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LECTURE VI.

THE LORD AND GIVER OF LIFE.

And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee. As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly, and came unto him. Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him. The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there. Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. 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. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees in council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us,

that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death. Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near to the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim, and there continued with his disciples. And the Jews' passover was nigh at hand: and many went out of the country up to Jerusalem before the passover, to purify themselves. Then sought they for Jesus, and spake among themselves, as they stood in the temple, What think ye, that he will not come to the feast? Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a commandment, that, if any man knew where he were, he should show it, that they might take him.-JOHN xi. 28-57.

WE have studied the previous part of this impressive and interesting miracle. I come now to its end-to that crowning act by which it was so gloriously closed: the resurrection of Lazarus. I need not say that every verse might be the basis of a sermon; but it is sometimes expedient and highly useful that we should look at passages as wholes, and not break them into fragments, in order to build on every fragment the superstructure of an appeal, an argument, or an address.

On the present occasion, therefore, I will incidentally examine the whole of the narrative I have read. In the 28th verse, we read that Martha hears the sound of joy in the very words that Jesus had uttered: "I am the resurrection and the life." What he intends to do with her brother she evidently knows not; but joy she evidently felt, and because of the prospect of some good he was about to achieve for her; and with that beautiful and unselfish characteristic by which the people of God ought always to be distinguished, she is resolved not to have a monopoly of the joy. She desires to share it with her sister Mary. She therefore runs to her secretly, and whispers in her ear the missionary sentiment which this female evangelist so joyfully conveyed: "The Master is come, and calleth for

thee." To be missionaries is the duty, yea, rather the pri-" vilege, of us all: the sister to her sister, the female to her friends, as well as the minister upon the distant isles of the ocean, and amid the untrodden deserts of Africa. It is a most erroneous, nay a Popish idea that we are merely to contribute a sovereign a year to send out a missionary to India or Africa, and that we are excused by that gift from doing any thing, or saying any thing, or attempting any thing, to spread the gospel in our own immediate neighbourhood. The true idea of missions is, that man, the moment he is made a Christian, becomes a missionary; the unction of the saint is thus expended in the duties and the sacrifices of the servant. And it is the feature, the grand ennobling feature, of the gospel, that he that drinks deepest of its living water thirsts most to diffuse it. You may estimate the depth of a man's Christianity by the extent of what he does, or gives, or sacrifices, or suffers, to spread it. There may be selfishness among statesmen, there may be selfishness among literary men, but there can be no selfishness among those who are truly Christians; for the very law of the economy they belong to is, that God gives us the largest blessings, that we may diffuse them the most largely around us.

Mary, we read, runs immediately to Jesus as her sister invited her, and repeats the words which had been spoken before by Martha, (ver. 32,) "Lord, if thou hadst been here our brother had not died." You recollect, when Martha first met Jesus, and told him of her brother's sufferings, and then of her brother's death, that she, too, gave utterance to the same sentiments: "Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died." What does this show? That it had been a frequent fire-side remark. These two sisters had often said, as they wept together over the hearth, and gazed upon the flame that reflected no longer its light

upon the face that they loved, and as their tears fell fast on the stone no longer trodden by a brother, "If Jesus had been here, Lazarus, our brother, had not died." And so deeply had this sentiment taken possession of their hearts, that Martha utters it in one place as the feeling that was uppermost in her mind, and Mary is no sooner introduced to Jesus than she too gives utterance to the same sentiment. But it was not a just remark. It indicated faith, and yet want of faith. It was as fixed a point that Jesus should not be at the bedside of the dying Lazarus, as it was that he should stand at the grave of the dead Lazarus. The "ifs" of men are the decrees of God. We say “if,” but that "if" is as fixed as the final close of the fact to which it refers. And hence, in the remarks we make about our relatives, we often say, "Ah! if I had only taken that, course; if I had only done this; if I had only sent for that physician; if I had only had recourse to this medicine, how different would it have been!" But all these ifs are part of the steps by which the relative rose from earth to glory, and were just as needful, and as decreed, every one of them, as that he should fall asleep in Jesus, and live for I am not a fatalist, yet I believe in the sovereignty of God. What is the meaning, what is the end, above all, the comfort of the doctrine of election? It is not intended to modify what we do now. God's election is not our rule of life. It is God's written word. But when facts have taken place over which we had no control, when we have lost the near and the dear that we loved, then election comes in with all its real and blessed consolations, and tells us: This was not an accident; this was not a chance, a hap-hazard occurrence, but it was just as fixed as God's own throne, and no power on earth could have made it otherwise.

ever.

The Jews, we read, followed Mary to the tomb. "When

Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled." These Jews went to the tomb in the exercise of a humane sympathy: they went to sympathize with Mary; but God sent them to be witnesses to a miracle that was to teach souls. Man pursues his own ends, chalks out his own path, and acts under the impulse of his own motives; but over every man, from the highest that sits upon the throne to the meanest that barely lives in the wretched attic, there is a controlling hand guiding, overruling, directing all to his glory, and to the most be⚫neficent designs. So those Jews took their own way, and went on their own errand; but they were afterward used by God, as the narrative shows, to make known to the Pharisees the fact that one was raised from the dead, and that Jesus was therefore the Son of God.

An expression occurs in this verse which I may notice : Jesus "groaned in the spirit." This is an unfortunate translation; it is not positively correct, and our translators in other passages have not so rendered it. It denotes not groaning in spirit, but properly, being indignant. The idea of indignation (I do not know by what other word I could well express it) is implied in the word which is here translated "groaned in spirit." We have the very same phrase, for instance, in Mark xiv. 5, where the disciples say, "For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her." That is the very same word in the original. It also occurs in other passages, with shades of variation, all of them conveying, and involving, and implying, the idea of indignation. But most persons who have examined it, and probably noticed this idea, have been perplexed by the thought, What could Jesus be indignant at? Why should there be indignation