The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 30:11-12
Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing.
Easter joy
Here is described a change, complete, and more or less sudden, from sadness to joy. David has escaped a danger which had brought him very near to death; and now he is thankful and exultant. His words are in keeping with what Christians feel, as they pass from the last days of Holy Week into the first hours of Easter. If Easter is associated predominantly with any one emotion, it is with that of joy. And thus, ever since, the Church of Christ has laboured to make the Easter festival, beyond all others, the feast of Christian joy. All that nature and art could furnish has been summoned to express, so far as outward things may, this overmastering emotion of Christian souls worshipping at the tomb of their Risen Lord. All the deliverances of God’s ancient people, from Egypt, from Assyria, from Babylon, are but rehearsals of the great deliverance of all on the Resurrection morning; and each prophet and psalmist that heralds any of them, sounds in Christian ears some separate note of the Resurrection hymn. And this, the joy which fills the soul of the believing Church on Easter Day, has some sort of echo in the world outside; so that those who sit loosely to our faith and hope, and who worship rarely, if ever, before our altars, yet feel that good spirits are somehow in order on Easter morning. For their sakes, as for our own, let us try to take the emotion to pieces, as we find it in a Christian soul; let us ask why it is so natural for Christians to say, this day, with David, “Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy: Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.”
I. The first reason, then, for this Easter joy is the triumph and satisfaction enjoyed by our Lord himself. We follow Him in the stages of His sufferings and death. We sympathize reverently with the awful sorrows of our Adorable Lord and Friend; and thus we enter, in some far-off way, into the sense of triumph, unspeakable and sublime, which follows beyond it. It is His triumph; that is the first consideration; His triumph, who was but now so cruelly insulted and tortured. It is all over now; by a single motion of His Majestic Will, He is risen. And we, as we kneel before Him, think, first of all, of Him. It is His joy which inspires ours; it turns our heaviness into joy, and puts off our sorrow and girds us with gladness. Do I say this is the case? Perhaps it were more prudent to say that it ought to be. For in truth the habit of getting out of and forgetting our miserable selves in the absorbing sense of the beauty and magnificence of God, belongs rather to ancient than to modern Christianity. To those old Christians God was all, man nothing, or well-nigh nothing. Theirs was a disinterested interest in God. With us, we are too prone to value God, not so much for His own sake as for ours. Be it yours to show that my misgiving is unwarranted. You know that pure sympathy with an earthly friend’s happiness loaves altogether out of consideration the question whether it contributes anything to your own; and in like manner endeavour to say to-day to your Heavenly Friend: “It is because Thou, Lord Jesus, hast vanquished Thine enemies, hast overcome death, and hast entered into Thy glory, that Thou hast turned my Lenten heaviness into joy, and put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.”
II. because of the sense of confidence with which Christ’s resurrection from the dead invigorates our grasp of Christian truth. The mind loves to rest truth on a secure basis. This is what the old Roman poet meant by saying that the man was really happy who had attained to know the causes of things. The chemist who has at last explained the known effect of a particular drug, by laying bare, upon analysis, an hitherto undiscovered property in it; the historian who has been enabled to show that the conjecture of years rests on the evidence of a trustworthy document; the mathematician on whom has flashed the formula which solves some problem that has long haunted and eluded him; the anatomist who has been able to refer what he had hitherto regarded as an abnormal occurrence to the operation of a recognized law;--these men know what joy is. Now, akin to the joy of students and workers is the satisfaction of a Christian when he steadily dwells on the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Christian Creed is like a tower which rears towards heaven its windows and pinnacles in successive stages of increasing gracefulness. We lavish our admiration first on this detail of it, and then on that; and, while we thus study and admire, we dwell continuously in its upper stories, till at last perhaps a grave question occurs or is suggested to us. What does it all rest upon? What is the foundation-fact on which this structure has been reared in all its august and fascinating beauty? What fact, if removed, would be fatal to it? And the answer is--our Lord’s Resurrection is one such fact. He was declared to be the Son of God with power by the Resurrection from the dead. Yes; it is here, beside the empty tomb of the Risen Jesus, that Christian faith feels itself on the hard rock of fact; here we break through the tyranny of matter and sense, and rise with Christ into the immaterial world; here we put a term to the enervating alternation of guesses and doubts which prevails elsewhere, and we reach the frontier of the absolutely certain. And we can but answer, Truly, Lord Jesus, by Thy Resurrection Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy: Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and gilded me with gladness.
III. And because of the assurance it gives of our own resurrection. Paganism could only guess and speculate as to the immortality of the soul. It is the Gospel which gives certainty; it has unveiled the immortality of man in his completeness, in body and in soul. Thus shall we recognize our friends in heaven, for they shall wear there the features and the expression which they wore on earth. “All men shall rise with their bodies.” Joyfully, therefore, do we think of the blessed dead. (Canon Liddon.)
Girded me with gladness.--
Elevation of feeling
For the expression and manifestation of the state in which we are, God has made a rich provision of power. The forehead, the eye, the mouth, the whole face, the hands, the arms, the gait, and especially the voice, are so many instruments and agents ‘of expression; and we are not true to ourselves, we are false to our condition, we are disloyal to God, when we clothe ourselves with a uniform reticence and unexpressiveness of demeanour. The clouds drop their blackness and appear brilliantly coloured and gorgeously gilded when the sun shines on them. The sea casts off its leaden hue and is covered with crisped smiles when the storm is over. The battle-field absorbs the blood which, in the day of war, is spilt on its bosom, and exhibits lovely flowers, or verdant pasture, or golden corn. The earth casts off her winterly attire and puts on her summerly vestments when “the time of the singing of birds has come.” In like manner there is in human life and experience the turning of mourning into dancing; the putting off of sackcloth and the girding with gladness. (S. Martin.)
Praise continuous
One summer day I watched a lark rise from a field, and I listened with almost rapture to its unequalled song. The bird rose in successive stages, singing while rising and singing while resting, and the last ascent it made caused it to appear like a speck on the blue sky, an almost imperceptible spring of sweet music in the heavens. Nothing appeared wanting to complete the scene but the opening of the heavenly gates to receive this minister of song, that its sacrifice of sweetest sounds might be laid on the altar of God. But while thinking of this consummation the bird began to descend, falling rapidly in successive stages until near the earth, and then flying horizontally until it was lost in its nest. Does not the ascent and descent of this favourite songster represent our praise to God? Our glory is not always silent. We do sometimes sing praise to our God, and we rise into glorious elevations of feeling and of thought. But if we rise high in the morning, we fall low before noon; if we ascend on the Lord’s day, we sink low on other days. A day will come in which there shall be a final putting off of sackcloth, and a final girding with gladness; and in that day silence shall be broken for ever, and our eternal life shall be one eternal psalm and service of praise. (S. Martin.).