Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2518
“And she went and told them that had been with Him, as they mourned and wept.” Mark 16:10.
Some of you, dear Friends, have seen those small pictures by famous Dutch artists where, with many little touches— very lifelike, very suggestive, very homely—they depict an interior. Now Mark is that kind of painter. He delights to give us interiors. He is best pleased when he can record something which nobody else seems to have described, or when he can take a description by somebody else and fill in the details, the finishing touches that have been omitted. I do not remember that we are told by Matthew, or Luke, or John, how the disciples behaved themselves while their Lord was in the grave. It is left to us to imagine their feelings, with this exception—that Mark tells us that “they mourned and wept.”
Remember, this was on the morning of the third day after our Lord’s death. They had had the Jewish Sabbath for quiet reflection and, no doubt, for lamentation and mourning. But this is the morning of our own Lord’s-Day, the first day of the week, and when Mary Magdalene comes into the room, she tells them that she has seen the risen Lord! And what is the scene which is presented to her eyes? In two or three words, Mark stipples it in thus, “as they mourned and wept.” They were mainly men, I suppose. If Mary came only to the eleven, they were all men, yet this is how they are occupied—“They mourned and wept.” We know most of them. We have read so much of them and they stand out in such clear light—these early leaders of the Church of Christ, these first few chosen men—that I seem to be almost able to see them all in my imagination just now. They were not grouped around a table as they are in that celebrated picture of the Last Supper, but sitting together in the room and not able to restrain their emotions. They are all mourning, and most of them are expressing those emotions in a way not usual to men. “They mourned and wept.”
There were sighs, cries and salt tears. It was a scene of sad sorrow which Mary came in upon. You can almost picture her as she stands at the door with her hand upon the latch. She pauses a moment before she can communicate the news— they are so unhappy, they are so broken down, it is such a funeral gathering—that she can scarcely find her tongue! At last she breaks out, “Christ has risen! I have seen Him! He has risen from the dead! Cease your mourning. An angel has descended from Heaven and has spoken to me and said, ‘He is not here: for He is risen, as He said.’” After she has delivered her message, she stands still, almost petrified, because she finds herself not believed. Perhaps nobody speaks. It may be no one says, “Mary Magdalene, you are mad! We do not believe you!” They weep on. They look around as much as to ask one another, “Do you believe it?” And each one seems to say, “I do not believe it. myself,” and their eyes give themselves again to their copious weeping—and their hearts yield themselves, still, to their perpetual mourning. “She went and told them that had been with Him, as they mourned and wept.”
I want, at this time, to speak first about the sorrowing assembly—that mourning and weeping band of disciples to whom Mary came. Then I will say something about the consoling messenger whose message ought to have transformed that mourning and weeping into the opposite, namely, into joy and gladness. And, in the last place, I will tell you of the reassuring reflection that I see in this narrative.
I. First, let me take you to this interior which Mark has so beautifully painted, and bid you look at the sorrowing assembly. “She went and told them that had been with Him, as they mourned and wept.”
What made them weep? What makes men weep about the death of Christ? It does make them weep—we are not all turned to stone, we are not all brutish. There are times with some of us—we wish they were more frequent—when the
Cross of Christ seems to touch our inmost heart and makes the rock that lies within our nature stream with living floods of tears. Why do we mourn over Christ crucified?
First, because, like these disciples, we have some faith in Him. They had been with Him and they had been with Him because they had believed in Him. They had so believed in Him that they had left all and followed Him and been subjected to reproach for His dear sake. They had heard Him preach and the power of His teaching had won their hearts. They believed that He was the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Deliverer of men! Yet now He was dead and the very fact that they had believed made them feel intense sorrow of heart as they looked back upon what He had been to them. If they had had no faith in Him, they would have said, “He was an impostor and He is put away. That is the end of Him and it is always a blessing when an impostor, at last, comes to his end.” But because they had believed in Him, therefore they sorrowed to think that He was gone.