XII.
The Weeping Saviour.
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!
Whence 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 Saviour’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. Whence, 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.