Part 9

THE MOURNER'S CREED.

How stands our faith?

These mighty thoughts and words of consolation--are they really believed, felt, trusted in, rejoiced over?

Christian, "Believest thou this?" Art thou really looking to this exalted life-giving Saviour? Hast thou in some feeble measure realised this resurrection-life as thine own? Hast thou the joyful consciousness of participating in this vital union with a living Lord? In vain do we listen to these sublime Bethany utterances unless we feel "Jesus speaks to me," and unless we be living from day to day under their invigorating power.

He had unfolded to Martha in a single verse a whole Gospel; He had irradiated by a few words the darkness of the tomb; and now, turning to the poor dejected weeper at his side, He addresses the all-important question, "Believest thou this?"

Her faith had been but a moment before staggering. Some guilty misgivings had been mingling with her anguished tears. She has now an opportunity afforded of rising above her doubts,--the ebbings and flowings of her fitful feelings,--and cleaving fast to the Living Rock.

It elicits an unfaltering response--"Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

Remarkable confession! We should not so much have wondered to hear it after the grave, hard by, had been rifled, and the silent lips of Lazarus had been unsealed; or had she stood like the other Mary at her Lord's own sepulchre in the garden, and after a few brief, but momentous days and hours, seen a whole flood of light thrown on the question of His Messiahship.

But as yet there was much to damp such a bold confession, and lead to hesitancy in the avowal of such a creed. The poverty, the humiliations, the unworldly obscurity of that solitary One who claimed no earthly birthright, and owned no earthly dwelling, were not all these, particularly to a Jew, at variance with every idea formed in connexion with the coming Shiloh?

Was Martha's then a blind unmeaning faith? Far from it. It was nurtured, doubtless, in that quiet home of holy love, where, while Lazarus yet lived, this mysterious Being, in an earthly form and in pilgrim garb, came time after time discoursing to them often, as we are warranted to believe, on the dignity of His nature, the glories of His person, the completeness of His work. It was neither the evidence of miracle or prophecy which had revealed to that weeping disciple that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. With the exception of Micah's statement regarding Bethlehem-Ephratah as His birthplace, we question if any other remarkable prediction concerning Him had yet been fulfilled; and so far as miracles were concerned, though she may and must have doubtless known of them by hearsay, we have no evidence that she had as yet so much as witnessed one. We never read till this time of their quiet village being the scene of any manifestations of His power. These had generally taken place either in Jerusalem or in the cities and coasts of Galilee. The probability, therefore, is that Martha, had never yet seen that arm of Omnipotence bared, or witnessed those prodigies with which elsewhere He authenticated His claims to Divinity.

Whence then her creed? May we not believe she had made her noble avowal mainly from the study of that beauteous, spotless character--from those looks, and words, and deeds--from that lofty teaching--so unlike every human system--so wondrously adapted to the wants and woes, the sins, the sorrows, and aching necessities of the human heart. All this had left on her own spirit, and on that of Lazarus and Mary, the irresistible impression and evidence that he was indeed the Lord of Glory--"the Hope of Israel, and the Saviour thereof."

And is it not the same evidence we exult in still? Is this not the reason of many a humble believer's creed and faith--who may be all unlettered and unlearned in the evidences of the schools--the external and internal bulwarks of our impregnable Christianity? Ask them why they believe? why their faith is so firm--their love so strong?

They will tell you that that Saviour, in all the glories of His person, in all the completeness of His work, in all the beauties of His character, is the very Saviour they need!--that His Gospel is the very errand of mercy suited to their souls' necessities;--that His words of compassion, and tenderness, and hope, are in every way adapted to meet the yearnings of their longing spirits. They need to stand by the grave of no Lazarus to be certified as to His Messiahship. His looks and tones--His character and doctrine,--His cures and remedies for the wants and woes of their ruined natures, point Him out as the true Heavenly Physician.

They can tell of the best of all evidences, and the strongest of all--the experimental evidence! They are no theorists. Religion is no subject with them of barren speculation; it is a matter of inner and heartfelt experience. They have tried the cure--they have found it answer;--they have fled to the Physician--they have applied His balm--they have been healed and live! And you might as well try to convince the restored blind that the sunlight which has again burst on them is a wild dream of fancy, or the restored deaf that the world's joyous melodies which have again awoke on them are the mockeries of their own brain, as convince the spiritually enlightened and awakened that He who has proved to them light and life, and joy and peace--their comfort in prosperity--their refuge in adversity--is other than the Son of God and Saviour of the world!

Reader, is this your experience? Have you tasted and seen that the Lord is gracious? Have you felt the preciousness of His gospel, the adaptation of His work to the necessities of your ruined condition?--the power of His grace, the prevalence of His intercession, the fulness and glory and truthfulness of His promises? Are you exulting in Him as the Resurrection and Life, who has raised you from the death of sin, and will at last raise you from the power of death, and invest you with that eternal life which His love has purchased?

Precious as is this hope and confidence at all times, specially so is it, mourners in Zion! in your seasons of sorrow. When human refuges fail, and human friendships wither, and human props give way, how sustaining to have this "anchor of the soul sure and steadfast"--union with a living Lord on earth, and the joyful hope of endless and uninterrupted union and communion with Him in glory! Are you even now enjoying, through your tears, this blessed persuasion, and exulting in this blessed creed? Do you know the secret of that twofold solace, "the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings?"--the "fellowship of His sufferings" telling of His sympathy with your sorrows below;--the "power of His resurrection" assuring you of the glorious gift of everlasting life in a world where sorrow dare not enter. Rest not satisfied with a mere outward creed and confession that "Jesus is the Saviour." Let yours be the nobler formula of an appropriating faith--"He is my Saviour; He loved ME, and gave Himself for ME." Let it not be with you a salvation possible, but a salvation found; so that, with a tried apostle, you can rise above the surges of deepening tribulation as you glory in the conviction, "I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him."

