Are You Bereaved?
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These pages will, doubtless, find their way within the home of the bereaved. We refer to this sorrow with the most profound awe—we touch it with a shrinking hand. It seems almost too sacred for human sympathy to approach. But there is One, and only one, who can approach it; One, and only one, who can enter into and understand it; One, and only one, who can soothe it. It is Jesus! Contemplate Him in the bereaved home of Bethany! Martha and Mary are mourners.
Lazarus their brother is dead. Jesus, their brother’s Friend and theirs, is come—but He has come too late! “Lord, if You had been here, my brother had not died.” No! Not too late! It was just the moment that Jesus should come. He timed His visit of sympathy and help with their grief and need. Beloved, Jesus never approaches you a moment sooner, or a moment later than your case demands. He will come—but it will be at the very instant that you most need Him. There shall be more than an angel’s chime of His sympathy with your sorrow—the most perfect and exquisite blending.
If He come a moment too soon, your grief would not be matured enough for His sympathy; if a moment too late, that grief might have crushed you. Now, mark the thoughtfulness and skill, the delicacy and sympathy of Jesus. All is inscribed in one brief but expressive sentence: “JESUS WEPT!” To this weeping Jesus go! You return to the house of mourning from the grave where repose the ashes of one once animated and glowing with a spirit that blended with your own—you seem to have entombed a second self—all that gave existence an object, or life its charm. But rise, and go to Jesus.
Tell Him what a wreck your heart is, what a blank life seems, and what wintry gloom enshrouds all the landscape of human existence. Tell Him how mysterious to your view seems the event—how heavy falls the blow—what hard, dark, rebellious thoughts of God now haunt your perturbed mind. Lay your grief upon Jesus’ breast. Think not that you are alone in your sorrow—that there is not one in this wide, wide world, one who can appreciate your loss, or enter into all the peculiar features of your afflictions, the delicate shadings of your sadness; Jesus can, and Jesus only.
The vacancy, too, death has made, in your love and friendship, whatever be the relation, Jesus can fill. Ah! There is not a relation, many and varied though they are, both of domestic and social life, which the Son of God has not assumed, so that when these human ties are sundered by death, Jesus stands prepared to reknit, replace, and restore them, by Himself occupying the vacancy. In the rupture of the parental bond, He is a Father; of the filial, He is a Son; of the conjugal, He is a Husband; of the fraternal, He is a Brother; of friendship, He is Friend.
Thus, in every condition of human life, whatever the peculiarity of its bond, the specialty of its sorrow, or the desolation it produces, Jesus avows His aptitude and readiness to meet and sympathize with it. Go, then, bereaved mourner, and present your claim to a newborn relation, it may be, to the Incarnate Son of God.
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