II.

_THE DARK ENIGMA OF DEATH._

ST. JOHN xi.

This morning I ask your attention to the story that has been read in the

eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St. John.

The rulers of the Jews at Jerusalem had resolved on Christ's death, and

the mass of the people sympathised with them. The Master's life had been

threatened by a popular outburst. His work on earth was not yet done,

and so He withdrew into the country, to escape from the violence and

danger of Jerusalem. He went away to the Jordan, to the point, not very

far from Jerusalem, where John first began baptizing, and there He

remained in comparative seclusion. But people knew where He was.

Probably people in the surrounding districts gathered together to hear

Him teach; and possibly, as a very ingenious commentator has suggested,

Christ, reaping the harvest of John's prolonged teaching in this

district, succeeded in winning the faith of a great many of his hearers;

and so He was busy doing good and happy work, building up His kingdom on

the banks of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, sickness came to the home at Bethany, where most He felt

Himself at home during His wanderings in this world of ours. Lazarus was

stricken with a very dangerous illness, grew worse and worse, and at

last all hope was gone. Now, I should fancy that from the very first day

that it became evident that their brother was seriously ill, the hearts

of Mary and Martha longed to have Jesus come to them, if it was only to

be with them in their anxiety, and suspense, and watching. And the heart

of the sick man must have longed for that great Divine Friend of his to

be by his sick bed. Why did they not send for Him at once? I think there

is a very simple reason. They were not selfish, as we sometimes tend to

be in our sickness or in our sorrow. They thought about others as well

as about themselves. They remembered that for Jesus to come back to the

vicinity of Jerusalem was to risk His own life, and not even for the

safety of their brother could they bring themselves for a long time to

ask the beloved Master to run such a risk as that, and so they delayed

really till too late. In the extremity of their grief and despair they

sent a messenger to Jesus—not to ask Him to come: there, again, I read

that that was their meaning—they would not take it on themselves to ask

Him to imperil His life, but they could not resist just letting Him know

that their brother, whom Jesus so loved, was very sick. It is

exceedingly touching, that simple message, "Lord, behold, he whom Thou

lovest is sick." And they knew that it would say to Jesus, "Thou knowest

how much we would like Thee to come and recover him, and Thou knowest,

too, the last thing we would ask of Thee would be, out of favour and

kindness to us, to risk that life on which so much hangs—the kingdom of

God upon earth."

There was real danger in Christ's return to Jerusalem. He was conscious

of it, for you find that when He did make His way to Bethany He seems to

have taken care, as far as possible, to conceal the fact from the

inhabitants of Jerusalem. He came very quietly. He did not at first

enter into Bethany. He remained outside the precincts of the village. He

sent word secretly to Martha, so that not even Mary or the other persons

that were with them in the house knew of the fact. And then, again, He

sent Martha back, or Martha went back, to Mary, and, with somewhat

studied concealment, warned her of the Master's vicinity, so that when

she went out those who were with her fancied she was going to the grave.

I point all that out to you in order that you may see that it is not a

mere imagination or fancy, but that one of the great elements in

determining the conduct of the family at Bethany, and the action of

Christ, was that real hazard of His life, which He dared not needlessly

risk in perils at this time, since His time of toil on earth, His

daylight of labour, was not yet over and done.

