THE MASTER
Martha can withhold no longer from her sister the joyful
tidings which she has been the first to hear. With fleet foot she hastens
back to the house with the announcement, "The Master has come, and calls for
you." Mary hears, but makes no comment. Wrapped in the silence of her own
meditative grief, "when she heard that, she arose quickly and came unto
Him."
"To her all earth could render nothing back
Like that pale changeless brow.
Calmly she stood
As marble statue.
In that maiden's breast
Sorrow and loneliness sank darkly down,
Though the blanched lips breathed out no boisterous plaint
Of common grief."
The formal sympathizers who gathered around her had
observed her departure. They are led to form their conjectures as to the
cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up until that
moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we
have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing
the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an
altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other
auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her
seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened
lattice. They can form but one surmise: that, in accordance with custom, she
has betaken herself to the burial-ground to feed her morbid grief. "She goes
unto the grave to weep there." Ah! little did they know how much nobler was
her motive—how truer and grander the solace she sought and found.
There is little that is really profitable or hallowed in
visiting the grave of loved ones. Though fond affection will, from
some false feeling of the tribute due to the memory of the departed, seek to
surmount sadder thoughts, and linger at the spot where treasured ashes
repose, yet—think and act as we may—there is nothing cheering, nothing
elevating there. The associations of the burial-place are all with the
humiliating triumphs of the King of Terrors. It is a view of death taken
from the earthly entrance of the valley, not the heavenly view of it as that
valley opens on the bright plains of immortality. The gay flowers and
emerald sod which carpet the grave are poor mockeries to the bereft spirit,
shrouding, as they do, nobler withered blossoms which the foot of the
destroyer has trampled into dust, and which no earthly beauty can again
clothe, or earthly spring reanimate. They are to be pitied who have no
higher solace, no better remedy for their grief, than thus to water with
unavailing tears the trophies of death; or to read the harrowing record
which love has traced on its slab of cold marble, telling of the vanity of
human hopes.
Such, however, was not Mary's errand in leaving the
chamber of bereavement. That drooping flower was not opening her leaves,
only to be crushed afresh with new tear-floods of sorrow. She sought One who
would disengage her soiled and shattered tendrils from the chill comforts of
earth, and bathe them in the genial influences of Heaven. The music of her
Master's name alone could put gladness into her heart, and invite her to
muffle other conflicting feelings and hasten to His feet. "The Master has
come!" Nothing could have roused her from her profound grief but this.
While her poor earthly comforters are imagining her prostrate at the
sepulcher's mouth, giving vent to the wild delirium of her young grief, she
is away, not to the victim of death, but to the Lord of Life, either to tell
to Him the tale of her woe, or else to listen from His lips to words of
comfort no other comforter had given.
Is there not the same music in that name—the same
solace and joy in that presence still? Earthly sympathy is not
to be despised; no, when death has entered a household, taken the dearest
and the best and laid them in the tomb, nothing is more soothing to the
wounded, crushed, and broken one, than to experience the genial sympathy of
true Christian friendship. Those, it may be, little known before
(comparative strangers), touched with the story of a neighbor's sorrow, come
to offer their tribute of condolence, and to "weep with those who weep."
Never is true friendship so tested as then. Hollow attachments, which have
nothing but the world, or a time of prosperity to bind them, discover their
worthlessness. "Summer friends" stand aloof; they have little patience for
the sadness of sorrow's countenance and the funereal trappings of the
death-chamber; while sympathy, based on lofty Christian principle, loves to
minister as a subordinate healer of the broken-hearted, and to indulge in a
hundred nameless ingenious offices of kindness and love.
But "thus far shall you go, and no farther." The purest
and noblest and most unselfish of earthly friends can only go a certain way.
Their minds and sympathies are limited. They cannot enter into the deep
recesses of the smitten heart—the yawning crevices that bereavement has laid
bare. But JESUS can! Ah! there are capacities and sensibilities in
that Mighty Heart that can probe the deepest wound and gauge the profoundest
sorrow. While from the best of earthly comforters the mind turns away
unsatisfied; while the burial-ground and the grave only recall the deep
humiliations of the body's wreck and ruin—with what fond emotion does the
spirit, like Mary, turn to Him who possesses the majesty of Deity with
all the tenderness of humanity! The Mighty Lord, and yet the Elder
Brother!
The sympathy of man is often selfish, formal,
constrained, commonplace, coming more from the surface than from
the depths of the heart. It is the finite sympathy of a finite creature. The
Redeemer's sympathy is that of the perfect Man and the infinite God—able to
enter into all the peculiarities of the case—all the tender features and
shadings of sorrow which are hidden from "the keenest and kindliest human
eye."
Mary's example is a true type and picture of what the
broken heart of the Christian feels. Not undervaluing human sympathy, yet,
nevertheless, all the crowd of sympathizing friends—Jewish citizens, Bethany
villagers—are nothing to her when she hears her Lord has come! Happy for us
if, while the world, like the condoling crowd of Jews, is forming its own
cold speculations on the amount of our grief and the bitterness of our loss,
we are found hastening to cast ourselves at our Savior's feet; if our
afflictions prove to us like angel messengers from the inner
sanctuary—calling us from friends, home, comforts, blessings; all we most
prize on earth—telling us that ONE is near who will more than compensate for
the loss of all—"The Master has come, and calls for you!"
It is the very end and design our gracious God has in all
His dealings, to lead us, as he led Mary, to the feet of Jesus. Yes! you
poor weeping, disconsolate one, "The Master calls for you." You
individually, as if you stood the sole sufferer in a vast world. He wishes
to pour His oil and wine into your wounded heart—to give you some
overwhelming proof and pledge of the love he bears you in this your sore
trial. He has come to pour drops of comfort in the bitter cup—to ease you of
your heavy burden, and to point you to hopes full of immortality. Go and
learn what a kind, and gentle, and gracious Master He is! Go forth, Mary,
and meet your Lord. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the
morning!"
We may imagine her hastening along the foot-road, with
the spirit of the Psalmist's words on her tongue—"As the deer pants after
the water brooks, so pants my soul after you, O God. My soul thirsts for
God—for the living God!"