The inmates of that house at Bethany had received Jesus with a rare degree of sympathetic feeling and heartfelt welcome. They entered into the meaning of His teaching and preaching with a degree of fellowship and quick response that moved His heart and soul even beyond the best of His disciples. One of them at least—Mary, and almost certainly Lazarus too—had come very near to that Divine Lord, in full understanding of all His grandeur, His sinlessness, His mighty love Though yet all ignorant of a great deal about His person, and about the fashion in which He was to make His kingdom, with a genuine purity and ardour of attachment and affection, they worshipped Him, they recognised the Divine within Him, they hailed Him as the world's Christ and Saviour. Listen to Martha's cry in her perplexity: "I cannot understand it all, but I know Thou art the Christ come from God, the world's King, the world's Saviour. That I know, that I hold to." It was that understanding, that sympathy in that home, that made it so sweet a place of rest to Jesus. More than that—manifestly the two sisters and brother lived a life of sweet human affection. There was an atmosphere of tender love in their home, broken by little storms of misunderstanding, as may be in the very best of our imperfect human homes, but in reality a great depth of tenderness, and clinging attachment, and loyal love to one another, bound the household together. Oh, thank God for every such home on earth! That is the real bulwark against all pessimism, the charter of our eternal birthrights. Given the grandeur, the reality of human love, as, thank God, most of us know it in our homes, that is the absolute guarantee that it came from the creating hands of grander Love Divine. Jesus was not merely loved by the family where He came to spend the nights when He was working in Jerusalem, but He got to love them with a very wonderful tenderness. You remember that chivalrous, impassioned defence of Mary, when she was assailed by the coarse attacks of the disciples. You catch it, too, in that message sent to Him—"He whom Thou lovest." Ah, many an act of affection, many a look that was a caress, many an appeal for sympathy that bespoke brotherhood, had passed between Jesus of Nazareth and that Lazarus, else the sisters would not have thought of saying, "He whom Thou lovest is sick." And yet into that home so dear to the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, into that home that had for its Friend the Man that was master of life and of death, of calamity and prosperity, of all earthly powers and forces, into that home there penetrated cruel, painful, deadly sickness. The man Jesus loved lay there on his bed dying.