Part 8

There are many, many things about the mysteries of our religion which I do not understand. But this I say to you, before God: Beyond all this world holds of pride, splendour, pleasure, and joy, to have taken that real, living, holy Jesus Christ into your heart, to be your Saviour, Counsellor, and Friend, your Divine Lord and Master, means blessedness both here and hereafter.

II.

_THE DARK ENIGMA OF DEATH._

ST. JOHN xi.

This morning I ask your attention to the story that has been read in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St. John.

The rulers of the Jews at Jerusalem had resolved on Christ's death, and the mass of the people sympathised with them. The Master's life had been threatened by a popular outburst. His work on earth was not yet done, and so He withdrew into the country, to escape from the violence and danger of Jerusalem. He went away to the Jordan, to the point, not very far from Jerusalem, where John first began baptizing, and there He remained in comparative seclusion. But people knew where He was. Probably people in the surrounding districts gathered together to hear Him teach; and possibly, as a very ingenious commentator has suggested, Christ, reaping the harvest of John's prolonged teaching in this district, succeeded in winning the faith of a great many of his hearers; and so He was busy doing good and happy work, building up His kingdom on the banks of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, sickness came to the home at Bethany, where most He felt Himself at home during His wanderings in this world of ours. Lazarus was stricken with a very dangerous illness, grew worse and worse, and at last all hope was gone. Now, I should fancy that from the very first day that it became evident that their brother was seriously ill, the hearts of Mary and Martha longed to have Jesus come to them, if it was only to be with them in their anxiety, and suspense, and watching. And the heart of the sick man must have longed for that great Divine Friend of his to be by his sick bed. Why did they not send for Him at once? I think there is a very simple reason. They were not selfish, as we sometimes tend to be in our sickness or in our sorrow. They thought about others as well as about themselves. They remembered that for Jesus to come back to the vicinity of Jerusalem was to risk His own life, and not even for the safety of their brother could they bring themselves for a long time to ask the beloved Master to run such a risk as that, and so they delayed really till too late. In the extremity of their grief and despair they sent a messenger to Jesus—not to ask Him to come: there, again, I read that that was their meaning—they would not take it on themselves to ask Him to imperil His life, but they could not resist just letting Him know that their brother, whom Jesus so loved, was very sick. It is exceedingly touching, that simple message, "Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick." And they knew that it would say to Jesus, "Thou knowest how much we would like Thee to come and recover him, and Thou knowest, too, the last thing we would ask of Thee would be, out of favour and kindness to us, to risk that life on which so much hangs—the kingdom of God upon earth."

There was real danger in Christ's return to Jerusalem. He was conscious of it, for you find that when He did make His way to Bethany He seems to have taken care, as far as possible, to conceal the fact from the inhabitants of Jerusalem. He came very quietly. He did not at first enter into Bethany. He remained outside the precincts of the village. He sent word secretly to Martha, so that not even Mary or the other persons that were with them in the house knew of the fact. And then, again, He sent Martha back, or Martha went back, to Mary, and, with somewhat studied concealment, warned her of the Master's vicinity, so that when she went out those who were with her fancied she was going to the grave. I point all that out to you in order that you may see that it is not a mere imagination or fancy, but that one of the great elements in determining the conduct of the family at Bethany, and the action of Christ, was that real hazard of His life, which He dared not needlessly risk in perils at this time, since His time of toil on earth, His daylight of labour, was not yet over and done.

When Jesus received the message He behaved in a seemingly strange fashion. Apparently He just did nothing, but went on with His teaching and preaching for two long days. Did He think how often anxious faces would be at the door of that house in Bethany, peering along the road that led to the home, looking for the figure that had so often trodden that way, because His heart drew Him to that happy family circle? Did Jesus know that Lazarus was dying? Did Jesus think that the hearts of Mary and Martha were breaking? Oh, He had the most loving heart that ever man had on earth, and yet He delayed two days before He set out for that home of distress. Now, that fact is often presented in a somewhat revolting fashion, and I think it is worth while just to diverge from my main theme to remove the effect of such presentation if it weighs with any of you. It is said that Jesus deliberately hung back for two days in order to let Lazarus die. That is a mistake—a total mistake. Lazarus had been already buried four days before Christ arrived. Now, suppose He had lost no time; suppose He had set out at once, He would only have reached Bethany two days earlier, and so, you see, Lazarus would have then already been buried two days. The real fact is just this, that the message was sent too late, and the sick man had died; and even if Christ had gone at once, all the same He would have found him in the grave. But none the less the story is so told as to shut us up to this conviction, that it was planned, and purposed, and accepted in the will of God, and in the will of Jesus, that Lazarus should be sick, and grow worse and worse, and should sink and fail, and die and be buried. Indubitably Jesus, with His knowledge, could, of His own action, have returned earlier to have intervened and prevented the sickness ending fatally. He was absent that Lazarus might die. When He spoke of the thing He told His disciples, first of all, the perfect, complete truth. "This," said Jesus, "is not to end in death's darkness. Its real goal and termination is to be the glory of God, revealed in the glory of his Son, the Christ on earth." That is the end of it; nevertheless, Lazarus must die. God's glory is to find its consummation, not in rescuing Lazarus from the grave, but in restoring him from death, and bringing him back into life. It was part of the material Christ used in building up His kingdom—the sickness and the death of Lazarus. He did delay, not in that seeming revolting, cold-blooded fashion in which it is often portrayed. He did deliberately hold His hand and delay; ay, and He held His loving human heart too, and He let his friend sicken, and suffer pain, and die, and He let the hearts of those two women that loved Him well-nigh break. He did it.

