““Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still at the place where Martha met Him. Then the Jews who were with her in the house and were consoling her, when they saw that Mary had gotten up quickly and left, they followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to weep there. So when Mary came to the place where Jesus was, she saw Him and fell at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” Therefore when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and He said, “Where have you laid him?” They *said to Him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved him!””
”

— John 11:30-36 NASB

Jesus wept is the shortest verse in the entire Bible. Yet, have you ever wondered why He wept? Well, just consider all that Jesus was taking in at the moment. Mary has come before Him weeping and repeating the same thing Martha said. They’re basically saying, “Why Jesus? Why didn’t you come and heal our brother Lazarus? We thought You loved him.” And all the while the passage repeatedly states that in fact Jesus did love them, deeply. However, they were crushed and disappointed in Jesus, and He knew it as He stood there. And in addition to this, coming out of the house behind Mary and now there before Jesus were those who’d come to mourn, yet among them were the very unbelieving, hypocritical Jews who wanted Jesus just as dead as Lazarus. The text says that Jesus groaned or was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, which in the Greek meant He was also angry. He was no doubt angry at the pretended grief and simultaneous unbelief of those Jewish leaders who were there at wanted to kill Him. Yet, I believe Jesus also wept because even though He knew what He was about to do, He entered into the grief of Mary and Martha, on the heels of all the cumulated human suffering, grief, loss and pain He’s had to endure since the Fall! You see, Jesus responds to families grieving the loss of a loved one by drawing close to…

GRIEVE WITH THEM WHILE IN INCOMPREHENSIBLE SUFFERING.

It’s like the famous, beloved and late actor Chadwick Bossman who played the role of the Black Panther. He was diagnosed with colon cancer at the very beginning of filming The Black Panther. However he kept this a secret. And while this movie blew up to become an international box office success, he was doing philanthropic work and visiting hospitals like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to encourage children who were fighting cancer. And the entire time he was raising awareness to fight cancer, donating money towards this cause, visiting little children with cancer and entering into their suffering, Chadwick Bossman was himself dying from colon cancer in a way that no one could comprehend.

Have you ever given some serious thought to the reality that God is suffering? Have you considered that one of the core traits of His character of love is that He’s long-suffering? Or how about the fact that though Jesus was full of love, joy, peace and faithfulness during His incarnation, He was simultaneously grieving and in sorrow at a capacity that we can’t even comprehend? The prophet Isaiah foretold Jesus’ experience as Messiah in Isaiah 53:3-4a, which says,…

““He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows;…””

— Isaiah 53:3-4a NKJV

I also want you to consider this profoundly insightful quote from the Desire of Ages…

““It was not only because of the scene before Him that Christ wept. The weight of the grief of ages was upon Him. He saw the terrible effects of the transgression of God’s law. He saw that in the history of the world, beginning with the death of Abel, the conflict between good and evil had been unceasing. Looking down the years to come, He saw the suffering and sorrow, tears and death, that were to be the lot of men. His heart was pierced with the pain of the human family of all ages and in all lands. The woes of the sinful race were heavy upon His soul, and the fountain of His tears was broken up as He longed to relieve all their distress.””

— Desire of Ages P. 534

Though God has always been at work to intervene, stemming the tide of evil without violating our free will, and though He will surely bring evil to an end, what if crying out of the divine human heart of Jesus in that moment was, “I’m sick of this! I’m sick of the pain, the suffering and the death of My children!” Yet all the while He enters our sorrow, comforts our grief, and fully empathizes with our pain, thus revealing His glory.

And as followers of Jesus we too can weep with those who weep and empathize with their grief by the power of the in dwelling Holy Spirit. Even though we may be experiencing our own pain, we can reveal the other-centered, compassionate and comforting heart of Jesus by entering the grief of a family whose lost a loved one.

Nevertheless, their were some people present, as Jesus wept, who saw His weeping as a lack of power to prevent Lazarus from dying, though He’d been able to give the blind their sight. Not only were they about to realize just how wrong they were, but nothing could have prepared them for what happened next beginning in verse 39…