John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”
The shortest verse in the Bible; Jesus wept.
Throughout my tweens and teens I was a avid poet. I love poems and the different ways we can write the exact same words, but just a slightly different format, and the meaning is completely different.
So as we taught the story of Lazarus the the 3 year olds today in Sunday School, I couldn't help but wonder why would Jesus weep when he's about to raise Lazarus from the dead? And why was it emphasized in it's own verse that Jesus was crying?
There's lots of different opinions out there, so if you want to do some research on it, I promise that it's very fascinating, but I have three different points I'd like to share with you.
1) Jesus was not just the Son of God, He was also fully human.
The fact that Jesus was God in human form means that when he fell down as a child, he hurt. When he celebrated their holidays with family and friends, he felt happy. When he got sick, he ached. So why wouldn't he cry when he saw his friends grieving?
He felt our pain and sorrow, and felt our joyful and happy moments. He experienced them as we have! Even more so should we rely on God to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly feelings and situations we find ourselves in. He's been there. He knows.
2) Jesus knew that even though he was going to perform this miracle, people were still not going to believe that he is God.
It pains me to think that when Jesus walked among us, performing miracles completely unfathomable today, people still didn't believe that he was God. In fact, the very fact that we today have to rely on more faith because we haven't seen with our own eyes, seems like it's even more blatantly obvious that if the people of Jesus time saw and did not believe, how blind and hard hearted they truly must have been.
3) Just as poems emphasize on certain phrases, God wrote it this way in the Bible to make a point.
And what exactly is that point? I believe the point was to make you stop and think about how powerful those two words are...
Jesus wept
The Universe is Gods throne and the Earth is His footstool. In the vastness of space and time each one of us are nothing more that the tiniest blip in the grand scheme of the known universe, and even smaller than that in what is beyond the edge of space.
And yet, God sent his only son to become one of us. To experience the pain and devastation we go through, to die for us in the most painful and tortured way, just to repair the bridge between us and God and restore what Satan had destroyed when evil entered the world.
All because He loved us. The human race. The little, simple minded, undeserving of a second glance, and completely lost in darkness, sheeple.
God repaired what once was broken and all we have to do today is just ask for salvation and it is done. But even though it's in His book, in black and white, simply put,
People will still not believe.
So
Jesus. Wept.
With Love,
Emily
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