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!