When Christ became incarnate as Saviour of the world, the world was not eagerly awaiting him. This aspect of his work is clearer here than in the raising of Lazarus. Mankind in its natural state was not crying out for God to come. The very opposite was true: human beings rejected him, and refused to receive his teaching; they resented his interference in human lives and wanted to take their lives for themselves, and get as far away from God as they could. They resented his laws, and the reminder that they owed him our worship. Why should he come for such ungrateful people? Truly the Apostle Paul says, ‘When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son’ (Romans 5:10). Christ came down from heaven to save men and women who only wanted to be left alone. Salvation would not happen if God did not take initiative. Christ came to a world that was lost because it was alienated from God by sin.
‘Weep not.’ The Lord never spoke a platitude to anyone, words said just to comfort without any true foundation. We do this often enough – ‘don’t worry.’ We may say this when we can do nothing to remove the cause of worry, and have no power to help. Our ‘don’t worry’ is more like a drug to anaesthetise, or something to put people to sleep. But his words are always real. He never says more than he ought to say, never promises more than he has power to deliver. We should study carefully the implication of all that he says. Christ’s words, ‘weep not’, were mighty words. He knows that sorrows cannot be separated from the cause of sorrow, and therefore there was in these words an indication that he was about to do something remarkable. Christianity is not a religion that encourages make-believe. Christ never told anyone to rejoice without giving cause to rejoice, and ‘weep not’ contains a remarkable promise of hope. But how could this mother be comforted while her son lay cold and still on this open coffin? These words clashed with the reason why she was there. By saying this, he forbade the funeral to continue; he forbade death to have the victory in this case.
It is amazing to think of the power of Christ. In just a moment he is going to raise this man up from the dead. How is he going to do it? Is it going to take him hours? If you need a heart transplant, it takes the surgeons several hours; it takes them a long time and that's not the end of it, because there's a long course of drugs to prevent tissue rejection and so on, and of course the whole thing is very risky and if you look at the statistics and you're a candidate for heart transplant, you might not be all that confident about going through with it. Many patients do not survive, and you might get worried, because it's a long and a complex operation. But the Lord Jesus Christ did not perform a heart transplant; he said to this young man, I say to you, ‘Get up’, and he gets up straight away. The Lord Jesus Christ is God, and he has absolute power over life and death. Yet he comes into this world and he sees a sorrowing widow in her situation, and he brings all his power to bear in a word. He is God overall; he doesn't have to expend any effort. Yet here is the amazing thing and the point of this: until God takes hold of us by the shoulders as it were and gives us a shake we ignore him. We live out our lives in this world, we have no power over fortune, catastrophes, serious illness, death, life, spiritual things, and yet here is the Lord of glory who is the hearer and answerer of our prayers and who has power over everything, and we ignore him.
When the Lord saw her, the mother who was a widow, he had compassion on her. Your great assurance that he will receive you if you come sincerely to him is the infinite compassion of Christ. He has never turned away a sincere seeker after salvation.