'And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her,
and said unto her, Weep not. 14. And He came and
touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still.
And He said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.
15. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.
And He delivered him to his mother.'--LUKE vii. 13-15.
We owe our knowledge of this incident to Luke only. He is the
Evangelist who specially delights in recording the gracious
relations of our Lord with women, and he is also the Evangelist who
delights in telling us of unasked miracles which Christ performed.
Both of these characteristics unite in this story, and it may have
been these, rather than the fact of its being a narrative of a
resurrection, that found for it a place in this Gospel.
Be that as it may, it is obvious to remark that this miracle was not
wrought with any intention of establishing Christ's claims thereby.
Its motive was simply pity; its purpose was merely to comfort a
desolate woman whose hope and love and defence were lying stretched
on her boy's bier. Was that a sufficient reason for a miracle?
People tell us that a test of a spurious miracle is that it is done
without any adequate purpose to be served. Jesus Christ thought that
to comfort one poor, sorrowful heart was reason enough for putting
His hand out, and dragging the prey from the very jaws of death, so
loftily did He think of human sorrow and of the comforting thereof.
Now I think we unduly limit the meaning of our Lord's miracles when we
regard them as specially intended to authenticate His claims. They are
not merely the evidences of revelation; they are themselves a large
part of revelation. My purpose in this sermon is to look at this
incident from that one point of view, and to try to set clearly before
our minds what it shows us of the character and work of Jesus Christ.
And there are three things on which I desire to touch briefly. We have
Him here revealed to us as the compassionate Drier of all tears; the
life-giving Antagonist of death; and as the Re-uniter of parted hearts.
Note, then, these three things.
I. First of all, look at that wonderful revelation that lies here of
Jesus Christ as the compassionate Drier of all tears.
The poor woman, buried in her grief, with her eyes fixed on the
bier, has no thought for the little crowd that came up the rocky
road, as she and her friends are hurrying down it to the place of
graves. She was a stranger to Christ, and Christ a stranger to her.
The last thing that she would have thought of would have been
eliciting any compassion from those who thus fortuitously met her on
her sad errand. But Christ looks, and His eye sees far more deeply
and far more tenderly into the sorrow of the desolate, childless
widow than any human eyes looked. And as swift as was His perception
of the sorrow, so swiftly does He throw Himself into sympathy with
it. The true human emotion of unmingled pity wells up in His heart
and moves Him to action.
And just because the manhood was perfect and sinless, therefore the
sympathy of Christ was deeper than any human sympathy, howsoever
tender it may be; for what unfits us to feel compassion is our
absorption with ourselves. That makes our hearts hard and
insensitive, and is the true, 'witches' mark'--to recur to the old
fable--the spot where no external pressure can produce sensation.
The ossified heart of the selfish man is closed against divine
compassion. Since Jesus Christ forgot Himself in pitying men, and
Himself 'took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,' He must have
been what none of us are--free from all taint of selfishness, and
from all insensibility born of sin.
But there is another step to be taken. That pitying Christ, on the
rocky road outside the little Galilean village, feeling all the pain
and sorrow of the lonely mother--that is God! 'Lo! this is our God;
and we have waited for Him.' Ay! waited through all the
uncompassionating centuries, waited in the presence of the false
gods, waited whilst men have been talking about an impassive Deity
careless in the heavens, over whose serene blessedness no shadow can
ever pass. This is our God. No impassive monster that no man can
love or care for, but a God with a heart, a God that can pity, a God
who, wonderful as it is, can and does enter, in the humanity of
Jesus Christ, into a fellow-feeling of our infirmities.
If Jesus Christ in His pity was only a perfect and lovely example of
unselfish sympathy such as man can exercise, what in the name of
common-sense does it matter to me how much, or how tenderly, He
pitied those past generations? The showers and the sunshine of this
summer will do as much good to the springing corn in the fields to-day
as the pity of a dead, human Christ will do for you and me. In our
weaknesses, in our sorrows great and small, in our troubles and
annoyances, you and I need, dear brethren, a living Jesus to pity
us, there in the heavens, just as He pitied that poor woman outside
the gate of Nain. Blessed be God!, we have Him. The human Christ is
the manifestation of the Divine, and as we listen to the Evangelist
that says, 'When He saw her He had compassion upon her,' we bow our
heads and feel that the old psalmist spoke a truth when He said,
'His compassions fail not,' and that the old prophet spoke a truth,
the depth of which his experience did not enable him to fathom, when
he said that 'in all their afflictions He was afflicted.'
