One Sunday morning twenty centuries ago a woman stood musing beside an
empty grave. She had come there early in the morning to bring the tribute
of a final service to a departed friend whose name was Jesus. He had died
on a cross the preceding Friday. Being poor, his body had received the
hospitality of a kind-hearted citizen of Arimathea.
The visitor at the grave of the Nazarene met with a surprising situation.
She did not find things as she expected—if she really expected anything.
Probably her thoughts were little more than vague impressions, and she was
taking it for granted that the grave still claimed its own.
She did not find it so. The seal was broken; the door was open; and the
former occupant was gone. The garden was silent, but not with the silence
of the dead. Its stillness seemed rather to speak of life. It was like a
battlefield upon which a great struggle has taken place, and a great
principle vindicated. The very voicelessness seemed eloquent of victory.
Mary need not have been surprised. Jesus had often told his friends that
such a thing would happen. His emphasis had never been upon dead people
nor dead things. His life had been a message of life triumphant. He had
even released others from the fetters of the grave.
The world has always had strange ways, however, of putting an indefinite
construction upon the words of Jesus. Men often remark upon the wonder of
them, but living the truth of them is quite another thing. People are
willing to admit their beauty. Here and there are those who are even
willing to admit their truth. They are not so many, however, who venture
to take them for a life program.
The same old story was repeated in this case. The assurance of Jesus that
the tomb should be but a temporary habitation had been listened to with
respect, but it had not been really taken seriously. It had become a
forgotten promise. Whether Mary disbelieved, or only failed to believe,
she acted upon the assumption that Jesus was dead. Others had remained in
their graves. She took it for granted that she would find him in his. She
had not learned her right to expect marvelous things. She cannot be blamed
much. She only did what most people do. To her credit it must be said that
she learned that day that hers was not a dead, but a living Lord. It is to
be hoped that others have learned as much.
The silences were eloquent, aided as they were by the shock of a great
surprise. They spoke very clearly to Mary as she stood thoughtfully by the
vacant tomb that morning. Indeed, they spoke so clearly that across all
the intervening generations we can still hear some of the things
they said.
They told her that life laughs at fetters. Whoever thinks to bind it with
stones and seals plans the impossible. It is made for the universal spaces
and for the everlasting years. The life of Jesus possessed altogether too
much vitality to long remain hidden behind the stone walls of a sepulcher.
The world is strewn with graves. We have dug them in countless numbers,
and departed generations made so many that the vast majority of them have
long been forgotten. They are all as empty as was the tomb of Jesus that
Sunday morning. We look at the earth and think of it as hiding those whom
we have loved when we ought to look upward and think of them as in the
keeping of another world. We look backward and think of their lives as
belonging to the past when we ought to look onward and think of them as
belonging to the boundless future.
The silences of the garden must have told her, too, that the Lord had
reached one of the final points in his leadership of men. His was largely
a mission of demonstration. For ages men had been frankly doubting that
true godliness and actual immortality were possible. Jesus demonstrated
the fact that the divine spirit fits normally into both the affairs of
life and the experiences of the hour of death. He proved that it was
possible not only to live like a god, but also to die like one.
He had led the way through the most trying experiences that life can
bring. He had gone ahead into the valley and the shadow of death. On the
first Sunday morning after his crucifixion he demonstrated his power to
lead the world out of the grave as well as into it. Mary was the first
witness to that demonstration.
A few days later he led the way to one still farther point in the
ascending scale of human experience—the gate of glory. He gained each of
these points in order to show men that it is possible to reach them. It
is for others not merely to admire, not merely to admit, not even merely
to worship, but to follow. Wherever Jesus has gone, he has gone that
others might also come.
Not all the places by which his footprints lead may seem pleasant. They
lie along paths of sacrifice, daring, and suffering. With an unfailingly
majestic spirit, he faced whatever presented itself as incident to the
fulfilling of a great mission.
A valley of pain matters much less, however, when a mountain of
achievement lifts its head beyond. It seems an insignificant thing that
one must follow him into the chill of the grave when one knows that he
has already broken the way through on the other side. It is not a
permanent condition. It is almost too swift in its passing to even be
called a temporary experience. A sunset would be a tragedy did one not
know that the sun will rise again. We cease to dread the twilight when we
reflect that it is but the pathway to another dawn.
The silences of the resurrection morning said still another thing. They
answered the old question as to whether the soul can exist when separated
from the body. The physical frame of Jesus had seemed that of a dead man
when it was taken from the cross three days before, and laid in the
hospitable tomb of the kind-hearted Joseph. Now it was again inhabited by
the same spirit which had shone from its eyes in other days.
This was no new miracle. Its like had been repeatedly performed by the
power of Jesus. The body and soul of his friend, Lazarus, had been
reunited after an even longer separation. Other spirits had been rewedded
to the tenements which they had inhabited, each time by the wonderful
will of this man who himself lived in such positive fashion and for such
abiding things that the hand of death could not permanently enchain him.
Let it be as it will with these earthly frames of ours. The sooner they
return to dust, after we are gone, the better. The human soul, however,
was not made to perish. It is a thing of universal interests and eternal
possibilities. It is life in its highest terms, and it was life with
which Jesus was essentially concerned.
The silences were eloquent as Mary stood by the tomb that morning. They
told her that immortality was not a dream, but a fact. They declared that
everlasting life was not a baseless hope, but a wonderful reality. They
gave an unspoken answer to an age-long question. They proclaimed the
glorious fulfillment of a precious promise.
They spoke with a reminding voice, and it can still be heard across the
years. They bid us not to think of the words of Jesus too vaguely. The
greatest beauty of the gospel is its truth. The ideal of Jesus will remain
unrealized until men have learned to accept his words at their face value,
and to act upon the assumption that they are true. Faith knows no other
testimony so worthy as that of obedience. The wonder of Jesus is the fact
that his power so far outreaches the limits of our experience.