"Jesus wept."--John, xi. 35.
It is an affecting thing to see a Great man in tears! "_Jesus wept!_" It
was ever His delight to tread in the footsteps of sorrow--to heal the
broken-hearted--turning aside from His own path of suffering to "weep
with those that weep."
_Bethany!_ That scene, that _word_, is a condensed volume of consolation
for yearning and desolate hearts. What a majesty in those tears! He had
just been discoursing on Himself as the Resurrection and the Life--the
next moment He is a Weeping Man by a human grave, melted in anguished
sorrow at a bereaved one's side! Think of the funeral at the gate of
Nain, reading its lesson to dejected myriads--"Let thy widows trust in
me!" Think of the farewell discourse to His disciples, when, muffling
all His own foreseen and anticipated sorrows, He thought only of
soothing and mitigating theirs! Think of the affecting pause in that
silent procession to Calvary, when He turns round and stills the sobs of
those who are tracking His steps with their weeping! Think of that
wondrous epitome of human tenderness, just ere His eyes closed in their
sleep of agony--in the mightiest crisis of all time--when filial love
looked down on an anguished mother, and provided her a son and a home!
Ah, was there ever sympathy like this! Son! Brother! Kinsman! Saviour!
all in one! The majesty of Godhead almost lost in the tenderness of a
Friend. But so it _was_, and so it is. The heart of the now enthroned
King beats responsive to the humblest of His sorrow-stricken people. "I
am poor and needy, yet the Lord _carries me on His heart_!" (margin.)
Let us "go and do likewise." Let us be ready, like our Lord, to follow
the beck of misery,--"to deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor
also, and him that hath no helper." Sympathy costs but little. Its
recompense and return are great, in the priceless consolation it
imparts. Few there are who undervalue it. Look at Paul--the weary, jaded
prisoner,--chained to a soldier--recently wrecked, about to stand before
Cæsar. He reaches Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, dejected and
depressed. Brethren come from Rome, a distance of sixty miles, to offer
their _sympathy_. The aged man is cheered! His spirit, like Jacob's,
"revived!" "He thanked God, and took courage!"
Reader! let "this mind," this holy, Christ-like _habit_ be in you, which
was also in your adorable Master. Delight, when opportunity occurs, to
frequent the house of mourning--to bind up the widow's heart, and to dry
the orphan's tears. If you can do nothing else, you can whisper into the
ear of disconsolate sorrow those majestic solaces, which, rising first
in the graveyard of Bethany, have sent their undying echoes through the
world, and stirred the depths of ten thousand hearts. "Exercise your
souls," says Butler, "in a loving sympathy with sorrow in every form.
Soothe it, minister to it, succor it, revere it. It is the relic of
Christ in the world, an image of the Great Sufferer, a shadow of the
cross. It is a holy and venerable thing."
Jesus Himself "_looked_ for some to take _pity_, but there was _none_;
and for comforters, but He found _none_!" It shows how even _He_ valued
sympathy, and that, too, in its commonest form of "_pity_," though an
ungrateful World denied it.
"ARM YOURSELVES LIKEWISE WITH THE SAME MIND."
Twelfth Day.