Then, note that the pitying Christ dries the tears before He raises
the dead. That is beautiful, I think. 'Weep not,' He says to the
woman--a kind of a prophecy that He is going to take away the
occasion for weeping; and so He calls lovingly upon her for some
movement of hope and confidence towards Himself. With what an
ineffable sweetness of cadence in His sympathetic voice these words
would be spoken! How often, kindly and vainly, men say to one
another, 'Weep not,' when they are utterly powerless to take away or
in the smallest degree to diminish the occasion for weeping! And how
often, unkindly, in mistaken endeavour to bring about resignation
and submission, do well-meaning and erring good people say to
mourners in the passion of their sorrow, 'Weep not!' Jesus Christ
never dammed back tears when tears were wholesome, and would bring
blessing. And Jesus Christ never said, 'Dry your tears,' without
stretching out His own hand to do it.
How does He do it? First of all by the assurance of His sympathy.
Ah! in that word there came a message to the lonely heart, as there
comes a message, dear brethren, to any man or woman among us now who
may be fighting with griefs and cares or sorrows, great or small--the
assurance that Jesus Christ knows all about your pain and will help
you to bear it if you will let Him. The sweet consciousness of
Christ's sympathy is the true antidote to excessive grief.
And He dries the tears, not only by the assurance of His sympathy,
but by encouraging expectation and hope. When He said, 'Weep not,'
He was pledging Himself to do what was needed in order to stay the
flow of weeping. And He would encourage us, in the midst of our
cares and sorrows and loneliness, not indeed to suppress the natural
emotion of sorrow, nor to try after a fantastic and unreal
suppression of its wholesome signs, but to weep as though we wept
not, because beyond the darkness and the dreariness we see the
glimmering of the eternal day. He encourages expectation as the
antagonist of sorrow, for the curse of sorrow is that it is ever
looking backwards, and the true attitude for all men who have an
immortal Christ to trust, and an immortality for themselves to
claim, is that not 'backward' should their 'glances be, but forward
to their Father's home.' These are the thoughts that dry our tears,
the assurance of the sympathy of Christ, and the joyous expectation
of a great good to be ours, where beyond those voices there is
peace.
Brother! it may be with all of us--for all of us carry some burden
of sorrow or care--as it is with the hedgerows and wet ploughed
fields to-day; on every spray hangs a raindrop, and in every
raindrop gleams a reflected sun. And so all our tears and sorrows
may flash into beauty, and sparkle into rainbowed light if the smile
of His face falls upon us.
And then, still further, this pitying Christ is moved by His pity to
bring unasked gifts. No petition, no expectation, not the least
trace of faith or hope drew from Him this mighty miracle. It came
welling up from His own heart. And therein it is of a piece with all
His work. For the divine love of which Christ is the Bearer, the
Agent, and the Channel for us men, 'tarries not for men, nor waiteth
for the sons of men,' but before we ask, delights to bestow itself,
and gives that which no man ever sought, even the miracles of the
Incarnation and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ our Lord. If heaven had
waited until men's prayers had forced its gates ere it sent forth
its greatest gift, it had waited for ever, and all mankind had
perished. God's love flows out of its own expansive and diffusive
nature. Its necessity is to impart itself, and its nature and
property is to give. A measureless desire to bestow itself, and in
itself all good, is the definition of the love of God. And Christ
comes 'to the unthankful and to the evil,' bringing a gift which
none of us have asked, and giving as much of Himself as He can give,
undesired, to every heart, that thereby we may be led to desire
these better gifts which cannot be bestowed unless we seek them.
So here we have the compassion of the human Christ, which is the
divine compassion, drying all tears and giving unasked blessings.
II. Note, secondly, the further revelation of our Lord here as being
the life-giving Antagonist of Death.
There is something exceedingly picturesque, and if I might use the
word, dramatic, in the meeting of these two processions outside the
city gate, the little crowd of mourners hurrying, according to the
Eastern fashion, down the hill to the place of tombs, and the other
little group toiling up the hill to the city. There Life and Death
stand face to face. Jesus Christ puts out His hand, and lays it upon
the bier, not to communicate anything, but simply to arrest its
progress. Is it not a parable of His work in the world? His great
work is to stop the triumphant march of Death--that grim power which
broods like a thundercloud over humanity, and sucks up all
brightness into its ghastly folds, and silences all song. He comes
and says 'Stop'; and it stands fixed upon the spot. He arrests the
march of Death. Not indeed that He touches the mere physical fact.
The physical fact is not what men mean by death. It is not what they
cower before. What the world shrinks from is the physical fact plus
its associations, its dim forebodings, its recoilings from the
unknown regions into which the soul goes from out of 'the warm
precincts of the cheerful day,' and plus the possibilities of
retribution, the certainty of judgment. All these Christ sweeps
away, so that we may say, 'He hath abolished Death,' even though we
all have to pass through the mere externals of dying, for the dread
of Death is gone for ever, if we trust Him.
