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 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? God has given us room away from himself as Robert Browning says:—
…"God, 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 God 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 God has yet to learn what being is. He who knows not God 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 noble 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 noblest. 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 pass 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 God to help one to be good now! no God who cares whether one is good or not! if a God, 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 God, 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 God 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 God, 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 God. 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 shell 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 God'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 God who gave her, and God 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 God, 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 God.
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 shell 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 class 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 class 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 God, 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. God alone is perfect, living, self-existent law.
I will try, in a few words, to give the ground on which I find it possible to accept these miracles. I cannot lay it down as for any other man. I do not wonder at most of those to whom the miracles are a stumbling-block. I do a little wonder at those who can believe in Christ and yet find them a stumbling-block.
How God creates, no man can tell. But as man is made in God's image, he may think about God's work, and dim analogies may arise out of the depth of his nature which have some resemblance to the way in which God works. I say then, that, as we are the offspring of God—the children of his will, like as the thoughts move in a man's mind, we live in God's mind. When God thinks anything, then that thing is. His thought of it is its life. Everything is because God thinks it into being. Can it then be very hard to believe that he should alter by a thought any form or appearance of things about us?
"It is inconsistent to work otherwise than by law."
True; but we know so little of this law that we cannot say what is essential in it, and what only the so far irregular consequence of the unnatural condition of those for whom it was made, but who have not yet willed God's harmony. We know so little of law that we cannot certainly say what would be an infringement of this or that law. That which at first sight appears as such, may be but the operating of a higher law which rightly dominates the other. It is the law, as we call it, that a stone should fall to the ground. A man may place his hand beneath the stone, and then, if his hand be strong enough, it is the law that the stone shall not fall to the ground. The law has been lawfully prevented from working its full end. In similar ways, God might stop the working of one law by the intervention of another. Such intervention, if not understood by us, would be what we call a miracle. Possibly a different condition of the earth, producible according to law, might cause everything to fly off from its surface instead of seeking it. The question is whether or not we can believe that the usual laws might be set aside by laws including higher principles and wider operations. All I have to answer is—Give me good reason, and I can. A man may say—"What seems good reason to you, does not to me." I answer, "We are both accountable to that being, if such there be, who has lighted in us the candle of judgment. To him alone we stand or fall. But there must be a final way of right, towards which every willing heart is led,—and which no one can find who does not seek it." All I want to show here, is a conceivable region in which a miracle might take place without any violence done to the order of things. Our power of belief depends greatly on our power of imagining a region in which the things might be. I do not see how some people could believe what to others may offer small difficulty. Let us beware lest what we call faith be but the mere assent of a mind which has cared and thought so little about the objects of its so-called faith, that it has never seen the difficulties they involve. Some such believers are the worst antagonists of true faith—the children of the Pharisees of old.
If any one say we ought to receive nothing of which we have no experience; I answer, there is in me a necessity, a desire before which all my experience shrivels into a mockery. Its complement must lie beyond. We ought, I grant, to accept nothing for which we cannot see the probability of some sufficient reason, but I thank God that this sufficient reason is not for me limited to the realm of experience. To suppose that it was, would change the hope of a life that might be an ever-burning sacrifice of thanksgiving, into a poor struggle with events and things and chances—to doom the Psyche to perpetual imprisonment in the worm. I desire the higher; I care not to live for the lower. The one would make me despise my fellows and recoil with disgust from a self I cannot annihilate; the other fills me with humility, hope, and love. Is the preference for the one over the other foolish then—even to the meanest judgment?
A higher condition of harmony with law, may one day enable us to do things which must now appear an interruption of law. I believe it is in virtue of the absolute harmony in him, his perfect righteousness, that God can create at all. If man were in harmony with this, if he too were righteous, he would inherit of his Father a something in his degree correspondent to the creative power in Him; and the world he inhabits, which is but an extension of his body, would, I think, be subject to him in a way surpassing his wildest dreams of dominion, for it would be the perfect dominion of holy law—a virtue flowing to and from him through the channel of a perfect obedience. I suspect that our Lord in all his dominion over nature, set forth only the complete man—man as God means him one day to be. Why should he not know where the fishes were? or even make them come at his will? Why should not that will be potent as impulse in them? If we admit what I hail as the only fundamental idea upon which I can speculate harmoniously with facts, and as alone disclosing regions wherein contradictions are soluble, and doubts previsions of loftier truth—I mean the doctrine of the Incarnation; or if even we admit that Jesus was good beyond any other goodness we know, why should it not seem possible that the whole region of inferior things might be more subject to him than to us? And if more, why not altogether? I believe that some of these miracles were the natural result of a physical nature perfect from the indwelling of a perfect soul, whose unity with the Life of all things and in all things was absolute—in a word, whose sonship was perfect.
