O Reader! leave not this subject—leave not the graveyard of Bethany till you think of Jesus as then weeping for thee. Yes! for thee—thy pitiable condition—thy perverse ingratitude—thy slighting of His warnings—thy grieving of His spirit—thy unkindness to Him—thine obstinate disregard of thine own everlasting interests. Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that for thy soul—that traitor, truant, worthless soul—which like a stray planet He might have suffered to drift away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness—helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!—Yes! that for thee, Jesus wept!
“And doth the Saviour weep
Over His people’s sin,
Because we will not let Him keep
The souls He died to win?
Ye hearts that love the Lord,
If at this sight ye burn,
See that in thought, in deed, in word,
Ye hate what made Him mourn.”
XIII.
The Grave Stone.
They have now reached the grave. It was a rocky sepulchre. A flat stone (possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it.
In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follow the footsteps of the Saviour. “Behold how He loved him,” whisper the Jews to one another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the “Abolisher of death”—to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness—“I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.”
Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant deed? He breaks silence. But we listen, in the first instance, not to the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders—“Jesus said, Take ye away the stone!”[15]