Life's Inanities and Ironies

  We do not bring our tears to a distant throne. We bring them to a Man of Sorrows. “Jesus wept.” — John 11:35 Jesus has already said Lazarus’s illness is for the glory of God. He has announced that He is the resurrection and the life. He is minutes from calling a dead man out. And He weeps. He is not confused. He enters the grief of the sisters and the outrage of death. John says He was “deeply moved… and greatly troubled”—holy indignation at the wreckage death makes—then come the tears. A high priest who can sympathize. “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15–16). The Son took a real human nervous system. He knew hunger, betrayal, Gethsemane, the death of a friend. Isaiah named Him “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). Acquainted—not briefly introduced. You do not have to clean up your sentences before you knock. The One who hears you has stood in a cemetery and felt His chest tighten. He bore our griefs. Isa...

  Grief is not unbelief. Sorrow is not a failure of faith. “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” — Ecclesiastes 3:4 Many Christians inherit an unspoken rule: mature believers should be “over it” quickly. We quote Romans 8:28 before the casket is closed. We treat tears as a theological leak—evidence that hope is not holding. Scripture will not allow that rule. Abraham mourns Sarah and buys a burial field. Jacob refuses to be comforted when he thinks Joseph is dead. David weeps until his voice is gone over Absalom. Israel weeps thirty days for Moses. Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet. An entire book is named Lamentations. Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, stands at a tomb He is about to empty and weeps (John 11:35). If the sinless Son of God can cry at a graveside, tears are not a defect in discipleship. They are one of the ways a human heart tells the truth. Death is an enemy, not a natural friend. The New Testament is sever...