Sad, indeed, for those who, when "deep calleth unto deep," have no such "strong consolation" to enable them to ride out the storm; who, when sorrow and bereavement overtake them--the lowering shadows of the dark and cloudy day--have still to grope after an unknown Christ; and, amid the hollowness of earthly and counterfeit comforts, have to seek, for the first time, the only true One.

Oh! if our hour of trial has not yet come, let us be prepared for it--for come it will. Let us seek to have our vessels moored now to the Rock of Ages, that when the tempest arises--when the floods beat, and the winds blow, and the wrecks of earthly joy are seen strewing the waters--we may triumphantly utter the challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"

"Say, ye who tempt The sea of life, by summer gales impell'd, Have ye this anchor? Sure a time will come For storms to try you, and strong blasts to rend Your painted sails, and shred your gold like chaff O'er the wild wave. And what a wreck is man, If sorrow find him unsustain'd by God!"

THE MASTER.

Martha can withhold no longer from her sister the joyful tidings which she has been the first to hear. With fleet foot she hastens back to the house with the announcement, "The Master is come, and calleth for thee." Mary hears, but makes no comment. Wrapt in the silence of her own meditative grief, "when she heard that, she arose quickly and came unto Him."

"To her all earth could render nothing back Like that pale changeless brow. Calmly she stood As marble statue.

In that maiden's breast Sorrow and loneliness sank darkly down, Though the blanch'd lips breathed out no boisterous plaint Of common grief."

The formal sympathisers who gathered around her had observed her departure. They are led to form their conjectures as to the cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened lattice. They can form but one surmise: that, in accordance with wont, she has betaken herself to the burial-ground to feed her morbid grief "She goeth unto the grave to weep there." Ah! little did they know how much nobler was her motive--how truer and grander the solace she sought and found.

There is little that is really profitable or hallowed in visiting the grave of loved ones. Though fond affection will, from some false feeling of the tribute due to the memory of the departed, seek to surmount sadder thoughts, and linger at the spot where treasured ashes repose, yet--think and act as we may--there is nothing cheering, nothing elevating there. The associations of the burial-place are all with the humiliating triumphs of the King of Terrors. It is a view of death taken from the earthly entrance of the valley, not the heavenly view of it as that valley opens on the bright plains of immortality. The gay flowers and emerald sod which carpet the grave are poor mockeries to the bereft spirit, shrouding, as they do, nobler withered blossoms which the foot of the destroyer has trampled into dust, and which no earthly beauty can again clothe, or earthly spring reanimate. They are to be pitied who have no higher solace, no better remedy for their grief, than thus to water with unavailing tears the trophies of death; or to read the harrowing record which love has traced on its slab of cold marble, telling of the vanity of human hopes.

Such, however, was not Mary's errand in leaving the chamber of bereavement. That drooping flower was not opening her leaves, only to be crushed afresh with new tear-floods of sorrow. She sought One who would disengage her soiled and shattered tendrils from the chill comforts of earth, and bathe them in the genial influences of Heaven. The music of her Master's name alone could put gladness into her heart--tempt her to muffle other conflicting feelings and hasten to His feet. "The Master is come!" Nothing could have roused her from her profound grief but this. While her poor earthly comforters are imagining her prostrate at the sepulchre's mouth, giving vent to the wild delirium of her young grief, she is away, not to the victim of death, but to the Lord of Life, either to tell to Him the tale of her woe, or else to listen from His lips to words of comfort no other comforter had given. Is there not the same music in that name--the same solace and joy in that presence still? Earthly sympathy is not to be despised; nay, when death has entered a household, taken the dearest and the best and laid them in the tomb, nothing is more soothing to the wounded, crushed, and broken one, than to experience the genial sympathy of true Christian friendship. Those, it may be, little known before (comparative strangers), touched with the story of a neighbour's sorrow, come to offer their tribute of condolence, and to "weep with those that weep." Never is true friendship so tested as then. Hollow attachments, which have nothing but the world or a time of prosperity to bind them, discover their worthlessness. "Summer friends" stand aloof--they have little patience for the sadness of sorrow's countenance and the funereal trappings of the death-chamber; while sympathy, based on lofty Christian principle, loves to minister as a subordinate healer of the broken-hearted, and to indulge in a hundred nameless ingenious offices of kindness and love.

But "thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." The purest and noblest and most disinterested of earthly friends can only go a certain way. Their minds and sympathies are limited. They cannot enter into the deep recesses of the smitten heart--the yawning crevices that bereavement has laid bare. But JESUS can! Ah! there are capacities and sensibilities in that Mighty Heart that can probe the deepest wound and gauge the profoundest sorrow. While from the best of earthly comforters the mind turns away unsatisfied; while the burial-ground and the grave only recall the deep humiliations of the body's wreck and ruin--with what fond emotion does the spirit, like Mary, turn to Him who possesses the majesty of Deity with all the tenderness of humanity. The Mighty Lord, and yet the Elder Brother!

The sympathy of man is often selfish, formal, constrained, commonplace, coming more from the surface than from the depths of the heart. It is the finite sympathy of a finite creature. The Redeemer's sympathy is that of the perfect Man and the infinite God--able to enter into all the peculiarities of the case--all the tender features and shadings of sorrow which are hidden from the keenest and kindliest human eye.