188. The Ivory Palaces
The Ivory Palaces
Psa_45:8 : ’93All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.’94
Among the grand adornments of the city of Paris is the Church of Notre Dame, with its great towers and elaborate rose-windows, and sculpturing of the last Judgment, with the trumpeting angels and rising dead; its battlements of quatrefoil; its sacristy, with ribbed ceiling and statues of saints. But there was nothing in all that building which more vividly appealed to my plain republican tastes than the costly vestments which lay in oaken presses’97robes that had been embroidered with gold, and been worn by popes and archbishops on great occasions. There was a robe that had been worn by Pius VII at the crowning of the first Napoleon. There was also a vestment that had been worn at the baptism of Napoleon II. As our guide opened the oaken presses, and brought out these vestments of fabulous cost, and lifted them up, the fragrance of the pungent aromatics in which they had been preserved, filled the place with a sweetness that was almost oppressive. Nothing that had been done in stone more vividly impressed me than these things that had been done in cloth and embroidery and perfume. But today I open the drawer of this text, and I look upon the kingly robes of Christ, and as I lift them, flashing with eternal jewels, the whole house is filled with the aroma of these garments, which ’93smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.’94
In my text the king steps forth. His robes rustle and blaze as he advances. His pomp and power and glory overmaster the spectator. More brilliant is he than Queen Vashti, moving amid the Persian princes; than Marie Antoinette, on the day when Louis XVI put upon her the necklace of eight hundred diamonds; than Anne Boleyn, the day when Henry VIII welcomed her to his palace’97all beauty and all pomp forgotten while we stand in the presence of this imperial glory, King of Zion, King of earth, King of heaven, King forever! His garments not worn-out, not dust-bedraggled; but radiant and jeweled and redolent. It seems as if they must have been pressed a hundred years amid the flowers of heaven. The wardrobes from which they have been taken must have been sweet with clusters of camphire and frankincense and all manner of precious wood. Do you not inhale the odors? Ay, ay, ’93They smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.’94
Your first curiosity is to know why the robes of Christ are odorous with myrrh. This was a bright-leafed Abyssinian plant. It was trifoliated. The Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and Jews bought and sold it at a high price. The first present that was ever given to Christ was a sprig of myrrh thrown on his infantile bed in Bethlehem, and the last gift that Christ ever had was myrrh pressed into the cup of his crucifixion. The natives would take a stone and bruise the tree, and then it would exude a gum that would saturate all the ground beneath. This gum was used for purposes of merchandise. One piece of it, no larger than a chestnut, would whelm a whole room with odors. It was put in closets, in chests, in drawers, in rooms, and its perfume adhered almost interminably to anything that was anywhere near it. So when in my text I read that Christ’92s garments smell of myrrh, I immediately conclude the exquisite sweetness of Jesus.
I know that to many he is only like any historical person; another John Howard, another philanthropic Oberlin; another Confucius; a grand subject for a painting; a heroic theme for a poem; a beautiful form for a statue; but to those who have heard his voice and felt his pardon and received his benediction he is music and light and warmth and thrill and eternal fragrance’97sweet as a friend sticking to you when all else betray; lifting you up while others try to push you down; not so much like morning-glories, that bloom only when the sun is coming up, nor like ’93four-o’92clocks,’94 that bloom only when the sun is going down, but like myrrh, perpetually aromatic’97the same morning, noon, and night; yesterday, today, forever. It seems as if we cannot wear him out. We put on him all our burdens, and afflict him with all our griefs, and set him foremost in all our battles; and yet he is ready to lift and to sympathize and to help. We have so imposed upon him that one would think in eternal affront he would quit our soul; and yet today he addresses us with the same tenderness, dawns upon us with the same smile, pities us with the same compassion.
