VIII. The Raising of the Dead

I linger on the threshold. In every age, men of every religion have hoped at least for life beyond its seeming end; without that hope, how could they have endured the life they had? There are men now who profess unbelief in a future and yet live well, saying not “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” but, nobly, “Let us do what good we may, for there are men to come after us.” Still, I could not claim to understand them, and they seem exceptions to the race. There have always been those absorbed in the present who never think of the future: some because, if there is one, they cannot be easy about their part in it; others because they are occupied with the poor present—grand if part of an endless whole, poor if alone. But here are thoughtful men who say, “There is no more. Let us make the best of this.” Their idea of best is not contemptible, though poor to those of us for whom being is worth only the hope of becoming what, at present rates, will take ages to realize. I will venture a word or two on the matter.

Their ideal does not approach Christianity’s even for this life. To know whether their words truly represent them in relation to the future, I would have to know their conscious and unconscious being; no wonder I am loath to judge them.

No poet of high rank, as far as I know, ever disbelieved in the future. He might fear there was none, but that very fear is faith. The greatest poet of the present day believes with ardour. I admit it is not proven to the intellect; but were it true, it would be beyond the intellect’s grasp, for understanding is the offspring of life and cannot understand its own origin, and continuity of existence depends on the nature of existence, not external relations. Even after death we shall be no more able to prove a further life than we can now prove our present being; it may be easier to believe, that is all. We constantly act on grounds we cannot prove, and the want of proof should neither destroy our hope of life beyond the grave nor prevent the action its bare possibility demands.

But I say this last: those who disbelieve in a future state yet live up to their conscience, however much lower its demands than those of a conscience enlightened by “the Lord, who is that spirit,” will enter the other life in a far more enviable relation to it than those who say Lord, Lord and do not do what he says.

It may seem strange that our Lord says so little about the life to come—though it is one life with the present, as leaf and blossom are one. Even with the Sadducees he argues from words they accepted and from the nature of God, not from a human point of view. He seems always to take it for granted and turns his scholars to its root: the life itself, oneness with God and his will. Continuance of conscious being follows from that, and without it would be an utter evil.

When he speaks of the world beyond, it is as his Father’s house with many mansions, and he does not explain. Man’s imagination, enlightened by the spirit of truth and working with experience and affection, was a far safer guide than an intellect schooled even by our Lord. At the words my Father’s house, the memory of a poor fisherman’s home on the Galilean shore, where as a child he had spent his years of divine carelessness, would tell Peter or James or John more about the many mansions than a revelation to their intellect as clear as the Apocalypse is obscure.

When he said “I have overcome the world,” he had overcome the cause of all doubt: belief in outside appearances rather than the living truth. He left it to his followers to say, from their own experience and not merely from belief in his resurrection, “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?” Only the inward life of truth conquers the outward death of appearance; no revelation from without could.

These miracles are the nearest we come to news of the other world—I cannot say from it. I except our Lord’s own resurrection, which I shall treat as the miracle it was, whatever interpretation is put on the word. I say nearest because not one of those raised gives us an atom of information. Could they have told their friends something that has filtered down to us?

I turn to the cases on record. They are only three. The day after he cured the centurion’s servant at Capernaum, Jesus went to Nain, and as they approached the gate—but I cannot part the story from the lovely words in which St Luke tells it: “There was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and much people of the city was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. And he came and touched the bier; and they that bare him stood still. And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother.”

In each case the miracle has a special fitness: this youth was a widow’s only son; Jairus’s daughter was his “one only daughter”; Lazarus was the brother of two orphan sisters.

I will not make the record more impressive by lingering over its details; that belongs to the reader. Friends crowd around a loss: the weeping mother, the dead man borne in the midst. They were going to the house of death, but Life was between them and it, walking to meet them unknown. He lays his hand on the bier; the bearers, recognizing authority, stand. A word, and the dead sits up; a moment more, and he is in his mother’s arms. O mother! were you more favoured than other mothers? Or were you made the type of the universal mother with a dead son, his raising a foretaste of the bliss of all such mothers? An exception would have ill met your need, for your motherhood could be justified only on universal grounds; it must go mourning still, even with your son restored, for its claims are universal or they are not. In God’s dealings there are no exceptions, and Jesus wrought no new thing, only the works of the Father. What matters it that the dead come not back to us, if we go to them? It is tenfold better. Dear as home is, he who loves it best must know that what he calls home is only a shadow of home, the open porch where the winds of the world rave while the glowing fire of the true home casts lovely gleams from within.

