Thanksgiving for the Blessed Dead

“Jesus said, Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me.” — John xi. 41.

WERE you ever struck by a peculiarity in the passage above quoted? Jesus thanks His Father for a boon which has not yet been given! He blesses God for a resurrection which has not yet been effected! ‘* I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me.” How could Jesus say that! Lazarus was still in the grave! The trappings of death were yet around him! The silence of the sepulchre was unbroken! The prayer had gone up; but there had been no audible response. Why should the thanksgiving have preceded the harvest? Because the act of Jesus has a foundation in experience. Do you and I never say, in our letters to a friend, ‘’ Thanking you in anticipation “! When do we use these words? It is when we feel sure that the thing will be agreeable to the friend’s will. Jesus, too, was sure of this. He was quite sure that the thing He asked was agreeable to the will of the Father; therefore He thanked the Father in anticipation. He did not ahuays feel this certainty; in Gethsemane He said, “Father, if it be possible,” But here He had no doubt at all. What zvas this point on which He felt so sure of the Father’s concurrence? It was the immortality of the soul. He knew that His Father shrank from the dying of a man. He knew that His Father was praying, as He was praying, for the soul’s eternal life. He knew that the heart of His Father was ever adverse to the claims of the grave. He was so sure of His Father’s mind that He thanked Him in advance.

I, too, will thank Thee for my hallowed dead, O God! I will thank Thee in the absence of outward evidence — in the midst of the great silence! There has as yet come no resurrection mandate to my ear. I have heard no voice which said “Lazarus, come forth!” I have seen with the eye of sense nothing to tell me that the garments of the grave are a delusion.

Yet the attitude of my soul will be one rather of thanksgiving than of prayer. Somehow, I feel as if this were one of the things I did not wee, to pray for, one of the things which are granted already, one of the things in which thanksgiving takes the place of prayer. When I stand beside the grave that professes to hold my dead, I seem to understand the words, ‘’ In that day ye shall ask me nothing.” There are some things for which it would be superfluous to pray. Could I pray that Thou shouldst love the Lord Jesus! Could I pray that Thou shouldst keep Thy Divine purity! Such requests I have no need to make. Neither need I ask the immortality of human love. It is a part of Thyself; Thou couldst not let it die. Therefore, I will not pray for my dead; I will give thanks for them. I will bring a wreath to the sepulchre — a wreath of immortelles. I will sing an Easter hymn in the winter of the year. I will number the departed among the members of my household; I will say, with the little girl by the gravestone, “We are seven!” I will keep a place for the old chair in a corner of my heart. I will garner the old songs in the fields of memory. I will preserve the birthdays on the fly-leaf of the old Bible as anniversaries, not of the dead, but of the living. And when, within Thy house, I bend my knee in the moment allotted to silent prayer, I will not say “Father, raise up my dead!” but “Father, I bless Thy Name, that my dead are raised already!”

^’•^•y»fc