You’ve Got Me Feeling Emotions

I read somewhere once — and I don’t know if it’s true or not — that the shortest declarative sentence in all 4 Gospels is this: “And Jesus wept.”

We could spend the rest of our days meditating on that short sentence which holds everything within its very utterance.

And Jesus wept.

Here in John’s account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, we are told the reason Jesus weeps is out of love for the loss of his best friend, whom the grave has claimed.

What a powerful thought to know God wept when his best friend died. Think about what that’s really saying. God’s very Self feels sorrow and experiences a profound agony that came upon him even before Calvary did. 

God suffers at the loss of Lazarus.

But it isn’t just Lazarus. After all, when all is said and done, we are all Lazarus — the best friend and beloved of the Lord. To know that God weeps when the grave claims my body is a comfort that words can’t quite capture. God weeps because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Our sinfulness and disobedience to God’s will made it to be so.

But it’s not the only reason God weeps. Notice, too, that Jesus is weeping at the sight of Mary’s grief. She who mourns her brother with a wailing sorrow (as Scripture describes it) is seen and emotionally embraced by the One who cries with her, who feels what she feels.

What’s so awesome about our God is the very fact that He is willing to get right into the muck with us and feel what we feel. We have a Savior of whom we could never say: You just don’t understand. The truth is — He does, every single time.

One of the Connecticut parents who lost a daughter in the Sandy Hook school massacre writes frequently about what faith feels like after facing such an evil act, one that brought her and her husband to the depths of grief, despair and anger. It took time to begin to heal, she says, but the one thing that she clung to in the storm of such great loss was knowing that Jesus wept with her. “Although I can’t fathom it,” she writes, “Jesus wept even harder because he took on the pain of us all.”

Many preachers this weekend will no doubt focus on the resurrection aspect of this account: how it foreshadows Jesus’ own death and resurrection. It’s certainly true and an important theme upon which to meditate as we get closer to Easter. Death will come for each of us. We must make a choice whether or not to walk in the “light of day” so that we will be truly ready when our journey here ends. Do we want eternity with God? Do we want resurrection?

I pray that for each of us, our answer is one in which it cannot be said: “And Jesus wept.” Today — and every day — we are asked to make a choice either for the Lord or for those things which keep us from loving authentically and righteously, as Paul states in his letter. What will you choose — life or death? The spirit or the flesh?

Choosing life in the spirit, you could say, is an act of great courage, for doing so means one thing: picking up the Cross and following the Crucified One. It means dieing to self. And it means a willingness to show great mercy and compassion to others who suffer and mourn and weep.

When we follow the One who weeps for us, we share in his call to mourn with others, to love them in their Crosses. I can’t help but think that little resurrection moments come whenever we are willing to lift another up after having held their hearts and their pain in ours.

There’s a beautiful scene at the end of the Delco-based HBO drama Mare of Easttown in which the police investigator character of Kate Winslet literally sinks to the ground in heart-wrenching grief with her best friend whose son was just jailed by Kate’s character for murder. Even though Mare was told by her friend she wasn’t wanted, she stayed. Together they wept. And when her friend was ready, Mare lifted her up to stand again. A mini resurrection right in her own kitchen. All because one wept in Mercy with another who grieved.

With Holy Week only one week away and Lent quickly coming to a close, may we find great comfort and hope in the reality that Jesus loves us enough to weep over the very things that break our hearts and crush our spirits. He thirsts to roll back the stone of our decay in sin in order to untie us and set us free. He calls to us in our suffering and pain — in those very places where we feel dead — come out. Be untied.

May each of us, in our own unique way, be like Martha. Once a complainer, now a woman of such incredible faith and love that she never gave up on Christ’s promise that He would provide and raise up to new beginnings, even when it seemed impossible. “Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah” whose will is perfect and always done to glorify God the Father.

Martha chose to follow the light of the world, even when surrounded by such great sorrow and darkness. She said yes, not always knowing the outcome. She clung to the One who thirsted for her heart to be all His.

I can’t help to think it’s due to the one moment that made all the difference for Martha and Mary:



“And Jesus wept.”