![]() So he insists upon all the points which emerge in the course of his narrative that show the reality of Christ’s corporeal manhood. His proclamation was ‘the Word was made flesh,’ and he had to dwell on both parts of that message, showing Him as the Word and showing Him as flesh. This Evangelist, to whom it was given to tell the Church and the world more than any of the others had imparted to them of the divine uniqueness of the Master’s person, had also given to him in charge the corresponding and complementary message-to insist upon the reality and the verity of His manhood. Here, for one thing, is the blessed sign and proof of His true brotherhood with us. Oh! brethren, surely-surely in this manifestation, or call it better, this revelation of Christ the Lord, expressed in these two emotions-surely there are large and blessed lessons for us! On them I can only touch in the lightest manner. And as there rose before Him the reality of man’s desolation through sin, and the thought that all this misery, loss, pain, parting, death, was a contradiction of the divine purpose, and an interruption of God’s order, and that it had all been pulled down upon men’s desperate heads by their own evil and their own folly, there rose in His heart the anger which is part of the perfectness of humanity when it looks upon sorrow linked by adamantine chains with sin.īut the lightning of the wrath dissolved soon into the rain of pity and of sorrow, and, as we read, ‘Jesus wept.’ Looking upon the weeping Mary and the lamenting crowd, and Himself feeling the pain of the parting from the friend whom He loved, the tears, which are the confession of human nature that it is passing through an emotion too deep for words, came to His all-seeing eyes. He saw the whole mass represented there, the ocean in the drop, and He looked beyond the fact and linked it with its cause. What caused the indignation? Cannot we fancy how there rose up, as in pale, spectral procession before His vision, the whole long series of human sorrows and losses, of which one was visible there before Him? He saw, in the one individual case, the whole genus. The word contains in it at least a tinge of the passion of ‘indignation’. And the nature of the emotion is not merely the grief and the sympathy which distilled in tears, but it is something deeper and other than that. The word which is rendered in our version ‘He groaned in the spirit,’ and which is twice repeated in the narrative, is, according to the investigations of the most careful philological commentators, expressive not only of the outward sign of an emotion, but of the nature of it. This miracle stands alone in the whole majestic series of His mighty works by the fact that it is preceded by a storm of emotion, which shakes the frame of the Master, which He is represented by the Evangelist not so much as suppressing as fostering, and which diverges and parts itself into the two feelings expressed by His groans and by His tears. First, then, we have here a revelation of Christ as our Brother, by emotion and sorrow. And to these three points I ask you to turn briefly. There is the revelation of Christ as our Life by His mighty life-giving word. There is the revelation of Christ as our Lord by His consciousness of divine power. There is the revelation of Christ as our Brother, by emotion and sorrow. And there are three things in this narrative which I think well worthy of our notice. We must content ourselves with dealing with one or two of the salient points. Of course it is impossible for us to attempt, even in the most cursory manner, to go over the whole. Therefore the great length to which the narrative extends. ![]() It crowns the whole, whether we regard the greatness of the fact, the manner of our Lord’s working, the minuteness and richness of the accompanying details, the revelation of our Lord’s heart, the consolations which it suggests to sorrowing spirits, or the immortal hopes which it kindles.Īnd besides all this, the miracle is of importance for the development of the Evangelist’s purpose, in that it makes the immediate occasion of the embittered hostility which finally precipitates the catastrophe of the Cross. The series of our Lord’s miracles before the Passion, as recorded in this Gospel, is fitly closed with the raising of Lazarus.
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