Certainly this mother did not lose her son again; doubtless she died first, knowing at last she had only to wait. The dead have their sorrow too, but once they find it is well with them they wait by the mouth of the coming stream better than the living, who watch the going stream carry their loves to the unknown ocean. The dead sit by the river-mouths of Time; the living mourn on its higher banks.

The mother’s joy no one can conceive, not even a mother who hopes one day to find a lost son. Had it all been a dream? A dream in this sense: the final, which alone is fully God’s will, casts the look of a dream over all before it. When we last awake we shall know we dreamed; every honest judgment, feeling, hope and desire will show itself a dream, but one whose waking is lovelier, with nothing lost and all gained in restored completeness. How triumphantly this mother would die when her turn came!

And how calmly the restored son would go about the world’s duties. [Footnote:11 Those who can take the trouble, and are capable of understanding it, will do well to study Robert Browning's "Epistle of an Arab Physician."]

He sat up and began to speak.

It is vain to look into what God has hidden; surely it is no chance that we are left in the dark. “He began to speak.” Why does the Evangelist give no hint of what he said? Would not all who have lost someone they love, even grandchildren weeping for a beloved gray head, have blessed God for St Luke’s record of it? For my part, I thank God he was silent.

Pictures of heaven made by prophecy’s attempt to utter its visions in the poor forms of earth’s glory make me see that it is better to walk by faith than by a fancied sight. The region beyond must differ so much from ours, gathering all our goods into one surpassing excellence, that any description by the had-been-dead would have bred wretched misconceptions, which might please lower stages of Christian development but would obstruct its growth. It is well that St Luke is silent; or that the friends heard the returning spirit’s words only as a child’s babble, meaningless to them, answered only by caresses.

The daughter of Jairus is told briefly by St Matthew, more fully by St Luke, most fully by St Mark. A ruler of the synagogue at Capernaum falls at our Lord’s feet, saying his little daughter, about twelve, is at the point of death, and begs him to lay his hands on her. Our Lord goes with him, followed by many people, but on the way a touch arrests him. He makes no haste to outstrip death. We can imagine the father’s impatience as the Lord stood and asked who touched him: his daughter was dying; Death would not wait.

But the woman’s heart and soul must not be passed by. The father must wait a little yet. The will of God cannot be outstripped.

Then word came from the ruler’s house: “Your daughter is dead; why trouble the Master any further?” “Death has won the race!” the father may have said bitterly within. But Jesus never tried men’s faith without feeding its strength, and with the trial gives the way of escape. At once, not leaving the word to work its despair, he said, “Do not be afraid; only believe.” These plain words held more for the man’s peace than all the consolations of philosophy and enforcements of morality, even than the raising of his daughter. To rouse a man’s hopeful, trusting nature, to make him look up into the unknown region of mysterious possibilities, does infinitely more for him than removing the direst evil without it; to rouse the hope that there may be a God with a heart like our own does more for the humanity in us than conviction that some being made heaven and earth. Jesus is the express image of God’s substance, and in him we know God’s heart; nourishing faith in himself was the best thing he could do for the man.

We hear no word from the ruler. No wonder: the compressed lip and uplifted eye would say more to the Saviour’s heart than words.

He seems to have stopped the crowd and let them go no farther. They could not all see, and he did not wish them to; it was not good for men to see too many miracles. They would feast their eyes and cease to wonder or think; the miracle, cut off from religion, would become common, and some would say she had only slept. A wonder is a poor thing for faith, and to those who had not prayed for it, nor could give thanks for it, nor felt in it the love of God, it would be only a wonder.

Jesus must have hated display. God’s greatest work has never been done in crowds but in closets, and when it comes out it acts upon individuals. A crowd is not a divine thing: not a body, its atoms not members one of another, but a chaos over which the Spirit of God has yet to move before each goes to his place and joins the organized chorus of the human creation. The crowd must be dispersed that the church may be formed.

The crowd’s relation to the miracle is reflected in what came to the friends of the house. To them, wailing greatly in the Eastern fashion, he said on entering, “Why make this ado, and weep? The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.” They laughed him to scorn. He put them all out.

What did he mean? Not that his words were literal, as we distinguish death from sleep; not coma, lethargy or suspended animation, for the narrative plainly means us to believe she was dead after the fashion we call death. That this was not to be dead after the fashion our Lord called death is a blessed and lovely fact.

