Mark 2:19

Mark 2:19

The Secret of Gladness.

There are three subjects for consideration arising from the words of my text: The Bridegroom; the Presence of the Bridegroom; the Joy of the Bridegroom's Presence.

I. With regard to the first a few words will suffice. The first thing that strikes me is the singular appropriateness and the delicate pathetic beauty in the employment of this name by Christ in the existing circumstances. Who was it that had first said, "He that hath the bride is the bridegroom," etc.? Why, it was the master of these very men who were asking the question. John's disciples came and said, "Why do not your disciples fast?" And our Lord reminded them of their own teacher's words, when He said, "The friend of the bridegroom can only be glad." And so He would say to them, "In your master's own conception of what I am, and of the joy that comes from My presence, he might have taught you who I am, and why it is that the men who stand around Me are glad."

II. A word as to the Presence of the Bridegroom. It might seem as if this text condemned us who love an unseen and absent Lord to exclusion from the joy which is made to depend on His presence. Are we in the dreary period when the bridegroom is taken away, and fasting appropriate? Surely not. The time of mourning for an absent Christ was only three days; the law for the years of the Church's history between the moment when the uplifted eyes of the gazers lost Him in the symbolic cloud and the moment when He shall come again is, "Lo, I am with you always." The absent Christ is the present Christ. The presence which survives, which is true for us here today, may be a far better and more blessed and real thing than the presence of the mere bodily form in which He once dwelt.

III. The Joy of the Bridegroom's Presence. What was it that made these rude lives so glad when Christ was with them, filling them with strange new sweetness and power? The charm of personal character; the charm of contact with one whose lips were bringing to them fresh revelations of truth, fresh visions of God; whose whole life was the exhibition of a nature, beautiful, and noble, and pure, and tender, and sweet, and loving, beyond anything that they had ever seen before.

A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,1st series, p. 137.

References: Mark 2:21. J. S. Exell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 318. Mark 2:21; Mark 2:22. D. Fraser, Metaphors of the Gospels,p. 106.