No. 3.
(Read Luke 7:11-15.)
“And He delivered him to his mother.”
Do you wonder how He did it? I think it not unlikely that He lifted him from the bier in His own arms of almighty love, and placed him on her bosom. It was but like Himself to do so; for those gracious hands of His could not be still when the helpless were before Him. (Mark 1:31; 6:5; 10:16.) But we do not know, and I do not believe, that if anyone had asked the widow herself at the very moment, she could have told them. That sudden bound from depths of utter desolation into full deliverance must have been overwhelming; her joy and amazement would utterly deprive her of all other consciousness than that her only son was alive again, and in his mother’s arms. You may rely upon it, that if the same precious sympathy, love, and power, which had given the young man back to life, had not sustained her in that wondrous hour, the joy, too big for any human heart, would have killed her outright; for joy, you know, can kill as well as sorrow. Was he not “the only son of his mother, and she a widow”?
Alone in a crowd, and desolate, she was following the bier to see her last prop buried. It is not said that she wailed or lamented aloud (as is the custom in the East), or uttered any sound. Her heart was broken, and broken hearts make no noise; her hopes as “a mother in Israel” had perished forever; the strong arm that had been her stay was withered in death; the warm heart where she had found a refuge was cold and still. That that son had loved and honored his mother you may be sure, or Jesus would never have done what He did. It was this that made her anguish too deep for words—the light of her eyes was gone. But there was One at hand who came “to heal the broken-hearted;” and though she knew Him not, nor asked mercy at His hands, His sympathy with sorrow, ever welling over, and needing but an object, is instantly in action. “He came and touched the bier;” for He will be one with her in all the sorrow that it tells; He will identify Himself with all that that sad scene declares, whether as to her or that which it shadows forth; for without a doubt Israel’s future and sudden deliverance from utter desolation are pictured here; but that is another matter. It is the blessed Jesus, “you lovely Man,” now glorified, and yet “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” I want you to contemplate now. He takes up that heart-wrung widow’s anguish unasked, and for Him to take it up is her deliverance and the young man’s too. The onward movement to the grave, the tomb of the widow’s help, and hope, and heart’s affections, is at once arrested, as it will be when He comes again, the Great Deliverer of His never-forgotten people, widowed now and desolate. “They that bare him stood still,” and the voice of Jesus speaks him into life! That same voice had but just before breathed balm into her broken heart, and so prepared and fortified that heart for all that was to follow. Who does not wish he could have heard that gentle whisper, “Weep not,” uttered in tones of such compassion as must have sent a thrill into her inmost soul, hushing to rest an agony of grief, and waking withered hope into life again! And when the astounded widow, her face yet wet with tears of sorrow, clasped her only son to her breast once more, do you think she knew who had done it all? Not she, much less why; for if the tender heart that moved the blessed Jesus to that deed of pity could not bear unmoved the sight of that widowed mother’s re-union with her child, He did not stay to tell her. Precious Jesus! He could but “deliver him to his mother,” and pass on where other hearts were aching.
K.