When Jesus received the message He behaved in a seemingly strange

fashion. Apparently He just did nothing, but went on with His teaching

and preaching for two long days. Did He think how often anxious faces

would be at the door of that house in Bethany, peering along the road

that led to the home, looking for the figure that had so often trodden

that way, because His heart drew Him to that happy family circle? Did

Jesus know that Lazarus was dying? Did Jesus think that the hearts of

Mary and Martha were breaking? Oh, He had the most loving heart that

ever man had on earth, and yet He delayed two days before He set out for

that home of distress. Now, that fact is often presented in a somewhat

revolting fashion, and I think it is worth while just to diverge from my

main theme to remove the effect of such presentation if it weighs with

any of you. It is said that Jesus deliberately hung back for two days in

order to let Lazarus die. That is a mistake—a total mistake. Lazarus had

been already buried four days before Christ arrived. Now, suppose He had

lost no time; suppose He had set out at once, He would only have reached

Bethany two days earlier, and so, you see, Lazarus would have then

already been buried two days. The real fact is just this, that the

message was sent too late, and the sick man had died; and even if Christ

had gone at once, all the same He would have found him in the grave. But

none the less the story is so told as to shut us up to this conviction,

that it was planned, and purposed, and accepted in the will of God, and

in the will of Jesus, that Lazarus should be sick, and grow worse and

worse, and should sink and fail, and die and be buried. Indubitably

Jesus, with His knowledge, could, of His own action, have returned

earlier to have intervened and prevented the sickness ending fatally. He

was absent that Lazarus might die. When He spoke of the thing He told

His disciples, first of all, the perfect, complete truth. "This," said

Jesus, "is not to end in death's darkness. Its real goal and termination

is to be the glory of God, revealed in the glory of his Son, the Christ

on earth." That is the end of it; nevertheless, Lazarus must die. God's

glory is to find its consummation, not in rescuing Lazarus from the

grave, but in restoring him from death, and bringing him back into life.

It was part of the material Christ used in building up His kingdom—the

sickness and the death of Lazarus. He did delay, not in that seeming

revolting, cold-blooded fashion in which it is often portrayed. He did

deliberately hold His hand and delay; ay, and He held His loving human

heart too, and He let his friend sicken, and suffer pain, and die, and

He let the hearts of those two women that loved Him well-nigh break. He

did it.

Can we justify Him? Did the sisters divine truly when they sent that

message, "He whom Thou lovest is sick"? If He loved him, why did He

prolong the agony? Why did He not intervene? Why did He not at once

cancel death? Why those terrible four days of mourning, and gloom, and

darkness, and doubt? Now that is precisely the painful position of all

of us in this world of sin, and pain, and sickness, and parting, and

death. We think a good God made our world; we think a loving Father

holds our lives in His hands; and then we turn and look at this world,

we look at the terrible strifes and struggles, we look at the great

entail of sin that lies on our race, we see the ravages of disease, and

disaster, and violence, and cruelty, and see everywhere the last black

enigma of death and the grave, and this in spite of all our Christian

faith, learnt from the Bible; ay, learnt from God's Spirit speaking

often in the instincts of our heart and nature—we, too, are forced to

ask the question, "Lord, why art Thou not here? Why does our brother

die? If Thou wert here Thou couldest save him. Dost Thou love him? and

if Thou lovest, why are we sick? Why do we die?"

The inmates of that house at Bethany had received Jesus with a rare

degree of sympathetic feeling and heartfelt welcome. They entered into

the meaning of His teaching and preaching with a degree of fellowship

and quick response that moved His heart and soul even beyond the best of

His disciples. One of them at least—Mary, and almost certainly Lazarus

too—had come very near to that Divine Lord, in full understanding of all

His grandeur, His sinlessness, His mighty love Though yet all ignorant

of a great deal about His person, and about the fashion in which He was

to make His kingdom, with a genuine purity and ardour of attachment and

affection, they worshipped Him, they recognised the Divine within Him,

they hailed Him as the world's Christ and Saviour. Listen to Martha's

cry in her perplexity: "I cannot understand it all, but I know Thou art

the Christ come from God, the world's King, the world's Saviour. That I

know, that I hold to." It was that understanding, that sympathy in that

home, that made it so sweet a place of rest to Jesus. More than

that—manifestly the two sisters and brother lived a life of sweet human

affection. There was an atmosphere of tender love in their home, broken

by little storms of misunderstanding, as may be in the very best of our

imperfect human homes, but in reality a great depth of tenderness, and

clinging attachment, and loyal love to one another, bound the household

together. Oh, thank God for every such home on earth! That is the real

bulwark against all pessimism, the charter of our eternal birthrights.

Given the grandeur, the reality of human love, as, thank God, most of us

know it in our homes, that is the absolute guarantee that it came from

the creating hands of grander Love Divine.

Jesus was not merely loved by the family where He came to spend the

nights when He was working in Jerusalem, but He got to love them with a

very wonderful tenderness. You remember that chivalrous, impassioned

defence of Mary, when she was assailed by the coarse attacks of the

disciples. You catch it, too, in that message sent to Him—"He whom Thou

lovest." Ah, many an act of affection, many a look that was a caress,

many an appeal for sympathy that bespoke brotherhood, had passed between

Jesus of Nazareth and that Lazarus, else the sisters would not have

thought of saying, "He whom Thou lovest is sick."

And yet into that home so dear to the heart of Jesus, the Son of God,

into that home that had for its Friend the Man that was master of life

and of death, of calamity and prosperity, of all earthly powers and

forces, into that home there penetrated cruel, painful, deadly sickness.

The man Jesus loved lay there on his bed dying.

