John 11:17-27 Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.… There was that in the tie of blood which death was powerless to alter. Many an aching heart would find comfort, if it were assured of this. Have we lost them forever as ours, those loved ones — lost all the claim upon their special answering love, which those old earthly names, "brother," "sister," and the like, gave us? Is the Communion of Saints one monotonous dead level of spiritual relationship? Or are the ties of earth — whether ties of blood, or ties of friendship, or ties of love — not abolished, but transfigured, in that mysterious world beyond death? On the warrant of these words of Jesus! dare to believe that they will be glorified, not destroyed; that that, which more than anything else makes earth bright and worth having, will be at least one of the lesser luminaries of heaven. Nay, even if we had no such words of Jesus as these, I could never bring myself to believe that God would so mock us, as to give us these relationships and bid us be faithful to them, only to tear our hearts in pieces with grief — grief which must necessarily be intense in proportion to our fidelity to them — when the cruel hour of death arrives to dissolve them. It is sad enough that they should be even suspended, through "ignorance of a common tongue" — their destruction would be intolerable to us. As the seed is transformed into the plant — as the natural body is transfigured into the spiritual body — so will the earthly relationship be glorified into its heavenly counterpart. (D. J. Vaughan, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.WEB: So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already. |
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