ry.

Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He shows
how He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word is
that Death, the divider of those who are separated from God, is the bond
of union between those that are united to Him.

I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as constituted
apart from God. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger of
disruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another,
lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sower
of discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the one
supreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Fool
of the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who place
their hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. For
these there is no appeal beyond the grave.

II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernatural
order, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is an
entrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may be
seen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the members
of whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family is
living in the love of God, Death, when he comes, draws not only the
survivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to have
separated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, but
he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he
explains old misunderstandings.

Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that
this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.
_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has
_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural,
simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer
makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and
interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.

Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once
raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the
dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;
but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an
even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting
to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so