Miracles Of Our Lord, George MacDonald [best new books to read .TXT] 📗

Paul's mind-he speaks of things so in a continuity, not even referring to the change-not even saying before death or after death, as if death made no atom of difference in the progress of holy events, the divine history of the individual and of the race together. In a word, when he raised the dead, the Son did neither more nor less nor other than the work of the Father-what he is always doing; he only made it manifest a little sooner to the eyes and hearts of men.

But they to whom he spoke laughed him to scorn. They knew she was dead, and their unfaithfulness blinded their hearts to what he meant. They were unfit to behold the proof of what he had said. Such as they, in such mood, could gather from it no benefit. A faithful heart alone is capable of understanding the proof of the truest things. It is faith towards God which alone can lay hold of any of his facts. There is a foregoing fitness. Therefore he put them all out. But the father and mother, whose love and sorrow made them more easily persuaded of mighty things, more accessible to holy influences, and the three disciples, whose faith rendered them fit to behold otherwise dangerous wonders, he took with him into the chamber where the damsel lay-dead toward men-sleeping toward God. Dead as she was, she only slept.

"Damsel, I say unto thee, arise." "And her spirit came again," "and straightway the damsel arose and walked," "and he commanded to give her meat." For in the joy of her restoration, they might forget that the more complete the health of a worn and exhausted body, the more needful was food-food which, in all its commonness, might well support the miracle; for not only did it follow by the next word to that which had wrought the miracle, but it worked in perfect harmony with the law which took shape in this resurrection, and in its relations to the human being involved no whit less marvel than lay in the miracle itself. The raising of the dead and the feeding of the living are both and equally divine-therefore in utter harmony. And we do not any more understand the power in the body which takes to itself that food, than we understand the power going out from Jesus to make this girl's body capable of again employing its ministrations. They are both of one and must be perfect in harmony, the one as much the outcome of law as the other.

He charges the parents to be silent, it may be for his sake, who did not want to be made a mere wonder of, but more probably for their sakes, that the holy thing might not evaporate in speech, or be defiled with foolish talk and the glorification of self-importance in those for whom a mighty wonder had been done; but that in silence the seed might take root in their hearts and bring forth living fruit in humility, and uprightness, and faith.

And now for the wonderful story of Lazarus. In this miracle one might think the desire of Jesus for his friend's presence through his own coming trouble, might have had a share, were it not that we never find him working a miracle for himself. He knew the perfect will of the Father, and left all to him. Those who cannot know that will and do not care for it, have to fall into trouble that they may know God as the Saviour from their own doings-as the fountain of all their well-being. This Jesus had not to learn, and therefore could need no miracle wrought for him. Even his resurrection was all for others. That miracle was wrought in, not for him.

He knew Lazarus was dying. He abode where he was and let him die. For a hard and therefore precious lesson for sisters and friends lay in that death, and the more the love the more precious the lesson-the same that lies in every death; and the end the same for all who love-resurrection. The raising of Lazarus is the type of the raising of all the dead. Of Lazarus, as of the daughter of Jairus, he said "he sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." He slept as every dead man sleeps.

Read the story. Try to think not only what the disciples felt, but what Jesus was thinking; how he, who saw the other side, regarded the death he was about to destroy.

"Lord, if thou hadst been here," said Martha, "my brother had not died."

Did she mean to hint what she had not faith enough to ask?

"Thy brother shall rise again," said the Lord.

But her faith was so weak that she took little comfort from the assurance. Alas! she knew what it meant. She knew all about it. He spoke of the general far-off resurrection, which to her was a very little thing. It was true he should rise again; but what was that to the present consuming grief? A thousand years might be to God as one day, but to Martha the one day was a thousand years. It is only to him who entirely believes in God that the thousand years become one day also. For he that believes shares in the vision of him in whom he believes. It is through such faith that Jesus would help her-far beyond the present awful need. He seeks to raise her confidence in himself by the strongest assertions of the might that was in him. "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live!" The death of not believing in God-the God revealed in Jesus-is the only death. The other is nowhere but in the fears and fancies of unbelief. "And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." There is for him nothing to be called death; nothing that is what death looks to us.

"Believest thou this?"

Martha was an honest woman. She did not fully understand what he meant. She could not, therefore, do more than assent to it. But she believed in him, and that much she could tell him plainly.

"Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

And that hope with the confession arose in her heart, she gave the loveliest sign: she went and called her sister. But even in the profounder Mary faith reached only to the words of her sister:

"Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."

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 God 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 God'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 God?"

Again I say the essential glory of God who raises all the dead, not merely an exceptional glory of God in raising this one dead man.

They should see not corruption but glory. No evil odour of dissolution should assail 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 God's, that he was doing the will of God, and that they might trust in the God whose will was such as this. He claimed the presence of God 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