THE WEEPING SAVIOR
"Jesus wept." John 11:35
The silent procession is moving on. We may suppose they
have reached the gates of the burial-ground. But a new scene and incident
here arrest our thoughts! It is not the humiliating memorials of mortality
that lie scattered around the caves and grottoes and grassy heaps sacred to
many a Bethany villager. It is not even the newly sealed stone which marks
the spot where Lazarus "sleeps." Let us turn aside for a little, and see
this great sight. It is the Creator of all worlds in tears!
The God-man Mediator dissolved in tenderest grief! Of all the memories
of Bethany, this surely is the most hallowed and the most wondrous. These
tears form the most touching episode in sacred story; and if we are in
sorrow, it may either dry our own tears, or give them the warrant to flow
when we are told—Jesus wept!
Why those tears? This is what we shall now inquire.
There is often a false interpretation put upon this brief and touching
verse, as if it denoted the expression of the Savior's sorrow for the loss
of a loved friend. This, it is plain, it could not be. However mingled may
have been the hopes and fears of the weeping mourners around him, He at
least knew that in a few brief moments Lazarus was to be restored. He could
not surely weep so bitterly, possessing, as He then did, the confident
assurance that death was about to give back its captive, and light up every
tear-dimmed eye with an ecstasy of joy. Why, then, we again ask, this
strange and mysterious grief? Come and let us surround the grave of Bethany,
and as we behold the chief mourner at that grave, let us inquire why
it was that "Jesus wept!"
(1.) Jesus wept out of sympathy for the bereaved.
The hearts around Him were breaking with anguish. All unconscious of how
soon and how wondrously their sorrow was to be turned into joy, the
appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness, "Lazarus
is dead!" When He, the God-man Mediator, with the refined
sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the
pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no
longer. His tears flowed too.
But it would be a contracted view of the tears of Jesus
to think that two solitary mourners in a Jewish graveyard engrossed and
monopolized that sympathy. It had a far wider sweep. There were hearts,
yes—myriads of desolate sufferers in ages then unborn, who He knew would be
brought to stand as He was then doing by the grave of loved
relatives—mourners who would have no visible comforter or restorer to rush
to, as had Martha, and Mary, to dry their tears, and give them back their
dead; and when He thought of this, "Jesus wept!"
What an interest it gives to that scene of weeping, to
think that at that eventful moment, the Savior had before Him the
bereaved of all time—that His eye was roaming at that moment through
deserted chambers, and vacant seats, and opened graves, down to the end of
the world. The aged Jacobs and Rachels weeping for their children—the
Ezekiels mourning in the dust and ashes of disconsolate widowhood, "the
desire of their eyes taken away by a stroke"—the unsolaced Marys and Marthas
brooding over a dark future, with the prop and support of existence swept
down, the central sun and light of their being eclipsed in mysterious
darkness!
Think, (as you are now perusing these pages,) throughout
the wide world, how many breaking hearts there are—how loud the wail of
suffering humanity, could we but hear it!—those written childless and
fatherless, and friendless and homeless!—Bethany-processions pacing with
slow and measured step to deposit their earthly all in the cold
custody of the tomb! Think of the Marys and Marthas who are now "going to
some grave to weep there," perhaps with no Savior's smile to gladden them—or
the desolate chambers that are now resounding to the plaintive dirge, "O
Absalom, Absalom, would God I had died instead of you; O Absalom, my son! my
son!"
Think of all these scenes that that moment vividly
suggested and pictured to the Redeemer's eye—the long and loud miserere,
echoing dismally from the remotest bounds of time, and there "entering into
the ear of the God of Sabbath," and can you wonder that—Jesus wept!
Blessed and amazing picture of the Lord of glory! It combines the
delineation alike of the tenderness of His humanity, and the
majesty of His Godhead. His Humanity! It is revealed in those
teardrops, falling from a human eye on a human grave. His Godhead! It
is manifested in His ability to take in with a giant grasp all the
prospective sufferings of His suffering people.
Weeping believer! your anguished heart was included in
those Bethany tears! Be assured your grief was visibly portrayed in that
moment to that omniscient Savior. He had all your sorrows before Him—your
anxious moments during your friend's tedious sickness—the trembling
suspense—the nights of weary watching—the agonizing revelation of "no
hope"—the closing scene! Bethany's graveyard became to Him a
picture-gallery of the world's aching hearts; and yours, yes! yours
was there! and as He beheld it, "Jesus wept!"
Jesus wept! His tears are over,
But His heart is still the same;
Kinsman, Friend, and Elder Brother,
Is His everlasting name.
Savior, who can love like Thee,
Gracious One of Bethany!
When the pangs of trial seize us,
When the waves of sorrow roll,
I will lay my head on Jesus—
Pillow of the troubled soul.
Surely none can feel like Thee,
Weeping One of Bethany!
Jesus wept! And still in glory,
He can mark each mourner's tear;
Loving to retrace the story
Of the hearts He solaced here.
Lord! when I am called to die,
Let me think of Bethany!
Jesus wept! That tear of sorrow
Is a legacy of love;
Yesterday, today, tomorrow,
He the same does ever prove.
You are all in all to me,
Living One of Bethany!
(2.) Jesus wept when He thought of the triumphs of
death! He was treading a burial ground—moldering heaps were around
Him—silent sepulchral caves, giving forth no echo of life! It is a solemn
and impressive thing, even for us, to tread the graveyard; more especially
if there are there treasures of buried affection. The thought that
those whose smile gladdened to us every step in the wilderness, who formed
our solace in sorrow, and our joy in adversity—whose words, and society, and
converse were intertwined with our very being—it is solemn and saddening, as
we tread that land of oblivion, to find these words and looks and tears
unanswered—a gloomy silence hovering over the spot where the wrecks of
treasure and loveliness are laid! He would have a bold, a stern heart
indeed who could pace unmoved over such hallowed ground, and forbid a tear
to flow over the gushing memories of the past!
What, then, must it have been at that moment in Bethany
with Jesus, when He saw one of those purchased by His own blood (dearest to
him) chased by the unsparing destroyer to that gloomy prison-house?
If we have supposed that the tears of Martha and Mary were suggestive of
manifold other broken and sorrowing hearts in other ages, we may well
believe that graveyard was suggestive of triumphs still in reserve for the
tomb, numberless trophies which in every age were to be reaped in by
the King of Terrors until the reaper's arm was paralyzed, and death
swallowed up in victory.
The few silent sepulchers around must have significantly
called to the mind of the Divine spectator how sin had blasted and
scathed His noblest workmanship; converting the fairest province of His
creation into one vast Necropolis—one dismal "city of the dead!" The
body of man, "so fearfully and wonderfully made," and on which He had
originally placed His own impress of "very good," ruined, and resolved into
a mass of humiliating dust! If the architect mourns over the
destruction of some favorite edifice of his, which the storm has swept down,
or the fire has wrapped in conflagration and reduced to ashes—if the
sculptor mourns to see his breathing marble with one crude stroke
hurled to the ground, and its fragments scattered at his feet—what must have
been the sensations of the almighty Architect of the human frame, at
whose completion the morning stars and the sons of God chanted a loud
anthem? What must have been His sensations as He thought of them, now a
devastated wreck, moldering in dissolution and decay, the King of Terrors
sitting in regal state, holding his high holiday over a vassal world!
In Bethany He beheld only a few of these broken and
prostrate columns, but they were powerfully suggestive of millions on
millions which were yet in coming ages to undergo the same doom of
mortality. If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with
emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies,
after all, but some passing hour in the world's history, but which has
carried death and lamentation into many households—the sudden pestilence
that has swept down its thousands—the gallant vessel that was a
moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous
hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the "many ports that would
exult in the gleam of her mast"—the next moment hurrying down to the
depths of an ocean grave, with no survivor to tell the tale! Or the
terrible records of War—the ranks of bold and brave patriots laid low
in the carnage of battle—youth and strength and beauty and rank and
friendship blent in one red burial!
If these and such like mournful tales of death, and the
power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous among us, causing
the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh!
what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive
spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the
Pale Horse with its ghastly rider trampling under foot the vast human
family; converting the globe in which they dwelt into a mournful valley of
dry bones, filled with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men and
animated frames!
The triumphs of death are, in ordinary
circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless
tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides
of the ocean, the oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder
churchyard is the "land of forgetfulness!" Not so with the Lord of
Life, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future,
rose in appalling vividness before Him. Death (vulture-like) flapping his
wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own—vessels freighted with
immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!
