Memories of Bethany

XXIII.

The Disciples’ Return.

The time has come when the disciples must leave the crest of Olivet and bend their steps once more to Jerusalem. Ah! most sorrowful thought—most sorrowful pilgrimage! Often, often had it been trodden before with their Lord’s voice of love and power sounding in their ears. Often had it proved an Emmaus journey, when their hearts “burned within them as He talked to them by the way and opened unto them the Scriptures.” But He is gone!—that voice is now hushed—the well-loved path, worn by His blessed footsteps, and consecrated by His midnight prayers, must be trodden by them alone! Willingly, perhaps, like Peter, on Tabor, would they have tarried on the spot where they last saw His human form, and listened to the music of His voice, just as we still love to revisit some haunt of hallowed friendship and associate it with the name and words and features of the departed. But they dare not linger. As the disciples of this great and good Master, they dare not remain to indulge in mere sentimental grief, or in vain hopes and expectations of a speedy return. Life is too short—their Apostolic work too solemn and momentous, to suffer them to consume their hours in unavailing sorrow. We may imagine them taking their last look upwards to heaven, and then bending a tearful eye down upon Bethany—its hallowed remembrances all the more hallowed, that the vision is now about to pass away for ever! The Angels, too, have sped away, and the eleven pilgrims begin their solitary return back to the city and temple from which the true Glory had indeed departed!

And how did they return? What were their feelings as they rose to pursue their way? Had we not been told far otherwise, we should have imagined them to have been those of deep dejection. We should have pictured to ourselves a weary, weeping, troubled band; their countenances shaded with a sorrow too profound for words;—the joyous melodies of that morning hour, all in sad contrast with those hearts which were bowed down with a bereavement unparalleled in its nature since a weeping world was bedewed with tears! They were going too, as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” to the very city where, a few weeks before, their Lord had been crucified,—the disciples of a hated Master, “not knowing the things that might befall them there.” Could we wonder, if for the moment these aching spirits should have surrendered themselves to mingled feelings of disconsolate grief and terror. But how different! Sorrow indeed they must have had; but if so, it was counterbalanced and overborne by far other emotions; for of the sorrow, the Evangelist says nothing; the simple record of this mournful journey is in these words, “They returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Most wonderful, and yet most true! Never did mourner return from a funeral scene—(from laying in the grave his nearest and dearest)—with a heavier sense of an overwhelming loss than did that widowed orphaned band. And yet, lo! they are joyful! A sunshine is lighting up their faces. The “Sun of their souls” has set behind the world’s horizon. But though vanished from the eye of sense, His glory and radiance seem still to linger on their spirits, just as the orb of day gilds the lofty mountain-peaks long after his descent. They tread the old footway with elastic step! As Gethsemane, and Kedron, and the Temple-path, are in succession skirted, while “sorrowful, they are alway rejoicing.” Why is this? It was God Himself fulfilling in their experience His own promise, “As thy day is, so shall thy strength be.” He metes out strength IN the day of trial, and FOR the day of trial. When we expect nothing but fainting and trembling, sadness and despondency, He whispers His own promise, and makes it good, “My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Who so faint as these disciples? Think of them in their by-past history, tossed on Gennesaret, cowering with dread in their vessel! Think of them in the Judgment-Hall of Pilate; think of them at the cross! Nothing there but pusillanimity and cowardice. Nay, when our Lord had spoken to them on a former occasion of this same departure, we read that “sorrow had filled their hearts.” They could not bear the thought of so cruel a severance from all they held dear: But see them now—when the sad hour has come—lonely—unbefriended—their Lord hopelessly removed from the eye of sense; though but a few days before, they were traitors to their trust—unfaithful in their allegiance—bending, like bruised reeds, before the storm—behold them now, retraversing their way to Jerusalem, not with sorrow, as we might expect, but with joy. The Evangelist even notes the extent and measure of the emotion. It was not a mere effort to overbear their sorrow—an outward semblance of reconciliation to their hard fate—but it was a deep fountain of real gladness, welling up from their riven spirits. They returned, he tells us, with “great joy!”

