| December 1, 2002 | Jared Hollett | |
| John 11:35 | Then Jesus Wept |
The Bible this book, written by people divinely favored, who were themselves, so holy and full of the Spirit of God- is really our only reference about the life of Jesus Christ. Everything anyone needs to know to live a fulfilling life is printed clearly, in plain English, on the pages of the Bible. The Bible is the true source of Christian faith. Jesus, when tempted by Satan with almost every earthly desire in the desert, must have said it best. When the devil would try to engage Jesus in sin, Jesus would preface his answers with the words: "So it is written" and rebuke the stabs at his purity with those few words - showing his clear and simple faith.
The Bible has many intricacies though, a lot of portions not clearly understood or often overlooked. I'd like to address an important idea I haven't often heard talked about, Jesus weeping. But first I'd like to ask God for help in conveying his words. If you'd like, please join me for a moment of prayer.
"Dear God, please allow all I speak about your scriptures to be just and correct in your eyes. Please allow our thoughts and meditations in the next few minutes to bring us closer to an understanding of how to live a Christian life. Also, please help my voice to be steady and my nerves to be concrete. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen."
In the Bible there are only two instances where Jesus weeps; only two.
One of them is before he raises Lazarus from the dead; the other is upon entering Jerusalem for the last time on Palm Sunday. I can't tell you how important I feel these two instances are. For starters, they show the Lord as a human character that we can all relate to, but there is something more, that keeps eating away at me. Why does Jesus cry? This is the son of God; he can heal any sickness, mend any argument, and perform any task. Why does he cry? Why not just fix the problem instead of weeping? There is no simple answer.
Let's take a look at the first instance found, in John chapter 11. The first time we're ever told about Jesus weeping is found right before he's about to bring his friend Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, back from the dead. Previously, at least two people have said the key words to him, "If you had been here he would not have died." But now he's at the grave with all of the mourners and he knows he's about to bring Lazarus back from the dead, yet in John 11:35 we find the words: "Then Jesus wept."
Directly after Jesus weeps the people around him say, "See how he loved him!" This is what I find most interesting. Why would Jesus cry over a man, although he obviously loves him very dearly, when he was about to resurrect him? What is sad about this situation from Jesus' point of view? He is about to show the world the true, supreme power of God by bringing a man that has been dead for four days to life again.
Jesus says later: "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" This is such an integral moment. This is one of, if not the most, amazing of the miracles that Jesus preformed with his time on earth. Before he performed this miracle we can see how the people treated him, just expecting his unconditional support and guidance. They loved him, yet they still did not even remotely understand. Because of the way that they desperately wanted Lazarus to stay alive they showed a sort of latent mistrust in the absolute power of the Lord and possibly a mistrust in the Heaven that he preached of.
John 11:37 shows how they doubted him, even in what could have been minutes before Lazarus's resurrection: "But some of them said, 'Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?' they couldn't even fathom that he would grab Lazarus from the clutches of death and lift him back to the mortal world. Death was not the end, he could see past it. Jesus would show the people that he could bring a man four days in the grave, back from death. When the people were smitten with this idea that Jesus had not saved Lazarus from death they were dumbfounded when, after ordering the tomb opened, he -- "cried out with a loud voice, 'Lazarus come out!"
Those three words, "Lazarus come out!" shouted with stern intensity and conviction are the words that enraged the conspirators against him at the time, and still echo as words that eternally changed the course of Christianity, humanity, and our lives as we know them. It was after he said these words the doubters believed with resolution and determination that he was indeed the Son of God. But the words were a catalyst for something else, this one being the reason that he wept before he performed this miracle. After the resurrection the chief priests decided they really did need to stop Jesus. In John 11:53 it's stated: "From that day on they planned to put him to death." This line is also intriguing; it shows this dichotomy of how the people reacted. Some were completely astonished, and praised God, and grew a closer faith in Jesus, yet others used this same miracle as a reason that he should die. It sort of illustrates the diverse ways that a person can deal with something so extreme, so unexplainable, and so unique.
