XXVIII

THE DARKEST HOUR

Good Friday Evening

What is the darkest hour to us when our friends die? Not the dying hour; for then love has some last act, some last word to receive, some comfort to give, some service to render, that diverts from the bitterness of pain. Not even when the eyes are closed forever, and the face is fixed in marble stillness; for still we gather at the side of the cold clay and feel as if there were something left us of our love. But when we have carried our dear ones to the grave, and seen the doors of the sepulchre shut between them and us, and come back to the house where they are no more—where they never more may be—then is indeed the darkest hour.

There is a very touching picture by Delaroche entitled "The Return from the Cross," in which the mother of Jesus, leaning on the arm of the beloved John, is seen just entering a lowly dwelling. A few faithful friends, men and women, are with them; they have seen him die—seen him laid in the sepulchre and a great stone rolled against the door; and now they are come to their desolate home to think it all over, and to weep.

Do we ask, Why did they not remember the words of Jesus, that he should rise again? Ah! because they had just such hearts as we have, and their faith was overpowered by sight just as ours is.

They may have thought they believed that they should see their Lord risen from the dead; but at the sight of the death agonies, and the lifeless form, and the dark, cold stone of the sepulchre, all this poor faith died in darkness. It was like carrying a taper out into a tempest. And we, when we lay our dear ones in the grave, say in solemn words that we do it "in sure and certain hope of a blessed and glorious resurrection," when what is sown in weakness shall be raised in power, what is sown in dishonor shall be raised in glory. We say it, and we think we believe it; but does it really then cheer us? Does it dry our tears? Does it make the return to our desolated home any less dreadful?

Still we remember the death-bed, the pains, the dying eyes, the weakness, the sinking—we are overwhelmed by sorrow, and our souls ache as with a wound. Our hearts throb and yearn towards the form we can no longer see or embrace, as if the loved one were a portion of our own selves that had been violently torn away, leaving us fainting and bleeding to death. All this—more than all this—was in the sorrow of the home of Mary and John that darkest of all nights.

He they mourned was not merely friend, but Lord and Leader, the Hope of Israel; the hope of the world; and God had let him suffer and die thus!

It was true that Jesus had made special efforts to provide against the sinking of this hour. He warned his friends of it beforehand. He admitted four of his chosen disciples upon the Mount of Transfiguration to look into the heavenly world and see him in glory and hear him speaking with Moses and Elijah of his coming death. All this was given that their faith might not fail. Then, just before his death, at the grave of Lazarus, he declared himself the Resurrection and the Life, and showed them in the restored form of a well-known friend what he meant by rising from the dead—for it is said, "They questioned among themselves what the rising from the dead should mean."

But all appeared to be gone now. Love still kept watch. Spices were prepared to embalm the precious form with no hope, apparently, of its resurrection. It had faded out from their minds as it seems to fade out of the minds of us Christians when we bewail our dead and speak of them as "lost." Their Jesus was to them dead and gone; and why this thing was permitted was a dark, insoluble mystery. "We trusted that it had been he that should have redeemed Israel," said the two disciples, sadly walking on the way to Emmaus. "We trusted!" All in the past tense. Not a word of any hope or faith in the resurrection! And yet their Lord and Master was even at that moment walking with them and comforting their hearts.

Surely, in this respect, we modern Christians too often tread in the footsteps of the saints and suffer as they did. But our Lord knows our weakness; he knows the physical faintness which comes from long watching, the obscuration of mind which comes from sorrow, and he is at hand to comfort us in our blind weeping. Mary Magdalene knew him not, because her eyes were full of tears, till his well-known voice called her name. The mourning disciples as they walked to Emmaus knew not that Jesus was walking by them. And so, ever since, to weary hearts and lonely homes the comforting Christ still comes invisibly, with sweetness and rest, if only we of little faith would remember his promises and recognize his presence. Still now, as he first announced himself, he comes "to heal the broken-hearted," and is beside them ever in the darkest and most dreadful hour of their afflictions.