Nor can it mean she was not dead as others are because he was about to wake her so soon; they did not know that, so it gave no ground for the reproach, “Why make this ado, and weep?”

Nor does it come only from his seeing death and sleep as alike, each needing God’s power to awake from; he sees the differences too, and how death looks to us, and his knowledge could be no reason for reproaching our ignorance. These people professed to believe in the resurrection of the dead, and did, after some feeble fashion; they were not Sadducees, being friends of a synagogue ruler. Our Lord did not bring the news of resurrection to the world, which all peoples had believed from the first; the resurrection he taught was far deeper, from dead works to serve the living and true God. But for most Christians too, practical faith in the resurrection of the body, though in their creed, is a poor affair; in grief they think little of it and live almost wholly in the present, not saved by hope. His reproach was that they did not draw from their own creed the consolation they should: if the child was to be restored one day, she was not dead as their lamentations implied. Any of them who believed God and the prophets might have said, “Hope, and fear not—only believe.” In this sense, I think, our Lord spoke.

This simple reading makes the miracle itself grander. The sequel stands to the words as if, bringing the maid out by the hand, he had said, “See—I told you she was not dead but sleeping.” The words apply to all death: the Lord brings his knowledge of what we do not know to feed our feeble faith. It is as if he told us our notion of death is wrong; we would be nearer the truth calling it sleep, for it is only a passing appearance and no right cause for our misery. I think it was from this word, and the same utterance about Lazarus, that St Paul so often says sleep for death; death as we feel it seems to have vanished from his mind, and he speaks of things in continuity, never saying before death or after death. When he raised the dead, the Son did neither more nor less than the Father’s work, what he is always doing; he only made it manifest a little sooner.

But those he spoke to laughed. They knew she was dead, and their unfaithfulness blinded them to his meaning; they were unfit to see the proof of what he said. Only a faithful heart can understand the proof of the truest things; only faith toward God can lay hold of his facts. There is a foregoing fitness. So he put them out, and took into the chamber only the father and mother, whose love and sorrow made them readier to be persuaded of mighty things, and the three disciples, whose faith made them fit to behold otherwise dangerous wonders. There lay the damsel, dead toward men, sleeping toward God.

He said, “Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.” “Her spirit came again,” she rose and walked at once, and he commanded that she be given food. In the joy of restoration they might forget that the healthier a worn, exhausted body becomes, the more it needs food, which in its commonness might well support the miracle. Raising the dead and feeding the living are equally divine and in harmony with the same law; we understand the body’s power to take that food no better than the power that went out from Jesus to make her body capable of using it.

He charges the parents to be silent—perhaps for his own sake, since he did not want to be made a mere wonder, but more probably for theirs: so the holy thing might not evaporate in speech or be defiled by foolish talk and self-importance, but take root in silence and bear fruit in humility, uprightness and faith.

And now for Lazarus. One might think Jesus’ desire for his friend’s presence through his own coming trouble had a share in this miracle, were it not that we never find him working a miracle for himself. He knew the Father’s perfect will and left all to him. Those who cannot know that will and do not care for it must fall into trouble to learn God as the Saviour from their own doings; this Jesus had not to learn. Even his resurrection was all for others: wrought in him, not for him.

He knew Lazarus was dying, stayed where he was, and let him die. A hard and therefore precious lesson lay in that death for sisters and friends—the more the love, the more precious the lesson—the lesson in every death, with the same end for all who love: resurrection. The raising of Lazarus is the type of the raising of all the dead. Of Lazarus, as of Jairus’s daughter, he said “he sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep.” He slept as every dead man sleeps.

Read the story. Try to think not only what the disciples felt but what Jesus was thinking: how he, who saw the other side, regarded the death he was about to destroy.

“Lord, if you had been here,” said Martha, “my brother would not have died.” Did she mean to hint at what she had not faith enough to ask?

“Your brother will rise again,” said the Lord. Her faith was so weak that she took little comfort from it. She knew what he meant: the general, far-off resurrection, a very little thing to her. It was true he would rise, but what was that to the present grief? A thousand years may be one day to God, but for Martha one day was a thousand years; only he who entirely believes in God finds the thousand years one day too. Jesus would help her through such faith, and so he asserts his might most strongly: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live!” The death of not believing in God—the God revealed in Jesus—is the only death; the other is nowhere but in the fears and fancies of unbelief. “And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die”: for him there is nothing that is what death looks to us.

