Chapter III: Part 3

Sad, indeed, for those who, when "deep calleth unto deep," have no such "strong consolation" to enable them to ride out the storm; who, when sorrow and bereavement overtake them--the lowering shadows of the dark and cloudy day--have still to grope after an _unknown Christ_; and, amid the hollowness of earthly and counterfeit comforts, have to seek, for the first time, the _only_ true One.

Oh! if our hour of trial has not yet come, let us be prepared for it--for come it will. Let us seek to have our vessels moored _now_ to the Rock of Ages, that when the tempest arises--when the floods beat, and the winds blow, and the wrecks of earthly joy are seen strewing the waters--we may triumphantly utter the challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"

"Say, ye who tempt
The sea of life, by summer gales impell'd,
Have ye this anchor? Sure a time will come
For storms to try you, and strong blasts to rend
Your painted sails, and shred your gold like chaff
O'er the wild wave. And what a wreck is man,
If sorrow find him unsustain'd by God!"

X.

THE MASTER.

Martha can withhold no longer from her sister the joyful tidings which she has been the first to hear. With fleet foot she hastens back to the house with the announcement, "The Master is come, and calleth for thee." Mary hears, but makes no comment. Wrapt in the silence of her own meditative grief, "when she heard that, she arose quickly and came unto Him."

"To her all earth could render nothing back
Like that pale changeless brow. Calmly she stood
As marble statue.

In that maiden's breast
Sorrow and loneliness sank darkly down,
Though the blanch'd lips breathed out no boisterous plaint
Of common grief."

The formal sympathisers who gathered around her had observed her departure. They are led to form their conjectures as to the cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened lattice. They can form but one surmise: that, in accordance with wont, she has betaken herself to the burial-ground to feed her morbid grief "She goeth unto the grave to weep there." Ah! little did they know how much nobler was her motive--how truer and grander the solace she sought and found.

There is little that is really profitable or hallowed in visiting the grave of loved ones. Though fond affection will, from some false feeling of the tribute due to the memory of the departed, seek to surmount sadder thoughts, and linger at the spot where treasured ashes repose, yet--think and act as we may--there is nothing cheering, nothing elevating _there_. The associations of the burial-place are all with the humiliating triumphs of the King of Terrors. It is a view of death taken from the _earthly_ entrance of the valley, not the _heavenly_ view of it as that valley opens on the bright plains of immortality. The gay flowers and emerald sod which carpet the grave are poor mockeries to the bereft spirit, shrouding, as they do, nobler withered blossoms which the foot of the destroyer has trampled into dust, and which no earthly beauty can again clothe, or earthly spring reanimate. They are to be pitied who have no higher solace, no better remedy for their grief, than thus to water with unavailing tears the trophies of death; or to read the harrowing record which love has traced on its slab of cold marble, telling of the vanity of human hopes.

Such, however, was not Mary's errand in leaving the chamber of bereavement. That drooping flower was not opening her leaves, only to be crushed afresh with new tear-floods of sorrow. She sought _One_ who would disengage her soiled and shattered tendrils from the chill comforts of earth, and bathe them in the genial influences of Heaven. The music of her Master's name alone could put gladness into her heart--tempt her to muffle other conflicting feelings and hasten to His feet. "_The Master is come!_" Nothing could have roused her from her profound grief but this. While her poor earthly comforters are imagining her prostrate at the sepulchre's mouth, giving vent to the wild delirium of her young grief, she is away, not to the victim of death, but to the Lord of Life, either to tell to Him the tale of her woe, or else to listen from His lips to words of comfort no other comforter had given. Is there not the same music in that name--the same solace and joy in that presence still? Earthly sympathy is not to be despised; nay, when death has entered a household, taken the dearest and the best and laid them in the tomb, nothing is more soothing to the wounded, crushed, and broken one, than to experience the genial sympathy of true Christian friendship. Those, it may be, little known before (comparative strangers), touched with the story of a neighbour's sorrow, come to offer their tribute of condolence, and to "weep with those that weep." Never is _true_ friendship so tested as then. Hollow attachments, which have nothing but the world or a time of prosperity to bind them, discover their worthlessness. "Summer friends" stand aloof--they have little patience for the sadness of sorrow's countenance and the funereal trappings of the death-chamber; while sympathy, based on lofty Christian principle, loves to minister as a subordinate healer of the broken-hearted, and to indulge in a hundred nameless ingenious offices of kindness and love.

_But_ "thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." The purest and noblest and most disinterested of earthly friends can only go a certain way. Their minds and sympathies are limited. They cannot enter into the deep recesses of the smitten heart--the yawning crevices that bereavement has laid bare. _But_ JESUS _can_! Ah! there are capacities and sensibilities in that Mighty Heart that can probe the deepest wound and gauge the profoundest sorrow. While from the _best_ of earthly comforters the mind turns away unsatisfied; while the burial-ground and the grave only recall the deep humiliations of the body's wreck and ruin--with what fond emotion does the spirit, like Mary, turn to Him who possesses the majesty of Deity with all the tenderness of humanity. The Mighty Lord, and yet the Elder Brother!

The sympathy of man is often selfish, formal, constrained, commonplace, coming more from the surface than from the depths of the heart. It is the finite sympathy of a finite creature. The Redeemer's sympathy is that of the perfect Man and the infinite God--able to enter into all the peculiarities of the case--all the tender features and shadings of sorrow which are hidden from the keenest and kindliest _human_ eye.

Mary's procedure is a true type and picture of what the broken heart of the Christian feels. Not undervaluing human sympathy, yet, nevertheless, all the crowd of sympathising friends--Jewish citizens, Bethany villagers--are nothing to her when she hears _her Lord has come_!

Happy for us if, while the world, like the condoling crowd of Jews, is forming its own cold speculations on the amount of our grief and the bitterness of our loss, we are found hastening to cast ourselves at our Saviour's feet; if our afflictions prove to us like angel messengers from the inner sanctuary--calling us from friends, home, comforts, blessings, all we most prize on earth--telling us that ONE is nigh who will more than compensate for the loss of all--"_The Master is come, and calleth for thee!_"

It is the very end and design our gracious God has in all His dealings, to lead _us_, as he led Mary, to the feet of Jesus.

Yes! thou poor weeping, disconsolate one, "The Master calleth for _thee_." _Thee_ individually, as if thou stoodest the alone sufferer in a vast world. He wishes to pour His oil and wine into thy wounded heart--to give thee some overwhelming proof and pledge of the love he bears thee in this thy sore trial. He has come to pour drops of comfort in the bitter cup--to ease thee of thy heavy burden, and to point thee to hopes full of immortality. Go and learn what a kind, and gentle, and gracious Master He is! Go forth, Mary, and meet thy Lord. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning!"

We may imagine her hastening along the foot-road, with the spirit of the Psalmist's words on her tongue--"As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God--for the living God!"

XI.

SECOND CAUSES.

With a bounding heart, Mary was in a moment at her Master's feet. She weeps! and is able only to articulate, in broken accents, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." It is the repetition of Martha's same expression. Often at a season of sore bereavement some one poignant thought or reflection takes possession of the mind, and, for the time, overmasters every other. This echo of the other mourner's utterance leads us to conclude that it had been a familiar and oft-quoted phrase during these days of protracted agony. This independent quotation, indeed, on the part of each, gives a truthful beauty to the whole inspired narrative.

The twin sisters--musing on the terrible past, gazing through their tears on the vacant seat at their home-hearth--had been every now and then breaking the gloomy silence of the deserted chamber by exclaiming, "If _He_ had been here, this never would have happened! This is the bitterest drop in our cup, that all might have been different! These hot tears might never have dimmed our eyes; our loved Lazarus might have been a living and loving brother still! Oh! that the Lord had delayed for a brief week that untoward journey, or anticipated by four days his longed-for return; or would that we had despatched our messenger earlier for Him. It is now too late. Though He _has_ at last come, His advent can be of little avail. The fell destroyer has been at our cottage door before Him. He may soothe our grief, but the blow cannot be averted. _His_ friend and _our_ brother is locked in sleep too deep to be disturbed."

Ah! is it not the same unkind surmise which is still often heard in the hour of bereavement and in the home of death?--a guilty, unholy brooding over _second causes_. "If such and such had been done, my child had still lived. If that mean, or that remedy, or that judicious caution had been employed, this terrible overthrow of my earthly hopes would never have occurred; that loved one would have been still walking at my side; that chaplet of sorrows would not now have been girding my brows; the Bethany sepulchre would have been unopened--'This my brother had not died!'"

Hush! hush! these guilty insinuations--that dethroning of God from the Providential Sovereignty of His own world--that hasty and inconsiderate verdict on His divine procedure.

"IF _Thou_ hadst been here!" Can we, _dare_ we doubt it? Is the departure of the immortal soul to the spirit-world so trivial a matter that the life-giving God takes no cognisance of it? No! Mourning one, in the deep night of thy sorrow, thou must rise above "untoward coincidences"--thou must cancel the words "accident" and "fate" from thy vocabulary of trial. God, _thy_ God, was _there_! If there _be_ perplexing accompaniments, be assured they were of _His_ permitting; all was planned--wisely, kindly planned. Question not the unerring rectitude of His dealings. Though _apparently_ absent, He was _really_ present. The apparent veiling of His countenance is only what Cowper calls "the severer aspect of His love." Kiss the rod that smites--adore the hand that lays low. Pillow thy head on that simple, yet grandest source of composure--"_The Lord reigneth!_" It is not for us to venture to dictate what the procedure of infinite love and wisdom should be. To our dim and distorted views of things, it might have been more for the glory of God and the Church's good, if the "beautiful bird of light" had still "sat with its folded wings" ere it sped to nestle in the eaves of Heaven. But if its earthly song has been early hushed; if those full of promise have been allowed rather to fall asleep in Jesus, "Even so, Father; for it seems good in Thy sight!" It was from no want of power or ability on God's part that they were not recalled from the gates of death. "We will be dumb--we will open not our mouths, because _Thou_ didst it."

