'When Jesus heard this, He said unto him, Fear not, believe only,
and she shall be made whole.' How preposterous this rekindling of
hope must have seemed to Jairus when the storm had blown out the
last flickering spark! How irrelevant, if it were not cruel, the
'Fear not!' must have sounded when the last possible blow had
fallen. And yet, because of the word in the middle, embedded between
the obligation to hope and the prohibition to fear, neither the one
nor the other is preposterous, 'Only believe.' That is in the
centre; and on the one side,' Fear not!'--a command ridiculous
without it; and on the other side, 'Hope!' an injunction impossible
apart from faith.
Jesus Christ is saying the very same things to us. His fundamental
commandment is 'Only believe,' and there effloresce from it the two
things, courage that never trembles, and hope that never despairs.
'Only believe'--usually He made the outflow of His miraculous power
contingent upon the faith, either of the sufferer himself or of some
others. There was no necessity for the connection. We have instances
in His life of miracles wrought without faith, without asking, simply
at the bidding of His own irrepressible pity. But the rule in regard
to His miracles is that faith was the condition that drew out the
miraculous energy. The connection between our faith and our experience
of His supernatural, sustaining, cleansing, gladdening, enlightening
power is closer than that. For without our trust in Him, He can do
no mighty works upon us, and there must be confidence, on our part,
before there is in our experience the reception into our lives of His
highest blessings; just because they are greater and deeper, and belong
to a more inward sphere than these outward and inferior miracles of
bodily healing. Therefore the connection between our faith and His
gifts to us is inevitable, and constant, and the commandment 'Only
believe,' assumes a more imperative stringency, in regard to our
spiritual experience, than it ever did in regard to those who felt
the power of His miracle-working hand. So it stands for us, as the
one central appeal and exhortation which Christ, by His life, by the
record of His love, by His Cross and Passion, by His dealings and
pleadings with us through His Spirit, and His providence to-day, is
making to us all. 'Only believe'--the one act that vitally knits the
soul to Christ, and makes it capable of receiving unto itself the
fullness of His loftiest blessings.
But we must note the two clauses which stand on either side of this
central commandment. They deal with two issues of faith. One forbids
fear, the other gives fuel for the fire of hope. On the one hand,
the exhortation, 'Fear not,' which is the most futile that
can be spoken if the speaker does not touch the cause of the fear,
comes from His lips with a gracious power. Faith is the one
counterpoise of fear. There is none other for the deepest dreads
that lie cold and paralysing, though often dormant, in every human
spirit; and that ought to lie there. If a man has not faith in God,
in Christ, he ought to have fear. For there rise before him,
solitary, helpless, inextricably caught into the meshes of this
mysterious and awful system of things--a whole host of possible, or
probable, or certain calamities, and what is he to do? stand there
in the open, with the pelting of the pitiless storm coming down upon
him? The man is an idiot if he is not afraid. And what is to calm
those rational fears, the fear of wrath, of life, of death, of what
lies beyond death? You cannot whistle them away. You cannot ignore
them always. You cannot grapple with them in your own strength.
'Only believe,' says the Comforter and the Courage-bringer. The
attitude of trust banishes dread, and nothing else will effectually
and reasonably do it. 'I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear.' Him
who can slay and who judges. You have, and you cannot break, a
connection with God. He ought to be one of two things--your
ghastliest dread or your absolute trust. 'Only believe then,' 'fear
not.' Believe not, _then_ be afraid; for you have reason to be.
Men say, 'Oh! keep your courage up'; and they contribute no means to
keep it up: Christ says 'Fear not; only believe,' and gives to faith
the courage which He enjoins. Like a child that never dreams of any
mischief being able to reach it when the mother's breast is beneath
its head, and the mother's arms are round its little body, each of
us may rest on Christ's breast, and feel His arm round about us.
Then we may smile at all that men call evils; and whether they are
possible, or probable, or certain, we can look at them all and say,
'Ah! I have circumvented you.' 'All things work together for good to
them that' trust Christ. 'Fear not; only believe.'
But on the other hand, from that simple faith will spring up also
hope that cannot despair. 'She shall be made whole.' Irreversible
disasters have no place in Christian experience. There are no
irrevocable losses to him who trusts. There are no wounds that
cannot be stanched, when we go to Him who has the balm and the
bandage. Although it is true that dead faces do not smile again upon
us until we get beyond earth's darkness, it is also true that bonds
broken may be knit in a finer fashion, if faith instead of sense
weaves them together; and that in the great future we shall find
that the true healing of those that went before was not by
deliverance from, but by passing through, the death that emancipates
from the long disease of earthly life.
