CHRIST THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE.
By W. M. Punshon
A SERMON BY REV. W. M. PUNSHON, D. D. “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life.” John 11:25. These are grand words, suggestive in their real meaning of exaltation and of triumph, although in the connection in which we most frequently hear them they strike sorrowfully upon hearts already bruised and pained, and have far more to do with the cypress than with the laurel. In the sad intercourse which we are compelled to hold so often with the mystery of death, we are apt to lose sight of the gradual unfolding of that higher mystery of life which God has arranged to come out of it, and which is at once the holiest revelation of his glory and the fullest evangel of his love. Like his creation, perfect wherever we discover it, whether in mammoth or in microscopic forms, the breath of God sweeps again over the world that he has made. To reproduce life where it is extinct, to reanimate after it has expired, to evolve it in nobler and in more glorious forms—this is a divine prerogative, inseparable from, and worthy of, a God. Your hearts have lingered, I do not doubt, very often upon the tenderness of this inimitable narrative. That cottage at Bethany has no architectural pretensions. It peeps humbly through the embowering olives beneath whose shade it stands. But never yet was human dwelling so highly honored; for though many houses had entertained and welcomed Jesus, it was to Bethany that his footsteps oftenest turned, and there, where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus made up the united household—there, if anywhere, was his dear human home; there, if anywhere, the curse of the sojourner seemed lifted from him, and, in reversal of his own account of his loneliness and penury, he found where to lay his head. The evangelist has not drawn for us the curtains of the Saviour’s private life. We have not revealed to us the wealthy secrets of that friendship which in its unbent hours communed with the “family that Jesus loved.” We can only imagine, therefore, the happiness of those favored ones who were privileged with his familiar teachings, who heard the conversation which raised a doubt only to resolve it, which startled only to reassure their faith, and which made the heart to burn and the eye to sparkle by its opening of the Scriptures, and by its showing of the Father. Thrice blessed must have been that family; blessed in the strong love that welded diverse temperaments together into one bond of union which no discord could sever; blessed in their common participation of like gospel hope and privilege; blessed, above all, in that matchless Friend whose visits brought such rapture that they were envious both of daybreak and of eventide, that their one sorrow seemed to be the pang of his parting and their one hope the joy of his return. Happy home! No prancing cavalcade of honor was there, attendant upon prince or chieftain; but who may say how often in the thickly peopled air were hosts of angels watching and tracking with loving vigilance the steps of their incarnate God? But upon this brief dream of bliss there comes a rude awaking. The light glimmers pale through the dreary night from the window, and there sounds the voice of wailing from the dwelling where often rose the minstrelsy of blended voices in joyous song. Lazarus is sick; dying; dead. The light of their home is quenched beneath this unlooked-for sorrow. The memory of the happy past becomes almost insupportable, it seems so to mock the future. The sisters, weeping, clasp each other convulsively, and can scarcely realize that their brother has departed. They go to the grave to weep there. The sky of their life is hidden and clouded by this one sad sorrow, and—strange aggravation of this mysterious bitterness—He, their Master and their Friend, is absent. They sent him word on the earliest intimation of illness and danger, but he has made no sign. No swift footsteps have hurried to the house of mourning; not a word of loving greeting has comforted them. They have heard nothing from the compassionate Teacher of hearts, who has ever been faithful until now. Had He come, their faith so often whispered, he could have stayed the plague; he could have driven the foulness from the blood. Had they not seen him do works of healing that were more wondrous far? Strangers that had never known him, that had never had speech of his lips, that he had only casually encountered on his way, that had pressed with obtrusive boldness that they might touch the hem of his garment,—all these had partaken of his benefits, and for these he had displayed his power; surely he would not refuse to work it on behalf of the family that he loved. Their hearts had said it often, though their lips had not uttered it before, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” Oh, deem it not indifference to the claims of friendship, deem it not forgetfulness of the family that he loved, that Jesus the Master, when he heard the tidings of the illness, “abode two days still in the same place where he was.” It was neither indifference to his friends, nor fear for his own safety, that kept the Master away. The disciples, indeed, seemed to regard it as very needful that he should not make the journey into Judea. Their affection was startled into watchful anxiety by the barest