The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

present, at any moment, or in any place, He could emerge to view andreappear
in corporeal guise, so that former intimacy was able to exclaim, 'It
is the Lord,' and so that He Himself was able to say, 'Reach hither thy
hand, and thrust it into my side;' and as soon as the purpose was fulfilled,
without necessarily quitting the spot, the glorified body ceased to be seen.
In its escape from the sepulchre, more entirely transfigured than it had
been on the Holy Mount, it was only when the Lord Jesus so willed, that
in flesh and blood, as of old, that body stood revealed; and when the design
was accomplished, it again retired into the super-sensual sphere of its
habitual invisibleness. It was ‘on this wise that Jesus showed Himself,'
when, at any period after His resurrection, He was seen at all. It was not by
entering an apartment, or by arriving from a journey, but by coming forth
from the impalpable and viewless, that, whether to longing disciples or to
the startled persecutor, He stood disclosed; no phantom, no mere vision,
courting severest scrutiny: 'Handle me and see,'--and into that materialism,
reembodied by His own divine volition, the normal state of His glorified
humanity was such as mortal sense cannot grasp; and just as when the
body was 'earthy;' the thing supernatural was for His 'face to shine as the
sun,' so now that it was 'heavenly,' the thing supernatural was for that body
to come out appreciable by untransfigured organs--perceptible to eyes and
ears which were not yet immortal like itself."
If such was the nature of the manifestations of Christ's spiritual body
in what we might style the provisional intervals, what might we expect
when it entered upon all the plenitude of its glory at the right hand of
God?
2. The right hand of God.
2. For to us the right hand of God is not a place, nor is the ascension
to His right hand the rising to a place. If the right hand of God means a
place, we might well ask, Where is His left hand? To sit at the right hand.
of God is to be associated in His sovereign rule, and to share in His
sovereign power. The right hand of God, if you relate it to presence, is
everywhere; if you take it in its Scriptural use, it either means the
omnipotence of God, or His regal majesty, and has no reference to space
at all. When we teach that