Oh! the wonders of the grace of God. What grace has done—what grace can do! We speak not of it now under its manifold other and diversified phases,—converting grace, and restraining grace, and sanctifying grace, and dying grace. Here we have to do only with sustaining and supporting grace. But how many Christian disciples, in their Olivets of sorrow, have been able to tell the same experience? How often, when a believer is stricken down with sore affliction—when the hand of death enters his family—when the treasured life of the dwelling is taken, and he feels in the anticipation of such a blow as if it would smite him, too, to the dust, and it were impossible to survive the prostration of all that links him to life—when the tremendous blow comes, lo! sustaining grace he never could have dreamed of comes along with it. He rises above his trial. Underneath him are the Everlasting arms. “The joy of the Lord is his strength!” He treads along life’s lonely way sorrowful, yet with a “song in the night.” Amid earth’s separations and sadness, he hears the voice of Jesus, saying, “Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

Oh, trust that Grace still! It is the secret of your spiritual strength. “Not I, not I, but the grace of God that is with me!” You may have to confront “a great fight of afflictions;” but that grace sustaining you, you will be made “more than conquerors.” “All men forsook me,” said the great Apostle, “nevertheless, the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me, and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” “And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all-sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.” You have found Him faithful in the past;—trust Him in the future. Cast all your cares, and each care, as it arises, on Him, saying, in childlike faith, “Undertake Thou for me!” Then, then, in your very night-seasons, “His song will be with you.” The Mount of your trial—the mournful, desolate, solitary, rugged path you tread, will be carpeted with love, fringed with mercy, and earth’s darkest future will grow bright as you listen to a voice stealing from the upper sanctuary, “I will come again and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

In this scene of the disciples returning to Jerusalem, we are presented with the last picture of the Home of Bethany. Here the earthly vision is sealed, and we are only left to imagine Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus, when the joyous footfall that had cheered their dwelling could be heard no more, living together in sacred harmony, exulting in “the blessed hope, even the glorious appearing of the Great God their Saviour.”[50] Did they live to survive the destruction of Jerusalem? Did they live to hear the tramp of the Roman legions resounding through their quiet hamlet, and “the abomination of desolation,” the imperial eagles desecrating the hallowed ridges of Olivet? Did they often repair to the meetings of the infant Church in Jerusalem, and delight to mingle with the under shepherds, when the “Chief Shepherd” had gone? Or did the venerable company of Apostles love to resort, as their Lord before them, to the old village of palm-trees, whose every memory was fragrant with their Master’s name? All these, and similar questions, we cannot answer. This we know and feel assured of—they are now gathered a holy and happy family in the true Bethany above—there never more to listen to the voice of weeping, or hear the tread of the funeral crowd, or the wail of the Mourner!

And soon, too, shall many of us (let us trust) be there, to meet them! Bethany, we have seen, had alike its tears and its joys; so will it be with every spot and every scene in this mingled world. But where the Family of Bethany now are, the motto is—“Never sorrowful, alway rejoicing!” And, better than all, while they never can be severed from one another, they never can be separated from their Lord. He is no longer now, as formerly at their earthly home, like “a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night.” No Olivet now to remind of farewells. They are “with Him,” “seeing Him as He is,” and that “for ever and ever!”

And if, meanwhile, regarding ourselves, the journey of life has for a little still to be traversed, and the battle of life still to be fought; blessed be God, “we go not a warfare on our own charges.” The same grace vouchsafed to the disciples is promised to us. That grace will enable us to rise superior to all the vicissitudes and changes of the journey. Let us rise from our Olivet-ridge and be going; and though traversing different footpaths to the same Home—be it ours, like the disciples, to reach at last—a holy and happy company—the true Heavenly Jerusalem—“with Great Joy.”

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Bethany signifies literally “The house of dates.”

[2] “The figs of Bethany” are mentioned specially by the Rabbins as being subject to tithing.

[3] Stanley’s “Sinai and Palestine.”

[4] Anderson.

[5] Bartlett’s “Walks about Jerusalem.”

[6] Neander’s “Life of Christ.”

[7] “What Mary fell short in words she made up in tears. She said less than Martha, but wept more; and tears of devout affection have a voice, a loud prevailing voice—no rhetoric like that.”—Matthew Henry.

[8] Note.—See p. 173.

[9] “Within and Without.”

[10] John xi. 11.

[11] John xi. 20.

[12] John xi. 21.

[13] John xi. 26.

[14] John xi. 27.

[15] John xi. 39.

[16] John xi. 39.

[17] John xi. 41.

[18] Rev. iii. 5.

[19] Rom. viii. 34.

[20] John v. 29.

[21] As the Jewish sabbath began at six o’clock on Friday evening, and lasted till six on Saturday evening, we may infer it was after the close of its sacred hours (at “eventide”) He reached Bethany.

[22] It is supposed to have been equivalent to £10 of our money.

[23] Tennyson.

