308. Off for Nazareth

Off for Nazareth

Eze_8:5 : ’93So I lifted up mine eyes the way toward the north.’94

At one o’92clock on a December afternoon, through Damascus Gate we are passing out of Jerusalem for a journey northward. Ho! for Bethel, with its stairs, the bottom step of which was a stone pillow; and Jacob’92s well, with its immortal colloquy; and Nazareth, with its Divine Boy in Joseph’92s carpenter shop; and the most glorious lake that ever rippled or flashed:

Blue Galilee, sweet Galilee,

The lake where Jesus loved to be;

and Damascus, with its crooked street called Straight; and a hundred places charged and surcharged with apostolic, evangelistic, prophetic, patriarchal, kingly and Christly reminiscences.

In traveling along the roads of Palestine, I am impressed as I could not otherwise have been, with the fact that Christ for the most part went afoot. We find him occasionally in a boat, and once riding in a triumphal procession, as it is sometimes called; although it seems to me that the hosannas of the crowd could not have made a ride on a stubborn, unimpressive and funny creature like that which pattered with him into Jerusalem, very much of a triumph. But we are made to understand that generally he walked. How much that means only those know who have gone over the distance traversed by Christ. We are accustomed to read that Bethany is two miles from Jerusalem. Well, any man in ordinary health can walk two miles without fatigue. But not more than one man out of a thousand can walk from Bethany to Jerusalem without exhaustion. It is over the Mount of Olives, and you will have to climb up among the rolling stones and descend where exertion is necessary to keep you from falling prostrate. I, who am accustomed to walk fifteen or twenty miles without lassitude, tried part of this road over the Mount of Olives, and confess I would not want to try it often, such demand does it make upon one’92s physical energies. Yet Christ walked it twice a day’97in the morning from Bethany to Jerusalem, and in the evening from Jerusalem to Bethany.

Likewise, it seemed a small thing that Christ walked from Jerusalem to Nazareth. But it will take us four days of hard horseback riding, sometimes on a trot and sometimes on a gallop, to do it this week. The way is mountainous in the extreme. To those who went up to the Tip-Top House on Mount Washington, before the railroad was laid, I will say that this journey from Jerusalem to Nazareth is like seven such American journeys. So, all up and down and across and re-crossing Palestine, Jesus walked. Ahab rode; David rode; Solomon rode; Herod rode; Anthony rode’97but Jesus walked. With swollen ankles and sore muscles of the legs, and bruised heel and stiff joints and panting lungs and faint head, along the roads, and where there were no roads at all’97Jesus walked.

We tried to get a new horse other than that on which we had ridden on the journey to the Dead Sea, for he had faults which our close acquaintanceship had demonstrated. But after some experimenting with other quadrupeds of that species, and finding that all horses, like their riders, have faults, we concluded to choose a saddle on that beast whose faults we were most prepared to pity or resist. We rode down through the valley and then up Mount Scopus, and, as our dragoman tells us that this is the last opportunity we shall have of looking at Jerusalem, we turn our horses’92 heads toward the city and take a long, sad and thrilling look at the religious capital of our planet. This is the most impressive view of the most tremendous city of all time. On and around this hill the armies of the Crusaders at the first sight of the city threw themselves on their faces in worship. Here most of the besieged armies encamped the night before opening their volleys of death against Jerusalem. Our last look! Farewell, Mount Zion, Mount Moriah, Mount of Olives, Mount Calvary! Will we never see them again? Never! The world is so large and time is so short, and there are so many things we have never seen at all, that we cannot afford to duplicate visits or see anything more than once. Farewell, yonder thrones of gray rock, and the three thousand years of architecture and battlefields. Farewell, sacred, sanguinary, triumphant, humiliated Jerusalem! Across this valley of the Kedron with my right hand I throw thee a kiss of valedictory. Our last look, like our first look, an agitation of body, mind and soul, indescribable.

And now, like Ezekiel in my text, I lift up mine eyes the way toward the north. Near here was one of the worst tragedies of the ages, mentioned in the Bible. A hospitable old man, coming home at eventide from his work in the fields, finds two strangers, a husband and wife, proposing to lodge in the street because no shelter is offered them, and invites them to come in and spend the night in his home. During the night the ruffians of the neighborhood conspired together and surrounded the house and left the woman dead on the doorstep; and the husband, to rally in revenge the twelve tribes, cut the corpse of the woman into twelve parts, and sent a twelfth of it to each tribe; and the fury of the nation was roused, and a peremptory demand was made for the surrender of the assassins; and, the demand refused, in one day twenty thousand people were left dead on the field, and the next day eighteen thousand. Wherever our horse today plants his foot, a corpse lay in those ancient times, and the roads were crossed by red rivulets of carnage.

Now we pass on where seven youths were put to death and their bodies gibbeted or hung in chains, not for anything they had themselves done, but as a reparation for what their father and grandfather, Saul, had done. Burial was denied these youths from May until November. Rizpah, the mother of two of these dead boys, appoints herself as sentinel to guard the seven corpses from beak of raven and tooth of wolf and paw of lion. She pitches a black tent on the rock close by the gibbets. Rizpah by day sits on the ground in front of her tent, and when a vulture begins to lower out of the noonday sky seeking its prey among the gibbets, Rizpah rises, her long hair flying in the wind, and, swinging her arms wildly about, shoos away the bird of prey until it retreats to its eyrie. At night she rests under the shadow of her tent and sometimes falls into a drowsiness or half sleep. But the step of a jackal among the dry leaves or the panting of a hyena arouses her, and with the fury of a maniac she rushes out upon the rock, crying, ’93Away! away!’94 and then, examining the gibbets to see that they still keep their burden, returns again to her tent till some swooping wing from the midnight sky or some growling monster on the rock again awakes her.

A mother watching her dead children through May, June, July, August, September and October! What a vigil! Painters have tried to put upon canvas the scene, and they succeeded in sketching the hawks in the sky and the panthers crawling out from the jungle, but they fail to give the wanness, the earnestness, the supernatural courage, the infinite self-sacrifice of Rizpah, the mother. To portray a mother in the home watching the casket of a dead child for one night taxes the artist to his utmost, but who is sufficient to put upon canvas a mother for six months of midnights guarding her whole family, dead and gibbeted upon the mountains? Go home, Rizpah! You must be awfully tired. You are sacrificing your reason and your life for those whom you can never bring back again to your bosom. As I say that, from the darkest midnight of the century Rizpah turns upon me and cries: ’93How dare you tell me to go home? I am a mother; I am not tired. You might as well expect God to get tired as for a mother to get tired. I cared for those boys when they lay upon my breast in infancy, and I am not going to forsake them now that they are dead. Interrupt me not. There stoops an eagle that I must drive back with my agonized cry. There is a panther I must beat back with my club.’94

Do you know what that scene by our roadside in Palestine makes me think of? It is no unusual scene. Right here in these three cities by the American sea-coast, there are a thousand cases this moment worse than that. Mothers watching boys that the rum saloon, that annex of hell, has gibbeted in a living death. Boys hung in chains of habit they cannot break. The father may go to sleep after waiting until twelve o’92clock at night for the ruined boy to come home and, giving it up, he may say: ’93Mother, come to bed; there’92s no use sitting up any longer.’94 But mother will not go to bed. It is one o’92clock in the morning; it is half-past one; it is two o’92clock; it is half-past two when he comes staggering through the hall. Do you say that young man is yet alive? No; he is dead’97dead to his father’92s entreaties, dead to his mother’92s prayers, dead to the family altar where he was reared, dead to all the noble ambitions that once inspired him; twice dead; only a corpse of what he once was; gibbeted before God and man and angels and devils; chained in a death that will not loosen its cold grasp. His father is asleep, his brothers are asleep, his sisters are asleep, but his mother is watching him, watching him in the night. After he has gone up to bed and fallen into a drunken sleep his mother will go up to his room and see that he is properly covered, and, before she turns out the light, will put a kiss upon his bloated lips. ’93Mother, why don’92t you go to bed?’94 ’93Ah!’94 she says, ’93I cannot go to bed. I am Rizpah watching the slain!’94

And what are the political parties of this country doing for such cases? They are taking care not to hurt the feelings of the jackals and the buzzards that roost on the shelves of the grog-shops and hoot above the dead. I am often asked to what political party I belong, and I now declare my opinion of the political parties of today. Each one is worse than the other, and the only consolation in regard to them is that they have putrefied until they have no more power to rot. Oh, that comparatively tame scene upon which Rizpah looked! She looked upon only seven of the slain. American motherhood and American wifehood this moment are looking upon seventy of the slain, thousands of the slain. Woe! woe! woe! My only consolation on this subject is that foreign capitalists are buying up the American breweries. The present owners see that the doom of that business is coming, as surely as that God is not dead. They are unloading upon foreign capitalists; and when we can get these breweries into the hands of people living on the other side of the sea, our political parties may cease to be afraid of the liquor traffic, and at their conventions nominating Presidential candidates will put in their platform a plank as big as the biggest plank of the biggest ocean-steamer, saying: ’93Resolved unanimously that we always have been and always will be opposed to alcoholism.’94

But I must spur on our Arab steed, and here we come in sight of Beeroth, said to be the place where Joseph and Mary missed the boy Jesus on the way from Jerusalem to Nazareth, going home now from a great national festival. ’93Where is my child Jesus?’94 says Mary. ’93Where is my child Jesus?’94 says Joseph. Among the thousands that are returning from Jerusalem, they thought that certainly he was walking on in the crowd. They described him, saying: ’93He is twelve years old and of light complexion and blue eyes. A lost child.’94 Great excitement in all the crowd. Nothing so stirs folks as the news that a child is lost. I shall not forget the scene when in a great outdoor meeting I was preaching and some one stepped on the platform and said that a child was lost. We went on with the religious service, but all our minds were on the lost child. After a while a man brought on the platform a beautiful little tot that looked like a piece of heaven dropped down, and said: ’93Here is that child,’94 and I forgot all that I was preaching about, and lifted the child to my shoulder and said: ’93Here is the lost child, and the mother will come and get her right away, or I will take her home and add her to my own brood!’94 And some cried, and some shouted and amid all that crowd I instantly detected the mother. Everybody had to get out of her way or be walked over. Hats were nothing, and shoulders were nothing, and heads were nothing in her pathway, and I realized something of what must have been Mary’92s anxiety when she lost Jesus, and what her gladness when she found her boy in the temple of Jerusalem, talking with those old ministers of religion Shammai and Betirah.

I bear down on you today with a mighty comfort. Mary and Joseph said, ’93Where is our Jesus?’94 and you say, ’93Where is John?’94 or ’93Where is Henry?’94 or ’93Where is George?’94 Well, I should not wonder if you found him after a while. Where? In the same place where Joseph and Mary found their boy’97in the temple. What do I mean by that? I mean you do your duty toward God and toward your child, and you will find him after a while in the kingdom of Christ. Well, you say, ’93I do not have any way of influencing my child?’94 I answer, you have the mightiest line of influence open right before you. As you write a letter, and there are two or three routes by which it may go, but you want it to go the quickest route, and you put on it ’93via Southampton,’94 or ’93via San Francisco,’94 or ’93via Marseilles;’94 put on your wishes about your child ’93via the throne of God.’94 How long will such a good wish take to get to its destination? Not quite as long as the millionth part of a second. I will prove it. The promise is ’93Before they call I will answer.’94 That means at your first motion toward such prayerful exercise the blessing will come, and if the prayer be made at ten o’92clock at night it will be answered five minutes before ten. ’93Before they call I will answer.’94

Well, you say, I am clear discouraged about my son, and I am getting on in years, and I fear I will not live to see him converted. Perhaps not; nevertheless I think that you will find him in the temple, the heavenly temple. There has not been an hour in heaven the last one hundred years when parents in glory have not had announced to them the salvation of children whom they left in this world profligate. We often have to say, ’93I forgot,’94 but God has never yet once said ’93I forgot.’94 It may be after the grass of thirty summers has greened the top of your grave that your son may be found in the earthly temple. It may be fifty years from now when, some morning, the towers are chiming the matins of the glorified in heaven that you shall find him in the higher temple, which has ’93no need of candle or of sun, for the Lord God and the Lamb are the light thereof.’94 Cheer up, Christian father and mother! Cheer up! Where Joseph and Mary found their boy you will find yours’97in the temple. You see, God could not afford to do otherwise. One of the things he has positively promised in the Bible is that he will answer earnest and believing prayer. Failing to do that, he would wreck his own throne, and the foundations of his palace would give way, and the bank of heaven would suspend payment, and the dark word ’93repudiation’94 would be written across the sky, and the Eternal Government would be disbanded, and God himself would become an exile. Keep on with your prayer, and you will yet find your child in the temple, either the temple here or the temple above.

Out on the Western prairies was a happy but isolated home’97father, mother and child. By the sale of cattle quite a large sum of money was one night in that cabin, and the father was away. A robber, who had heard of the money, that night looked in at the window, and the wife and mother of that home saw him, and she was helpless. Her child by her side, she knelt down and prayed, among other things, for all prodigals who were wandering up and down the world. The robber heard her prayer and was overwhelmed, and entered the cabin and knelt beside her and began to pray. He had come to rob that house, but the prayer of that woman for prodigals reminded him of his mother, and her prayers before he became a vagabond, and from that hour he began a new life. Years after, that woman was in a city in a great audience, and the orator who came on the platform and plead gloriously for righteousness and God was the man who many years before had looked into the cabin on the prairie as a robber. The speaker and the auditor immediately recognized each other. After so long a time a mother’92s prayers answered.

But we must hurry on, for the muleteers and baggagemen have been ordered to pitch our tents for tonight at Bethel. It is already getting so dark that we have to give up all idea of guiding the horses, and leave them to their own sagacity. We ride down amid mud cabins and into ravines where the horses leap from depth to depth, rocks below rocks, rocks under rocks. Whoa! whoa! We dismount in this place, memorable for many things in Bible history, the two more prominent, a theological seminary where of old they made ministers, and Jacob’92s dream. The students of this Bethel theological seminary were called ’93Sons of the Prophets.’94 Here the young men were fitted for the ministry, and those of us who ever had the advantage of such institutions will everlastingly be grateful, and in the calendar of saints, which I read with especial affection, are the doctors of divinity who blessed me with their care. I thank God that from these theological seminaries there is now coming forth a magnificent crop of young ministers who are taking the pulpits in all parts of the land. I hail their coming and tell these young brothers to shake off the somnolence of centuries, and get out from under the dusty shelves of theological discussions which have no practical bearing on this age, which needs to get rid of its sins and have its sorrows comforted. Many of our pulpits are dying of humdrum. People do not go to church because they cannot endure the technicalities, and profound explanations of nothing, and sermons about the ’93eternal generation of the Son,’94 and the difference between sub-lapsarianism and supra-lapsarianism, and about who Melchizedek wasn’92t. There ought to be as much difference between the modes of presenting truth now and in olden time, as between an express rail-train and a canal-boat.

Several years ago, I went up to the door of a factory in New England. On the outside door, I saw the words ’93no admittance.’94 I went in and came to another door over which were the words ’93no admittance.’94 Of course I went in, and came to the third door inscribed with the words ’93no admittance.’94 Having entered this, I found the people inside making pins, beautiful pins, useful pins, and nothing but pins! So over the outside door of many of the churches has been practically written the words ’93no admittance.’94 Some have entered, and have come to the inside door, and found the words ’93no admittance.’94 But persisting, they have came inside, and found us pounding out our little niceties of belief, pointing out our little differences of theological sentiment’97making pins!

But most distinguished was Bethel for that famous dream which Jacob had, his head on a collection of stones. He had no trouble in this rocky region in finding a rocky pillow. There is hardly anything else but stone. Yet the people of those lands have a way of drawing their outer garment up over their head and face, and such a pillow I suppose Jacob had under his head. The plural was used in the Bible story, and you find it was not a pillow of stone, but of stones, I suppose; so that if one proved to be of uneven surface he would turn over in the night and take another stone, for, with such a hard bolster, he would probably change often in the night. Well, that night God built in Jacob’92s dream a long, splendid ladder, the feet of it on either side of the tired pilgrim’92s pillow, and the top of it mortised in the sky. And bright immortals came out from the castles of amber and gold and put their shining feet on the shining rungs of the ladder, and they kept coming down and going up, a procession both ways.

I suppose they had wings, for the Bible almost always reports them as having wings; but this was a ladder on which they used hands and feet to encourage all those of us who have no wings to climb, and encouraging us to believe that, if we will use what we have, God will provide a way; and if we will employ the hand and the foot, he will furnish the ladder. Young man, do not wait for wings. Those angels folded theirs to show you wings are not necessary. Let all the people who have hard pillows’97hard for sickness, or hard for poverty, or hard for persecution’97know that a hard pillow is the landing place of angels. They seldom descend to pillows of eiderdown. They seldom build dreams in the brain of the one who sleeps easy.

The greatest dream of all time was that of St. John, with his head on the rocks of Patmos, and in that vision he heard the seven trumpets sounded, and saw all the pomp of heaven in procession cherubic, seraphic, or archangelic. The next most memorable and glorious dream was that of John Bunyan, his pillow the cold stone of the floor of Bedford jail, from which he saw the Celestial City, and so many entering it, he cried out in his dream, ’93I wished myself among them.’94 The next most wonderful dream was that-of Washington, sleeping on the ground at Valley Forge, his head on a white pillowcase of snow, where he saw the vision of a nation emancipated. Columbus slept on a weaver’92s pillow, but rose on the ladder let down until he could see a new hemisphere. Demosthenes slept on a cutler’92s pillow, but on the ladder let down rose to see the mighty assemblages that were to be swayed by his oratory. Arkwright slept on a barber’92s pillow, but went up the ladder till he could see all England aquake with the factories he set going. Akenside slept on a butcher’92s pillow, and took the ladder up till he saw other generations helped by his scholarship. John Ashworth slept on a poor man’92s pillow and took the ladder up until he could see his prayers and exertions bringing thousands of the destitute of England to salvation and heaven. Nearly all those who are today great in merchandise, in statesmanship, in law, in medicine, in art, in literature were once at the foot of the ladder, and in their boyhood had a pillow hard as Jacob’92s. They who are born at the top of the ladder are apt to spend their lives in coming down, while those who are at the foot of the ladder, and their head on a boulder, if they have the right kind of dream, are almost sure to rise. I notice that those angels, whether in coming down or going up on Jacob’92s ladder, took it rung by rung. They did not leap to the bottom, nor jump to the top. So you are to rise. Faith added to faith, good deed to good deed, industry to industry, consecration to consecration, until you reach the top, rung by rung’97gradually going up from a block of granite to a pillar of throne.

That night at Bethel I stood in front of my tent and looked up, and the heavens were full of ladders; first, a ladder of clouds, then a ladder of stars; and all up and down the heavens were angels of beauty, angels of consolation, angels of God, ascending and descending. ’93Surely God is in this place,’94 said Jacob, ’93and I knew it not.’94 But tonight God is in this place, and I know it!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage