Sermon Preached in Union Church on Easter Morning, April 8, 1928, by the Rey. E, F. Horst-Smith "And they remembered His Luke 3 he mind of man is a strange and wonderful thing. In its archives has ways and means of storing a vast amount of unrelated information that is not usually needed or available, but sometimes all that is required is one added fact in order to bring leaping out of their hiding-places numerous other and forgotten facts that have a bearing on St, with the result that numberless fragmentary ideas form themselves into. an organized scheme of thought, into one coherent and luminous whole, Something of that Kind happened within the minds of the early visitors to the Holy rpulchre on the first Easter morning.
Now, the words that suddenly Jeapt to their memory were spoken and at different times, but particularly during the weeks and months that immediately preceded the death of Jesus. In other ad-Aressex we have made extended ref erence to forecasts of His death made by Jesus at Creserea Philippi; and at the time of His Transfiguration; and also when He was setting out upon the last stage of the Journey to Jerusalem. In many of His parables, too, Jesus clearly foretold Iis death. "But nothing more certain than that Tis diseiples completely failed to understand these grave announcements. The words which appear to us, as clear 8 Tanguage can make them seemed to make no impression whatever upon the first hearers. You have only to read of the things they talked about immediately afterwards to see how complete was their misunderstanding. You might easily reach the conclusion that Jeans had wasted His breath and that His words were lost upon. them, but that was not the case, for our text tells us that on Easter morning Something happened to bring all there forgotten words leaping, back to their memory.
What we Know We are inclined to believe those who tell us that no ideas are ever completely lost. Tt is true that at any one time we are only conscious of the merest fraction of the things we know. All kinds of things are stored away in the godowns of the mind of which we have no conscious recollection. Most of them never return to consciousness at all, but ome of them do; something happens to stimulate them and they ome leaping to the foreground of the mind. Now, so far as we can tell, the death of Jesus did not have this effect upon the disciples. When the-actual tragedy which Jesus had #0 often foretold actually' occurred, we might have thought that the fulfiiment of the forecast would have Yecalled the forecast itself. We should have expected them to say something like thie:—"This is what He told us would happen. His words at the time did not impress us and we did not believe them, but now we recall His frequent refer ences to a cross and His evident desire to prepare us." But the crops did not have that effect upon them. For them it was a relieved darkness; it contained no plan and, Answered no purposes: it was an nitter frustration of all their hopes: it Spelt complete chaos. Tt is beand the power of words to describe the black darkness that filled the minds of the friends of Fests on the two nights that followed the Erne ixion. Tt is, however, one Nature' wise provisions that, at the arkest times, some form of aetivit 48 usually demanded of us. Work fig the anodye of despair. So, the third morning, and before sawn, some of the devout women who had Believed in Jesus went to the putchre to embalm His body. The Very nature of their ministrations precluded all thought of is rising again. Such high hopes had even occurred to them. As they proached the tomb, their grief was Bartly forgotten by the facing of a practical problem—namely, the moving of the great stone which they expected would bick the en-destination they discovered the stone was already rolled away and the body of Jesus was not there. Their first thoughts were of perplexity and suspicion. What new devilry had been at work? Who had stolen the body?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.