"'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my
brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your
Father; and to my God and your God.'

"Why did he say, DO NOT TOUCH ME? It could not be that there was any
defilement to one in the new body of the resurrection, from contact
with one still in the old garments of humanity. But could it be that
there was danger to her in the contact? Was there something in the
new house from Heaven hurtful to the old tabernacle? I can hardly
believe it. Perhaps it might be. But we must look at the reason the
Master gives--only of all words hard to understand, the little
conjunctions are sometimes the hardest. What can that FOR mean?
'Touch me not, FOR I am not yet ascended to my Father.' Does it
mean, 'I must first present myself to my Father; I must first have
His hand laid on this body new-risen from the grave; I must go home
first?' The child must kiss his mother first, then his sisters and
brothers: was it so with Jesus? Was he so glad in his father, that
he must carry even the human body he had rescued eternal from the
grave, home to show him first? There are many difficulties about the
interpretation, and even if true, it would still shock every heart
whose devotion was less than absolutely child-like. Was not God WITH
him, as close to him as even God could come to his eternal son--in
him--ONE with him, all the time? How could he get nearer to him by
going to Heaven? What head-quarters, what court of place and
circumstance should the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible hold? And yet
if from him flow time and space, although he cannot be subject to
them; if his son could incarnate himself--cast the living,
responsive, elastic, flowing, evanishing circumstance of a human
garment around him; if, as Novalis says, God can become whatever he
can create, then may there not be some central home of God, holding