When Jesus Wept

It is the shortest verse in the English Bible. Two words. Yet those two words carry more comfort for the grieving heart than almost any other line in Scripture. The scene is the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus had already declared, “I am the resurrection, and the life,” and He knew the miracle was only minutes away. He knew Lazarus would walk out of that grave. He knew the weeping of that afternoon would soon turn to wonder. And still, standing there, He wept. If we want to understand grief, we must begin where Jesus began, at a graveside, with tears.

Look closely and you will find that His tears were not gentle resignation. Verse 33 tells us that Jesus “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,” and the word carries the force of indignation. He was stirred. He was confronting what sin had done to His good creation. Scripture calls death “the last enemy that shall be destroyed.” Death was never part of Eden. It is a cruel intruder, the bitter fruit of the Fall. This is why the Bible speaks of the sting of death, for the sting is not merely that a body ceases to live. The sting is separation, the tearing apart of lives that God Himself had woven together. Jesus wept because death is an enemy, and He hates what it does to those He loves.

He also wept because He loved. The onlookers understood it in a moment, for they said, “Behold how he loved him!” Lazarus was His friend, and friendship makes us tender to sorrow. As John Stott wrote in The Cross of Christ, “Who is capable of love is also capable of suffering.” Grief, then, is not a flaw in our discipleship. Grief is love wounded. Where there is no love, there is no grief, and so the depth of our sorrow is only ever the measure of our love. If you are grieving deeply today, it is because you loved deeply, and that is no sin.

This frees us from a quiet guilt that many believers carry, the suspicion that a stronger Christian would not hurt so much. Scripture says otherwise. The text Principles and Practice of Grief Counselling calls grief “the normal and natural reaction to loss,” and Megan Devine, in It’s OK That You’re Not OK, writes that it is “a healthy and sane response to loss.” Even the most settled saint is shaken by it. After losing his wife, C. S. Lewis confessed in A Grief Observed, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The Bible never asks us to pretend. It gives us Ecclesiastes, “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” It gives us a Saviour who is “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” It gives us the laments of David, the tears of Jeremiah, and the heavy heart of Paul. Grief is not the absence of faith. It is often faith at its most honest.

And into that honest sorrow God draws near. He does not stand at a distance from the broken. “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart,” says the Psalm, and our great High Priest is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities.” He does not rebuke our tears. He did not silence Mary, and He will not silence you. As Mark Vroegop writes in Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, “Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust.” God even sends His comfort through other people, for as David Powlison reminds us in God’s Grace in Your Suffering, “Other people are part of the comfort God brings to us in affliction.” Sometimes the most Christlike thing a friend can do is not to explain, but simply to sit, as Job’s friends did well before they ever began to speak. Timothy Keller, in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, observes that the Bible does not hand the sufferer a tidy philosophy of pain. It hands us a person. And that Person weeps.

This is the hope that makes Christian grief unlike any other in the world. Paul does not tell us not to sorrow. He tells us not to sorrow “even as others which have no hope.” We weep, and we cling. We grieve, and we wait, because a day is coming when God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying.” Until that day He walks with us patiently, and as Carol Peters writes in A Christian’s Journey Through Grief, “He respects your humanness and limitations.” So bring Him your sorrow without apology, for as Peter promises, “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” The old hymn by Frank Graeff asks whether Jesus truly cares when the heart aches to breaking. The answer of John 11 is settled and sure. He cares. He came. He wept. And one day He will raise the dead.