Now, I emphasize that, because there used to be a great deal of thinking

about God's relation to those that love Him and whom He loves—a great

deal of teaching in the Christian Church that counted itself most

orthodox, and which was, indeed, deadly heresy, coarse, materialistic,

despicable, misunderstanding the ideal grandeur of the Bible promises.

Some of you know the sort of teaching that used to prevail—the idea that

God's saints should be exceptionally favoured; the sun would shine on

their plot of corn, and it would not shine on the plot of corn of the

bad man; their ships would not sink at sea, their children would not

catch infectious diseases; God would pamper them, exempt them from

bearing their part in the world's great battle, with hardness and toil

of labour, with struggle, and attainment, and achievement. It came of a

very despicable conception of what a father can do for a child, as if

the best thing for a father to do for his son was to pet and indulge

him, and save him all bodily struggle and all difficulties, instead of

giving him a life of discipline. As if a general in the army would,

because of his faltering heart, refuse to let his son take the post of

danger; as if he would not rather wish for that son—ay, with a great

pang in his own soul—that he should be the bravest, the most daring, the

one most exposed to the deadliest hazard.

Ah, we have got to recognise that we whom God loves may be sick and

dying, and yet God does love us. Lazarus was loved by Jesus, yet he whom

Jesus loved was sick and dying. Ah, and there is a still more poisonous

difficulty in that materialistic, that worldly way of looking at God's

love; that horrible, revolting misjudgment that Christ condemned,

crushed with indignation when it confronted Him. "The men on whom the

tower of Siloam fell must have been sinners worse than us on whom it did

not fall." Never, never! The great government of the world is not made

up of patches and strokes of anger and outbursts of weak indulgence. The

world is God's great workshop, God's great battle-field. These have

their places. Here a storm of bullets falls, and brave and good men as

well as cowards fall before it. You mistake if you try to forestall

God's judgments, God's verdicts on the last great day of reckoning.

Still we have got the fact that Christ does not interpose to prevent

death, that Christ does not hinder those dearest to Him from bearing

their share of life's sicknesses and sufferings, that God Himself

suffers death to go on, apparently wielding an undisputed sway over

human existence.

What is the consequence of it? Well, the first consequences seem to be

all evil. You might look on the surface of life, and when you read

superficially the narrative of this chapter in St. John, it looks as if

mischief and evil came of the strange delay of God and of His Christ.

Look at the effect upon the disciples. Now here there is not enough told

to justify me in putting more positively to you the picture of their

inner hearts, but I am going to present—I dread that I may be guilty of

a want of charity, at all events of disproportion—but as I read this

chapter, and try to think myself into it, this is the conception I have:

Had these men known that Lazarus was very sick, they would not have

wished their Master to go back to try and save him. They were selfish

enough to have been rather glad that He was at a distance, to wish that

He should not know. When the message did come I think they were puzzled

and perplexed. Selfishly, they were rather pleased that He did not set

off to go. But, on the other hand—for, mind you, a selfish man

understands the dictates of love—they said to themselves, "It is not

quite like Him. Well, it is wise, it is prudent not to go, but it is a

little cowardly. Does He love Lazarus so much as we used to think?" Oh,

if I am right, what a painful thing, all these bad, poor, selfish

thoughts of the Divine heart in Jesus! all created, mark you, because

Jesus suffered the man whom He loved to be sick, and at last to die, and

did not go and check death, and drive the dark King of Terrors back.

Then Jesus says to them that He has resolved to go and visit Lazarus. It

is here I get the ground on which I stand in forecasting that

selfishness in them. Then they thought He was wrong. They did venture to

blurt out what was a censure: "He will go; He ought not to do it. What

are we to do who see with clearer eyes the pathway of prudence? To let

Him go and die? It was a total blunder, a mistake, but all the same we

cannot let Him go and die alone. Let us go and die with Him."

Oh, what a dearth of understanding of their Master, His love, His power,

His real character, created by the enigma of Christ's conduct, that He

had held His hand, that He had suffered His friend to be sick, that He

had permitted him to die!

Then come to the two sisters. Ah, what a struggle must have gone on in

their hearts, as hour after hour passed after the point had come when

Jesus should have been with them if He had listened to their message, if

He pitied their brother, His own beloved friend. What could the Master

mean? Did something hinder Him and prevent His coming? or was it the

danger to His life? Was there a little selfishness? or had they any

right to expect it? Either He is lacking in love, or else He is lacking

in power. What could it mean? And then, when at last the poor sick eyes

shut and their brother lay there dead, their hearts were like stones

within them. And the burial, following swiftly after in the East,

because decay begins so quickly there; and then the mourning and the

hired mourners, professional mourners, all around them, and these poor

women there saying in their hearts, "Surely, surely it need not have

been; certainly if the Master, who healed so many sick, had been here,

if He had come, if He knew, if He had been here all this horror, this

agony, this pain, might have been escaped."

