Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

The rulers of the Jews at Jerusalem had resolved on Christ's death, and the mass of the people sympathised with them. The Master's life had been threatened by a popular outburst. His work on earth was not yet done, and so He withdrew into the country, to escape from the violence and danger of Jerusalem. He went away to the Jordan, to the point, not very far from Jerusalem, where John first began baptizing, and there He remained in comparative seclusion. But people knew where He was. Probably people in the surrounding districts gathered together to hear Him teach; and possibly, as a very ingenious commentator has suggested, Christ, reaping the harvest of John's prolonged teaching in this district, succeeded in winning the faith of a great many of his hearers; and so He was busy doing good and happy work, building up His kingdom on the banks of the Jordan.

Meanwhile, sickness came to the home at Bethany, where most He felt Himself at home during His wanderings in this world of ours. Lazarus was stricken with a very dangerous illness, grew worse and worse, and at last all hope was gone. Now, I should fancy that from the very first day that it became evident that their brother was seriously ill, the hearts of Mary and Martha longed to have Jesus come to them, if it was only to be with them in their anxiety, and suspense, and watching. And the heart of the sick man must have longed for that great Divine Friend of his to be by his sick bed. Why did they not send for Him at once? I think there is a very simple reason. They were not selfish, as we sometimes tend to be in our sickness or in our sorrow. They thought about others as well as about themselves. They remembered that for Jesus to come back to the vicinity of Jerusalem was to risk His own life, and not even for the safety of their brother could they bring themselves for a long time to ask the beloved Master to run such a risk as that, and so they delayed really till too late. In the extremity of their grief and despair they sent a messenger to Jesus—not to ask Him to come: there, again, I read that that was their meaning—they would not take it on themselves to ask Him to imperil His life, but they could not resist just letting Him know that their brother, whom Jesus so loved, was very sick. It is exceedingly touching, that simple message, "Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick." And they knew that it would say to Jesus, "Thou knowest how much we would like Thee to come and recover him, and Thou knowest, too, the last thing we would ask of Thee would be, out of favour and kindness to us, to risk that life on which so much hangs—the kingdom of God upon earth."

There was real danger in Christ's return to Jerusalem. He was conscious of it, for you find that when He did make His way to Bethany He seems to have taken care, as far as possible, to conceal the fact from the inhabitants of Jerusalem. He came very quietly. He did not at first enter into Bethany. He remained outside the precincts of the village. He sent word secretly to Martha, so that not even Mary or the other persons that were with them in the house knew of the fact. And then, again, He sent Martha back, or Martha went back, to Mary, and, with somewhat studied concealment, warned her of the Master's vicinity, so that when she went out those who were with her fancied she was going to the grave. I point all that out to you in order that you may see that it is not a mere imagination or fancy, but that one of the great elements in determining the conduct of the family at Bethany, and the action of Christ, was that real hazard of His life, which He dared not needlessly risk in perils at this time, since His time of toil on earth, His daylight of labour, was not yet over and done.

When Jesus received the message He behaved in a seemingly strange fashion. Apparently He just did nothing, but went on with His teaching and preaching for two long days. Did He think how often anxious faces would be at the door of that house in Bethany, peering along the road that led to the home, looking for the figure that had so often trodden that way, because His heart drew Him to that happy family circle? Did Jesus know that Lazarus was dying? Did Jesus think that the hearts of Mary and Martha were breaking? Oh, He had the most loving heart that ever man had on earth, and yet He delayed two days before He set out for that home of distress. Now, that fact is often presented in a somewhat revolting fashion, and I think it is worth while just to diverge from my main theme to remove the effect of such presentation if it weighs with any of you. It is said that Jesus deliberately hung back for two days in order to let Lazarus die. That is a mistake—a total mistake. Lazarus had been already buried four days before Christ arrived. Now, suppose He had lost no time; suppose He had set out at once, He would only have reached Bethany two days earlier, and so, you see, Lazarus would have then already been buried two days. The real fact is just this, that the message was sent too late, and the sick man had died; and even if Christ had gone at once, all the same He would have found him in the grave. But none the less the story is so told as to shut us up to this conviction, that it was planned, and purposed, and accepted in the will of God, and in the will of Jesus, that Lazarus should be sick, and grow worse and worse, and should sink and fail, and die and be buried. Indubitably Jesus, with His knowledge, could, of His own action, have returned earlier to have intervened and prevented the sickness ending fatally. He was absent that Lazarus might die. When He spoke of the thing He told His disciples, first of all, the perfect, complete truth. "This," said Jesus, "is not to end in death's darkness. Its real goal and termination is to be the glory of God, revealed in the glory of his Son, the Christ on earth." That is the end of it; nevertheless, Lazarus must die. God's glory is to find its consummation, not in rescuing Lazarus from the grave, but in restoring him from death, and bringing him back into life. It was part of the material Christ used in building up His kingdom—the sickness and the death of Lazarus. He did delay, not in that seeming revolting, cold-blooded fashion in which it is often portrayed. He did deliberately hold His hand and delay; ay, and He held His loving human heart too, and He let his friend sicken, and suffer pain, and die, and He let the hearts of those two women that loved Him well-nigh break. He did it.

