Posts Tagged: John 11:35

“A Weeping God”

On August 15, 2024 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)

When I was growing up in church, at the beginning of our worship service the children’s Sunday School classes would have to stand and recite a Bible verse. I never figured out why the adults didn’t have to do that. I always thought that they needed to pay more attention to Bible verses than we kids did, but . . .

One of the most often-recited verses was John 11:35. Since it is the shortest verse in the Bible at two words, if we hadn’t memorized something else, John 11:35 was easily popped in the microwave, even if microwaves weren’t really a thing when I was little.

I’ve decided that John 11:35 actually is a wonderful verse to memorize. The context is that Jesus’ good friend Lazarus has died, but even though it seems crazy way too late to do anything but mourn, Jesus shows up for the express purpose of raising his friend from the dead. And yet, just before Jesus calls Lazarus out of the grave and back into mortal life, Jesus wept. Why? Why weep when Jesus knew that within a few minutes, Lazarus would be alive again?

The Scripture is very cagey. It doesn’t often answer all our questions. More often, the Bible questions all our answers.

Could it be that Jesus cried because this whole thing of dying and death was a problem that we humans created back in the Garden of Eden? Was Jesus crying because of how painful and unnecessary this whole business was?

Or was Jesus crying because life is difficult and now, Lazarus had to get back to the tough, frustrating business of living? Lazarus had to come back to the same problems that death had temporarily allowed him to escape.

Perhaps Jesus was crying because that is what Lazarus’ family and friends were doing? Yes, Jesus was going to raise Lazarus, but grief was the present reality, and Jesus entered into that reality with absolute abandon.

We are not told why Jesus wept. We are simply informed that he did. We can’t help asking why, and perhaps it is wise to simply live with the whys, and allow these whys to make us wiser still. But when I read about Jesus’ tears, I also think of John’s overall way of portraying Jesus. For the writer of the Gospel of John, Jesus is God in the flesh. To see Jesus is to see God. And to see Jesus cry is to realize that God also cries when we lose someone we love. We have a weeping God.

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