1. Mary Magdalene's story tells us that sorrow is often blind.-For a moment let us think of the last scene. A sorrow, of which those can judge in part who have lost the dearest object of their heart's love, was rending the soul of Mary. “She stood without at the sepulchre weeping.” She had lost, not Him only who had been to her more than any human creature can be to another in this world-not Him only, but the body; not even the poor comfort was left of embalming the body. It was a grief too deep for fear. The vision of angels alarmed some other women. But perhaps Mary saw nothing strange in those appearances through her tears; and there seems to have been no unearthly sound to her ear in the voice which asked, “Why weepest thou?” for it drew forth only the words, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” But now there is another Presence of which Mary becomes conscious. Some movement behind her there may have been, or some sound, for it is said she turned herself, and, being turned, there was the figure of a man. The thought of this sorrowing woman was cramped within the closest bonds of earth. It centred in a grave. It was clinging round a dead body. Where was this dead body? It was gone. The eye of Mary was upon the empty tomb, and there her very soul was fixed. “I know not where they have laid him.” She could not get beyond that. It held her bound. Neither the vision nor the voice of an angel could touch the numbed sense. No wonder that Mary thought this was the gardener. “In the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus.” There was no one so likely as the gardener to be standing near the mouth of that sepulchre-no one so likely, but yet it might, of course, be someone else. Why did Mary not know that it was someone else? The darkness was not the cause. It was not darkness that caused Mary to think that Man was the gardener. “She saw Jesus.” St. John's actual word is, “She beholdeth Jesus”; it expresses the fixing of the eye upon an object as with a certain intentness. In this way Mary, when she was turned, looked upon Jesus, but she knew not that it was Jesus.
Sorrow is a very engrossing thing. We hear it spoken of as a purifying discipline. And this, no doubt, is its purpose, and a sympathizing friend will tell the suffering person that this is the purpose. But the sympathizing friend is not the suffering person. It is so very easy to say a true thing; but to feel it, and give to this true thing the force which indeed belongs to it, and would come forth from it if it were felt-this is very hard. Suffering absorbs thought; it gathers round itself all the outgoings of the mind; it tones with its own colouring all surrounding objects; it looks off from the withered treasure, and sees only the rust and the moth; it looks off from the wreck of property, and sees only the misadventure of circumstance or the fraud of men; it looks off from the desolated hearth, and sees only the place where the dead was laid. In the garden it can see only the gardener.
I have heard mourners gathered at a funeral say afterwards, “I could not tell you who was there.” All the great passions in their full intensity have a certain blinding power about them. But neither love nor hate nor jealousy nor anger is more effectual in sealing up the eyes than is the pressure of overwhelming grief.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, 100.]
When in darkness and clouds
The way of God is concealed,
We doubt the words of His promises,
And the glory to be revealed.
We do but trust in part;
We grope in the dark alone;
Lord, when shall we see Thee as Thou art,
And know as we are known?
We say, they have taken our Lord,
And we know not where Ho lies,
When the light of His resurrection morn
Is breaking out of the skies.2 [Note: Phœbe Cary.]
2. Love always wins the victory.-For what is rightly-regulated love but moral power of the highest order? As St. Paul puts it, “The love of Christ constraineth us.” Few men have ever explored the heights and depths of our human nature more thoroughly than did St. Augustine, and St. Augustine has a saying which shows how highly he valued the invigorating and transforming power of love. “Only love,” he said, “and then do what thou wilt.” Love is indeed the very muscle and fibre of moral force. If the condition of mankind is bettered, this is effected by those who love their fellow-men. If goodness is embodied in life and character, this is by those who begin by seeing, however imperfectly, the beauty of goodness. They are enamoured of it before they try to make it their own. If truth is sought and found, amid and across difficulties which have seemed insuperable, this is not seldom by intellects to which truth has presented itself as an object in itself so beautiful as to win the love of their hearts. And if Mary rose in the dark night to visit the grave of her slain Master, and to pay Him such honours as her poverty could yield, this was because her soul was on fire with the moral power of a strong and pure affection, which was to be rewarded presently by the attainment of its object.
There is a kind of love that faces facts, and it is a noble and courageous love. It opens its eyes wide to dark realities, and bowing the head it says, “I must accept them.” But there is an agony of love that does not act so; it hopes against hope and beats against all evidence. It is only women who can love like that, and it was a love like that which inspired Mary. No one will ever doubt John's love to Jesus. No one will ever doubt the love of Simon. “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” “Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.” But the fact remains that on that Easter morning Peter and John went to their homes again, and only a woman lingered by the grave.