Brethren! if we trust Christ we may 'hope perfectly.' If we do not
trust Him our firmest hopes are as spiders' webs that are swept away
by a besom; and our deepest desires remain unfulfilled. 'Only
believe,' then, on the one side, 'Fear not,' and on the other side
'Hope ever.'
II. We have here a word of revelation which softens the grimness of
death.
Our Lord reaches the house of affliction, and finds it a house of
hubbub and noise. The hired mourners, with their shrill shrieks,
were there already, bewailing the child. The tumult jarred upon His
calmness, and He says 'Weep not; she is not dead but sleepeth.' One
wonders how some people have read those words as if they declared
that the apparent physical death was only a swoon or a faint, or
some kind of coma, and that so there was no miracle at all in the
case. 'They laughed Him to scorn; knowing that she was dead.' You
can measure the hollowness of their grief by its change into
scornful laughter when a promise of consolation began to open before
them. And you can measure their worth as witnesses to the child's
resurrection by their absolute certainty of her death.
But notice that our Lord never forbids weeping unless He takes away
its cause. 'Weep not,' is another of the futile forms of words with
which men try to encourage and comfort one another. There is nothing
more cruel than to forbid tears to the sad heart. Jesus Christ never
did that except when He was able to bring that which took away
occasion for weeping. He lets grief have its way. He means us to run
rivers of waters down our cheeks when He sends us sorrows. We shall
never get the blessing of these till we have felt the bitterness of
them. We shall never profit by them if we stoically choke back the
manifestations of our grief, and think that it is submissive to be
dumb. Let sorrow have way. Tears purge the heart from which their
streams come. But Jesus Christ says to us all, 'Weep not,' because
He comes to us all with that which, if I may so say, puts a rainbow
into the tear-drops, and makes it possible that the great paradox
should be fulfilled in our hearts, 'As sorrowful yet always
rejoicing.' Weep not; or if you weep, let the tears have
thankfulness as well as grief in them. It is a difficult
commandment, but it is possible when His lips tell us not to weep,
and we have obeyed the central exhortation, 'Only believe.'
Note, further, in this second of our Lord's words, how He smooths
away the grimness of death. I do not claim for Him anything like a
monopoly of that most obvious and natural symbolism which regards
death as a sleep. It must have occurred to all who ever looked upon
a corpse. But I do claim that when He used the metaphor, and by His
use of it modified the whole conception of death in the thoughts of
His disciples, He put altogether different ideas into it from that
which it contained on the lips of others. He meant to suggest the
idea of repose--
'Sleep, full of rest from head to foot.'
The calm immobility of the body so lately racked with pain, or
restless in feverish tossings, is but a symbol of the deeper
stillness of truer repose which remaineth for the people of God and
laps the blessed spirits who 'sleep in Jesus.' He meant to suggest
the idea of separation from this material world. He did not mean to
suggest the idea of unconsciousness. A man is not unconscious when
he is asleep, as dreams testify. He meant, above all, if sleep, then
waking.
So the grim fact is smoothed down, not by blinking any of its
aspects, but by looking deeper into them. They who, only believing,
have lived a life of courage and of hope, and have fronted sorrows,
and felt the benediction of tears, pass into the great darkness, and
know that they there are rocked to sleep on a loving breast, and,
sleeping in Jesus, shall wake with the earliest morning light.
This is a revelation for all His servants. And how deeply these
words, and others like them which He spake at the grave of Lazarus
and at other times, were dinted into the consciousness of the
Christian Church, is manifested by the fact, not only that they are
recurrently used by Apostles in their Epistles, but that all through
the New Testament you scarcely ever find the physical fact of
dissolution designated by the name 'death,' but all sorts of
gracious paraphrases, which bring out the attractive and blessed
aspects of the thing, are substituted. It is a 'sleep'; it is a
'putting off the tabernacle'; it is a 'departure'; it is a pulling
up of the tent-pegs, and a change of place. We do not need the ugly
word, and we do not need to dread the thing that men call by it. The
Christian idea of death is not the separation of self from its
house, of the soul from the body, but the separation of self from
God, who is the life.