Bible Commentaries

JOY FOR HEAVINESS: GLADNESS FOR SACKCLOTH

‘Thou hast turned my heaviness into joy: Thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.’

Psalms 30:12 (Prayer Book Version)

I. The first reason for the Easter joy is the triumph and satisfaction enjoyed by our Lord Himself.—We sympathise reverently with the awful sorrow 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 joy which inspires ours; it turns our heaviness into joy, and puts off our sorrow, and girds us with gladness.

II. Easter joy is inspired by the sense of confidence with which Christ’s resurrection from the dead invigorates our grasp of Christian truth.—The understanding, be sure, has its joy, no less than the heart; and a keen sense of intellectual joy is experienced when we succeed in resting truth, or any part of it, on a secure basis. 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. Our Lord’s resurrection is a foundation on which all truth in the Christian creed—that is, distinctively Christian, and not merely theistic—really rests. It is 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.

III. We may hope to meet our friends, not as formless, unrecognisable shades, but with the features, the expressions, which they wore on earth.—Christ’s resurrection is the model as well as the warrant of our own. Nay, more, ‘all men shall rise with their bodies.’ And if they whom we call the dead know anything of what is passing here on earth, then we may believe that the Easter festival is for them too, in whatever measure, an occasion of rejoicing, and that the happiness of the Church on earth is responded to from beyond the veil.

—Canon Liddon.

Illustration

‘This is the song of a man who has been in the depths, but who stands now on the sun-crowned heights.

Let me remember the depths. I need to do so, if my spiritual life is to thrive. Thus I am kept lowly and humble. Thus I gain the largest and most adequate conception of my Saviour’s power and love. Thus I recall the great constraining motive to serve and obey.

Yes, but let me be just as certain of the heights. After the night of weeping, the morning of joy; why should I live as if the gloomy and heavy shadows still enveloped me? Instead of turning my gaze inward to my own moods and frames and words and ways—there is neither “certitude nor peace nor help for pain” in that quarter—let me look out and up to my glorious Lord. Such a sufficiency is in Him; in His sacrifice, His intercession. His Holy Spirit, His prevailing power, His infinite love. In a profounder acquaintance with Him lies the antidote to fear. In fellowship day by day with Him, mine is a sure dwelling and a quiet resting-place.’