Afflicted one! if the brother or friend whom you now mourn be a brother in glory--if he be now among the white-robed multitude--his last tear wept--for ever beyond reach of a sinning and sorrowing world--can you upbraid your God for his early departure? Would you weep him back if you could from his early crown?

Fond nature, as it stands in trembling agony watching the ebbing pulses of life, would willingly arrest the pale messenger--stay the chariot--and have the wilderness relighted with his smile.

But when all is over, and you are able to contemplate, with calm emotion, the untold bliss into which the unfettered spirit has entered, do you not feel as if it were cruel selfishness alone that would denude that sainted pilgrim of his glory, and bring him once more back to earth's cares and tribulations?

"We sadly watch'd the close of all,
Life balanced in a breath;
We saw upon his features fall
The awful shade of death.
All dark and desolate we were;
And murmuring nature cried--
'Oh! surely, Lord! hadst _Thou_ been here
Our brother had not died!'

"But when its glance the memory cast
On all that grace had done;
And thought of life's long warfare pass'd,
And endless victory won.
Then faith prevailing, wiped the tear,
And looking upward, cried--
'O Lord! Thou surely _hast_ been here,
Our brother has _not_ died!'"

We have already had occasion to note the impressive and significant silence of the Saviour to Mary. We may just again revert to it in a sentence here. Martha had, a few moments before, given vent to the same impassioned utterance respecting her departed brother. Jesus had replied to her; questioned her as to her faith; and opened up to her sublime sources of solace and consolation. With Mary it is different. He responds to her also--but it is only in silence and in tears!

Why this distinction? Does it not unfold to us a lovely feature in the dealings of Jesus--how He adapts Himself to the peculiarities of individual character. With those of a bolder temperament He can argue and remonstrate--with those of a meek, sensitive, contemplative spirit, He can be silent and weep!

The stout but manly heart of Peter needed at times a bold and cutting rebuke; a similar reproof would have crushed to the dust the tender soul of John. The character of the one is painted in his walking on the stormy water to meet his Lord; of the other, in his reclining on the bosom of the same Divine Master, drinking sacred draughts at the Fountain-head of love!

So it was with Martha and Mary, "the Peter and John of Bethany;" and so it is with His people still.

How beautifully and considerately Jesus _studies_ their case--adapting His dealings to what He sees and knows they can bear--fitting the yoke to the neck, and the neck to the yoke. To some He is "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, uttering His thunders"--pleading with Martha-spirits "by terrible things in righteousness;"--to others (the shrinking, sensitive Marys) whispering only accents of gentleness--giving expression to no needless word that would aggravate or embitter their sorrows.

Ah, believer! how tenderly considerate is your dear Lord! Well may you make it your prayer, "Let me fall into the hands of God, for great are His mercies!" He may at times, like Joseph to His brethren, _appear_ to "speak roughly," but it is dissembled _kindness_. When a father inflicts on his wayward child the severest and harshest discipline, none but he can tell the bitter heart-pangs of yearning love that accompany every stroke of the rod. So it is with your Father in Heaven; with this difference, that the earthly parent _may_ act unwisely, arbitrarily, indiscreetly--he may misjudge the necessities of the case--he may do violence and wrong to the natural disposition of his offspring. Not so with an all-wise Heavenly Parent. He will inflict no redundant or unneeded chastisement. Man _may_ err, _has_ erred, and _is_ ever erring--but "as for God, His way is perfect!"

XII.

THE WEEPING SAVIOUR.

The silent procession is moving on. We may suppose they have reached the gates of the burial-ground. But a new scene and incident here arrest our thoughts!

It is not the humiliating memorials of mortality that lie scattered around,--the caves and grottoes and grassy heaps sacred to many a Bethany villager. It is not even the newly sealed stone which marks the spot where Lazarus "sleeps." Let us turn aside for a little, and see this great sight. It is the Creator of all worlds in tears!--the God-man Mediator dissolved in tenderest grief! Of all the memories of Bethany, this surely is the _most_ hallowed and the most wondrous. These tears form the most touching episode in sacred story; and if we are in sorrow, it may either dry our own tears, or give them the warrant to flow when we are told--_Jesus wept!_

Whence those tears? This is what we shall now inquire. There is often a false interpretation put upon this brief and touching verse, as if it denoted the expression of the Saviour's sorrow for the loss of a loved friend. This, it is plain, it could not be. However mingled may have been the hopes and fears of the weeping mourners around him, _He_ at least knew that in a few brief moments Lazarus was to be restored. He could not surely weep so bitterly, possessing, as He then did, the confident assurance that death was about to give back its captive, and light up every tear-dimmed eye with an ecstasy of joy. Whence, then, we again ask, this strange and mysterious grief? Come and let us surround the grave of Bethany, and as we behold the chief mourner at that grave, let us inquire why it was that "_Jesus wept!_"

(1.) JESUS WEPT _out of Sympathy for the Bereaved_.

