“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35).
The other day I was reflecting on the tears of Our Blessed Lord…
There are only three times in the Gospel where we are told that Christ wept. He wept for the Widow of Nairn before He raised her son from the dead, he wept upon seeing Jerusalem and knowing that her people would reject Him, and He wept when Lazarus died…
“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha...So the sisters sent to Him, saying, ‘Lord, he whom You love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it He said, ‘This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it.’ Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that he was ill, He stayed two days longer in the place where He was. Then after this He said to the disciples, ‘Let us go into Judea again...Lazarus is dead’... When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ He asked. ‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, ‘See how He loved him!’… Now when Jesus came, He found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.” (John 11:1-45).
We are told explicitly that Christ WEPT for Lazarus, and I have been thinking about that today. You see, Christ is God and knows that life is eternal in Heaven, and yet, when His good friend Lazarus died, Christ wept… And I have been reflecting on why…
You see, there is such pain in love. True love – sacrificial love – is a love that infiltrates so deeply into the heart of a person that the soul of the lover becomes entangled with the soul of the loved. And in many ways this is what happened with Christ. He loved Lazarus and his sisters so much that when his sisters felt the pain of Lazarus’ death, Christ felt it too…
When those friends of His – those women – ran out to meet Christ and told Him that He was late, they were speaking to a Man who they loved deeply and with whom they shared a deep bond and connection. Those were not the words of acquaintances. They were the heart-felt words of a close friend, of a soul who was a bosom friend of the heart. Only a friend as close as that with such a vast amount of love would have had the capacity to cry out in their pain and distress and say… “You are too late…”
And I have been reflecting on that today, because twenty centuries ago when those women cried out to their Friend – God Himself – in their distress, God Himself answered them by weeping and taking away the source of their pain.
And today it occurs to me, that perhaps it is not that my God does not hear me well enough, but it is that I do not love Him enough…?
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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