If in the human form God thus visited his people, he would naturally show himself Lord over their circumstances. He will not lord it over their minds, for such lordship is to him abhorrent: they themselves must see and rejoice in acknowledging the lordship which makes them free. There was no grand display, only the simple doing of what at the time was needful. Some say it is a higher thing to believe of him that he took things just as they were, and led the revealing life without the aid of wonders. On any theory this is just what he did as far as his own life was concerned. But he had no ambition to show himself the best of men. He comes to reveal the Father. He will work even wonders to that end, for the sake of those who could not believe as he did and had to be taught it. No miracle was needful for himself: he saw the root of the matter—the care of God. But he revealed this root in a few rare and hastened flowers to the eyes that could not see to the root. There is perfect submission to lower law for himself, but revelation of the Father to them by the introduction of higher laws operating in the upper regions bordering upon ours, not separated from ours by any impassable gulf—rather connected by gently ascending stairs, many of whose gradations he could blend in one descent. He revealed the Father as being under no law, but as law itself, and the cause of the laws we know—the cause of all harmony because himself the harmony. Men had to be delivered not only from the fear of suffering and death, but from the fear, which is a kind of worship, of nature. Nature herself must be shown subject to the Father and to him whom the Father had sent. Men must believe in the great works of the Father through the little works of the Son: all that he showed was little to what God was doing. They had to be helped to see that it was God who did such things as often as they were done. He it is who causes the corn to grow for man. He gives every fish that a man eats. Even if things are terrible yet they are God's, and the Lord will still the storm for their faith in Him—tame a storm, as a man might tame a wild beast—for his Father measures the waters in the hollow of his hand, and men are miserable not to know it. For himself, I repeat, his faith is enough; he sleeps on his pillow nor dreams of perishing.
On the individual miracles of this class, I have not much to say. The first of them was wrought in the animal kingdom.
He was teaching on the shore of the lake, and the people crowded him. That he might speak with more freedom, he stepped into an empty boat, and having prayed Simon the owner of it, who was washing his nets near by, to thrust it a little from the shore, sat down, and no longer incommoded by the eagerness of his audience, taught them from the boat. When he had ended he told Simon to launch out into the deep, and let down his nets for a draught. Simon had little hope of success, for there had been no fish there all night; but he obeyed, and caught such a multitude of fishes that the net broke. They had to call another boat to their aid, and both began to sink from the overload of fishes. But the great marvel of it wrought on the mind of Simon as every wonder tends to operate on the mind of an honest man: it brought his sinfulness before him. In self-abasement he fell down at Jesus' knees. Whether he thought of any individual sins at the moment, we cannot tell; but he was painfully dissatisfied with himself. He knew he was not what he ought to be. I am unwilling however to believe that such a man desired, save, it may be, as a passing involuntary result of distress, to be rid of the holy presence. I judge rather that his feeling was like that of the centurion—that he felt himself unworthy to have the Lord in his boat. He may have feared that the Lord took him for a good man, and his honesty could not endure such a mistake:
"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."
The Lord accepted the spirit, therefore not the word of his prayer.
"Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men."
His sense of sinfulness, so far from driving the Lord from him, should draw other men to him. As soon as that cry broke from his lips, he had become fit to be a fisher of men. He had begun to abjure that which separated man from man.
After his resurrection, St John tells us the Lord appeared one morning, on the shore of the lake, to some of his disciples, who had again been toiling all night in vain. He told them once more how to cast their net, and they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.
"It is the Lord," said St John, purer-hearted, perhaps therefore keener-eyed, than the rest.
Since the same thing had occurred before, Simon had become the fisher of men, but had sinned grievously against his Lord. He knew that Lord so much better now, however, that when he heard it was he, instead of crying Depart from me, he cast himself into the sea to go to him.
I take next the feeding of the four thousand with the seven loaves and the few little fishes, and the feeding of the five thousand with the five loaves and the two fishes.
Concerning these miracles, I think I have already said almost all I have to say. If he was the Son of God, the bread might as well grow in his hands as the corn in the fields. It is, I repeat, only a doing in condensed form, hence one more easily associated with its real source, of that which God is for ever doing more widely, more slowly, and with more detail both of fundamental wonder and of circumstantial loveliness. Whence more fittingly might food come than from the hands of such an elder brother? No doubt there will always be men who cannot believe it:—happy are they who demand a good reason, and yet can believe a wonder! Associated with words which appeared to me foolish, untrue, or even poor in their content, I should not believe it. Associated with such things as he spoke, I can receive it with ease, and I cherish it with rejoicing. It must be noted in respect of the feeding of the five thousand, that while the other evangelists merely relate the deed as done for the necessities of the multitude, St John records also the use our Lord made of the miracle. It was the outcome of his essential relation to humanity. Of humanity he was ever the sustaining food. To humanity he was about to give himself in an act of such utter devotion as could only be shadowed—now in the spoken, afterwards in the acted symbol of the eucharist. The miracle was a type of his life as the life of the world, a sign that from him flows all the weal of his creatures. The bread we eat is but its outer husk: the true bread is the Lord himself, to have whom in us is eternal life. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood ye have no life in you." He knew that the grand figure would disclose to the meditation of the loving heart infinitely more of the truth of the matter than any possible amount of definition and explanation, and yet must ever remain far short of setting forth the holy fact to the boldest and humblest mind. But lest they should start upon a wrong track for the interpretation of it, he says to his disciples afterwards, that this body of his should return to God; that what he had said concerning the eating of it had a spiritual sense: "It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing"—for that. In words he contradicts what he said before, that they might see the words to have meant infinitely more than as words they were able to express; that not their bodies on his body, but their souls must live on his soul, by a union and communion of which the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood was, after all, but a poor and faint figure. In this miracle, for the souls as for the bodies of men, he did and revealed the work of the Father. He who has once understood the meaning of Christ's words in connection with this miracle, can never be content they should be less than true concerning his Father in heaven. Whoever would have a perfect Father, must believe that he bestows his very being for the daily food of his creatures. He who loves the glory of God will be very jealous of any word that would enhance his greatness by representing him incapable of suffering. Verily God has taken and will ever take and endure his share, his largest share of that suffering in and through which the whole creation groans for the sonship.