There is no name like his for us. It is more imperial than C’e6sar’92s, more musical than Beethoven’92s, more conquering than Charlemagne’92s, more eloquent than Cicero’92s. It throbs with all life. It weeps with all pathos. It groans with all pain. It stoops with all condescension. It breathes with all perfume. Who like Jesus to set a broken bone, to pity a homeless orphan, to nurse a sick man, to take a prodigal back without any scolding, to illumine a cemetery all plowed with graves, to make a queen unto God out of the lost woman, to catch the tears of human sorrow in a lachrymatory that shall never be broken? Who has such an eye to see our need, such a lip to kiss away our sorrow, such a hand to snatch us out of the fire, such a foot to trample our enemies, such a heart to embrace all our necessities? I struggle for some metaphor with which to express him: he is not like the bursting forth of a full orchestra; that is too loud. He is not like the sea when lashed to rage by the tempest; that is too boisterous. He is not like the mountain, its brow wreathed with the lightnings; that is too solitary. Give us a softer type, a gentler comparison. We have seemed to see him with our eyes and to hear him with our ears and to touch him with our hands. Oh, that today he might appear to some other one of our five sense! Ay, the nostril shall discover his presence. He comes upon us like spice gales from heaven. Yea, his garments smell of lasting and all-pervasive myrrh.
Would that you all knew his sweetness! how soon you would turn from all other attractions. If the philosopher leaped out of his bath in a frenzy of joy, and clapped his hands, and rushed through the streets, because he had found the solution of a mathematical problem, how will you feel leaping from the fountain of a Saviour’92s mercy and pardon, washed clean, and made white as snow, when the question has been solved: ’93How can my soul be saved?’94 Naked, frost-bitten, storm-lashed soul, let Jesus this hour throw around thee the ’93garments that smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.’94
Your second curiosity is to know why the robes of Jesus are odorous with aloes. There is some difference of opinion about where these aloes grow, what is the color of the flower, what is the particular appearance of the herb. Suffice it for you and me to know that aloes mean bitterness the world over, and when Christ comes with garments bearing that particular odor, they suggest to me the bitterness of a Saviour’92s sufferings. Were there ever such nights as Jesus lived through’97nights on the mountains, nights on. the sea, nights in the desert? Who ever had such a hard reception as Jesus had? A hostelry the first; an unjust trial in oyer and terminer another; a foul-mouthed, yelling mob the last. Was there a space on his brow an inch square where he was not cut of the briers? When the spike struck at the instep, did it not go clear through to the hollow of the foot? Oh, long, deep, bitter pilgrimage! Aloes! aloes!
John leaned his head on Christ, but who did Christ lean on? Five thousand men fed by the Saviour; who fed Jesus? The sympathy of a Saviour’92s heart going out to the leper and the adulteress; but who soothed Christ? He had a fit place neither to be born nor to die. A poor babe! A poor lad! A poor young man! Not so much as a taper to cheer his dying hours. Even the candle of the sun snuffed out. Was it not all aloes? Our sins, sorrows, bereavements, losses, and all the agonies of earth and hell picked up as in one cluster and squeezed into one cup, and that pressed to his lips, until the acrid, nauseating, bitter draught was swallowed with a distorted countenance and a shudder from head to foot and a gurgling strangulation. Aloes! aloes! Nothing but aloes. All this for himself? All this to get the fame in the world of being a martyr? All this in a spirit of stubbornness, because he did not like C’e6sar? No, no! All this because he wanted to pluck me and you from hell. Because he wanted to raise me and you to heaven. Because we were lost, and he wanted us found. Because we were blind, and he wanted us to see. Because we were serfs, and he wanted us manumitted. O ye in whose cup of life the saccharine has predominated, O ye who have had bright and sparkling beverages, how do you feel toward him who in your stead, and to purchase your disenthralment, took the aloes, the unsavory aloes, the bitter aloes?
