he had to learn that
unto Jesus had already been committed power over life and death. She was
hopefully expectant of some superhuman interposition by the Lord Jesus
in her behalf, yet she knew not what that might be. Apparently at this
time she had no well-defined thought or even hope that He would call her
brother from the tomb. To the Lord's question as to whether she believed
what He had just said, she answered with simple frankness; all of it she
was not able to understand; but she believed in the Speaker even while
unable to fully comprehend His words. "Yea, Lord," she said, "I believe
that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the
world."

Then she returned to the home, and with precaution of secrecy on account
of the presence of some whom she knew to be unfriendly to Jesus, said to
Mary: "The Master is come, and calleth for thee." Mary left the house in
haste. The Jews who had been with her thought that she had been impelled
by a fresh resurgence of grief to go again to the grave, and they
followed her. When she reached the Master, she knelt at His feet, and
gave expression to her consuming sorrow in the very words Martha had
used: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." We
cannot doubt that the conviction so voiced had been the burden of
comment and lamentation between the two sisters--if only Jesus had been
with them they would not have been bereft of their brother.

The sight of the two women so overcome by grief, and of the people
wailing with them, caused Jesus to sorrow, so that He groaned in spirit
and was deeply troubled. "Where have ye laid him?" He asked; and Jesus
wept. As the sorrowing company went toward the tomb, some of the Jews,
observing the Lord's emotion and tears, said: "Behold how he loved him!"
but others, less sympathetic because of their prejudice against Christ,
asked critically and reproachfully: "Could not this man, which opened
the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have
died?" The miracle by which a man blind from birth had been made to see
was very generally known, largely because of the official investigation
that had followed the healing.[1025] The Jews had been compelled to
admit the actuality of the astounding occurrence; and the question now
raised as to whether or why One who could accomplish such a wonder could
not have preserved from death a man stricken with an ordinary illness,
and that man one whom He seeme