Miracles of Our Lord Part 7

When he saw her trouble, and that of the Jews with her, he was troubled likewise. But why? The purest sympathy with what was about to vanish would not surely make him groan in his spirit. Why, then, this trouble in our Lord's heart? We have a right, yea, a duty, to understand it if we can, for he showed it.

I think it was caused by an invading sense of the general misery of poor humanity from the lack of that faith in the Father without which he, the Son, could do, or endure, nothing. If the Father ceased the Son must cease. It was the darkness between G.o.d and his creatures that gave room for and was filled with their weeping and wailing over their dead.

To them death must appear an unmitigated and irremediable evil. How frightful to feel as they felt! to see death as they saw it! Nothing could help their misery but that faith in the infinite love which he had come to bring them; but how hard it was to persuade them to receive it! And how many weeping generations of loving hearts must follow! His Father was indeed with them all, but how slowly and painfully would each learn the one precious fact!

"Where have ye laid him?" he asked.

"Lord, come and see," they answered, in such mournful accents of human misery that he wept with them.

They come to the grave.

"Take ye away the stone."

"Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days," said she who believed in the Resurrection and the Life! They are the saddest of sad words. I hardly know how to utter the feeling they raise. In all the relations of mortality to immortality, of body to soul, there are painful and even ugly things, things to which, by common consent, we refer only upon dire necessity, and with a sense of shame. Happy they in whom the mortal has put on immortality! Decay and its accompaniments, all that makes the most beloved of the _appearances_ of G.o.d's creation a terror, compelling us to call to the earth for succour, and pray her to take our dead out of our sight, to receive her own back into her bosom, and unmake in secret darkness that which was the glory of the light in our eyes--this was upper-most with Martha, even in the presence of him to whom Death was but a slave to come and go at his will. Careful of his feelings, of the shock to his senses, she would oppose his will. For the dead brother's sake also, that he should not be dishonoured in his privacy, she would not have had that stone removed. But had it been as Martha feared, who so tender with feeble flesh as the Son of Man? Who so unready to impute the shame it could not help? Who less fastidious over the painful working of the laws of his own world?

Entire affection hateth nicer hands.

And at the worst, what was decay to him, who could recall the disuniting atoms under the restored law of imperial life?

"Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of G.o.d?"

Again I say _the essential_ glory of G.o.d who raises all the dead, not merely _an exceptional_ glory of G.o.d in raising this one dead man.

They should see not corruption but glory. No evil odour of dissolution should a.s.sail them, but glowing life should spring from the place of the dead; light should be born from the very bosom of the darkness.

They took away the friendly stone. Then Jesus spoke, not to the dead man, but to the living Father. The men and women about him must know it as the Father's work. "And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me." So might they believe that the work was G.o.d's, that he was doing the will of G.o.d, and that they might trust in the G.o.d whose will was such as this. He claimed the presence of G.o.d in what he did, that by the open claim and the mighty deed following it they might see that the Father justified what the Son said, and might receive him and all that he did as the manifestation of the Father. And now--

"Lazarus, come forth."

Slow toiling, with hand and foot bound in the grave clothes, he that had been dead struggled forth to the light. What an awful moment! When did ever corruption and glory meet and embrace as now! Oh! what ready hands, eager almost to helplessness, were stretched trembling towards the feeble man returning from his strange journey, to seize and carry him into the day--their poor day, which they thought _all_ the day, forgetful of that higher day which for their sakes he had left behind, content to walk in moonlight a little longer, gladdened by the embraces of his sisters, and--perhaps--I do not know--comforting their hearts with news of the heavenly regions!

Joy of all joys! The dead come back! Is it any wonder that this Mary should spend three hundred pence on an ointment for the feet of the Raiser of the Dead?

I doubt if he told them anything? I do not think he could make even his own flesh and blood--of woman-kind, quick to understand--know the things he had seen and heard and felt. All that can be said concerning this, is thus said by our beloved brother Tennyson in his book _In Memoriam_:

'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?'

There lives no record of reply, Which telling what it is to die, Had surely added praise to praise.

Behold a man raised up by Christ!

The rest remaineth unrevealed; He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist.

Why are we left in such ignorance?