[24] An excellent Christian poet has thus amplified this thought:—

“Thou hast thy record in the monarch’s hall,
And on the waters of the far mid sea;
And where the mighty mountain shadows fall,
The Alpine hamlet keeps a thought of thee.
Where’er, beneath some Oriental tree,
The Christian traveller rests—where’er the child
Looks upward from the English mother’s knee,
With earnest eyes, in wond’ring reverence mild,
There art thou known. Where’er the Book of Light
Bears hope and healing, there, beyond all blight,
Is borne thy memory—and all praise above.
Oh! say what deed so lifted thy sweet name,
Mary! to that pure, silent place of fame?—
One lowly offering of exceeding love.”

[25] This was a common opinion among the Fathers of the Church.

[26] Mark xi. 1-12.

[27] Stanley’s “Sinai and Palestine,” p. 188-191. A work of rare interest, which condenses in one volume the literature of the Holy Land.

[28] “Christian Year.”

[29] Bethphage, lit. “the house of figs.”

[30] Stanley, p. 418.

[31] “If the miracles generally have a symbolical import, we have in this case one that is entirely symbolical.”—Neander.

[32] “Trench on the Miracles,” p. 444. See a full exposition of the design and import of this miracle in this exhaustive and admirable dissertation.

[33] “The fig-tree, rich in foliage, but destitute of fruit, represents the Jewish people, so abundant in outward shows of piety, but destitute of its reality. Their vital sap was squandered upon leaves. And as the fruitless tree, failing to realise the aim of its being, was destroyed, so the theocratic nation, for the same reason, was to be overtaken, after long forbearance, by the judgments of God, and shut out from His kingdom.”—Neander.

[34] Psalm i. 3.

[35] “In that of the devils in the swine there was no punishment, but only a permitting of the thing.”—See “Stier’s Words of the Lord Jesus,” vol. iii. p. 100.

[36] Mark xi. 19.

[37] “Sinai and Palestine,” p. 165.

[38] “On the wild uplands,” says Mr Stanley, “which immediately overhangs the village, He finally withdrew from the eyes of His disciples, in a seclusion which, perhaps, could nowhere else be found so near the stir of a mighty city, the long ridge of Olivet screening those hills, and those hills the village beneath them, from all sight or sound of the city behind; the view opening only on the wide waste of desert rocks, and ever-descending valleys, into the depths of the distant Jordan and its mysterious lake. At this point the last interview took place. He led them out as far as to Bethany. The appropriateness of the whole scene presents a singular contrast to the inappropriateness of that fixed by a later fancy, ‘Seeking for a sign’ on the broad top of the mountain, out of sight of Bethany, and in full sight of Jerusalem, and thus an equal contradiction to the letter and the spirit of the Gospel narrative.”—P. 192.

The same writer, in another place (p. 450), says, “Even if the evangelist had been less explicit in stating that He led them out ‘as far as to Bethany,’ the secluded hills (that especially to which Tobler assigns the name of Djebel Sajach) which overhang that village on the eastern slope of Olivet, are evidently as appropriate to the whole tenor of the narrative, as the startling, the almost offensive publicity of the traditional spot, in the full view of the whole city of Jerusalem, is wholly inappropriate, and (in the absence, as it now appears, of even traditional support) wholly untenable.”

[39] Acts i. 5.

[40] Acts i. 8.

[41] John xvi. 7.

[42] John xvi. 14.

[43] Acts i. 6, 7.

[44] Acts i. 8.

[45] Luke xxiv. 50.

[46] Ps. lxviii. 18.

[47] Montgomery.

[48] “Within and Without.”

[49] Acts i. 11.