Can we justify Him? Did the sisters divine truly when they sent that message, "He whom Thou lovest is sick"? If He loved him, why did He prolong the agony? Why did He not intervene? Why did He not at once cancel death? Why those terrible four days of mourning, and gloom, and darkness, and doubt? Now that is precisely the painful position of all of us in this world of sin, and pain, and sickness, and parting, and death. We think a good God made our world; we think a loving Father holds our lives in His hands; and then we turn and look at this world, we look at the terrible strifes and struggles, we look at the great entail of sin that lies on our race, we see the ravages of disease, and disaster, and violence, and cruelty, and see everywhere the last black enigma of death and the grave, and this in spite of all our Christian faith, learnt from the Bible; ay, learnt from God's Spirit speaking often in the instincts of our heart and nature—we, too, are forced to ask the question, "Lord, why art Thou not here? Why does our brother die? If Thou wert here Thou couldest save him. Dost Thou love him? and if Thou lovest, why are we sick? Why do we die?"

The inmates of that house at Bethany had received Jesus with a rare degree of sympathetic feeling and heartfelt welcome. They entered into the meaning of His teaching and preaching with a degree of fellowship and quick response that moved His heart and soul even beyond the best of His disciples. One of them at least—Mary, and almost certainly Lazarus too—had come very near to that Divine Lord, in full understanding of all His grandeur, His sinlessness, His mighty love Though yet all ignorant of a great deal about His person, and about the fashion in which He was to make His kingdom, with a genuine purity and ardour of attachment and affection, they worshipped Him, they recognised the Divine within Him, they hailed Him as the world's Christ and Saviour. Listen to Martha's cry in her perplexity: "I cannot understand it all, but I know Thou art the Christ come from God, the world's King, the world's Saviour. That I know, that I hold to." It was that understanding, that sympathy in that home, that made it so sweet a place of rest to Jesus. More than that—manifestly the two sisters and brother lived a life of sweet human affection. There was an atmosphere of tender love in their home, broken by little storms of misunderstanding, as may be in the very best of our imperfect human homes, but in reality a great depth of tenderness, and clinging attachment, and loyal love to one another, bound the household together. Oh, thank God for every such home on earth! That is the real bulwark against all pessimism, the charter of our eternal birthrights. Given the grandeur, the reality of human love, as, thank God, most of us know it in our homes, that is the absolute guarantee that it came from the creating hands of grander Love Divine.

Jesus was not merely loved by the family where He came to spend the nights when He was working in Jerusalem, but He got to love them with a very wonderful tenderness. You remember that chivalrous, impassioned defence of Mary, when she was assailed by the coarse attacks of the disciples. You catch it, too, in that message sent to Him—"He whom Thou lovest." Ah, many an act of affection, many a look that was a caress, many an appeal for sympathy that bespoke brotherhood, had passed between Jesus of Nazareth and that Lazarus, else the sisters would not have thought of saying, "He whom Thou lovest is sick."

And yet into that home so dear to the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, into that home that had for its Friend the Man that was master of life and of death, of calamity and prosperity, of all earthly powers and forces, into that home there penetrated cruel, painful, deadly sickness. The man Jesus loved lay there on his bed dying.

Now, I emphasize that, because there used to be a great deal of thinking about God's relation to those that love Him and whom He loves—a great deal of teaching in the Christian Church that counted itself most orthodox, and which was, indeed, deadly heresy, coarse, materialistic, despicable, misunderstanding the ideal grandeur of the Bible promises. Some of you know the sort of teaching that used to prevail—the idea that God's saints should be exceptionally favoured; the sun would shine on their plot of corn, and it would not shine on the plot of corn of the bad man; their ships would not sink at sea, their children would not catch infectious diseases; God would pamper them, exempt them from bearing their part in the world's great battle, with hardness and toil of labour, with struggle, and attainment, and achievement. It came of a very despicable conception of what a father can do for a child, as if the best thing for a father to do for his son was to pet and indulge him, and save him all bodily struggle and all difficulties, instead of giving him a life of discipline. As if a general in the army would, because of his faltering heart, refuse to let his son take the post of danger; as if he would not rather wish for that son—ay, with a great pang in his own soul—that he should be the bravest, the most daring, the one most exposed to the deadliest hazard.

Ah, we have got to recognise that we whom God loves may be sick and dying, and yet God does love us. Lazarus was loved by Jesus, yet he whom Jesus loved was sick and dying. Ah, and there is a still more poisonous difficulty in that materialistic, that worldly way of looking at God's love; that horrible, revolting misjudgment that Christ condemned, crushed with indignation when it confronted Him. "The men on whom the tower of Siloam fell must have been sinners worse than us on whom it did not fall." Never, never! The great government of the world is not made up of patches and strokes of anger and outbursts of weak indulgence. The world is God's great workshop, God's great battle-field. These have their places. Here a storm of bullets falls, and brave and good men as well as cowards fall before it. You mistake if you try to forestall God's judgments, God's verdicts on the last great day of reckoning.