Can we justify Him? Did the sisters divine truly when they sent that message, "He whom Thou lovest is sick"? If He loved him, why did He prolong the agony? Why did He not intervene? Why did He not at once cancel death? Why those terrible four days of mourning, and gloom, and darkness, and doubt? Now that is precisely the painful position of all of us in this world of sin, and pain, and sickness, and parting, and death. We think a good God made our world; we think a loving Father holds our lives in His hands; and then we turn and look at this world, we look at the terrible strifes and struggles, we look at the great entail of sin that lies on our race, we see the ravages of disease, and disaster, and violence, and cruelty, and see everywhere the last black enigma of death and the grave, and this in spite of all our Christian faith, learnt from the Bible; ay, learnt from God's Spirit speaking often in the instincts of our heart and nature—we, too, are forced to ask the question, "Lord, why art Thou not here? Why does our brother die? If Thou wert here Thou couldest save him. Dost Thou love him? and if Thou lovest, why are we sick? Why do we die?"

The inmates of that house at Bethany had received Jesus with a rare degree of sympathetic feeling and heartfelt welcome. They entered into the meaning of His teaching and preaching with a degree of fellowship and quick response that moved His heart and soul even beyond the best of His disciples. One of them at least—Mary, and almost certainly Lazarus too—had come very near to that Divine Lord, in full understanding of all His grandeur, His sinlessness, His mighty love Though yet all ignorant of a great deal about His person, and about the fashion in which He was to make His kingdom, with a genuine purity and ardour of attachment and affection, they worshipped Him, they recognised the Divine within Him, they hailed Him as the world's Christ and Saviour. Listen to Martha's cry in her perplexity: "I cannot understand it all, but I know Thou art the Christ come from God, the world's King, the world's Saviour. That I know, that I hold to." It was that understanding, that sympathy in that home, that made it so sweet a place of rest to Jesus. More than that—manifestly the two sisters and brother lived a life of sweet human affection. There was an atmosphere of tender love in their home, broken by little storms of misunderstanding, as may be in the very best of our imperfect human homes, but in reality a great depth of tenderness, and clinging attachment, and loyal love to one another, bound the household together. Oh, thank God for every such home on earth! That is the real bulwark against all pessimism, the charter of our eternal birthrights. Given the grandeur, the reality of human love, as, thank God, most of us know it in our homes, that is the absolute guarantee that it came from the creating hands of grander Love Divine.

Jesus was not merely loved by the family where He came to spend the nights when He was working in Jerusalem, but He got to love them with a very wonderful tenderness. You remember that chivalrous, impassioned defence of Mary, when she was assailed by the coarse attacks of the disciples. You catch it, too, in that message sent to Him—"He whom Thou lovest." Ah, many an act of affection, many a look that was a caress, many an appeal for sympathy that bespoke brotherhood, had passed between Jesus of Nazareth and that Lazarus, else the sisters would not have thought of saying, "He whom Thou lovest is sick."

And yet into that home so dear to the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, into that home that had for its Friend the Man that was master of life and of death, of calamity and prosperity, of all earthly powers and forces, into that home there penetrated cruel, painful, deadly sickness. The man Jesus loved lay there on his bed dying.