[50] Is it lawful to think of Bethany in connexion with the Church of the Future? Are there no foreshadowed glories found in the pages of Holy Writ, which include this lowly village—gilding it with the beams of a Millennial Sun? Is it destined to remain as it now is—a wreck of vanished loveliness? and is the crested ridge above it, which was the scene of the great terminating event of the Incarnation, to be associated with no other august displays of the Redeemer’s power and majesty? The following remarkable prediction occurs in the prophet Zechariah:—“And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.” Zech. xiv. 4. Were we of the number of those—(perhaps some who read these pages)—who look with firm and joyful confidence to the Personal Reign of the Redeemer on earth, and who in their code of interpretation regarding unfulfilled prophecy, espouse the literal in preference to the spiritual meaning, we might here have an inviting picture presented to us of the Bethany of the future. The Mount of Olives, by some great physical, or rather supernatural agency, is represented as heaving from its foundations, and parting in twain. The middle summit disappears. The remaining two form the steep sides of a new Valley, which, as it is spoken of as opening at Jerusalem (from Gethsemane), eastwards, the Vista must necessarily terminate with Bethany; thus connecting the two most memorable spots associated with our Lord’s humiliation. “His feet shall stand in that day on the Mount of Olives.”—The once lowly Saviour again “stands” in power and great glory on the very spot over Bethany from which He formerly ascended. A new highway from the “Village of Palms” is made for His triumphal entrance to the Holy City, while the air resounds with the old welcome—“Rejoice, O daughter of Zion, behold thy King cometh!” If further we turn with the literalists to the majestic Temple-Visions of Ezekiel, we find the front of the newly-erected structure facing up this valley; a new stream—(indeed a mighty river)—gushes down from the temple-colonnade, flowing through the same gorge, and discharging its purifying waters into the Dead Sea. (Verse 8, and Ezekiel xlvii. 1-12; Joel iii. 18. The reader is referred to these passages in full.) From the geographical position, this river must needs, in the course assigned to it, flow nigh to the restored palm-groves of Bethany—thus murmuring by scenes consecrated for centuries by the footsteps and tears of a weeping Saviour.

But if we cannot participate in these gorgeous literal picturings, we are abundantly warranted to take the words of the Prophet as delineating the glorious results of the future restoration of the Jews to their own Jerusalem. We can think of the City of the Great King raised from her desolation, “her walls salvation, and her gates praise.” The Messiah, once rejected, now owned and welcomed—“the children of Zion joyful in their King.” We can think of the valley which is to divide the Mount of Olives—(the mountain bedewed with the memory of the Saviour’s prayers)—we can think of that valley, and the stream which flows through it, as emblematic of spiritual blessings. “Ask of Me,” says God, addressing His adorable Son, “and I will give Thee the heathen for thine inheritance.” Is not the symbolic answer here given? The Mountain where the Saviour so “oft resorted” to “ask of His Father,” is rent in sunder—every barrier to the progress of the truth is now swept away—the living stream of Gospel mercy issues from Zion (or rather, from Him who is the True Temple), that it may flow to the remotest nations of the earth! As it enters the bituminous waters of the Asphaltite Lake, it is represented as curing them of their bitterness (Ezek. xlvii. 8, 9); descriptive of the power of the Gospel, whose living streams, like the symbolic “leaves of the tree of life,” are for “the healing of the nations.” Then shall the words of Isaiah be fulfilled, “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” (Isa. xl. 4.) In the prophecy of Zechariah, to which we have just referred, we are told that in that same happy millennial period, the representatives of the world’s nations will go up “year by year to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts, and to keep the feast of Tabernacles.” (Zech. xiv. 16.) Who can tell but this may be a literal revival of the old Hebrew festival, only invested with a new Gospel and Christian meaning. “This feast,” says a gifted expositor, “is the only unfulfilled one of the great feasts of Israel. Passover was fulfilled at Christ’s death, and Pentecost at the outpouring of the Spirit. But this feast represents the Lord tabernacling with men, and is only fulfilled when ‘The Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with Thee.’ On the Transfiguration-Hill, Peter, almost unwittingly, set forth this truth. He seemed to mean to say, ‘Is not this the true joy of the Feast of Tabernacles? Is not the Lord here?’” If this be so, we can think of the palm-groves of Bethany again bared of their branches;—these waved in triumph as a new and nobler “Hosannah” awakes the ancient echoes of Olivet—“Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!” As the regenerated children of Abraham build up the waste places in and around Zion, which for ages have been “without inhabitant,” and whose names are still dear to them—think we, amid other scenes of hallowed interest, they will not love oftentimes to take the old “Sabbath-day’s journey” to the site of “the Home of Mary and her sister Martha.” While seated nigh the reputed burial-place, with the Gospel in their hands, reading, through their tears, the story of their fathers’ impenitency, and of their Saviour’s compassion and sympathy at the grave of His friend, will not a new and impressive truthfulness invest one of the old Bethany utterances, “Then said the Jews, Behold how He loved him!”

But these, after all, are merely speculative thoughts, on which we can build nothing. We have in these “Memories” to deal with the Bethany of the past, not with the imagined Bethany of the future. However pleasing, in connexion with the Honoured Village, these thoughts of a Millennial day may be, “nevertheless we, according to His promise, rather look for new Heavens and a new Earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

Clyx.com