And then note, still further, we have Christ here as the Life-giver.
'Young man, I say unto thee, Arise!'
Christ took various methods of imparting His miraculous power. These
methods varied, as it would appear, according to the religious
necessities of the subjects or beholders of the miracle. Sometimes
He touched, sometimes He employed still more material vehicles, such
as the clay with which He moistened the eyes of the blind man, and
the spittle with which He touched the ears of the deaf. But all
these various methods were but helps to feeble faith, and in the
case of all the raisings from the dead it is the voice alone that is
employed.
So, then, what is the meaning of that majestic 'I say unto thee,
Arise'? He claims to work by His own power. Unless Jesus Christ
wielded divine authority in a fashion in which no mere human
representative and messenger of God ever has wielded it, for Him to
stand by that bier and utter, 'I say unto thee, Arise!' was neither
more nor less than blasphemy. And yet the word had force. He assumed
to act by His own power, and the event showed that He assumed not
too much. 'The Son quickeneth whom He will.'
Further, He acts by His bare word. So He did on many other
occasions--rebuking the fever and it departs, speaking to the wind
and it ceases, calling to the dead and they come forth. And who is
He, the bare utterance of whose will is supreme, and has power over
material things? Let that centurion whose creed is given to us in
the earlier portion of this chapter answer the question. 'I say to
my servant, Go! and he goeth; Come! and he cometh; Do this! and he
doeth it. Speak Thou, and all the embattled forces of the universe
will obey Thine autocratic and sovereign behest,' they 'hearken to
His commandments, and do the voice of His word.'
Then note, still further, that this voice of Christ's has power in
the regions of the dead. Wherever that young man was, he heard; in
whatsoever state or condition he was, his personality felt and
obeyed the magnetic force of Christ's will. The fact that the Lord
spake and the boy heard, disposes, if it be true, of much error, and
clears away much darkness. Then the separation of body and soul
_is_ a separation and not a destruction. Then consciousness is
not a function of the brain, as they tell us. Then man lives wholly
after he is dead. Then it is possible for the spirit to come out of
some dim region, where we know not, in what condition we know not.
Only this we know--that, wherever it is, Christ's will has authority
there; and there, too, is obedience to His commandment.
And so let me remind you that this Voice is not only revealing as to
Christ's authority and power, and illuminative as to the condition
of the disembodied dead, but it is also prophetic as to the future.
It tells us that there is nothing impossible or unnatural in that
great assurance. 'The hour is coming when they that are in the
graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth.' There shall be
for the dead a reunion with a body, which will bring men again into
connection with an external universe, and be the precursor of a
fuller judgment and an intenser retribution.
Brethren, that Voice that raised one poor bewildered boy to sit up
on his bier, and begin to speak--broken exclamations possibly, and
stammering words of astonishment--shall be flung, like a trumpet
that scatters marvellous sounds, through the sepulchres of the
nations and compel all to stand before the throne. You and I will
hear it; let us be ready for it.
III. So, lastly, we have here the revelation of our Lord as the
Reuniter of parted hearts.
That is a wonderfully beautiful touch, evidently coming from an
eye-witness--'He delivered him to his mother.' That was what it had
all been done for. The mighty miracle was wrought that that poor
weeping woman might be comforted.
May we not go a step further? May we not say, If Jesus Christ was so
mindful of the needs of a sorrowful solitary soul here upon earth, will
He be less mindful of the enduring needs of loving hearts yonder in the
heavens? If He raised this boy from the dead that his mother's arms
might twine round him again, and his mother's heart be comforted, will
He not in that great Resurrection give back dear ones to empty,
outstretched arms, and thereby quiet hungry hearts? It is impossible
to suppose that, continuing ourselves, we should be deprived of our
loves. These are too deeply engrained and enwrought into the very
texture of our being for that to be possible. And it is as impossible
that, in the great day and blessed world where all lost treasures are
found, hearts that have been sad and solitary here for many a day
shall not clasp again the souls of their souls--'and with God be the
rest.'
So, though we know very little, surely we may take the comfort of
such a thought as this, which should be very blessed and sweet to
some of us, and with some assurance of hope may feel that the risen
boy at the gate of Nain was not the last lost one whom Christ, with
a smile, will deliver to the hearts that mourn for them, and there
we 'shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure
for ever.' 'And so shall we'--they and I, for that is what _we_
means--' so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one
another with these words.'