Now, I emphasize that, because there used to be a great deal of thinking about God's relation to those that love Him and whom He loves—a great deal of teaching in the Christian Church that counted itself most orthodox, and which was, indeed, deadly heresy, coarse, materialistic, despicable, misunderstanding the ideal grandeur of the Bible promises. Some of you know the sort of teaching that used to prevail—the idea that God's saints should be exceptionally favoured; the sun would shine on their plot of corn, and it would not shine on the plot of corn of the bad man; their ships would not sink at sea, their children would not catch infectious diseases; God would pamper them, exempt them from bearing their part in the world's great battle, with hardness and toil of labour, with struggle, and attainment, and achievement. It came of a very despicable conception of what a father can do for a child, as if the best thing for a father to do for his son was to pet and indulge him, and save him all bodily struggle and all difficulties, instead of giving him a life of discipline. As if a general in the army would, because of his faltering heart, refuse to let his son take the post of danger; as if he would not rather wish for that son—ay, with a great pang in his own soul—that he should be the bravest, the most daring, the one most exposed to the deadliest hazard.

Ah, we have got to recognise that we whom God loves may be sick and dying, and yet God does love us. Lazarus was loved by Jesus, yet he whom Jesus loved was sick and dying. Ah, and there is a still more poisonous difficulty in that materialistic, that worldly way of looking at God's love; that horrible, revolting misjudgment that Christ condemned, crushed with indignation when it confronted Him. "The men on whom the tower of Siloam fell must have been sinners worse than us on whom it did not fall." Never, never! The great government of the world is not made up of patches and strokes of anger and outbursts of weak indulgence. The world is God's great workshop, God's great battle-field. These have their places. Here a storm of bullets falls, and brave and good men as well as cowards fall before it. You mistake if you try to forestall God's judgments, God's verdicts on the last great day of reckoning.

Still we have got the fact that Christ does not interpose to prevent death, that Christ does not hinder those dearest to Him from bearing their share of life's sicknesses and sufferings, that God Himself suffers death to go on, apparently wielding an undisputed sway over human existence.

What is the consequence of it? Well, the first consequences seem to be all evil. You might look on the surface of life, and when you read superficially the narrative of this chapter in St. John, it looks as if mischief and evil came of the strange delay of God and of His Christ. Look at the effect upon the disciples. Now here there is not enough told to justify me in putting more positively to you the picture of their inner hearts, but I am going to present—I dread that I may be guilty of a want of charity, at all events of disproportion—but as I read this chapter, and try to think myself into it, this is the conception I have: Had these men known that Lazarus was very sick, they would not have wished their Master to go back to try and save him. They were selfish enough to have been rather glad that He was at a distance, to wish that He should not know. When the message did come I think they were puzzled and perplexed. Selfishly, they were rather pleased that He did not set off to go. But, on the other hand—for, mind you, a selfish man understands the dictates of love—they said to themselves, "It is not quite like Him. Well, it is wise, it is prudent not to go, but it is a little cowardly. Does He love Lazarus so much as we used to think?" Oh, if I am right, what a painful thing, all these bad, poor, selfish thoughts of the Divine heart in Jesus! all created, mark you, because Jesus suffered the man whom He loved to be sick, and at last to die, and did not go and check death, and drive the dark King of Terrors back.

Then Jesus says to them that He has resolved to go and visit Lazarus. It is here I get the ground on which I stand in forecasting that selfishness in them. Then they thought He was wrong. They did venture to blurt out what was a censure: "He will go; He ought not to do it. What are we to do who see with clearer eyes the pathway of prudence? To let Him go and die? It was a total blunder, a mistake, but all the same we cannot let Him go and die alone. Let us go and die with Him."

Oh, what a dearth of understanding of their Master, His love, His power, His real character, created by the enigma of Christ's conduct, that He had held His hand, that He had suffered His friend to be sick, that He had permitted him to die!

Then come to the two sisters. Ah, what a struggle must have gone on in their hearts, as hour after hour passed after the point had come when Jesus should have been with them if He had listened to their message, if He pitied their brother, His own beloved friend. What could the Master mean? Did something hinder Him and prevent His coming? or was it the danger to His life? Was there a little selfishness? or had they any right to expect it? Either He is lacking in love, or else He is lacking in power. What could it mean? And then, when at last the poor sick eyes shut and their brother lay there dead, their hearts were like stones within them. And the burial, following swiftly after in the East, because decay begins so quickly there; and then the mourning and the hired mourners, professional mourners, all around them, and these poor women there saying in their hearts, "Surely, surely it need not have been; certainly if the Master, who healed so many sick, had been here, if He had come, if He knew, if He had been here all this horror, this agony, this pain, might have been escaped."

So when Jesus did come, look at them, how they met Him. Martha goes away out, and the first thing she says is just what they had said so often to one another and to their own hearts: "O Master, if Thou hadst only been here our brother had not died." And then the spirit of the woman told her that perhaps she had hurt Jesus' feelings, that perhaps He was not to blame, that perhaps there was some explanation, though she could not see it, and so, in her blundering way—for she had not the fine tact that was in Mary—she tried to mend it, and only made it worse by volunteering that she did believe in Him after all.