possibility of their Master’s danger. “Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?” And Thomas, whose love was heroic if his faith was not always undoubting, seemed to consider that the road to Judea was the road to martyrdom, which he bravely proposed to share himself. “Let us also go, that we may die with him,”—with Jesus, not with Lazarus. If he is determined to go, the Jews are sure to apprehend him and crucify him: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Ah, but there was a great purpose hidden beneath the delay of the Saviour’s advent, and beneath the grand indefiniteness of his words. For the family which he loved, he was about to compass the most marvelous deliverance, and to exhibit his mightiest display of power. Already had he re-inspired the frame from which the vital breath had only recently fled, and at the gates of the city of Nain had arrested the solemn funeral, and delivered the son, already coffined, to the wondering mother’s arms. He is going to do something grander than that now; he is going to show himself Master of corruption and the worm, he is going to show that there is no far catacomb or sepulcher where his voice is not imperial; and that when he utters the “Awake, come forth!” the sheeted corpses cannot choose but live. We pass over that wondrous grave-side, with its ineffable blending of compassion and divine sympathy; and we do not enter, either, into the wonderful reunion of that happy household, when the Master sat with them, and the happy sisters, weeping no longer, clasped their ransomed brother. There is very much of beautiful and interesting contemplation in it; but we want just now to fasten your thoughts upon the central announcement of the text—“I am the resurrection and the life”—for the chief end of the miracle—although, subordinately, it was both a witness and a blessing—the chief end of the miracle seems to have been to develop that, and to impress that as a gospel, not for that family only, but for the mourners of all time—“I am the resurrection and the life.” There is no special appropriateness, brethren, in this subject to some season of sorrow, to some dark hour when hope lingers fitfully over the wreck of fortune or the loss of friends. It is never out of season. As the highest result of the Redeemer’s coming is presented, it is always salutary to chasten life’s exuberance and to exalt its hopes, as well as to alleviate its sorrows, and to make a home for those who are weary of its wanderings. Let us try, then, for a moment or two, to meditate profitably upon these words. We frequently hear them burst from the lips of the surpliced minister, as the sad procession winds through the cemetery gate, “I am the resurrection and the life.” What does it mean? They can hardly be considered as synonymous, although their meanings strangely interweave. There is an added significance in the latter word, which, without it, the former perhaps would not bear. I. The first thing that strikes us is the authority with which these words are spoken. “I am,” not “I will be” the instrument at some future time, but I am the thing itself. “I am the resurrection and the life.” Surely no creature could speak thus. Amid the mean conditions of the outer life, Christ speaks with a consciousness of absolute and eternal right to reproduce the extinct existence, and reanimate the decayed body. He speaks just as a king would speak, to whom it never occurred that any one should doubt his royalty, or that he needed to vaunt him of his power. The words assume a supreme and essential power over life and over death. His was the original gift of life, his the right to dissolve its organization, and the right to confer it again; and therefore he, and he only, could be the opener of a world of graves. I need not remind you that this is the exclusive prerogative of Godhead. It is so in the nature of things. It is frequently and explicitly affirmed to be so in the sacred Scriptures. Man’s power is very mighty, I know; but it stops short of this. He can put a bone before him, and from a bone, a fossil bone, he can construct a massive elephant, and, with Promethean ambition, he can shape its features faultlessly, and by clock-work or by galvanism, he can simulate a strange hypocrisy of life; but he cannot draw down the vital breath: he cannot breathe the living fire. His province is combination and embellishment. By divine authority, plainly conferred, he may now and then be permitted to resuscitate; to breathe is beyond his power. That belongs only to God. “Am I God,” said the frightened king of Israel, “to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy?” If the Bible speaks of the resurrection, it speaks of it as a marvel and as a mystery—a marvel and a mystery beyond all human power to understand until we bring in the thought of the Divinity, and then the marvel and the mystery cease. “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God”—there is the force of it—“that God should raise the dead?” It would have been a marvel and a mystery if it had been affirmed that a man had done it; but it is now no marvel that God should raise the dead. And then if the life that now is, is spoken of in the Bible, its original gift, and its maintenance, are uniformly ascribed to God. “The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified.” “The Lord is the strength of my life, and