The hearts around Him were breaking with anguish. All unconscious of how soon and how wondrously their sorrow was to be turned into joy, the appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness--"Lazarus is dead!" When _He_, the God-man Mediator, with the refined sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no longer. His tears flowed too.

But it would be a contracted view of the tears of Jesus to think that two solitary mourners in a Jewish graveyard engrossed and monopolised that sympathy. It had a far wider sweep.

There were hearts, yes--myriads of desolate sufferers in ages then unborn, who He knew would be brought to stand as He was then doing by the grave of loved relatives--mourners who would have no visible comforter or restorer to rush to, as had Martha and Mary, to dry their tears, and give them back their dead; and when He thought of this, "_Jesus wept!_"

What an interest it gives to that scene of weeping, to think that at that eventful moment, the Saviour had before Him the bereaved of _all time_--that His eye was roaming at that moment through deserted chambers, and vacant seats, and opened graves, down to the end of the world. The aged Jacobs and Rachels weeping for their children--the Ezekiels mourning in the dust and ashes of disconsolate widowhood, "the desire of their eyes taken away by a stroke"--the unsolaced Marys and Marthas brooding over a dark future, with the prop and support of existence swept down, the central sun and light of their being eclipsed in mysterious darkness! Think, (as you are now perusing these pages,) throughout the wide world, how many breaking hearts there are--how loud the wail of suffering humanity, could we but hear it!--those written childless and fatherless, and friendless and homeless!--Bethany-processions pacing with slow and measured step to deposit their earthly all in the cold custody of the tomb! Think of the Marys and Marthas who are now "going to some grave to weep there," perhaps with no Saviour's smile to gladden them--or the desolate chambers that are now resounding to the plaintive dirge, "O Absalom, Absalom, would God I had died for thee; O Absalom, my son! my son!" Think of all these scenes at that moment vividly suggested and pictured to the Redeemer's eye--the long and loud _miserere_, echoing dismally from the remotest bounds of time, and there "entering into the ear of the God of Sabaoth," and can you wonder that--_Jesus wept!_

Blessed and amazing picture of the Lord of glory! It combines the delineation alike of the tenderness of His humanity, and the majesty of His Godhead. His Humanity! It is revealed in those tear drops, falling from a human eye on a human grave. His _Godhead_! It is manifested in His ability to take in with a giant grasp all the prospective sufferings of His suffering people.

Weeping believer! thine anguished heart was included in those Bethany tears! Be assured thy grief was visibly portrayed at that moment to that omniscient Saviour. He had all thy sorrows before Him--thy anxious moments during thy friend's tedious sickness--the trembling suspense--the nights of weary watching--the agonising revelation of "no hope"--the closing scene! Bethany's graveyard became to Him a picture-gallery of the world's aching hearts; and _thine_, yes! _thine_ was _there_! and as He beheld it, "_Jesus wept!_"

"Jesus wept! These tears are over,
But His heart is still the same;
Kinsman, Friend, and Elder Brother,
Is His everlasting name.

Saviour, who can love like Thee,
_Gracious_ One of Bethany!

"When the pangs of trial seize us,
When the waves of sorrow roll,
I will lay my head on Jesus,
Pillow of the troubled soul.

Surely none can feel like Thee,
_Weeping_ One of Bethany!

"Jesus wept! And still in glory,
He can mark each mourner's tear;
Loving to retrace the story
Of the hearts he solaced here.

Lord! when I am call'd to die,
Let me think of Bethany!

"Jesus wept! That tear of sorrow
Is a legacy of love;
Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,
He the same doth ever prove.

Thou art all in all to me,
_Living_ One of Bethany!"

(2.) JESUS WEPT _when He thought of the triumphs of Death_!

He was treading a burial ground--mouldering heaps were around Him--silent sepulchral caves, giving forth no echo of life!

It is a solemn and impressive thing, even for _us_, to tread the graveyard; more especially if there are there nameless treasures of buried affection. The thought that those whose smile gladdened to us every step in the wilderness, who formed our solace in sorrow, and our joy in adversity--whose words, and society, and converse were intertwined with our very being--it is solemn and saddening, as we tread that land of oblivion, to find these words and looks and tears unanswered--a gloomy silence hovering over the spot where the wrecks of worth and loveliness are laid! He would have a bold, a stern heart indeed who could pace unmoved over such hallowed ground, and forbid a tear to flow over the gushing memories of the past!

What, then, must it have been at that moment in Bethany with _Jesus_, when he saw one of those purchased by his own blood (dearest to him) chased by the unsparing destroyer to that gloomy prison-house?

