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.