my portion forever.” We cannot otherwise than regard these words as the Redeemer’s assumption of Divinity. II. But not only do these words affirm the divine authority of Christ, but they affirm also that through him, the Christ, through him exclusively, resurrection came to man. Resurrection, I need not inform you, implies death, and death, I may remind you, was not among the original arrangements of the universe. It came in after the “very good” had been pronounced of the fair earth and of the sparkling heavens. There must needs, therefore, be some provision to counteract its effects, and to restore its forfeited heritage of immortality to man. This provision has been secured by the vicarious atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Death was a penalty deserved, but Christ bore the penalty on the cross, and thus, through death, will destroy him who has the power of death; that is, the devil. Christ is the resurrection; therefore its source and spring, its Author and Finisher, in a sense in which no other can be. When he emerged from the tomb, he brought life and immortality with him, by which the pearls of the deep sea, before awaiting the plunge of the diver, the treasures, before lying in the dark mine, were by him seized and brought up to the light of day. Life and immortality were brought to light by the gospel; and, with this knowledge in our minds, we seem to stand by the Saviour’s broken sepulcher just as a man stands upon the shelving brink of the precipice from which some friendly hand has snatched him, shuddering as he thinks of the awful death that he has only just escaped. Look, and see the place where the Lord lay, and tremble, but rejoice with trembling. Is the stone there yet? If it is, if the stone is not yet rolled away, if the grave-clothes186and spices yet shroud and embalm the corpse, then let the darkness come and blot out the sun, and bid a long, long good-night to all the world’s hopes of life; for existence is a feverish dream, and death shall be its ghastly but its welcome end. “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept.” Christ, the divine man, has a right, therefore, to speak with authority, and to say, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Do you wonder, brethren, that, like Paul at Athens, we should preach to you “Jesus and the resurrection”? Is there not something in the tidings that thrills the heart of a believer just as an emigrant’s heart is stirred in some far settlement by a sweet song of home? Does not time appear a more solemn stewardship, and duty receive a richer stimulus, and the life that now is appear but a light thing in comparison with the life which that resurrection inspires? Dwell in this comforting thought, thou tempted and sorrowing believer; for it speaks encouragement and assurance to thee. Art thou a mourner? The sable which thou wearest is only the emblem of that darkness which has fallen upon Christ for thee. Is he gone—thy tender-hearted friend? Does thy gentle wife no longer minister? Are thy children fallen into that trance that has no waking and makes no parade of pain? Oh, let Jesus stand by thee, and as thou listenest to his inspiring word, thy frantic grief shall subside into the hush of quiet sorrow: thy tears, if they gather still, shall gather silently, and thy frame shall feel the pulses of a glad hope, as when nature stirs in the first blush of spring. If they and thou are alike in Jesus, thou hast not looked the last upon thy friends. Thou shalt see them again, not wan and shrunken as when the latest smile played upon the face, and there was scarce strength left to ripple it from lip to eye, but in immortal bloom that knows no hectic of fever, and in fadeless youth that chills beneath no frost of age. And thou, brave wrestler against evil, often foiled, but who dost not cease in thine endeavor, take thou the comfort too, for Jesus is the resurrection for thee. Thy yielding faith, thy slavish fear, thy maddened freaks of passion, were but the companions of thy perverse and unworthy unbelief. All that makes up the foulness and corruption of thy moral death shall trouble thee no longer. Thy restoration shall be complete, and shall be glorious. Let thy faith fasten upon the Redeemer’s perfect work; let there be a glad response in thy heart when he says to thee, “Believest thou this?” and there is nothing to hinder thine absolute and entire emergence out of the death of sin. The struggle may be long within thee. The passions that have held tyranny over thee for years may not be content easily to die. Lingering thoughts of evil or carnal thoughts not utterly subdued, may harass thee, like the guerilla forces of an enemy—Diabolonians—lurking yet in the holes and corners of the “Town of Mansoul”; but keep thy trust in Christ, and thou shalt be loosed from every grave-cloth of the sepulchre; not even the mold of its dampness, nor its fetid and unwholesome odor, shall remain. There shall not be a vestige of death about thee, and thou shalt rise up in the faultlessness of thy new character. This is your privilege, brethren, and it is mine. Let us realize the double consolation—comfort for the mourners who are crushed beneath some pressing sorrow, comfort for the mourners who wrestle with some giant sin; and in our distress and in our feebleness let us hear the voice again, as once by the charnel cave of Lazarus it ran electric, like a line of light, to make the blood flow freely in the veins of the living, and then leaped into the sepulchre to relax even the very grasp of death itself. “I am the resurrection and the life.” III. And now let us dwell upon the thoughts suggested by the words “I am the life”—that phrase that is always music—which, next to the word “God-in-Christ,” has in it the deepest meaning in the world. We have already seen that, in the first instance, Christ affirmed himself the Original and the Restorer of life, as that life had been lost by the fall; and, that being the case, we do not wonder that the life of a believer now should be in the enigma, as worldlings call it, of the apostle’s words, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and who gave himself for me.” But I want your thoughts just now to go across this flood, where especially that life is whose path the Saviour is to show, and the mansions which he has gone to prepare. In one passage, without a parallel almost in the Scripture for its ascription of illimitable authority to Jesus, he is called “The true God and eternal life.” And in another passage—this is presented as the culminating promise of all the promises—this is the promise which he hath made us—“even eternal life.” And then there is the further thought of social life. Heaven is not a solitude; it is a peopled city, a city in which there are no strangers, no homeless, no poor; where one does not pass another in the street without greeting; where no one is envious of another’s superior minstrelsy, or of another’s more brilliant crown. When God said, in the ancient Eden, “It is not good for man to be alone,” there was a deeper significance in the words than could be exhausted or explained by the family tie. It was the declaration of an essential want, which the Creator in his highest wisdom has impressed upon the noblest of his works. That is not life—you don’t call that life—where the hermit, in some woodland glade, drags out a solitary existence, or where the captive, in some cell of bondage, frets and pines unseen. Life—all kinds of life—tend to companionship, and rejoice in it, from the fecund larvae and the buzzing insect cloud, up to the kingly lion and the kinglier man. It is a social state into which we are to be introduced, as well as a state of consciousness. Not only, therefore, does the Saviour pray for his disciples—“Father, I will that those whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory”; but those who are in that heavenly recompense are said to have come “to the general assembly and church of the first-born.” Ay! and better than that, and dearer to some of us—“to the spirits of the just men made perfect.” This is an expressive representation of a social state in which all affections are pure, in which there is conscious recognition of the friends, from whom we have been some time parted, but with whom we are to abide in perpetual reunion; and of a home without a discord, a home without an illness, a home without a grave. The recognition of departed friends, and special and intimate reunion with them, Scripture and reason enable us to infer with almost certain persuasion. It is implied in the fact that the resurrection is a resurrection of individuals; that it is this mortal that shall put on immortality. It is implied in the fact that Heaven is a vast and happy society; and it is implied in the fact that there is no unclothing of the nature we now possess, only a clothing upon it with the garments of a brighter and more glorious immortality. Take comfort, then, those of you in whose history the dearest charities of life have been severed by the rude hand of the spoiler; those of whom you have thought about as lost are not lost, except to present sight. But if you and they are alike in Jesus, and remain faithful unto the end, doubt not that you shall see them again. It were strange—don’t you think?—if amid the multitudes of the heavenly hosts, the multitudes of earth’s ransomed ones that we are to see, we should see all but those we most fondly and fervently long to see! Strange, if in some of our walks along the golden streets we never happen to light upon them! Strange if we did not hear some heaven-song learned on earth trilled by some clear ringing voice that we have often heard before! Oh, depend upon it, in a realm of perfect happiness this element of happiness will not be absent—to know and love again those we have known and loved below. And although there may be a commonwealth, and although we know that they neither marry nor are given in marriage, yet dearer than all others there will be the wife to the husband, and the husband to the wife, and the friend to the friend, who have toiled and who have suffered on earth together. A private joy and sympathy mingling with the common joy, as the happy multitude sing the praises of the Lamb, and recount in endless iteration the story of his dying love. “The resurrection and the life!” Oh, what heart is not thrilled by the preciousness of the promise? Whose heart does not throb the more joyously as he recognizes the Redeemer who brings him life? “The resurrection and the life!” Enjoyed recompense, recovered friends—these are our hopes. Ah! but nearer still and dearer still, enhancing each of these a thousand fold, as every true and loyal believer thinks, with Jesus there.—Christian Herald.