The applications of a truth like this crowd upon us! To love Jesus with that absorbed intensity which makes it the supreme passion of the heart is the hidden secret of the Christian life. It is good to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, and find your mind illuminated and your purposes directed by them. It is good to spend yourself in His service, and find your energies freely and joyfully exercised in it. It is good to see, in moments of faith, the coming of His Kingdom, and to mark how all the toils and efforts and aspirations of men are hastening its consummation. But it is better to love Jesus. For then no word of His shall be dark, no call of His shall be strange, and the very desires of His heart shall be ours. Until you have come to the hour when a sense of Christ's personal love and leading awakes within you that sense of need which can be satisfied only by giving, that love which is stronger than death, you have not come to the hour for which your soul is waiting-waiting as the trees wait for the spring, as the poet waits for his song!
9th December, 1710.-This night I was in bad case. I find it is not easy for me to carry right, either with or without the cross. While I was walking up and down my closet in heaviness, my little daughter Jane, whom I had laid in bed, suddenly raising up herself said, She would tell me a note; and thus delivered herself:-Mary Magdalen went to the sepulchre.-She went back again with them to the sepulchre; but they would not believe that Christ was risen, till Mary Magdalen met Him; and He said to her, “Tell My brethren, they are My brethren yet.” This she pronounced with a certain air of sweetness. It took me by the heart: “His brethren yet” (thought I); and may I think that Christ will own me as one of His brethren yet? It was to me as life from the dead.1 [Note: Memoirs of Thomas Boston of Ettrick.]
Then comes the happy moment: not a stir
In any tree, no portent in the sky:
The morn doth neither hasten nor defer,
The morrow hath no name to call it by,
But life and joy are one,-we know not why,-
As though our very blood long breathless lain
Had tasted of the breath of God again.
And having tasted it I speak of it,
And praise Him thinking how I trembled then
When His touch strengthened me, as now I sit
In wonder, reaching out beyond my ken,
Reaching to turn the day back, and my pen
Urging to tell a tale which told would seem
The witless phantasy of them that dream.
But O most blessèd Truth, for Truth Thou art,
Abide Thou with me till my life shall end.
Divinity hath surely touched my heart;
I have possessed more joy than earth can lend:
I may attain what time shall never spend.
Only let not my duller days destroy
The memory of Thy witness and my joy.2 [Note: Robert Bridges.]
3. To the love that conquers is given the service of love.-“Go unto my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God.” Jesus gives Mary a work to do: to tell His brethren of His resurrection and His coming ascension; reminding them that His Father is their Father, His God their God. It is ever so with us. Each Christian life ought to be a life of witness. Each Christian life ought to bear its testimony to the great facts of the Christian religion. “Go unto my brethren, and say to them”-sometimes in word, always in life. “They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” Those who see our lives ought to discern in them a power that is not of ourselves. They ought to know that God is our Father, and that we are His children. They ought to know that God is our God, and that we receive gifts from Him. They ought to know that our Lord has ascended into heaven, and that from heaven He pours into us His own risen and ascended life.
The work of bearing witness will be as different as our lives are different. It may be a witness to be borne to many, or it may be a witness to be borne to few; it may be a witness to be borne only to one other soul; but there it is-a witness to be borne by every Christian in his own day of grace. “Ye shall be witnesses unto me.” “My witnesses.” Often we forget the witness-bearing of life. Often we are tempted to think that in other circumstances, other conditions, we could do something worth doing for our Lord, and to forget that just where we are lies the power of our life that should be shining out to others. I live, yet Christ liveth and worketh in me; and because of that there ought to be a mark on my life which makes it a life of witness. How we should treasure the thought, how we should value the truth, that through us others may be helped and led on in the Christian life! How we should treasure the thought that, in the far-off Eternity, one other soul that should otherwise have been lost has been saved, because we bore witness without knowing, perhaps, what we were doing; not, indeed, of our own strength, but because we had received the life of Him who has ascended to the Father; for all that makes anything in us a witness for good comes from that stream of life which He Himself pours into us.
Is not the trouble with most of our witnessing for God that it is inconstant and inconsistent, lacking unity as well as continuity? What is our hope but the indwelling Spirit of Christ, to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, to inspire every word and deed by His love? Then will “broken lights” blend in steady shining, the fractional be summed up in the integral, and life, unified and beautified by the central Christ, radiate God's glory, and shine with divine effulgence.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 9.]
Take all in a word; the Truth in God's breast
Lies trace for trace upon our's impressed:
Though He is so bright, and we are so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him.2 [Note: R. Browning.]