Yes! we can only understand the full import of these
tears of Jesus, as we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at
that moment every churchyard and every grave—the mausoleums of the great—the
grassy sods of the poor—the marble grave-stone of the noble and
illustrious—the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the
desert or the chimes of the ocean!—The child carried away in the twinkling
of an eye—the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted—the aged sire,
cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared
like the leaves of autumn—the young exulting in the prime of manhood—the
pious and benevolent—the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the
same inexorable decree—the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning,
hurried away in the midst of scorned mercy!
Oh! as He beheld this ghastly funeral procession
moving before Him, the whole world going to the same long-home, and
He Himself left the sole survivor, can we wonder that Jesus wept?
(3.) Jesus wept when He thought of the impenitence and
obduracy of the human heart. This may not be at first sight patent as a
cause of the tears of Jesus, but we may well believe it entered largely as
an element into this strange flood of sorrow. He was about to perform a
great (His greatest) miracle; but while he knew that, in consequence of this
manifestation of His mighty power, many of those who now stood around
Lazarus' tomb would believe, he knew also that others would only "despise,
and wonder, and perish;" that while some, as we shall afterwards find,
acknowledged Him as the Messiah, others went immediately into Jerusalem to
scheme with the Pharisees in plotting His murder—"But some of them went to
the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done."
When He observed the impenitence of these obdurate hearts
at His side, He could not subdue His tenderest emotion. We read that, when
He saw the sisters weeping, and the Jews that were with them weeping, Jesus
wept. These Jews could weep for a fellow-mortal, but they could not weep for
themselves, and therefore for them, Jesus wept!
One soul was precious to Him. He who alone can estimate
alike the worth and the loss of the soul, might have wept, even had there
been but one then present found to resist His claims and forfeit His
salvation. But these tears extended far beyond that lonely spot in a Jewish
village, and the few impenitent hearts that were then flocking around.
These obdurate Jews were types of the world's impenitency. There
was at that moment summoned before Him a mournful picture of the hardened
hearts in every age—those who would read His gospel, and hear of his
miracles, and listen to the story of His love all unmoved—who would die—as
they had lived, uncheered by His grace and unfit for His presence.
Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a
Redeemer's tears than this—the thought of His Redemption scorned, His
blood trampled on, His work valued as worthless. If we have thought of
Him shedding tears over the ruin of the body, what must have been the
depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the
soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and
consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed! Immortal
beings spurning away from themselves, both the day of grace and the
hopes of heaven!
Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and
sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more
agonizing and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the
limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity—those who
might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and
procrastinated, and finally perished!
If we think of it, it is not the loss of health,
or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the
heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. We put on the sable
attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw things as a weeping Jesus
sees them, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes for the
heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot
His Son, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary.
Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a
state of presumptuous impenitence—salvation unsought—Jesus a stranger—His
name unhonored—His Bible unread—His promises unappropriated—His wrath
undreaded—defeating all His marvelous contrivances of love, and
remonstrance, and forbearance—meeting a prodigal expenditure of His patience
with cold and chilling indifference and neglect—casting away from you the
reservoir of the riches of eternity which He has been holding out for
your acceptance?
In that sacred Bethany ground, as you mark these falling
tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear for you!
Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom "a thousand years
are as one day," marked even then your present ungrateful apostasy or guilty
alienation—there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of
unrequited love!
Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender
sympathy still with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to
think of Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin? Ah, never was
sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so eloquent as this.
Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his fervid love of souls all the
more striking when we find him confessing that he had wept like a child over
those who were "enemies to the cross of Christ." We have often felt Paul's
burning tears over hardened sinners to be touching and impressive. But what
are they, after all, in comparison with those of Paul's Lord? He, the Great
Sun of the World—the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days
behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood—His last rays
seem now lingering over the crest of Mount Olive—His tears seem to tell that
He has clung until He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent
nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live.
And still does He linger among us. Though the
night comes, the beams of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if hesitant
to leave the backsliding to their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own
midnight of despair. O Reader! leave not this subject—leave not the
graveyard of Bethany until you think of Jesus as then weeping for
you! Yes! for you—your pitiable condition—your perverse ingratitude—your
slighting of His warnings—your grieving of His Spirit—your unkindness to
Him—your obstinate disregard of your own everlasting interests.
Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all
the memories of Bethany, that for your soul—that traitor, truant,
worthless soul—which like a stray planet He might have allowed to drift
away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness—helpless, hopeless,
ruined, lost!—Yes! that for you, JESUS WEPT!