Without the raising of the dead, without the rising of the Saviour himself, Christianity would not have given what it could of _hope_ for the future. Hope is not faith, but neither is faith sight; and if we have hope we are not miserable men. But Christianity must not, could not interfere with the discipline needful for its own fulfilment, could not depose the schoolmaster that leads unto Christ. One main doubt and terror which drives men towards the revelation in Jesus, is this strange thing Death. How shall any man imagine he is complete in himself, and can do without a Father in heaven, when he knows that he knows neither the mystery whence he sprung by birth, nor the mystery to which he goes by death? G.o.d has given us room away from himself as Robert Browning says:--

..."G.o.d, whose pleasure brought

Man into being, stands away, As it were, an hand-breadth off, to give Room for the newly-made to live, And look at Him from a place apart, And use His gifts of brain and heart"--

and this room, in its time-symbol, is bounded by darkness on the one hand, and darkness on the other. Whence I came and whither I go are dark: how can I live in peace without the G.o.d who ordered it thus? Faith is my only refuge--an absolute belief in a being so much beyond myself, that he can do all for this _me_ with utter satisfaction to this _me_, protecting all its rights, jealously as his own from which they spring, that he may make me at last one with himself who is my deeper self, inasmuch as his thought of me is my life. And not to know him, even if I could go on living and happy without him, is death.

It may be said, "Why all this? Why not go on like a brave man to meet your fate, careless of what that fate may be?"

"But what if this fate _should_ depend on myself? Am I to be careless then?" I answer.

"The fate is so uncertain! If it be annihilation, why quail before it?

Cowardice at least is contemptible."

"Is not indifference more contemptible? That one who has once thought should not care to go on to think? That this glory should perish--is it no grief? Is life not a good with all its pain? Ought one to be willing to part with a good? Ought he not to cleave fast thereto? Have you never grudged the coming sleep, because you must cease for the time to _be_ so much as you were before? For my part, I think the man who can go to sleep without faith in G.o.d has yet to learn what being is. He who knows not G.o.d cannot, however, have much to lose in losing being. And yet--and yet--did he never love man or woman or child? Is he content that there should be no more of it? Above all, is he content to go on with man and woman and child now, careless of whether the love is a perishable thing?

If it be, why does he not kill himself, seeing it is all a lie--a false appearance of a thing too glorious to be fact, but for which our best nature calls aloud--and cannot have it? If one knew for certain that there was no life beyond this, then the n.o.ble thing would be to make the best of this, yea even then to try after such things as are written in the Gospel as we call it--for they _are_ the n.o.blest. That I am sure of, whatever I may doubt. But not to be sure of annihilation, and yet choose it to be true, and act as if it were true, seems to me to indicate a nature at strife with immortality--bound for the dust by its own choice--of the earth, and returning to the dust."

The man will say, "That is yielding everything. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I am of the dust, for I believe in nothing beyond."

"No," I return. "I recognize another law in myself which seems to me infinitely higher. And I think that law is in you also, although you are at strife with it, and will revive in you to your blessed discontent.

By that I will walk, and not by yours--a law which bids me strive after what I am not but may become--a law in me striving against the law of sin and down-dragging decay--a law which is one with my will, and, if true, must of all things make one at last. If I am made to live I ought not to be willing to cease. This unwillingness to cease--above all, this unwillingness to cease to love my own, the fore-front to me of my all men--may be in me the sign, may _well_ be in me the sign that I am made to live. Above all to pa.s.s away without the possibility of making reparation to those whom I have wronged, with no chance of saying _I am sorry--what shall I do for you? Grant me some means of delivering myself from this burden of wrong_--seems to me frightful. No G.o.d to help one to be good now! no G.o.d who cares whether one is good or not! if a G.o.d, then one who will not give his creature time enough to grow good, even if he is growing better, but will blot him out like a rain-drop! Great G.o.d, forbid--if thou art. If thou art not, then this, like all other prayers, goes echoing through the soulless vaults of a waste universe, from the thought of which its peoples recoil in horror. Death, then, is genial, soul-begetting, and love-creating; and Life is nowhere, save in the imaginations of the children of the grave. Whence, then, oh! whence came those their imaginations? Death, thou art not my father! Grave, thou art not my mother! I come of another kind, nor shall ye usurp dominion over me."

