_Good Friday Evening_
What is the darkest hour to us when our friends die? Not the dying
hour; for then love has some last act, some last word to receive,
some comfort to give, some service to render, that diverts from the
bitterness of pain. Not even when the eyes are closed forever, and
the face is fixed in marble stillness; for still we gather at the
side of the cold clay and feel as if there were something left us of
our love. But when we have carried our dear ones to the grave, and
seen the doors of the sepulchre shut between them and us, and come
back to the house where they are no more--where they never more may
be--_then_ is indeed the darkest hour.
There is a very touching picture by Delaroche entitled "The Return
from the Cross," in which the mother of Jesus, leaning on the arm
of the beloved John, is seen just entering a lowly dwelling. A few
faithful friends, men and women, are with them; they have seen him
die--seen him laid in the sepulchre and a great stone rolled against
the door; and now they are come to their desolate home to think it
all over, and to weep.
Do we ask, Why did they not remember the words of Jesus, that he
should rise again? Ah! because they had just such hearts as we have,
and their faith was overpowered by sight just as ours is.
They may have thought they believed that they should see their Lord
risen from the dead; but at the sight of the death agonies, and the
lifeless form, and the dark, cold stone of the sepulchre, all this
poor faith died in darkness. It was like carrying a taper out into
a tempest. And we, when we lay our dear ones in the grave, say in
solemn words that we do it "in sure and certain hope of a blessed
and glorious resurrection," when what is sown in weakness shall be
raised in power, what is sown in dishonor shall be raised in glory.
We say it, and we think we believe it; but does it really then cheer
us? Does it dry our tears? Does it make the return to our desolated
home any less dreadful?
Still we remember the death-bed, the pains, the dying eyes, the
weakness, the sinking--we are overwhelmed by sorrow, and our souls
ache as with a wound. Our hearts throb and yearn towards the form
we can no longer see or embrace, as if the loved one were a portion
of our own selves that had been violently torn away, leaving us
fainting and bleeding to death. All this--more than all this--was
in the sorrow of the home of Mary and John that darkest of all
nights.
He they mourned was not merely friend, but Lord and Leader, the Hope
of Israel; the hope of the world; and God had let him suffer and die
thus!
It was true that Jesus had made special efforts to provide against
the sinking of this hour. He warned his friends of it beforehand.
He admitted four of his chosen disciples upon the Mount of
Transfiguration to look into the heavenly world and see him in glory
and hear him speaking with Moses and Elijah of his coming death.
All this was given that their faith might not fail. Then, just
before his death, at the grave of Lazarus, he declared himself the
Resurrection and the Life, and showed them in the restored form of
a well-known friend what he meant by rising from the dead--for it
is said, "They questioned among themselves what the rising from the
dead should mean."
But all appeared to be gone now. Love still kept watch. Spices were
prepared to embalm the precious form with no hope, apparently, of
its resurrection. It had faded out from their minds as it seems to
fade out of the minds of us Christians when we bewail our dead and
speak of them as "lost." Their Jesus was to them dead and gone; and
why this thing was permitted was a dark, insoluble mystery. "We
trusted that it had been he that should have redeemed Israel," said
the two disciples, sadly walking on the way to Emmaus. "We trusted!"
All in the past tense. Not a word of any hope or faith in the
resurrection! And yet their Lord and Master was even at that moment
walking with them and comforting their hearts.
Surely, in this respect, we modern Christians too often tread in the
footsteps of the saints and suffer as they did. But our Lord knows
our weakness; he knows the physical faintness which comes from long
watching, the obscuration of mind which comes from sorrow, and he
is at hand to comfort us in our blind weeping. Mary Magdalene knew
him not, because her eyes were full of tears, till his well-known
voice called her name. The mourning disciples as they walked to
Emmaus knew not that Jesus was walking by them. And so, ever since,
to weary hearts and lonely homes the comforting Christ still comes
invisibly, with sweetness and rest, if only we of little faith would
remember his promises and recognize his presence. Still now, as he
first announced himself, he comes "to heal the broken-hearted," and
is beside them ever in the darkest and most dreadful hour of their
afflictions.