“Do you believe this?” Martha was an honest woman. She did not fully understand, so could only assent, but she believed in him, and that much she told him plainly.

“Yes, Lord: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

With that hope and confession arising in her, she gave the loveliest sign: she went and called her sister. But even in the profounder Mary faith reached only as far as her sister’s words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When he saw her trouble, and that of the Jews with her, he was troubled too. Why? The purest sympathy with what was about to vanish would not make him groan in spirit. We have a right, even a duty, to understand it if we can, for he showed it.

I think it was caused by an invading sense of the general misery of humanity for lack of that faith in the Father without which the Son could do or endure nothing—if the Father ceased, the Son must cease. The darkness between God and his creatures gave room for their weeping over their dead, and was filled with it; to them death must appear an unmitigated, irremediable evil. Nothing could help but the faith in infinite love he had come to bring, and how hard it was to persuade them to receive it, and how many weeping generations of loving hearts must follow! His Father was with them all, but how slowly and painfully would each learn the one precious fact!

“Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Lord, come and see,” they answered, in such mournful accents of human misery that he wept with them.

They come to the grave. “Take away the stone.”

Martha, who believed in the Resurrection and the Life, said, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” In the relations of mortality to immortality, of body to soul, there are painful, even ugly things, which by common consent we mention only in dire necessity and with shame. Decay, and all that makes the most beloved of God’s created appearances a terror so that we ask the earth to take our dead out of sight, was uppermost with Martha even before him to whom Death was a slave. Careful of his feelings, she would not have the stone removed, for her brother’s sake also. But had it been as she feared, who is so tender with feeble flesh as the Son of Man, so unready to impute a shame it could not help or be fastidious over the painful working of the laws of his own world?

Entire affection hateth nicer hands.

And at the worst, what was decay to him, who could recall the disuniting atoms under the restored law of imperial life?

“Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?” I say again: the essential glory of God who raises all the dead, not merely an exceptional glory in raising this one man.

They should see not corruption but glory: no evil odour of dissolution, but glowing life springing from the place of the dead, light born from the very bosom of the darkness.

They took away the friendly stone. Then Jesus spoke, not to the dead man but to the living Father, so that the people about him would know it as the Father’s work: “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said it because of the people standing by, that they may believe you sent me.” So they might believe the work was God’s, see the Father justify what the Son said, and receive him and all he did as the Father’s manifestation, trusting a God whose will was such as this. And now—“Lazarus, come forth.”

Slowly, toiling, hand and foot bound in grave clothes, he that had been dead struggled out to the light. When did corruption and glory ever meet and embrace as now! What ready hands, eager almost to helplessness, reached trembling for the feeble man returning from his strange journey, to carry him into the day—their poor day, which they thought all the day, forgetting the higher day he had left for their sakes: content to walk in moonlight a little longer, glad of his sisters’ embraces, and—perhaps, I do not know—comforted with news of the heavenly regions!

Joy of all joys! The dead come back! Is it any wonder that this Mary spent three hundred pence on ointment for the feet of the Raiser of the Dead?

I doubt he told them anything. I do not think he could make even his own flesh and blood—womankind, quick to understand—know the things he had seen and heard and felt. Our beloved brother Tennyson says all that can be said, in his book In Memoriam:

Why are we left in such ignorance? Without the raising of the dead and the Saviour’s own rising, Christianity would not have given what it could of hope. Hope is not faith, but neither is faith sight, and with hope we are not miserable men. But Christianity could not interfere with the discipline needed for its own fulfilment or depose the schoolmaster that leads to Christ. One main doubt and terror driving men toward the revelation in Jesus is Death. How can a man imagine he is complete in himself and can do without a Father in heaven, when he knows neither the mystery he sprang from by birth nor the one he goes to by death? God has given us room away from himself, as Robert Browning says:—

..."God, whose pleasure brought

and this room, in its time-symbol, is bounded by darkness on both sides. Whence I came and whither I go are dark: how can I live in peace without the God who ordered it so? Faith is my only refuge—absolute belief in a being so far beyond me that he can do all for this me with utter satisfaction to this me, guarding its rights as jealously as his own, from which they spring, that he may make me at last one with himself, my deeper self, since his thought of me is my life. Not to know him, even if I could live happily without him, is death.

It may be said, “Why all this? Why not go on like a brave man to meet your fate, careless of what that fate may be?”