What better sign of immortality than the raising of the dead could G.o.d give? He cannot, however, be always raising the dead before our eyes; for then the holiness of death's ends would be a failure. We need death; only it shall be undone once and again for a time, that we may know it is not what it seems to us. I have already said that probably we are not capable of being told in words what the other world is. But even the very report through the ages that the dead came back, as their friends had known them, with the old love unlost in the grave, with the same face to smile and bless, is precious indeed. That they remain the same in all that made them lovely, is the one priceless fact--if we may but hope in it as a fact. That we shall behold, and clasp, and love them again follows of simple necessity. We cannot be sure of the report as if it were done before our own eyes, yet what a hope it gives even to him whose honesty and his faith together make him, like Martha, refrain speech, not daring to say _I believe_ of all that is reported! I think such a one will one day be able to believe more than he even knows how to desire. For faith in Jesus will well make up for the lack of the sight of the miracle.

Does G.o.d, then, make death look what it is not? Why not let it appear what it is, and prevent us from forming false judgments of it?

It is our low faithlessness that makes us misjudge it, and nothing but faith could make us judge it aright. And that, while in faithlessness, we should thus misjudge it, is well. In what it appears to us, it is a type of what we are without G.o.d. But there is no falsehood in it. The dust must go back to the dust. He who believes in the body more than in the soul, cleaves to this aspect of death: he who believes in thought, in mind, in love, in truth, can see the other side--can rejoice over the bursting sh.e.l.l which allows the young oak to creep from its kernel-prison. The lower is true, but the higher overcomes and absorbs it. "When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." When the spirit of death is seen, the body of death vanishes from us. Death is G.o.d's angel of birth. We fear him. The dying stretches out loving hands of hope towards him. I do not believe that death is to the dying the dreadful thing it looks to the beholders. I think it is more like what the spirit may then be able to remember of its own birth as a child into this lower world, this porch of the heavenly. How will he love his mother then! and all humanity in her, and G.o.d who gave her, and G.o.d who gives her back!

The future lies dark before us, with an infinite hope in the darkness.

To be at peace concerning it on any other ground than the love of G.o.d, would be an absolute loss. Better fear and hope and prayer, than knowledge and peace without the prayer.

To sum up: An express revelation in words would probably be little intelligible. In Christ we have an ever-growing revelation. He is the resurrection and the life. As we know him we know our future.

In our ignorance lies a force of need, compelling us towards G.o.d.

In our ignorance likewise lies the room for the development of the simple will, as well as the necessity for arousing it. Hence this ignorance is but the sh.e.l.l of faith.

In this, as in all his miracles, our Lord _shows_ in one instance what his Father is ever doing without showing it.

Even the report of this is the best news we can have from the _other_ world--as we call it.

IX. THE GOVERNMENT OF NATURE.

The miracles I include in this cla.s.s are the following:--

1. The turning of water into wine, already treated of, given by St John.

2. The draught of fishes, given by St Luke. 3. The draught of fishes, given by St John. 4 The feeding of the four thousand, given by St Matthew and St Mark. 5. The feeding of the five thousand, recorded by all the Evangelists. 6. The walking on the sea, given by St Matthew, St Mark, and St John. 7. The stilling of the storm, given by St Matthew, St Mark, and St Luke. 8. The fish bringing the piece of money, told by St Matthew alone.

These miracles, in common with those already considered, have for their end the help or deliverance of man. They differ from those, however, in operating mediately, through a change upon external things, and not at once on their human objects.

But besides the fact that they have to do with what we call nature, they would form a cla.s.s on another ground. In those cases of disease, the miracles are for the setting right of what has gone wrong, the restoration of the order of things,--namely, of the original condition of humanity. No doubt it is a law of nature that where there is sin there should be suffering; but even its cure helps to restore that righteousness which is highest nature; for the cure of suffering must not be confounded with the absence of suffering. But the miracles of which I have now to speak, show themselves as interfering with what we may call the righteous laws of nature. Water should wet the foot, should ingulf him who would tread its surface. Bread should come from the oven last, from the field first. Fishes should be now here now there, according to laws ill understood of men--nay, possibly according to a piscine choice quite unknown of men. Wine should take ripening in the grape and in the bottle. In all these cases it is otherwise. Yet even in these, I think, the restoration of an original law--the supremacy of righteous man, is foreshown. While a man cannot order his own house as he would, something is wrong in him, and therefore in his house. I think a true man should be able to rule winds and waters and loaves and fishes, for he comes of the Father who made the house for him. Had Jesus not been capable of these things, he might have been the best of men, but either he could not have been a perfect man, or the perfect G.o.d, if such there were, was not in harmony with the perfect man. Man is not master in his own house because he is not master in himself, because he is not a law unto himself--is not himself obedient to the law by which he exists. Harmony, that is law, alone is power. Discord is weakness.