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The Friend on the Road and Other Studies in the Gospels: Chapter 48 - Breaking the Awful Silence

By John Henry Jowett


      "Jesus saith unto her . . ."--John xi. 23.

      WHO likes to break the silence when some sorrow has stricken our neighbor dumb? The stroke has fallen, and that which was so beautiful lies in apparent ruin. There is a strange silence. All the bird-song is hushed, as when a gun has just been fired in a grove And who likes, I say, to break the silence? We often just take the hand of the one who is smitten dumb, and we clasp it in a masonry of sympathy which has no other speech.

      And sometimes those who do speak only intensify the pain of the silence, and make it harder to bear. Their words have no significance. Their wallets have no cordials. Their lamps have no light. Their ministry has no grace. What has the materialist to say, that is worth saying, when the heart is aching in the unfamiliar pangs of bereavement? What word of comfort has the secularist when there seems to be nothing in all the wide world but a newly-made grave? What song has the agnostic which can fill the silence with a quickening hope? All these attempted ministries may disturb the sorrowful, but they leave the desolate soul in a silence which is all the more desolate because of their futile effort to break it.

      How many such fearful silences there are to-day! In how many millions of lives the sunshine has fled, and all the birds are hushed, and it seems as though the final night has fallen, and as if there will be spring no more! "Speak Thou, availing Christ, and fill this pause!" And the Lord Jesus Christ will speak in the awful pause. And his word is not as a mocking echo in the halls of death. It fills the vacancy with life and light. "The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life." The grace of His speech is as ample as our need, and His comforts are as deep as our pain.

      His word besets us behind, and before, and it lays its hand upon us. It covers the entire field over which our soul is wandering in pathetic vagrancy. It throws its hallowing grace over our yesterdays. It enfolds us in our present journey. And it lights up tomorrow with eternal hope. When the Lord Jesus breaks the silence, He breaks what makes the silence deadly; He breaks the bondage of the soul, and spiritual assurance is born, and the winter is past, and the time of the singing of birds is come. He is waiting to speak to us if only we will listen. "He that hath ears to hear let him hear." "Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth!"

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See Also:
   Chapter 1 - Critics and Surgeons
   Chapter 2 - The Challenge of the Closed Door
   Chapter 3 - How the Best Things Become Ours
   Chapter 4 - Sixpennyworth of Miracle
   Chapter 5 - The Peace of the Larger Life
   Chapter 6 - Education by Contagion
   Chapter 7 - The Tares Among the Wheat
   Chapter 8 - Things New and Old
   Chapter 9 - The Buoyancy of Faith
   Chapter 10 - Sound the Great Recall
   Chapter 11 - The Bright Cloud
   Chapter 12 - Mercy and Obligation
   Chapter 13 - The Simplification of Life
   Chapter 14 - Life's Perilous Heats
   Chapter 15 - Feverishness
   Chapter 16 - The Truly Sensational Life
   Chapter 17 - The Dominant Passion
   Chapter 18 - Doing the Impossible
   Chapter 19 - The Life I Should Live
   Chapter 20 - The Blessing and Discipline of Retirement
   Chapter 21 - Endless Possibilities
   Chapter 22 - The Price of Liberty
   Chapter 23 - The Dynamics of Expulsion
   Chapter 24 - Evils That Never Arrive
   Chapter 25 - Returning in Power
   Chapter 26 - The Old Tackle and the New Presence
   Chapter 27 - The Noble Dissatisfaction
   Chapter 28 - The Malady of Not Wanting
   Chapter 29 - Sentimentaltsm
   Chapter 30 - The Pedantic Conscience
   Chapter 31 - A Receiver of Wrecks
   Chapter 32 - The Supreme Test
   Chapter 33 - Fainting
   Chapter 34 - Doing the Impossible
   Chapter 35 - Divine Visitations
   Chapter 36 - Self-Possession
   Chapter 37 - The Treacherous Kiss
   Chapter 38 - The Friend on the Road
   Chapter 39 - Dull Scholars
   Chapter 40 - The Unknown Christ
   Chapter 41 - The Worst and the Best
   Chapter 42 - Increase and Decrease
   Chapter 43 - Hating the Light
   Chapter 44 - Heroic Goodness
   Chapter 45 - Living Words
   Chapter 46 - The Last Bridge
   Chapter 47 - The Ministry of Infusion
   Chapter 48 - Breaking the Awful Silence
   Chapter 49 - Preparing for the Miracle
   Chapter 50 - The Inner Door
   Chapter 51 - The Revelation in the After Days
   Chapter 52 - The Troubled Heart
   Chapter 53 - The Gift of Peace
   Chapter 54 - Settling Down in Christ
   Chapter 55 - The Joy of the Lord
   Chapter 56 - The Joy of Christian Life
   Chapter 57 - The Sense of Mission
   Chapter 58 - Living at Second Hand
   Chapter 59 - The Great Act of Receiving

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