If we have supposed that the tears of Martha and Mary were suggestive of manifold other broken and sorrowing hearts in other ages, we may well believe that graveyard was suggestive of triumphs still in reserve for the tomb, numberless trophies which in every age were to be reaped in by the King of Terrors until the reaper's arm was paralyzed, and death swallowed up in victory. The few silent sepulchres around must have significantly called to the mind of the Divine spectator how sin had blasted and scathed His noblest workmanship; converting the fairest province of His creation into one vast _Necropolis_,--one dismal "city of the dead!" The body of man, "so fearfully and wonderfully made," and on which he had originally placed His own impress of "very good," _ruined_, and resolved into a mass of humiliating dust! If the Architect mourns over the destruction of some favourite edifice which the storm has swept down, or the fire has wrapt in conflagration and reduced to ashes--if the Sculptor mourns to see his breathing marble with one rude stroke hurled to the ground, and its fragments scattered at his feet--what must have been the sensations of the mighty Architect of the human frame, at whose completion the morning stars and the sons of God chanted a loud anthem--what must have been His sensations as He thought of them, now a devastated wreck, mouldering in dissolution and decay, the King of Terrors sitting in regal state, holding his high holiday over a vassal world!

In Bethany He beheld only a few of these broken and prostrate columns, but they were powerfully suggestive of millions on millions which were yet in coming ages to undergo the same doom of mortality.

If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies, after all, but some passing hour in the world's history, but which has carried death and lamentation into many households--the sudden pestilence that has swept down its thousands--the gallant vessel that was a moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the "many ports that would exult in the gleam of her mast"--the next! hurrying down to the depths of an ocean grave, with no survivor to tell the tale!--or the terrible records of War--the ranks of bold and brave laid low in the carnage of battle--youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!--if these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous amongst us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the Pale Horse with its ghastly rider trampling under foot the vast human family; converting the globe in which they dwelt into a mournful valley of vision, filled with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men and animated frames!

The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the world's oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is "the _land of forgetfulness_!" Not so with the Lord of Life, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in appalling vividness before Him.--Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own,--vessels freighted with immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!

Yes! we can only understand the full import of these tears of Jesus, as we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great--the grassy sods of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy--the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye--the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the young exulting in the prime of manhood; the pious and benevolent, the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable decree; the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried away in the midst of scorned mercy--Oh! as He beheld this ghastly funeral procession moving before Him, the whole world going to the same long home, and He Himself alone left the survivor, can we wonder that _Jesus wept_?

(3.) Once more, JESUS WEPT _when He thought of the impenitence and obduracy of the human heart_.

This may not be at first sight patent as a cause of the tears of Jesus, but we may well believe it entered largely as an element into this strange flood of sorrow.

He was about to perform a great (His greatest) miracle; but while He knew that, in consequence of this manifestation of His mighty power, many of those who now stood around Lazarus' tomb would _believe_, He knew also that others would only "despise, and wonder, and perish;" that while some, as we shall afterwards find, acknowledged Him as the Messiah, others went straightway into Jerusalem to concert with the Pharisees in plotting His murder. When He observed the impenitence of these obdurate hearts at His side, He could not subdue His tenderest emotion. We read that, when He saw the sisters weeping, _and the Jews that were with them weeping_, Jesus wept. These Jews could weep for a fellow-mortal, but they could not weep for _themselves_, and therefore _for them, Jesus wept_!

One soul was precious to Him. He who alone can estimate alike the worth and the loss of the soul, might have wept, even had there been but one then present found to resist His claims and forfeit His salvation. But these tears extended far beyond that lonely spot in a Jewish village, and the few impenitent hearts that were then flocking around. These obdurate Jews were types of the world's impenitency. There was at that moment summoned before Him a mournful picture of the hardened hearts in every age--those who would read His gospel, and hear of His miracles, and listen to the story of His love all unmoved--who would die as they had lived, uncheered by His grace and unmeet for His presence.

Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a Redeemer's tears than _this_--the thought of His Redemption scorned, His blood trampled on, His work set at nought.

If we have thought of Him shedding tears over the ruin of the _body_, what must have been the depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed!--immortal beings spurning from them the day of grace and the hopes of heaven! Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more agonising and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity; those who might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and procrastinated, and finally perished!

If we think of it, it is not the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. _We_ put on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw it as a weeping Jesus sees it, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes in the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot His Son, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary.

Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a state of presumptuous impenitence--salvation unsought--Jesus a stranger--His name unhonoured--His Bible unread--His promises unappropriated--His wrath undreaded--defeating all His marvellous appliances of love, and remonstrance, and forbearance--meeting a prodigal expenditure of patience and long-suffering with cold and chilling indifference and neglect--casting away from you the hoarded riches of eternity which He has been holding out for your acceptance? In that sacred Bethany ground, as ye mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear for _you_! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom "a thousand years are as one day," marked even _then_ your present ungrateful apostacy or guilty alienation--there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love?

Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender sympathy still with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to think of Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin?

Ah, never was sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so eloquent as _this_. Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his fervid love of souls all the more striking when we find him confessing that he had wept like a child over those who were "enemies to the cross of Christ." We have often felt Paul's burning tears over hardened sinners to be touching and impressive. But what are they, after all, in comparison with those of Paul's Lord?

He, the Great Sun of the World--the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood--His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of Olivet--His tears seem to tell that He has clung till He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live.

And still does He linger among _us_. Though the night cometh, the beams of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if loth to leave the backsliding to their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own midnight of despair.

O Reader! leave not _this_ subject--leave not the graveyard of Bethany till you think of Jesus as then weeping for _thee_. Yes! for _thee_--thy pitiable condition--thy perverse ingratitude--thy slighting of His warnings--thy grieving of His spirit--thy unkindness to _Him_--thine obstinate disregard of thine own everlasting interests. Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that for thy soul--that traitor, truant, worthless soul--which like a stray planet He might have suffered to drift away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness--helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!--Yes! that for _thee_, JESUS WEPT!

"And doth the Saviour weep
Over His people's sin,
Because we will not let Him keep
The souls He died to win?
Ye hearts that love the Lord,
If at this sight ye burn,
See that in thought, in deed, in word,
Ye hate what made Him mourn."

XIII.

THE GRAVE STONE.

They have now reached the grave. It was a rocky sepulchre. A flat stone (possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it.

In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follow the footsteps of the Saviour. "Behold how He loved him," whisper the Jews to one another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the "Abolisher of death"--to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness--"I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction."

Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant deed? He breaks silence. But we listen, in the first instance, not to the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders--"_Jesus said, Take ye away the stone!_"[15]

What need of this parenthesis in His mighty work? Why this summoning in any feeble human agency when His own independent fiat could have effected the whole? Would it not have been a more startling manifestation of Omnipotence, by a mandate similar to that which chained the tempests of Tiberias, or the demoniac of Gadara, to have hurled the incumbent stone into fragments? Might not He who has "the keys of the grave and of death" have Himself unlocked the portals preparatory to the vaster prodigy that was to follow?

Nay, there was a mighty lesson to be read in thus delegating human hands to remove the intervening barrier. The Church of the living God may, in every age, gather from it instruction!

What, then, does the Saviour here figuratively, but significantly, teach His people? Is it not the important truth that, though dependent on Him for all they are, and all they have, they are not thereby released and exempted from the use of _means_? He alone can bring back Lazarus from his death-sleep. Martha and Mary may weep an ocean of tears, but they cannot weep him back. They may linger for days and nights in that lonely graveyard, making it resound with their bitter dirges, but their impassioned entreaties will be mocked with impressive silence. Too well do they know _that_ spirit is fled beyond their recall--the spark of life extinguished beyond any earthly rekindling!

But though the word of Omnipotence can alone bring back the dead, human hands and human efforts can roll away the interjacent stone, and prepare for the performance of the miracle; and after the miracle _is_ performed, human hands may again be called in to tear off the cerements of the tomb, to ungird the bandages from the restored captive, to "loose him and let him go!"

This simple incident in the Bethany narrative admits of manifold practical applications. Let us look to it with reference to the mightier moral miracle of the Resurrection of the soul "dead in trespasses and sins." Jesus, and Jesus alone, can awake that soul from the deep slumber of its spiritual death, and invest it with the glories of a new resurrection-life. In vain can it awake of itself; no human skill can put animation into the moral skeleton. No power of human eloquence, no "excellency of man's wisdom," can open these rayless eyes, and pour life, and light, and hope into the dull caverns of the spiritual sepulchre. "Prophesy to the dry bones!"--We may prophesy for ever--we may wake the valley of vision by ceaseless invocations, but the dead will hear not. No bone of the spiritual skeleton will stir, for it is "not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

But though it be a Divine work from first to last which effects the spiritual regeneration of man, are we from this presumptuously to disregard the use of means? Are prayer, and preaching, and human effort, and strenuous earnestness in the work of our high calling, are these all to be superseded, and pronounced unavailing and unnecessary?

Nay, though man cannot wake to life his dormant spiritual energies--though these lie slumbering in the deep sleep of the sheeted dead, and nothing but Lazarus' Lord can break the moral trance--yet _he can use the appointed means_. He dare not be guilty of the monstrous inconsistency and crime of willingly allowing impediments to stand in the way of his spiritual revival which his own efforts may remove! He cannot expect his Lord to sound over his soul the gladdening accents of peace, and reconciliation, and joy, if some known sin be still lying, like the superincumbent grave-stone, which it is in his power to roll away, and at his peril if he suffer to remain!