The soul of Christ felt the intended love, and shuddered at that tremendous distance of sympathy and understanding. "You believe in Me." He could not hold it in. "Thy brother shall rise again." And poor Martha was unable to rise to the height of Christ's meaning. "Oh, yes, Lord, I know, at the great resurrection. Yes, he will rise again." Then comes Jesus' declaration, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. The man that lives in Me, in whom I live, has in Me a deathless life. I am here to-day to prove that." That was what He meant, but He was far away above her. The poor heart in her had lost Him. She was dazed, and so she just fell back upon the one thing that she was quite sure of, even if He had not been quite kind to her, or even if His power was limited. "Yes, yes, Master, I know Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, come into this world to be its Saviour and its King." And then, perhaps, with a sort of sense that Mary could understand the Master better, could read His meaning and tell it to her, she slipped away, and she found her sister, and whispered in her ear, "The Master is come, and asks for thee." Then Mary went away to meet Him too.

It is much harder to read what was in that sweet heart of Mary. I have no doubt that she, too, had fought a battle with doubt. The story seems to show that she had attained to greater faith than Martha. She had been pained, but still there was a divining instinct in her, like the divining instinct that warned her, when all the disciples were blind to it, that He was going to die, and she went and anointed Him to His burial; a divining instinct in her that somehow the cloud was going to be rolled away. And she went out and said simply, "Lord, if Thou hadst been here our brother had not died." And then she was too wise to say one word more. With her finer tact, with her deeper understanding, she knew that was all she should say. But it was like saying, "There is perplexity in this visitation, in Thy delay, in my brother's death; Thou couldst have made it different if Thou hadst seen it well to be here. I cannot understand the right and the love of it." It was a question. It did say, "Master, what art Thou going to do?" And Christ felt it was. As she broke out and burst into tears, He lost control and wept with her.

But there were others—the Jews, the enemies of Christ; men who hated Him, men who disbelieved in Him, men who grudged Him all His glory and the love He had won on the earth. They had hurried out—some of them with a degree of human compassion—to that home of bereavement. It was known as the home of Christ, and I think some of them had come with greater pleasure that Lazarus had died. What they said when they saw Him weep betrays their mood. "This is He who professed to be able to open the eyes of the blind and heal all sicknesses. How, then, is it that He allows His dearest friend on earth to be sick, and die, and be buried? He has lost His power, if He ever had it." They were rejoicing over His seeming defeat. They had no love for Him, and so had no faith in Him.

Is not that true of our world to-day? The best of you, Christians, when death comes to your own homes, do you manage to sing the songs of triumph right away? Well, you are very wonderful saints if you do. If you do not, perhaps you say, "If God is in this world, how comes that dark enigma of death?"

And others of you grip hold of your faith, but yet your heart cries out against it. You believe that God is good, but has He been quite good to you? Like Martha, you feel as if you had some doubt; you feel bound in your prayers; you say, "O God, I do not mean to reproach Thee;" weak, sinful if you will, yet the sign of a true follower of the Christ.

And then the enemies of Christ, the worldlings all about in this earth of ours, as they look upon death's ravages, they are saying, "If there were a God, if there were a Father, if there were a great heart that could love, why does not He show it?" Now, I said to you that at first it looks as if nothing but evil came of God's delay to interpose against death; but when you look a little deeper I think you begin to discover an infinitely greater good and benefit come out of that evil.

I must very briefly, very rapidly, trace to you in the story, and you can parallel it in the life of yourselves, that discipline of goodness there is in God's refraining from checking sickness and death. Christ said, the end of it is first of all death, but that is not the termination. Through death this sickness, this struggle of doubt and faith, should end in the glory of God. He meant this: In the preparation of His life and His death the death and resurrection of Lazarus held a central position. It was the turning-point, the thing that determined His crucifixion on Calvary. That tremendous miracle compelled the rulers of Jerusalem to resolve on and carry out His death. That miracle of Lazarus' resurrection gave to the faith of the disciples and of Christ's followers a strength of clinging attachment that carried them through the eclipse of their belief when they saw Him die on Calvary.

Now, what would you say? Was it cruel of Christ to allow His friend Lazarus, His dear friends Mary and Martha, to go through that period of suspense, of anxiety, of sickness, of death, and of the grave, that they might do one of the great deeds in bringing in the world's Redeemer? Oh, men and women, if God be wise, and if God be great, then must it not be that somehow or other the structure of this world is the best for God's end, and our tears, and partings, and calamities but incidents in the grand campaign that shall end in the resplendent glory of heaven? Yes, for the glory of God, and for the sake of others, for the sake of the disciples, for the sake of the world, says Christ, I have suffered My friend Lazarus to die.