Its hours of sacred converse have long ago fled. Its honoured family have slumbered for ages in their tomb. Bethany’s Lord has been for centuries enthroned amid the glories of a brighter home. But though its Memories are all that remain, the place is still fragrant with His presence. The echoes of His voice—words of unearthly sweetness—still linger around it; and have for eighteen hundred years served to cheer and encourage many a fainting pilgrim in his upward ascent to the true Bethany above!
There, the Redeemer of the world proclaimed a brief but impressive Gospel. Heaven and earth seemed then to touch one another. We have the tender tones of a Man blended with the ineffable majesty of God. Hopes “full of immortality” shine with their celestial rainbow-hues amid a shower of holy tears. The cancelling from our Bibles of the 11th chapter of St John would be like the blotting out of the brightest planet from the spiritual firmament. Each of its magnificent utterances has proved like a ministering-angel—a seraph-messenger bearing its live-coal of comfort to the broken, bleeding heart from the holiest altar which Sympathy (divine and human) ever upreared in a trial-world! Many has been the weary footstep and tearful eye that has hastened in thought to Bethany—“gone to the grave of Lazarus, to weep there.”
“The town of Mary and her sister Martha,” then, furnishes us alike with a garnered treasury of Christian solaces, and one of the very loveliest of the Bible’s domestic portraitures. If the story of Joseph and his brethren is in the Old Testament invested with surpassing interest, here is a Gospel home-scene in the New, of still deeper and tenderer pathos—a picture in which the true Joseph appears as the central figure, without any estrangements to mar its beauty. Often at other times a drapery of woe hangs over the pathway of the Man of Sorrows. But Bethany is bathed in sunshine;—a sweet oasis in his toil-worn pilgrimage. At this quiet abode of congenial spirits he seems to have had his main “sips at the fountain of human joy,” and to have obtained a temporary respite from unwearied labour and unmerited enmity. The “Lily among thorns” raised His drooping head in this Eden home! Thither we can follow Him from the courts of the Temple—the busy crowd—the lengthened journey—the miracles of mercy—the hours of vain and ineffectual pleading with obdurate hearts. We can picture Him as the inmate of a peaceful family, spirit blending with spirit in sanctified communion. We can mark the tenderness of His holy humanity. We can see how He loved, and sympathised, and wept, and rejoiced!
As the tremendous events which signalised the close of His pilgrimage drew on, still it is Bethany with which they are mainly associated. It was at Bethany the fearful visions of His cross and passion cast their shadow on his path! From its quiet palm-trees[1] He issued forth on His last day’s journey across Mount Olivet. It was with Bethany in view He ascended to heaven. Its soil was the last He trod—its homes were the last on which his eye rested when the cloud received Him up into glory. The beams of the Sun of Righteousness seemed as if they loved to linger on this consecrated height.
We cannot doubt that many incidents regarding His oft sojournings there are left unrecorded. We have more than once, indeed, merely the simple announcement in the inspired narrative that He retired from Jerusalem all night to the village where His friend Lazarus resided. We dare not withdraw more of the veil than the Word of God permits. Let us be grateful for what we have of the gracious unfoldings here vouchsafed of His inner life—the comprehensive intermingling of doctrine, consolation, comfort, and instruction in righteousness. His Bethany sayings are for all time—they have “gone through all the earth”—His Bethany words “to the end of the world!” Like its own alabaster box of precious ointment, “wheresoever the Gospel is preached,” there will these be held in grateful memorial.
The traveller in Palestine is to this day shewn, in a sort of secluded ravine on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives (about fifteen furlongs or two miles from Jerusalem), a cluster of poor cottages, numbering little more than twenty families, with groups of palm-trees surrounding them, interspersed here and there with the olive, the almond, the pomegranate, and the fig.[2]
This ruined village bears the Arab name of El-Azirezeh—the Arabic form of the name Lazarus—and at once identifies it with a spot so sacred and interesting in Gospel story. It is described by the most recent and discerning of Eastern writers as “a wild mountain hamlet, screened by an intervening ridge from the view of the top of Olivet—perched on its open plateau of rock—the last collection of human habitations before the desert hills that reach to Jericho. ... High in the distance are the Peræan mountains; the foreground is the deep descent of the mountain valley.”[3]
“The fields around,” says another traveller, “lie uncultivated, and covered with rank grass and wild flowers; but it is easy to imagine the deep and still beauty of this spot when it was the home of Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary. Defended on the north and west by the Mount of Olives, it enjoys a delightful exposure to the southern sun. The grounds around are obviously of great fertility, though quite neglected; and the prospect to the south-east commands a magnificent view of the Dead Sea and the plains of Jordan.”[4]
“On the horizon’s verge,
The last faint tracing on the blue expanse,
Rise Moab’s summits; and above the rest
One pinnacle, where, placed by Hand Divine,
Israel’s great leader stood, allow’d to view,
And but to view, that long-expected land
He may not now enjoy. Below, dim gleams
The sea, untenanted by ought that lives,
And Jordan’s waters thread the plain unseen.