Christ is alone the "abolisher of death," and the "giver of life;" but notwithstanding this, "Roll ye away the stone!"--neglect not the means He has appointed and prescribed. If ye neglect prayer, and despise ordinances, and trifle with temptation, or venture on forbidden ground, ye are only making the intervening obstacle firmer and faster, and wilfully denuding yourselves of the gift of life. Naaman must plunge seven times in Jordan, else he cannot be made clean. To cleanse _himself_ of his leprosy he cannot, but to wash in Jordan _he can_. The Israelite must gaze on the brazen serpent; he cannot of himself heal one fevered wound, but to gaze on the appointed symbol of cure he can. In vain can the engines of war effect a breach on the walls of Jericho; but the hosts of Joshua can sound the appointed trumpet, and raise the prescribed shout, and the battlements in a moment are in the dust. Martha and Mary in vain can make their voices be heard in the "dull, cold ear of death," but at their Lord's bidding they can hurl back the outer portals where their dead is laid. They cannot unbind one fetter, but they can open with human hand the prison-door to admit the Divine Liberator.

Let it not be supposed that in this we detract in any wise from the omnipotence of the Saviour's grace. God forbid! All is of grace, from first to last--free, sovereign grace. Man has no more merit in salvation than the beggar has merit in reaching forth his hand for alms, or in stooping down to drink of the wayside fountain. But neither must we ignore the great truth which God strives throughout His Word to impress upon us, that He works by _means_, and that for the neglect of these means we are ourselves responsible. Paul had the assurance given him by an angel from heaven, when tossed in the storm in Adria, that not one life in his vessel was to be lost; that though the ship was to be wrecked, all her crew were to come safe to land. But was there on this account any effort on his part relaxed to secure their safety? No! he toiled and laboured at the pumps and rigging and anchors as unremittingly as before; and when some of the sailors made the cowardly attempt, by lowering a small boat, to effect their own escape, the voice of the apostle was heard proclaiming, amid the storm, that unless they abode in the ship none could be saved!

The true philosophy of the Gospel system is this, to feel as if much depended on ourselves; but at the same time entertaining the loftier conviction that _all_ depends upon God. Jesus, when He invites to the strait gate, does not inculcate remaining outside, in a state of passive and listless inaction, until the portals be seen to move by the Divine hand. His exhortation and command rather is, "Strive"--"knock"--_agonise_ to "enter in!" We are not to ascend to heaven, seated, like Elijah, in a chariot of fire, without toil or effort, but rather to "_fight_ the good fight of faith." The saying of the great Apostle is a vivid portraiture of what the Christian's feelings ought to be regarding personal holiness--"I laboured, ... yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."

As the Lord of Bethany gives the summons, "Roll ye away the stone," His words seem paraphrased in this other Scripture, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." You may feel assured that He will not impose upon you one needless burden; He will not exact more than He knows your strength will bear; He will ask no Peter to come to Him on the water, unless He impart at the same time strength and support on the unstable wave; He will not demand of you the endurance of providences, and trials, and temptations you are unable to cope with; He will not ask you to draw water if the well is too deep, or withdraw the stone if too heavy. But neither, at the same time, will He admit as an impossibility that which, as a free and responsible agent, it is in your power to avert. He will not regard as your misfortune what is your crime. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me."

Oh! let life be, more than it ever has been, one constant effort to roll away the stone from the moral sepulchre--carefully to remove every barrier between our souls and Jesus--looking forward to that glorious day when the voice of the Restorer shall be heard uttering the omnipotent "_Come forth!_" and to His angel assessors the mandate shall be given regarding the thronging myriads of risen dead, "_Loose them and let them go!_"

XIV.

UNBELIEF.

Man--short-sighted man--often raises impossibilities when God does not. It is hard for rebellious unbelief to lie submissive and still. In moments when the spirit might well be overawed into silence, it gives utterance to its querulous questionings and surmisings rather than remain obedient at the feet of Christ, reposing on the sublime aphorism, "All things are possible to him that believeth." In the mind of Martha, where faith had been so recently triumphant, doubt and unbelief have begun again to insinuate themselves. This "Peter of her sex" had ventured out boldly on the water to meet her Lord. She had owned Him as the giver of life, and triumphed in Him as her Saviour! But now she is beginning to sink. A natural difficulty presents itself to her mind about the removal of the incumbent grave-stone. She avers how needless its displacement would be, as by this time corruption must have begun its fatal work. Four brief days only had elapsed since the eye of Lazarus had beamed with fraternal affection. Now these lips must be "saying to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister." Death, she felt, must now be stamping his impressive mockery on that cherished earthly friendship, and, attired in his most terrible insignia, putting the last fatal extinguisher on the glimmerings of her faith and hope. "What need is there, Lord," she seems to say, "for this redundant labour? My brother is far beyond the reach even of a voice like Thine. Why excite vain expectations in my breast which never can be realised? That grave has closed upon him for the 'for ever' of time. Nothing now can revoke the sentence, or reanimate the silent dust, save the trump of God on the final day."[16]

Thus blindly did Martha reason. She can see no other object her Redeemer can have for the removal of the stone, save to gaze once more on a form and countenance He loved. Both for His sake, and the strangers assembled, she recoils from the thought of disclosing so humiliating a sight.

