Jesus Wept
“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked. ‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept.” — John 11:33–35 (NIV)
“Jesus wept.”
It’s one of the shortest verses in the Bible. Two words we can memorize without even trying. Yet tucked inside those two words is an incredible picture of the heart of God, especially when we consider something important about the moment in which Jesus cried: He already knew how the story ended.
Lazarus was dead. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were grieving. Their home was filled with mourners. And maybe most painfully, Jesus could have prevented all of it.
Mary and Martha knew that too. They had sent word to Jesus while Lazarus was still sick: “Lord, the one you love is sick” (John 11:3, NIV). They knew Jesus loved their brother. They knew He could heal him. They had seen enough of Jesus to know exactly what He was capable of, so sending for Him probably felt like the obvious thing to do. Lazarus is sick. Jesus heals sick people. Call Jesus. Problem solved.
Except… Jesus didn’t come.
John tells us something that initially sounds almost contradictory:
“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days” (John 11:5–6, NIV).
Jesus loved them, so He waited. Obviously...(????)
Those are not two ideas we naturally put together. We tend to think love should hurry. Love should fix it. Love should prevent the thing that is about to break our hearts. If God loves us and has the power to intervene, surely He will do it before the worst happens.
But by the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. I mean this guy was so dead they felt the need to warn Jesus about the SMELL.
Both sisters greet Him with exactly the same sentence. Martha says it first:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, NIV).
Then Mary falls at His feet and says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32, NIV) (emphasis added).
You can almost imagine how many times that sentence had been spoken in their home during those four days. If Jesus had been here. If He had come when we asked. If He had gotten here sooner.
There are few things harder in the Christian life than knowing God can do something and watching Him not do it. We know He can heal. We know He can provide. We know He can restore relationships, open doors, change circumstances, prevent losses and answer prayers. That knowledge is usually a tremendous source of hope, but sometimes it makes disappointment with God even harder. Because we aren’t wondering whether He was powerful enough. We are wondering why He didn’t use that power the way we begged Him to.
Most of us eventually accumulate a few sentences that sound a lot like Mary’s — Lord, if You had answered this prayer. Lord, if You had changed this situation. Lord, if You had stopped this from happening. Lord, if You had just gotten here sooner.
Look at what Jesus does with her words. He doesn’t correct her. He doesn’t chastise her for questioning His timing. He doesn’t launch into a theological explanation of everything God is accomplishing through Lazarus’s death. He doesn’t even remind her that He is about to fix the entire situation in approximately ten minutes, which, personally, feels like fairly relevant information.
He enters her grief.
“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (John 11:33, NIV).
He asks where Lazarus has been laid, they take Him to the tomb, and then comes that tiny verse:
“Jesus wept” (John 11:35, NIV) (emphasis added).
This becomes even more remarkable when we remember that Jesus knows Lazarus is about to walk out of that tomb. Earlier, He had already told His disciples what was going to happen. He knows death is not going to have the final word in this story. He knows there is resurrection on the other side of this funeral.
And He still believes the grief is worth grieving.
That tells us something important about the way Christians are allowed to suffer. Knowing that God is sovereign does not make sadness faithless. Knowing that He works for our good does not mean we have to rush toward an explanation. Knowing that eternity is secure does not make earthly loss painless.
Sometimes Christians can be incredibly uncomfortable with grief. We want to get to the hopeful part quickly. We quote the verse. We explain God’s plan. We remind someone that their loved one is in a better place. We look for the lesson, the purpose, the testimony that might eventually emerge from the pain. Usually we mean well, but earlier this week we saw how Job’s friends already gave us several chapters demonstrating that theological statements can be technically true and still be terribly unhelpful when delivered at the wrong moment.
Jesus does something different — He cries.
Paul later tells believers that we “do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, NIV). He does not say that we do not grieve. Christians grieve deeply because loss is real. We simply grieve differently because grief is not the only thing that is real.
Hope is real too.
Earlier in John 11, Martha tells Jesus she knows Lazarus will rise again at the resurrection on the last day. Jesus responds,
“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25, NIV).
Jesus doesn’t merely point Martha toward a doctrine about resurrection. He points her toward Himself. Resurrection isn’t simply an event on the Christian calendar waiting somewhere at the end of history. The Resurrection and the Life is standing in front of her.
That means the hope of John 11 is bigger than “don’t worry, everything will work out.” Everything does work out spectacularly for this particular family. Jesus walks to the tomb, commands Lazarus to come out, and a man who has been dead for four days emerges still wrapped in his grave clothes (probably in desperate need of a shower and good meal). I assume no one at that gathering had prepared socially for this possibility. What do you wear to a funeral where the guy comes back to life? Not much precedent there…
But Lazarus’s resurrection was temporary. He would eventually die again. The greater hope of John 11 is not that Jesus occasionally prevents death. It is that Jesus defeats it.
Not long after He stands outside Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus will be placed inside one of His own. The One who cried over death would enter death Himself, bear sin on the cross, and rise victorious over the grave. Peter later calls what we have through Christ “a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3, NIV).
That is why Christians can hold grief and hope at the same time. We don’t have to pretend the painful thing isn’t painful in order to believe God is still good. We don’t have to understand why Jesus didn’t come when we asked in order to trust that He has not abandoned us. We don’t have to turn every loss into a lesson before we have even finished crying.
Psalm 34:18 says, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (NIV).
2 Corinthians 1:3 calls Him “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (NIV).
Scripture consistently gives us a God who moves toward hurting people, not one who stands at a safe distance waiting for them to pull themselves together.
Mary brings Jesus her grief exactly as it is. She brings the tears, the disappointment, and even the sentence that sounds a little bit like an accusation: If You had been here.
Jesus can handle all of it! — And He can handle ours too. We can tell Him where it hurts. We can tell Him what we wish He had done differently. We can ask why He didn’t intervene when we know perfectly well that He could have.
Faith does not require pretending we aren’t disappointed. Some of the most faithful people in Scripture spoke to God with startling honesty about their pain. But John 11 also reminds us that our pain never gets to tell us the whole story about God. Mary sees a tomb and believes Jesus arrived too late. Jesus sees the same tomb knowing death is about to encounter the One person it cannot hold.
We often cannot see what Jesus sees. So when we stand in the painful space between what we asked God to do and what He actually allowed, John 11 does not give us an easy explanation. It gives us something better: Jesus Himself. The Savior who is powerful enough to raise the dead is compassionate enough to weep beside their tomb.
He does not ask us to choose between trusting Him and grieving what hurts. He meets us in both. And ultimately, our hope is not that Jesus will keep us from every tomb. Our hope is that because of Him, no tomb gets the final word.
Jesus does.
bytaylormcgee
