And Sarah died in Kiriath-arba (the same is Hebron), in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.- Gen_23:2.
1. Into this home, so much happier in its fruitful age than in its hopeful youth, death entered, and “Sarah died in Kiriath-arba.” The loss was more than the manhood of the old man could calmly bear, and he “came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.” The oak round which the ivy has grown for years may well feel naked and cold when the clasping fibres are torn from its limbs and bark, and untwisted from its far-spreading roots. The old house will seem bare and forlorn when the honeysuckle which has clustered and blossomed on its walls for generations is rooted up and cast away. So this old man in whose heart, while yet young, love of the beautiful Sarah had struck deep root, into whose large nature that love had grown till its soft presence filled and made fragrant every chamber, clasped and beautified every branch, might well feel, when she fell by his side, as if his own being had been cloven in twain, the fairer section perishing while only the sterner and barer remained. What death spared, or rather produced, was so strong and painful a contrast to the living and once beautiful form he had known and loved, that, fleeing as it were from its presence and touch, he stood before the sons of Heth and cried, “Give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.”
2. There is something within us which rebels against the ordinary ongoing of the world side by side with our great woe; we feel as if either the whole world must mourn with us, or we must go aside from the world and have our grief out in private. The bustle of life seems so meaningless and incongruous to one whom grief has emptied of all relish for it. We seem to wrong the dead by every return of interest we show in the things of life which no longer interest him. Yet he speaks truly who says:-
When sorrow all our heart would ask,
We need not shun our daily task,
And hide ourselves for calm;
The herbs we seek to heal our woe,
Familiar by our pathway grow,
Our common air is balm.
We must resume our duties, not as if nothing had happened, but proudly forgetting death and putting grief aside as if this life did not need the chastening influence of such realities as we have been engaged with, or as if its business could not be pursued in an affectionate and softened spirit, but acknowledging death as real and as humbling and sobering.
3. So “Abraham rose up from before his dead, and spake unto the children of Heth, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you” (Gen_23:3-4). See how sorrow reveals the heart. When all is going well, we wrap up our secrets; but when sorrow rends the veil, the arcana of the inner temple are laid bare. To look at Abraham as the great and wealthy patriarch, the emir, the chieftain of a mighty clan, we cannot guess his secret thoughts. He had been in the land for sixty-two years; and surely by this time he must have lost his first feelings of loneliness. He is probably as settled and naturalized as any of the princes round. So you might think, until he is widowed of his beloved Sarah! Then, amid his grief, you hear the real man speaking his most sacred thought: “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you.”
These are very remarkable words; and they were never forgotten by his children. Speaking of the land of promise, God said, through Moses, to the people, “The land shall not be sold for ever; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” When David and his people made splendid preparations to build the Temple, as their spokesman he said, “Who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly after this sort? for all things come of thee; and of thine own have we given thee; for we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers. Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” And, further, in one of his matchless Psalms, he pleads,; “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears; for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.” So deeply had those words of Abraham sunk into the national mind that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews makes use of them in the great roll-call of Jewish faith: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb_11:13).
They declare plainly that they are seeking their Fatherland. They declare it more plainly for every day of the search, for every night of the accomplished homeward march. It may be said of Christ's lovers, as is said in the song in Hamlet:
How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.
“Be shod,” said He, “with sandals!” Do you suppose He was only talking to the Seventy, or to the Twelve?… Not saying over all of us, “Are they not all pilgrim souls?” That little verse which I quote, describing the marks of the lover that is on pilgrimage, describes those marks progressively: they are not all gained at once. These sandal shoes were, indeed, put on at the very beginning; but this shell in the hat, that was picked up on the shore of a certain Red Sea which lay by the pilgrim's path: and this staff that he carries was cut on the banks of the Jordan when he descended to it. He steadied himself with it as he passed through. And so, brave soul that hast consented to be a Pilgrim of the Kingdom, know this, that thy definition becomes clearer as the years go by, and thou art more perfectly known as belonging to that heaven-born, heaven-bound company, of whom the most earnest speak like one who once willed to make an earthly pilgrimage, and, being asked what he wanted, said, “I am nought, I desire nought, except to be at Jerusalem.”1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, The Guiding Hand of God.]
What Francis desired was what Jesus of Nazareth desired-that men should own as little as possible, that they should work with their hands for their food, and ask others for help when work failed them, that they should not give themselves unnecessary troubles and lay up superfluous possessions, that they should keep themselves free as birds and not let themselves be caught in the snares of the world, that they should go through life with thanks to God for His gifts and with songs of praise for the beauty of His works. “Like strangers and like pilgrims”-these words of an Apostle return over and over again to the mouth of Francis, when he wants to express his ideal. “He wished,” says one of his biographers, “that all things should sing pilgrimage and exile.”1 [Note: J. Jörgensen, Saint Francis of Assisi, 79.]
4. The first landed property, then, of the patriarchs is a grave. In this tomb were laid Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah; here, too, Jacob buried Leah, and here Jacob himself desired to be laid after his death, his last words being, “Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite.” This grave, therefore, becomes the centre of the land. Where the dust of our fathers is, there is our country; and as we may often hear aged persons who are content to die, and have little else to pray for, still express a wish that they may rest in the old well-remembered churchyard where their kindred lie, and may thus in the weakness of death find some comfort, and in its solitariness some companionship from the presence of those who tenderly sheltered the helplessness of their childhood; so does this place of the dead become henceforth the centre of attraction for all Abraham's seed, to which still from Egypt their longings and hopes turn, as to the one magnetic point which, having once been fixed there, binds them ever to the land. This laying of Sarah in the tomb is the real occupation of the land.
My dear young wife and I were landed on Tanna on the 5th November 1858, in excellent health and full of all tender and holy hopes. On the 12th February 1859, she was confined of a son; for two days or so both mother and child seemed to prosper, and our island-exile thrilled with joy! But the greatest of sorrows was treading hard upon the heels of that joy! My darling's strength showed no signs of rallying. In a moment, altogether unexpectedly, she died on the 3rd March. To crown my sorrows, and complete my loneliness, the dear baby boy was taken from me after one week's sickness, on the 20th March. Let those who have passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me; as for all others, it would be more than vain to try to paint my sorrows. Stunned by that dreadful loss, in entering upon this field of labour to which the Lord had Himself so evidently led me, my reason seemed for a time almost to give way. Ague and fever, too, laid a depressing and weakening hand upon me, continuously recurring, and reaching oftentimes the very height of its worst burning stages. But I was never altogether forsaken. The ever-merciful Lord sustained me, to lay the precious dust of my beloved ones in the same quiet grave, dug for them close by at the end of the house; in all of which last offices my own hands, despite breaking heart, had to take the principal share! I built the grave round and round with coral blocks and covered the top with beautiful white coral, broken small as gravel; and that spot became my sacred and much-frequented shrine, during all the following months and years when I laboured on for the salvation of these savage Islanders amidst difficulties, dangers, and deaths. Whensoever Tanna turns to the Lord, and is won for Christ, men in after days will find the memory of that spot still green,-where with ceaseless prayers and tears I claimed that land for God in which I had “buried my dead” with faith and hope. But for Jesus, and the fellowship He vouchsafed me there, I must have gone mad and died beside that lonely grave.1 [Note: John G. Paton: An Autobiography, i. 129.]
