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...

 The scene in Bethany is one of profound grief. Jesus, arriving four days after the death of his friend Lazarus , stands before a tomb where the air is heavy with sorrow and the scent of decay. A crowd of mourners, having come to comfort Martha and Mary , stands by as a poignant question hangs in the air: "Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?". Then, in a moment of stunning paradox, the Son of God, the "resurrection and the life," gives us the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept".  This familiar story, found in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John , is far more than a simple act of miraculous power. It is a multi-layered narrative that reveals the divine and human nature of Jesus, subverts first-century Jewish expectations of life and death, and provides a powerful analogy for spiritual salvation and the ongoing work of the Christian community. By examining the historical context, the theologica...