“But what if this fate should depend on myself? Am I to be careless then?” I answer.

“The fate is so uncertain! If it be annihilation, why quail before it? Cowardice at least is contemptible.”

“Is not indifference more contemptible? Is it no grief that one who has once thought should not care to go on, and this glory perish? Is life not a good with all its pain, to be clung to? Have you never grudged the coming sleep, because you cease for the time to be so much? I think the man who can go to sleep without faith in God has yet to learn what being is; yet he who knows not God cannot have much to lose in losing being. And yet—did he never love man or woman or child? Is he content to go on loving them now, careless whether love is perishable? If it is, why not kill himself, since it is all a lie, a false appearance of what our best nature calls aloud for and cannot have? If I knew for certain there was no life beyond this, the noble thing would be to make the best of this, even to try after what is written in the Gospel, for that is the noblest. But not to be sure of annihilation, yet choose it and act as if it were true, seems to me the sign of a nature at strife with immortality, bound for the dust by its own choice.”

The man will say, “That is yielding everything. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I am of the dust, for I believe in nothing beyond.”

“No,” I return. “I recognize another law in myself, infinitely higher. I think it is in you too, though you are at strife with it, and it will revive in you to your blessed discontent. By that I will walk, not by yours: a law that bids me strive after what I am not but may become, striving in me against sin and down-dragging decay, one with my will, and, if true, bound at last to make all one. If I am made to live, I ought not to be willing to cease. This unwillingness, above all to cease to love my own, may well be the sign I am made to live. To pass away with no way of making reparation to those I have wronged, no chance of saying I am sorry—what shall I do for you?, seems to me frightful. No God to help one be good now, none who cares whether one is good; or a God who gives his creature no time to grow good, even as he is growing better, but blots him out like a rain-drop! Great God, forbid—if thou art. If thou art not, then this, like all prayers, goes echoing through the soulless vaults of a waste universe. Then death begets souls and creates love, and life is nowhere save in the imaginations of the children of the grave. Whence came those imaginations? Death, thou art not my father! Grave, thou art not my mother! I come of another kind, nor shall ye usurp dominion over me.”

What better sign of immortality than the raising of the dead could God give? Yet he cannot always be raising the dead before our eyes, or the holiness of death’s ends would fail; we need death, only it shall be undone once and again for a time, that we may know it is not what it seems. But even the report through the ages that the dead came back as their friends had known them, the old love unlost in the grave, the same face to smile and bless, is precious. That they remain the same in all that made them lovely is the one priceless fact, if we may hope in it as fact; that we shall behold and clasp and love them again follows of necessity. We cannot be sure of the report, yet it gives a hope even to him who, like Martha, honestly refrains from saying I believe of all that is reported. I think he will one day believe more than he knows how to desire, for faith in Jesus will make up for lack of sight of the miracle.

Does God, then, make death look what it is not? Why not let it appear what it is, and spare us false judgments of it?

It is our low faithlessness that makes us misjudge death, and only faith could make us judge it aright; that we misjudge it while faithless is well, for as it appears it is a type of what we are without God. But there is no falsehood in it: the dust must go back to the dust. He who believes in the body more than the soul clings to this aspect; he who believes in thought, mind, love and truth can see the other side, and rejoice over the bursting shell that lets the young oak creep from its kernel-prison. The lower is true, but the higher overcomes and absorbs it: “When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” When the spirit of death is seen, the body of death vanishes. Death is God’s angel of birth. We fear him; the dying stretch out loving hands of hope toward him. I do not believe death is to the dying what it looks to beholders; I think it is more like what the spirit may remember of its own birth into this lower world. How will he love his mother then, and all humanity in her, and God who gave her, and God who gives her back!

The future lies dark before us, with an infinite hope in the darkness. To be at peace about it on any ground but the love of God would be an absolute loss. Better fear and hope and prayer than knowledge and peace without the prayer.

To sum up: An express revelation in words would probably be little intelligible. In Christ we have an ever-growing revelation. He is the resurrection and the life. As we know him we know our future. In our ignorance lies a force of need, compelling us toward God.

In our ignorance likewise lies the room for the development of the simple will, as well as the necessity for arousing it. Hence this ignorance is but the shell of faith.

In this, as in all his miracles, our Lord shows in one instance what his Father is ever doing without showing it. Even the report of this is the best news we can have from the other world—as we call it.