Jesus had just
proclaimed himself as the Resurrection and the Life, and said that if someone
believed in him, he'd never really die. He comforted Martha with these
words, and then he met with Mary for a few minutes before he went to the tomb.
I find it interesting that she repeated the first sentence that Martha had led
with, but without the word of confidence that had followed when her sister had said it. Did she believe,
like Martha, that Jesus could raise her brother if he wanted? We don’t know, but
if she did, she didn’t express it.
Now we get to the shortest verse in the Bible, and one of the most mysterious. Of course, the immediate meaning is pretty clear. For some reason, Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb. Now, we know that he planned to raise his friend from the dead and give him back to his sisters. So that raises the question: Why did he weep? If he really is the Resurrection and the Life, then why the tears at a funeral? There are at least three explanations I’ve found, and all of them have a case to make. I also want to point out that these explanations are not mutually contradictory at all.
Before we get to them, however, let’s look at one more
piece of evidence. Vs.33 might furnish us with a
clue: “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her
also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” So this tells me
that the reason behind his weeping might lie (at least in part) behind their
grief.
The first explanation is that he was just joining them in
their grief. Yes, he knew that he was about to restore Lazarus, but that
doesn’t mean he wouldn’t sympathize with them up to that point. I believe that
he weeps with us now: When we lose a loved one, he sorrows with us. The
Psalmist tells us that God “daily bears our burdens.” And if he
does weep with us at our loss, that too is in the shadow of the great
resurrection. We’re going to be reunited with our loved ones (who are saved)
just as Lazarus’s family was. It’ll just take a little longer.
The second explanation, which I have a little more trouble
with, is that he was grieved by their lack of faith. He'd proclaimed himself
to be the Resurrection and the Life, and they were still grieving as if they
had no hope. Quite frankly, I don’t buy it. Paul
had no problem with grieving
for a lost brother, even though he believed in the resurrection as much as
anyone. This explanation sounds a little too heartless to me.
The third theory--which I get from C. S. Lewis--has to do
with death itself. We were not originally designed to die. Death is an
intruder, one which our first parents let
in when they opened the door
to sin. The ancient Greeks, because of their hatred of the physical body,
actually wrote poems about death. They saw it as a release from the crude body
into a glorious spirituality. But that’s the not the message of the Bible. God
hates death. It’s not the natural state for us; it’s the ultimate corruption of
his creation. Yes, it’s a defeated foe, and yes it’s the means by which the
Lord brings us into his presence. But it’s still a foe, not something to be embraced
for its own sake. And one day the One who is the Resurrection and the Life will swallow
it up forever, and the
victory which Christ started at his own resurrection will be completed. So the
reason why Jesus wept over the tomb of Lazarus was the same feeling which an
artist displays when he sees his work destroyed or damaged. He designed that
body lovingly within the mother’s womb. Those weren’t tears of pity; they were
tears of holy anger at what sin had done to his work.
Like I said, we can’t be totally sure why Jesus wept. I
sort of lean towards the first, while the third really intrigues me. But
ultimately we don’t want to miss the main point: We have a Savior who weeps.
When we suffer, he weeps. Our loss is his. Our pain is his. And unlike the
tears of our other friends, the tears of Jesus represent a determination to do
something about it. Decisively.
Thank you Lord Jesus for being God-with-us. You're not out
there, somewhere removed from our suffering. You're here, closer than a
heartbeat, closer than the breath on my lips.
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