Your third curiosity is to know why these garments of Christ are odorous with cassia. This was a plant which grew in India and the adjoining islands. You do not care to hear what kind of a flower it had or what kind of a stalk. It is enough for me to tell you that it was used medicinally. In that land and in that age, where they knew but little about pharmacy, cassia was used to arrest many forms of disease. So, when in my text we find Christ coming with garments that smell of cassia, it suggests to me the healing and curative power of the Son of God. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93now you have a superfluous idea. We are not sick. Why do we want cassia? We are athletic. Our respiration is perfect. Our limbs are lithe, and on bright, cool days we feel we could bound like a roe.’94 I beg to differ, my brother, from you. None of you can be in better physical health than I am, and yet I must say we are all sick. I have taken the diagnosis of your case, and have examined all the best authorities on the subject, and I have to tell you that you are ’93full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, which have not been bound up, or mollified with ointment.’94 The marasmus of sin is upon us’97the palsy, the dropsy, the leprosy. The man that is expiring to-night in the next street’97the allopathic and homoeopathic doctors have given him up, and his friends are now standing around to take his last words’97is no more certainly dying as to his body than you and I are dying unless we have taken the medicine from God’92s Apothecary. All the leaves of this Bible are only so many prescriptions from the Divine Physician, written, not in Latin, like the prescriptions of earthly physicans, but written in plain English, so that a ’93man, though a fool, need not err therein.’94 Thank God that the Saviour’92s garments smell of cassia!
Suppose a man were sick, and there was a vial on his mantlepiece with medicine he knew would cure him, and he refused to take it, what would you say of him? He is a suicide. And what do you say of that man who, sick in sin, has the healing medicine of God’92s grace offered him, and refuses to take it? If he dies, he is a suicide. People talk as though God took a man and led him out to darkness and death, as though he brought him up to the cliffs and then pushed him off. Oh, no! When a man is lost it is not because God pushes him off; it is because he jumps off. In olden times a suicide was buried at the cross-roads, and the people were accustomed to throw stones upon his grave. So it seems to me there may be at this time a man who is destroying his soul, and as though the angels of God were here to bury him at the point where the roads of life and death cross each other, throwing upon the grave the broken law and a great pile of misimproved privileges, so that those going by may look at the fearful mound, and learn what a suicide it is when an immortal soul, for which Jesus died, puts itself out of the way.
When Christ trod this planet with foot of flesh, the people rushed after him’97people who were sick, and those who, being so sick they could not walk, were brought by their friends. Here I see a mother holding up her little child, saying: ’93Cure this croup, Lord Jesus! Cure this scarlet fever!’94 And others: ’93Cure this ophthalmia! Give ease and rest to this spinal distress! Straighten this clubfoot!’94 Christ made every house where he stopped a dispensary. I do not believe that in the nineteen centuries which have gone by since, his heart has got hard. I feel that we can come now with all our wounds of soul and get his benediction. O Jesus, here we are. We want healing. We want sight. We want health. We want life. ’93The whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.’94 Blessed be God that Jesus Christ comes through this assemblage now, his ’93garments smelling of myrrh’94’97that means fragrance; ’93and aloes’94’97that mean bitter sacrificial memories; ’93and cassia’94’97that means medicine and cure.
According to my text, he comes ’93out of the ivory palaces.’94 You know, or if you do not know, I will tell you now, that some of the palaces of olden time were adorned with ivory. Ahab and Solomon had their homes furnished with it. The tusks of African and Asiatic elephants were twisted into all manners of shapes, and there were stairs of ivory and chairs of ivory and tables of ivory and floors of ivory and pillars of ivory and windows of ivory and fountains that dropped into basins of ivory and rooms that had ceilings of ivory. Oh, white and overmastering beauty! Green tree branches sweeping the white curbs. Tapestry trailing the snowy floors. Brackets of light flashing on the lustrous surroundings. Silvery music rippling on the beach of the arches. The mere thought of it almost stuns my brain, and you say: ’93Oh, if I could only have walked over such floors! If I could have thrown myself in such a chair! If I could have heard the drip and dash of those fountains!’94 You shall have something better than that if you only let Christ introduce you. From that place he came, and to that place he proposes to transport you, for his ’93garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces.’94 What a place heaven must be! The Tuileries of the French, the Windsor Castle of the English, the Spanish Alhambra, the Russian Kremlin, are mere dungeons compared with it! Not so many castles on either side the Rhine as on both sides of the river of God’97the ivory palaces! One for the angels, insufferably bright, winged, fire-eyed, tempest-charioted; one for the martyrs, with blood-red robes from under the altar; one for the King, the steps of his palace the crown of the Church militant; one for the singers, who lead the one hundred and forty and four thousand; one for you, ransomed from sin; one for me, plucked from the burning. Oh, the ivory palaces!
