“All thy garments smell
Of myrrh and aloes and cassia:
Out of the ivory palaces
Whereby they have made thee glad.”
And what does this flowery abode of death speak to us, Christian friends? It proclaims how death and the grave have been divested of all their terrible features by the work of Christ, how He hath planted flowers of heavenly promise around the margin of the tomb, perfumed the sepulchre itself with odours of eternal love, and scented the once hateful garments of the dead with the fragrance and freshness of a sure and certain immortality. It proclaims that there is nothing now in the chill and darkness of the narrow house, to alarm the fears of the dying Christian. For Jesus has been there and has left within it the impress of His own form, and has changed its aspect and altered its character. It is no longer a prison-house, but the vestibule of heaven, in which the children of the kingdom repose their wearied frames before they enter with spiritual bodies on the employments of a glorious eternity.
“And there,” says St. Matthew, “was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre.” Let us draw near, and share with them their holy musings.
There, in that rock, lies He that made the world. There are sealed up the lips which said, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” There are closed the eyes which always beamed compassion, and wept for human woe. There, cold, are the hands which were laid on little children to bless them, and opened the eyes of the blind, and delivered the widow’s son alive to his mother. There reposes that gentle head, that knew no resting place till He could say “I have finished the work that my father gave me to do.” There lies the Life of the world and the Hope of Israel!—The Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace! He was fairer than the children of men! He was the image of the invisible God! He went about doing good; He was rich, and for our sakes He become poor!
Were we seated beside the two Marys, with bleeding hearts we might think what epitaph would best become Immanuel’s tomb; and had we been like them at that moment, ignorant of the purpose of His death, this would express both our faith and our fears—
“We trusted that it had been He
Who should have redeemed Israel.”
But had their conceptions of the great scheme of the atonement been correct, had they understood the nature of Christ’s satisfaction for sin, had they comprehended how before one sinner could be saved the law must be made honourable in all its penalties and all its requirements, they would have been disposed to rejoice rather than mourn when Jesus came to the grave, and they would have written “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, that the King of Glory may come in, to spoil you of your strength and prostrate all your pride. He comes, the Lord of hosts, like a second Samson, to lay His hands on your most colossal pillars, and complete by His own death the overthrow begun in the days of His life.”
On the tombs of mortals, however illustrious, we write these humbling words, “Here he lies,” but I hear the angel saying at the tomb of Christ, “Come, see the place where the Lord lay.”
Brethren, “companions in tribulation, and in the patience and kingdom of Christ”—it is well for us to stand by His grave and compare His deep humiliation with His essential glory. Let us behold in His death the infliction pronounced against sin; let us learn the odiousness of it in the sight of God, the vastness of the evil displayed in the magnitude of the remedy, the boundlessness of God’s grace in “sparing not His own Son but giving him up” to the death “for us all.”
But, above all, let us learn to look on Jesus as one whom we have pierced, and who has purchased our ransom from eternal death by sorrows and sacrifices which neither time nor eternity will enable us to estimate aright. Let us put ourselves in the place of those charged with the bloody deed, when they reflected that they had sacrificed an innocent being. Suppose that you had been consenting to His death. Suppose you had been the cause of it. Suppose his murderers had only been agents employed by you. Then your resentment will operate nearer home, and your grief will rend your own heart. And this, brethren, is the only true repentance. By faith the sinner perceives his own blood guiltiness in this cruel tragedy, and “looking upon Him whom he has pierced, he mourns for him.” (Zech. xii. 10.) No; you cannot learn the true evil of sin and your own lost condition because of it, but by considering and laying to heart the cross and passion, the precious death and burial, of your Lord and Saviour. Many think that sin is but a light thing; but hear Him, in whom was no sin and who did no sin, saying, in the anguish of a wounded spirit “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.” See Him “sore amazed and very heavy;” behold “His sweat as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” No; you cannot otherwise learn what a dreadful evil sin is—you cannot trifle with it—you cannot be reconciled to it—when you see the agonies of Him who “made His soul an offering for” it, and became a curse on account of it.