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Summary: AI-assisted (Claude) from transcripts

Summary

Tears of Jesus

The saying that "real men don't cry" finds no support in Scripture. Peter wept bitterly after denying his Lord. David wept in the chamber above the gate when Absalom died. Job's friends wept when they saw his suffering from afar. And Jesus himself — true God and true man — wept openly. His tears bear witness that genuine strength and tender grief are not opposed, and that the incarnate Son truly took on our flesh, including the capacity to weep.

The Gospels record three occasions when Jesus wept. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus, where the bystanders said, "See how he loved him" John 11:35. He wept in the Garden of Gethsemane before the cross — Hebrews tells us he "offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears" Hebrews 5:7. And on Palm Sunday, as he came near to Jerusalem, he wept over the city Luke 19:41. The Greek word used there is the strongest term for weeping in the language — not merely crying, but a deep, body-shaking grief. In verse 42, the sentence Jesus speaks is actually broken in the original by his own sobs: "If you, even you, had only known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

Why did he weep over Jerusalem? The crowds said the right things — "Hosanna," "Son of David," "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" — but they believed the wrong things. Their focus was on his miracles and healings, on the political deliverer they wanted him to be, rather than on the reconciliation he had come to accomplish between God and humanity. As the Palm Sunday lesson explains, his grief was rooted in the triteness of their fascination with his deeds of power, the shallowness of their messianic expectations, and the superficiality of unrepentant hearts. And on the cross he bore it all — our triteness, our shallowness, our superficiality — shedding his blood for us.

A week later, on Easter morning, the cry is heard once more, but now it belongs to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb John 20:11. She does not yet understand what the two angels at the head and feet of where Jesus had lain signify: an echo of the mercy seat of Exodus 25, where God had promised to meet his people through the sprinkled blood. Now God meets his people not at the ark, but at the empty tomb of his risen Son. Mary's tears are the tears of every believer who has not yet recognized the living Christ — until he speaks her name. Grace-born recognition follows: "Rabboni!"

God does not miss a single tear. As David writes, "You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record?" Psalm 56:8. The same Lord who wept over Jerusalem, who wept at Lazarus's tomb, who wept in Gethsemane, knows our weeping and addresses it. As the Easter lesson on John 20 draws out, a mother in a crowded park does not need to turn around to know her own child's cry; so it is with our heavenly Father.

Yet the message of Easter is finally that what awaits the baptized child of God is the tearless life. "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the former things have passed away" Revelation 21:4. On this side of the resurrection, weeping may linger for the night Psalm 30:5. But because Christ is not in the tomb, because the sacrifice for sin has been accepted, because we have been washed in the life-giving water of Baptism, joy comes in the morning — and one day the morning of mornings will dawn, when every tear will be wiped away and our alleluias will reign.

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