To-day it seems to me as if the windows of those palaces were illumined for some great victory, and I look and see, climbing the stairs of ivory and walking on floors of ivory and looking from the windows of ivory, some whom we knew and loved on earth. Yes; I know them. There are father and mother, not eighty-two years and seventy-nine years, as when they left us, but blithe and young as when on their marriage day. And there are brothers and sisters, merrier than when we used to romp across the meadows together. The cough gone. The cancer cured. The erysipelas healed. The heartbreak over. Oh, how fair they are in the ivory palaces! And your dear little children that went out from you’97Christ did not let one of them drop as he lifted them. He did not wrench one of them from you. No. They went as from one they loved well to one whom they loved better. If I should take your little child and press its soft face against my rough cheek, I might keep it a little while; but when you, the mother, came along, it would struggle to go with you. And so you stood holding your dying child when Jesus passed by in the room, and the little one sprang out to greet him. That is all. Your Christian dead did not go down into the dust and the gravel and the mud. Though it rained all that funeral day, and the water came up to the wheel’92s hub as you drove out to the cemetery, it made no difference to them, for they stepped from the home here to the home there, right into the ivory palaces. All is well with them. All is well.
It is not a dead-weight that you lift when you carry a Christian out. Jesus makes the bed up soft with velvet promises, and he says: ’93Put her down here very gently. Put that head which will never ache again on this pillow of hallelujahs. Send up word that the procession is coming. Ring the bells. Ring! Open your gates, ye ivory palaces!’94 And so your loved ones are there. They are just as certainly there, having died in Christ, as that you are here. There is only one thing more they want. Indeed, there is one thing in heaven they have not got. They want it. What is it? Your company. But, oh, my brother, unless you change your tack you cannot reach that harbor. You might as well take the Southern Pacific railroad, expecting in that direction to reach Toronto, as to go on in the way some of you are going, and yet expect to reach the ivory palaces. Your loved ones are looking out of the windows of heaven now, and yet you seem to turn your back upon them. You do not seem to know the sound of their voices as well as? you used to, or to be moved by the sight of their dear faces. Call louder, ye departed ones! Call louder from the ivory palaces!
When I think of that place, and think of my entering it, I feel awkward; I feel as sometimes when I have been exposed to the weather, and my shoes have been bemired and my coat is soiled and my hair is disheveled and I stop in front of some fine residence where I have an errand. I feel not fit to go in as I am, and sit among the guests. So some of us feel about heaven. We need to be washed, we need to be rehabilitated before we go into the ivory palaces. Eternal God, let the surges of thy pardoning mercy roll over us! I want not only to wash my hands and my feet, but, like some skilled diver standing on the pierhead, who leaps into the wave and comes up at a far distant point from where he went in, so I want to go down, and so I want to come up. O Jesus, wash me in the waves of thy salvation! And here I ask you to solve a mystery that has been oppressing me for thirty years. I have been asking it of doctors of divinity who have been studying theology half a century, and they have given me no satisfactory answer. I have turned over all the books in my library, but got no solution to the question, and today I come and ask you for an explanation. By what logic was Christ induced to exchange the ivory palaces of heaven for the crucifixion agonies of earth? I shall take the first thousand million years in heaven to study out that problem; meanwhile, and now, taking it as the tenderest, mightiest of all facts that Christ did come, that he came with spikes in his feet, came with thorns in his brow, came with spears in his heart, to save you and to save me. ’93God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’94 O Christ, whelm all our souls with thy compassion! Mow them down like summer grain with the harvesting sickle of thy grace! Ride through today the conqueror, thy garments smelling ’93of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces’94!
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage