Mark 7:33

Mark 7:33

I. Our Lord seems to have taken this man apart. He may have intended the multitude to follow with their eyes that which He was about, that the might that there was in the action, the might that underlay the deed, should be dwelt upon, and so should sink more surely into their spirits. As we too follow the Redeemer, may we not feel that in our lives He has taken us apart from the multitude? We have had moments awful precious moments they were when something of God's mercy has made us feel that God and we exist alone, in this mighty universe, something that has shut out the crowd, drowned the noise, stopped the wheels of the world, taken us into a kind of sacred solitude, and made us feel in deepest earnestness, "I live, God lives; my God and my Lord." While God can have compassion upon numbers, while we can understand the Lord Jesus lifting up His eyes and seeing the multitudes being moved with compassion, yet that same Blessed One is also the Good Shepherd who leaveth the heavenly Jerusalem, leaves the ninety-and-nine perfect of God's hundred beings, and going to seek and to save the one that is lost.

II. And yet, mark the sadness of the Divine Healer. He looked to heaven and He sighed. That sigh must be part of the perfect revelation of the Father. In that sigh, as in all else, there is a portion, a fragment, of God's love to us. May it not be that He was bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows at the very moment that He was healing them and having compassion upon them? And in this we learn the truth, that there is no self-sacrifice, there is no errand of mercy, there is no ministry of love, there is no work of goodness, there is no great deed of kindness, which does not involve painstaking and the giving up of self. Any alleviation of human woe must be at a cost. Imagine what lay upon His heart; imagine to the purest, holiest manhood what it was to come in contact with the man with the unclean spirit. And in all the ministries of our sorrowing and enfeebled humanity you may be sure that there are none that are Christlike that are not touched with the shadows of the Cross.

T. J. Rowsell, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 343.