So when Jesus did come, look at them, how they met Him. Martha goes away

out, and the first thing she says is just what they had said so often to

one another and to their own hearts: "O Master, if Thou hadst only been

here our brother had not died." And then the spirit of the woman told

her that perhaps she had hurt Jesus' feelings, that perhaps He was not

to blame, that perhaps there was some explanation, though she could not

see it, and so, in her blundering way—for she had not the fine tact that

was in Mary—she tried to mend it, and only made it worse by volunteering

that she did believe in Him after all.

The soul of Christ felt the intended love, and shuddered at that

tremendous distance of sympathy and understanding. "You believe in Me."

He could not hold it in. "Thy brother shall rise again." And poor Martha

was unable to rise to the height of Christ's meaning. "Oh, yes, Lord, I

know, at the great resurrection. Yes, he will rise again." Then comes

Jesus' declaration, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. The man that

lives in Me, in whom I live, has in Me a deathless life. I am here

to-day to prove that." That was what He meant, but He was far away above

her. The poor heart in her had lost Him. She was dazed, and so she just

fell back upon the one thing that she was quite sure of, even if He had

not been quite kind to her, or even if His power was limited. "Yes, yes,

Master, I know Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, come into this world

to be its Saviour and its King." And then, perhaps, with a sort of sense

that Mary could understand the Master better, could read His meaning and

tell it to her, she slipped away, and she found her sister, and

whispered in her ear, "The Master is come, and asks for thee." Then Mary

went away to meet Him too.

It is much harder to read what was in that sweet heart of Mary. I have

no doubt that she, too, had fought a battle with doubt. The story seems

to show that she had attained to greater faith than Martha. She had been

pained, but still there was a divining instinct in her, like the

divining instinct that warned her, when all the disciples were blind to

it, that He was going to die, and she went and anointed Him to His

burial; a divining instinct in her that somehow the cloud was going to

be rolled away. And she went out and said simply, "Lord, if Thou hadst

been here our brother had not died." And then she was too wise to say

one word more. With her finer tact, with her deeper understanding, she

knew that was all she should say. But it was like saying, "There is

perplexity in this visitation, in Thy delay, in my brother's death; Thou

couldst have made it different if Thou hadst seen it well to be here. I

cannot understand the right and the love of it." It was a question. It

did say, "Master, what art Thou going to do?" And Christ felt it was. As

she broke out and burst into tears, He lost control and wept with her.

But there were others—the Jews, the enemies of Christ; men who hated

Him, men who disbelieved in Him, men who grudged Him all His glory and

the love He had won on the earth. They had hurried out—some of them with

a degree of human compassion—to that home of bereavement. It was known

as the home of Christ, and I think some of them had come with greater

pleasure that Lazarus had died. What they said when they saw Him weep

betrays their mood. "This is He who professed to be able to open the

eyes of the blind and heal all sicknesses. How, then, is it that He

allows His dearest friend on earth to be sick, and die, and be buried?

He has lost His power, if He ever had it." They were rejoicing over His

seeming defeat. They had no love for Him, and so had no faith in Him.

Is not that true of our world to-day? The best of you, Christians, when

death comes to your own homes, do you manage to sing the songs of

triumph right away? Well, you are very wonderful saints if you do. If

you do not, perhaps you say, "If God is in this world, how comes that

dark enigma of death?"

And others of you grip hold of your faith, but yet your heart cries out

against it. You believe that God is good, but has He been quite good to

you? Like Martha, you feel as if you had some doubt; you feel bound in

your prayers; you say, "O God, I do not mean to reproach Thee;" weak,

sinful if you will, yet the sign of a true follower of the Christ.

And then the enemies of Christ, the worldlings all about in this earth

of ours, as they look upon death's ravages, they are saying, "If there

were a God, if there were a Father, if there were a great heart that

could love, why does not He show it?" Now, I said to you that at first

it looks as if nothing but evil came of God's delay to interpose against

death; but when you look a little deeper I think you begin to discover

an infinitely greater good and benefit come out of that evil.

