she must not touch him. When he says, ‘I have not yet gone to my Father’ he uses the very flowery language of the Orient. He meant, ‘I am not dead yet’, but he feels so broken and ill and unhappy that he feels as if he could die any hour, and he sends his best wishes to his brothers. Is that not perfectly natural? He had suffered the meanest punishment they knew in those days. He was a condemned man and a pariah. He must not defile the land with his presence, and he dared not show himself in public lest his enemies find him again. He is so shy that he hides himself in the garden; and as he is walking along a lonely road to Emmaus, one day, he meets his disciples, but only for a little while. They dare not offer help, dare not walk with him for fear of detection. If the disciples had helped him back they would not have left him to go alone hungry and friendless. Through messengers he arranged to meet them in a lonely place. He disappears now and then, and at last he left them for ever. Once only (Matthew 28:18) he is talking in his high tone; ‘I have been given all power in heaven and earth. ’ We doctors know what that is: we call it ‘Dementia Paranoids’.