Luke 8:49-56 While he yet spoke, there comes one from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, Your daughter is dead… I. The words of the messenger (ver. 49) may serve to REMIND US OF THE LIMITS WHICH ORDINARILY OUR UNBELIEF SETS TO OUR FAITH. "While there's life there is hope," we are accustomed to say. But "if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." Christ has the same power over death now as He had when on earth. The difference between His treatment of death now, and His treatment of it then, is not in kind — it is only in circumstance and scene. Cling to the belief that Christ has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light, and that one day your loved ones shall be restored to you and you to them, and, when set over against the consolation which that belief has power to yield, the question of the time when will come to matter less and less to you. II. Looking at the text itself we find in it — 1. That when Christ reached the house of Jairus the relatives and neighbours who had assembled in the deathchamber, were, according to Eastern custom, bitterly weeping and loudly bewailing the loss which had just befallen the family; and — 2. That He bade them cease their mourning. WHY, THEN, DID CHRIST SAY TO THEM "WEEP NOT"? Surely their grief was pardonable and even fitting. Surely it would have argued the possession of a callous heart and an unsympathetic nature if they had been unmoved in that house of mourning that day. It seems to me that we must invest these words in the mouth of Christ with the tenderest look and the most sympathetic tone, and that we must regard them not as condemnatory of a grief that was natural, but as gentle chiding of sorrow that was hopeless, and therefore unbelieving, "Weep not for them! it is no cause of sorrow That theirs was no long pathway to the tomb; They had one bright to-day, no sad to-morrow Rising in hope, and darkening into gloom. Weep not for them! give tears unto the living; O waste no vain regret on lot like theirs! But rather make it reason for thanksgiving That ye have cherished angels unawares." III. THE REASON WHICH CHRIST GAVE WHY THEY WERE NOT TO WEEP. "She is not dead." And yet the very next verse tells us that they all knew very well that she was dead. How came Christ then to deny a fact so patent to all? It was because He set His face and "the whole weight of His thought and speech " against the merely natural and temporal views of men as to what death is — "The illuminating significance of the fact of Christ's indisposition to use the word death." IV. We have seen that Jesus said, and why He said, that the daughter of Jairus was not dead. How, then, does He explain the wondrous and awful change which has come ever her visible form? HE SAYS THAT SHE IS SLEEPING. Perhaps never was a time, since men began to seek out the analogies in things, when they did not see and speak of the striking similarity between Death and his twin-brother Sleep. But is this fact enough to account for Christ's use of the similitude? I think not. "If Christ had done nothing more for humanity," says Munger, than give to it this word "sleep" in place of "death," He Would have been the greatest of benefactors. To that which seems the worst thing, He has given the best name, and the name is true. It is a great thing that we are able to take that almost sweetest and most soothing word in our tongue — sleep — and give it unto death: sleep that ends our cares and relieves us of our toils, that begins in weariness and ends in strength.', Out of sleep there is awakening, and the light of the eternal morning gladdens the vision of all who fall asleep in Christ. (J. R. Bailey.) Parallel Verses KJV: While he yet spake, there cometh one from the ruler of the synagogue's house, saying to him, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not the Master. |
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