In some such form as this the storm of doubt and anguish must have torn the minds of those mourners.  But the storm is not yet over; the deepest darkness has not yet come.  Their brother is dead.  Death with his marks, which once seen can never be mistaken, stamps every lineament of that well-known countenance.  It is death’s colour on the cheek; death’s cold stiffness in the limbs; and no hand but his could so close those eyes and make rigid those lips.  There is no swoon here!  Swathe him then in the garments of the grave; make ready for the funeral; let him be buried for ever out of sight; follow him to the ancestral tomb, and let the other household dead be remembered, and the other sad processions from the home of the living to the home of the lost and gone be recalled, and think that as they never returned, so never can he.  Lay the body gently down beside those who have been long sleeping there; look at it; remember the past since childhood; weep and say farewell; return, Martha and Mary, with wrung hearts to your home, and see the empty room and listen for a voice that is no more, and experience a second death in the emptiness, the silence of this changed abode, and let the heaviest burden of all be borne, the deepest sorrow of all be endured—­the doubt of a Saviour’s love!

Yes, that terrible agony of doubt was there.  Other friends came to sympathise with them, and to be present with them at the funeral; but this Friend was absent, and did not send even one comforting message!  Of what avail is His coming now? for Lazarus has been dead four days, and corruption is already doing its foul work on his body.  Here is “darkness that might be felt!”

Would that we could feel how real all this mysterious sorrow must have been to those sisters—­our sisters, with our hearts, affections, and sympathies—­that so we may be the more prepared to receive the blessed teaching which this narrative is designed to afford, and have our faith strengthened by seeing how the darkness and perplexity which belong so often to God’s providential dealings towards us, may be caused by the deepest workings of that very love which we do not for a time see, and therefore may in our blindness and weakness for a time doubt.

But we must now look at the other portion of this history, which interprets the one we have been considering, and reveals the mind and ways of Jesus, now, as then, to His sorrowing friends.

We read that “when Jesus heard that Lazarus was sick,” “he abode two days still in the same place where he then was.”  But His thoughts and His heart were all the while in Bethany.  He saw all that was taking place there.  He was cognisant of every groan and tear; yet He did nothing to prevent the progress of the disease, or to lessen the intensity of the sorrow.  At the very moment when the sisters watch their brother’s last breath, Jesus “said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead,”

Let us inquire, then, whether we can discover any reasons which could have induced our Lord thus to prolong His stay at Bethabara, and to absent Himself from Bethany.  What means this deep calm and quiet at such a time beside the troubled waters of the Jordan?