My friends, the Lord sighed because He was not thinking only of the individual case. That He had power to remedy; but how many myriads were there of the bereaved whom He could not then console? of the deaf and dumb who in this world could never hear and never speak? Even in the individual cases there was, to His quick sympathy, cause enough to sigh for the wreck caused by the sin of man and the malice of Satan, in deforming the beauty of God's fair creation. His sigh for these was not the sigh of Powerlessness-it was the sigh of Sympathy.' But more than this, He was thinking of all the world, looking down to the very depths of its drear abyss of sorrow. His act of healing could be but a drop in the ocean. "That sigh," says Luther, was not drawn from Him on At the same time we should bear in mind that the sympathy of our Lord, even as sympathy, was something more intense, something more deep and mysterious, than the ordinary sympathy of which we are capable. In some unspeakable manner He bore, as though it were His own, the burden of our griefs and iniquities. Is. liii. 4; Matt. viii. 17 (ěλaße . . . ¿Báotaσe); John i. 29 (αἴρων); 1 Pet. ii. 24 (αὐτὸς ἀνήνεγκεν . ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον). ... I account of the single tongue and ears of this poor man, but it is a common sigh over all tongues and ears, yea over all hearts, bodies, and souls, and over all men, from Adam to his last descendant." The doing of good is not a work of unmixed happiness, for good men can never do all the good that they desire. "We can, indeed, only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as for ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we should choose before everything." 2 What wonder then that our Saviour, even in the act of healing, heaved the deep sigh of sympathy? So too St. Chrysostom, who says that Jesus sighed, tǹv toû ἀνθρώπου φύσιν ἐλεῶν εἰς ποῖαν ταπείνωσιν ἤγαγεν ταύτην ὅ τε μισόκαλος διάβολος καὶ ἡ τῶν πρωτοπλάστων ἀπροσεξία,—i.. because He pitied the humiliation to which our human nature has been reduced by the Devil, who hates all fairness, and by the incontinence of our first parents. 2 Romola. "O'erwhelming thoughts of pain and grief Over his sinking spirit sweep; What boots it gathering one lost leaf Out of yon sere and withered heap, Or tossing in the autumnal blast?" 3. My friends, there was in truth cause enough, and more than enough, why the Lord should sigh. In that poor afflicted man He saw but one more sign of that vast crack and flaw which sin causes in everything which God has made. When God had finished His work, He saw that it was very good; but since then tares have been sown amid His harvest; an alien element intruded into His world; a jangling discord clashed into His music. Earth is no longer Eden. Look out even on the inanimate creation; its storm, and earthquake, and eclipse; the devastating fury of its elements; the pitiless rush of its waters; the deadly pestilence of its malaria ; the invisible germs of corruption which impregnate its waters with pollution and people Keble, "Twelfth Sunday after Trinity." its air with death:-these surely are signs of something wrong somewhere, Or look at the animal world, and the finish and frightfulness of the lethal armour with which it is provided,the shark's teeth, the hornet's sting, the tiger's claw, the serpent's fang. What do we see? Not the lion lying down with the lamb, or the leopard playing with the kid; but the bright creatures bounding through the forest with hungry rage, and the dull eye of the snake in the dry leaves. Nay, there is massacre daily going on, daily raging among the blithe birds of the air, and the mute fishes of the sea. The air, the field, the wave are one vast slaughterhouse. What is the meaning of it all, but this,— that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now? And was there not 2 "The May-fly is torn by the swallow, the swallow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey."-TENNYSON. 2 Rom. viii. 22-25, where the words of the originalσυστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει ἄχρι τοῦ νῦν—are very powerful. But C enough in this rapine and fury to make Jesus look up to Heaven and sigh? 4. And alas, it is not only the unintelligent creation which groans and travails. We ourselves, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we ourselves also groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit the redemption of the body. We are apt to be very proud of ourselves and of our marvellous discoveries and scientific achievements; but, after all, what a feeble creature is man! what a little breed his race! what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! We fade as the grass, and are crushed before the moth. If we knew no more than Nature can tell us, and had no help but what Science can give to us, what sigh would be too deep for beings born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards? "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery;" so we say at the solemn truthful moment when we drop the body the universal groan is full of hopefulness, for it is represented as being called forth by the travail-pangs of a new birth. |