Jehoiakim was king, and yet not one word of thanks do we find, nor one word of love, nor one word of regret expressed concerning his fate. We should learn from this how possible it is to pass through the world without leaving behind us one sacred or loving memory. He that seeketh his life shall lose it. A man that sacrifices daily to his own ambition, and never sets before himself a higher ideal than his own gratification, may appear to have much whilst he actually has nothing, may even appear to be winning great victories, when he is really undergoing disastrous defeats. What is a grand house if there be not in it a loving heart? What are walls but for the pictures that adorn them? What is life but for the trust which knits it into sympathetic unity? What is the night but for the stars that glitter in its darkness? There is an awful process of retrogression continually operating in life. Experienced men will tell us that the issue of life is one of two things: either advancement, or deterioration; continual improvement, or continual depreciation: we cannot remain just where we are, adding nothing, subtracting nothing, but realising a permanence of estate and faculty. The powers we do not use will fall into desuetude, and the abilities which might have made life easy may be so neglected as to become burdens too heavy to be carried. It lies within a man’s power so to live that he may be buried with the burial of an ass: no mourners may surround his grave; no beneficiaries may recall his charities; no hidden hearts may conceal the tender story of his sympathy and helpfulness. A bitter sarcasm this, that a man should be buried like an ass!(J. Parker, D. D.)
The doom of the defrauder, libertine, and assassin
After a life of private or public iniquity, a man’s death is not deplored. The obsequies may be pretentious--flags, wreaths, catafalques, military processions; but the world feels that a nuisance has been abated; he is cast forth by reason of the contempt of men; figuratively, if not literally, he is “buried with the burial of an ass.”
I. There is the romance of fraud. The heroes of this country are fast getting to be those who have most skill in swallowing “trust funds,” banks, stocks, and moneyed institutions. I thank God when fortunes thus gathered go to smash. They are plague struck, and blast a nation. I like to have them made loathsome and an insufferable stench, so that honest young men may take warning.
II. Next, I speak of the romance of libertinism. Society has severest retribution for the impurity that lurks about the cellars and alleys of the city. It cries out against it. It hurls the indignation of the law at it. But society becomes more lenient as impurity rises towards affluence and high social position, until, finally, it is silent, or disposed to palliate. Where is the judge, or the sheriff, or the police, who dare arraign for indecency the wealthy villain? Would God that the romance which flings its fascinations over the bestialities of high life might be gone! Whether it has canopied couch of eiderdown, or sleep amid the putridity of the low tenement house, four families in a room, God’s consuming vengeance is after it.
III. Next,. I speak of the romance of assassination. God gives life, and He only has a right to take it away; and that man who assumes this Divine prerogative has touched the last depth of crime. Society is alert for certain forms of murder. For garroting, or the beating out of life with a club, or axe, or slung shot, the law has a quick spring and a heavy stroke. But let a man come to wealth or social pretension, and then attempt to avenge his wrongs by aiming a pistol at the header heart of another, and immediately there are sympathies aroused. If capital punishment be right, then let the life of the polished murderer go with the life of the ignorant and vulgar assassin. Let there be no partiality of hemp, no aristocracy of the gallows. (T. De Witt Talmage.)
The ignominious burial of the wicked
Christ tells the story of a prosperous farmer who was clean intoxicated with success, and could not entertain a thought but of his gains,--how the very night that he had decided on the enlargement of his premises, a voice from heaven called his soul away; and whatever monument with flattering title his friends may have erected over his grave, God wrote his epitaph, in one word of four letters, “Fool.” “Buried with the burial of an ass.” No one will for a moment suppose that a splendid catafalque and imposing funeral obsequies betoken the close of a noble and honourable life. Ah! many a man is laid in one of yonder cemeteries with every form of ceremonial pomp, with gilt, and nodding plumes, and long rows of carriages and costly wreaths; and if the truth were told, a nuisance is being got rid of; the world will be better now that he is gone. Well might the artless child, who had been wandering among the tombstones, and reading the epitaphs, turn to its mother and say, “Mother, where are all the bad people buried?” (T. Thain Davidson, D. D.)
A kings humiliating burial
Our Richard II, for his exactions to maintain a great court and favourites, lost his kingdom, was starved to death at Pomfret Castle, and scarce afforded common burial. King Stephen was interred in Faversham monastery; but afterwards his body, for the gain of the lead wherein it was coffined, was cast into the river. (John Trapp.)