So we can see he wasn't crying for Lazarus because he was about to bring him back from the dead, that's only logical, why would he cry for a dead man a good man - anyway, when he preached of Heaven? And he couldn't have been weeping because of his own death, he could have just left Lazarus buried if that was the case. Why was he weeping then? As is clearly displayed in the second instance, Jesus weeps for his enemies, those who choose to plot against him who were filling his world with hate and misguided anger. He cried for those who hate him, those who would chose to do nothing but defile and persecute him and the peaceful people that followed him. Those who he gave nothing but love and kindness, those who he would have given anything for, yet they nail him with livid anger to a cross, to die the death of a thief or a murderer; those are who he weeps for.
The second - the last - passage where Jesus weeps is on the famous Palm Sunday. After having his disciples untie a colt, they threw their garments on it, and walked with Jesus into Jerusalem. Where the colt went the people threw their garments and placed palms in reverence to the animal that held the Son of God. As Jesus approached the city his followers yelled out: "Bless the king who comes in the name of the lord!" And it was here that the Pharisees heard them, and said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your followers for saying things like that!" and Jesus responded with the famous words that further clenched his fate. He replied to them- "If they kept quiet, the stones along the road would burst out in cheers!"
This interrogating just epitomizes the ignorance of the Pharisees. They couldn't even comprehend the grand scope of what was going on. The Messiah was making his last entrance into Jerusalem, where he knew he would meet his fate, yet they were questioning him still. As he came closer and closer he started to cry for the second time documented in his adult life. There's no ambiguity to his reasons this time. He loved all these people around him, yet he knew, possibly from close to the time of his virgin birth, that they would betray him. He wept this last time - for really the same reasons of the first- for the souls of people that he couldn't reach, because they had closed off their hearts to him. He wept because he pitied these people who hated them, and he must have wondered how they could hold such anger against someone who had shown only mercy and compassion towards them. He cries when we have erred.
Once we can see how Jesus cries for us, there's a question that's just imbedded in my mind. I mentioned it earlier. We can see that he cries now, and we can see the carnal reasons for it, but its harder still, to understand why Jesus, as all-powerful and almighty as to raise, not only his friend, but also himself from the dead, does not just take action and change the hearts of those that he weeps for with one thought. That's all it would take. He'd have to do no more than simply speak the word, to end all the problems of the world. Yet he doesn't. And yet he weeps.
For the answer to this question I look all the way back to the beginning - to Genesis. And in the first few pages of the Bible we find our answer. It's the same thing that makes us human, actually, probably the same thing that allows us to cry. When Adam and Eve tasted the apple, and created the original sin, they also embarked on a life of free will. With the same choice that Adam made to take from the tree, God made a choice to allow humanity an extraordinary gift. The gift of free will, of free action, of free thought; we are the only beings in our knowledge with this solely human characteristic; the ability to hate, to love, to befriend, and to destroy.
If you can try to imagine the scene at Lazarus' grave, and the Pharisees plotting to murder Jesus; or just try to imagine the thoughts of this man as he rode into Jerusalem, riding slowly on a donkey, knowingly, to his death, there you can see the effects of misguided human choice. The question I think I was really trying to tackle is something that we see in our life everyday, whenever we watch the 'little guy' being knocked around, or whenever the rich or powerful take precedent over the poor; or when a dictator can choose to gas thousands of people on a whim. If there is a God, how can these things happen; how can there be this kind of evil in the world? The truth is - we can't blame God for the evil in these people's hearts, and, however obvious it may be, God has granted them the gift of free will along with the rest of us; for better or for worse.
So what does this mean now, does it mean we're stranded here? And he'll cry for us when we make mistakes? It may strike you as odd that God chooses to not hold dominion over the hearts of men, but really, it's the only way that we can be human at all, and free. Instead of looking at this negatively we can choose to understand the responsibility that we all hold. Every choice you make is a choice for humanity, moving I guess - like a tide, to either good or to evil.
In our lives, free will is a sort of unspoken covenant with God if you will. And out of love; no matter how we abuse it, how we twist, mingle, disfigure or construed it - with plain evil effects, it's our human gift, and through the pain and sometimes through the tears of the Lord, we see can see in amazement, how much we really are loved.