Alas! how little are fitful frames and feelings to be trusted. Only a few brief moments before, she had made a noble protestation of her faith in the presence of her Lord. His own majestic utterances had soothed her griefs, dried her tears, and elicited the confession that He was truly the Son of God. But the sight of the tomb and its mournful accompaniments obliterate for a moment the recollection of better thoughts and a nobler avowal. She forgets that "things which are impossible with men are possible with God." She is guilty of "limiting the Holy One of Israel."

How often is it so with us! How easy is it for us, like Martha, to be bold in our creed when there is nothing to cross our wishes, or dim and darken our faith. But when the hour of trial comes, how often does _sense_ threaten to displace and supplant the nobler antagonist principle! How often do we lose sight of the Saviour at the very moment when we most need to have Him continually in view! How often are our convictions of the efficacy of prayer most dulled and deadened just when the dark waves are cresting over our heads, and voices of unbelief are uttering the upbraiding in our ears, "Where is now thy God?" But will Jesus leave His people to their own guilty unbelieving doubts? Will Martha, by her unworthy insinuations, put an arrest on her Lord's arm; or will He, in righteous retribution for her faithlessness, leave the stone sealed, and the dead unraised?

Nay! He loves His people too well to let their stupid unbelief and hardness of heart interfere with His own gracious purposes! How tenderly He rebukes the spirit of this doubter. "Why," as if He said, "Why distrust me? Why stultify thyself with these unbelieving surmises. Hast thou already forgotten my own gracious assurances, and thine own unqualified acceptance of them. My hand is never shortened that it cannot save; my ear is never heavy that it cannot hear. I can call the things which are not, and make them as though they were. Said I not unto thee, in that earnest conversation which I had a little ago outside the village, in which Gospel faith was the great theme, if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?"

This Bethany utterance has still a voice,--a voice of rebuke and of comfort in our hours of trial. When, like aged Jacob, we are ready to say, "All these things are against me;" when we are about to lose the footsteps of a God of love, or _have_ perhaps lost them, there is a voice ready to hush into silence every unbelieving doubt and surmise. "Although thou sayest thou canst not see Him, yet judgment is before Him, therefore trust thou in Him." God often thus hides Himself from His people in order to try their faith, and elicit their confidence. He puts us in perplexing paths--"allures" and "brings into the wilderness," only, however, that we may see more of Himself, and that He may "speak comfortably unto us." He lets our need attain its extremity, that His intervention may appear the more signal. He suffers apparently even His own promises to fail, that He may test the faith of His waiting people;--tutor them to "hope against hope," and to find, in _unanswered_ prayers and baffled expectations, only a fresh reason for clinging to His all-powerful arm, and frequenting His mercy-seat. He dashes first to the ground our human confidences and refuges, shewing how utterly "vain is the help of man;" so that faith, with her own folded, dove-like wings, may repose in quiet confidence in His faithfulness, saying, "In the Lord put I my trust: why say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?"

Reader! It would be well for you to hear this gentle chiding of Christ, too, in the moment of your _spiritual_ depression;--when complaining of your corruptions, the weakness of your graces, your low attainments in holiness, the strength of your temptations, and your inability to resist sin. "_Said I not unto thee_," interposes this voice of mingled reproof and love, "My grace is sufficient for thee?" "The bruised reed I will not break, the smoking flax I will not quench." "Look unto _Me_, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." We are too apt to look to _ourselves_, to turn our contemplation _inwards_, instead of keeping the eye of faith centered undeviatingly on a faithful covenant-keeping God, laying our finger on every promise of His Word, and making the challenge regarding each, "Hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not bring it to pass?"

Yes; there may be much to try and perplex. Sense and sight may stagger, and stumble, and fall; we may be able to see no break in the clouds; "deep may be calling to deep," and wave responding to wave, "yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me." If we only "_believe_" in spite of unbelief; hoping on, and praying on, and trusting on; like the great Father of the faithful, in the midst of adverse providences, "strong in faith, giving glory to God," He will yet cause the day-spring from on high to visit us. Even in _this_ world perplexing paths may be made plain, and slippery places smooth, and judgments "bright as the noonday;" but if not _here_, there _is_ at least a glorious day of disclosures at hand, when the reign of unbelieving doubt shall terminate for ever, when the archives of a chequered past will be ransacked of their every mystery;--all events mirrored and made plain in the light of eternity; and this saying of the weeping Saviour of Bethany obtain its true and everlasting fulfilment, "SAID I NOT UNTO THEE, IF THOU WOULDST BELIEVE, THOU SHOULDST SEE THE GLORY OF GOD?"

XV.

THE DIVINE PLEADER.

The stone is rolled away, but there is a solemn pause just when the miracle is about to be performed.