I must very briefly, very rapidly, trace to you in the story, and you

can parallel it in the life of yourselves, that discipline of goodness

there is in God's refraining from checking sickness and death. Christ

said, the end of it is first of all death, but that is not the

termination. Through death this sickness, this struggle of doubt and

faith, should end in the glory of God. He meant this: In the preparation

of His life and His death the death and resurrection of Lazarus held a

central position. It was the turning-point, the thing that determined

His crucifixion on Calvary. That tremendous miracle compelled the rulers

of Jerusalem to resolve on and carry out His death. That miracle of

Lazarus' resurrection gave to the faith of the disciples and of Christ's

followers a strength of clinging attachment that carried them through

the eclipse of their belief when they saw Him die on Calvary.

Now, what would you say? Was it cruel of Christ to allow His friend

Lazarus, His dear friends Mary and Martha, to go through that period of

suspense, of anxiety, of sickness, of death, and of the grave, that they

might do one of the great deeds in bringing in the world's Redeemer? Oh,

men and women, if God be wise, and if God be great, then must it not be

that somehow or other the structure of this world is the best for God's

end, and our tears, and partings, and calamities but incidents in the

grand campaign that shall end in the resplendent glory of heaven? Yes,

for the glory of God, and for the sake of others, for the sake of the

disciples, for the sake of the world, says Christ, I have suffered My

friend Lazarus to die.

"Ah," you say, "you have still got to show God's goodness and kindness

to me individually. My death may be for God's glory, it may be for the

good of others; but how about me and those who mourn?" Well, now, look

at it. You must get to the end of the story before you venture to judge

the measure, the worth, of God's goodness. After all, was that period of

sickness and death unmitigated gloom, and horror, and agony? Oh, I put

it to you, men and women, who have passed through it, watching by the

death of dear father or mother that loved the Lord and loved you, and

whom you loved—dark, and sore, and painful enough at the time; but oh,

if I called you to speak out, would you not say it was one of the most

sacred periods of your life—the unspeakable tenderness, the sweet

clinging love, the untiring service, the grateful responses, the

sacredness that came into life? Ay, and when the tie was snapped, the

new tenderness that you gave to the friends that are left, the new

pledge binding you to heaven, and to hope for it, and long for it—death

is not all an evil to our eyes. Death cannot ultimately be an evil,

since it is universal—the consummation, climax, crown of every human

life. Ah, if we had the grander majesty of soul to look at it from God's

altitude, we should call death, not a defeat, but a victory, a triumph.

I think sometimes that if death did not end these lives of ours, how

weary they would get. Think of it—to live on for ever in the sordidness,

in the littleness, in the struggle, the pain, the sin of this life of

ours. Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir

the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there

may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to

those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of

faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross;

it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating

features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's

minister. It is going home to one's Father.

Yes, but you want the guarantee that death is not the end, and that day

it was right and lawful for Christ to give it, to anticipate the last

great day, when in one unbroken army, radiant and resplendent, shining

like jewels in a crown, He shall bring from the dark grave all that

loved Him, fought for Him, and were loyal to Him on the road, and went

down into the dark waters singly, one by one, in circumstances of

ignominy often, and yet dying with Christ within them, the Resurrection

and the Life.

Ah, that great, grand vindication of God, and interpretation of this

world's enigma was made clear that day when Christ called Lazarus back,

and gave him alive to his sisters in the sight of His doubting

disciples, in the sight of those sneering enemies. And what I like to

think as best of all and most comforting of all is this, that Christ did

that deed of love and goodness to hearts that so misunderstood Him, were

so ignorant of His glory, denied and disbelieved so much of His claims,

were then and there so despairing, so hopeless, that perhaps it was only

in one heart, the heart of Mary, there was hope or faith like a grain of

mustard-seed. Yet He did it. Why? He whom He loved died, and they whom

He loved mourned. It was not that they loved Him; it was that He loved

them.

Ah, when I read sneers at the simple Evangelical Gospel that says, "Put

away all thoughts of earning heaven; your good works are rags"—true

enough, true enough—the sneers are mistaken. It is a very grand Gospel

that, for what it says is this, "There is hope, salvation from sin, life

eternal, for you and for me, not for anything in us, nor for anything we

can do, even if we did the best we could. We hold the hope and

confidence of redemption, resurrection, in our hearts, because the God

that made us loves us;" and so—as I read lately in a recently published

book, amid much that I think is foolish, what yet struck me as

singularly tender and true—"When in the hour of death we cry, 'Good

Lord, deliver us,' we might stop and leave out the 'deliver us.' It is

quite enough if we are dying in the arms of a God that is good."