Does God cry?
Bethany's grave is where the shortest verse in the Bible stands, and it stands there because the One who called Himself the resurrection and the life stopped and cried in front of a tomb. That raises the question people really want answered: were those only a man's tears, or do they tell us something true about God Himself?
Divine compassion through human eyes
The tears were not self-pity. They were shed by someone who had nothing to lose at that grave, and one writer treats the fact as a mystery worth sitting with rather than explaining away.
C. H. Mackintosh"Jesus wept"! A wonderful, meaningful fact! He wept not for Himself, but for others. He wept with them. Mary wept. The Jews wept. All this is easily grasped and understood. But that Jesus should weep reveals a mystery which we cannot fathom. It was divine compassion weeping through human eyes over the ruin that sin had caused in this poor world, weeping in sympathy with those whose hearts had been crushed by the pitiless hand of death.
One Person, not two
You cannot answer the question by splitting Jesus into a human part that felt and a divine part that stayed untouched. The weeping and the deity belong to the same "He."
J. A. TrenchIt seems to me beautifully simple if we let the plain words of Scripture have their place in our hearts. There we find a Man — a perfect, blessed Man "full of grace and truth." He was "wearied" at the well; He "loved" Martha, and the rest; "he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled"; He "wept" — all beautiful expressions of human feeling in perfection. But who was "He"? The eternal Word, the Son of God, one with the Father. If you bring in another personality, the truth of incarnation is gone.
Tears for the living, not the dead
Onlookers assumed He was crying over His dead friend. One writer points out why that reading does not hold up.
Hamilton SmithThe Jews wrongly interpret these tears as a sign of the Lord's love for Lazarus. He did love Lazarus, but there was no need to weep for someone He was about to raise from the dead. It was the sorrow of the living that drew out the tears of Jesus, as we read, "When Jesus saw her weeping … He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled," and His trouble found its outlet in tears, for "Jesus wept."
Tears for friends and for enemies
He also cried over a city that was set on rejecting Him. Put the two scenes side by side and they answer the question about God directly, because Jesus said that seeing Him is seeing the Father.
J T MawsonSee Him weeping with the sisters of Bethany at the closed grave of their brother, and see Him as He looks at guilty Jerusalem and weeps over it, knowing what is coming. Tears for friends and tears for foes! Impartial tears! Do you want to know the Father? "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."
God's sorrow before Bethlehem
The feeling did not begin at Bethany. It is stated of God long before, in the way He carried a rebellious people.
James BoydHas the living God no compassion or sympathy? Can He not be moved by the sight of human suffering? The presence of Him who was sent here by the Father is a sufficient answer to that. And is not the cross of the Son the great display of that love and pity with which He looked down on a world dominated by sin and Satan? Even about the sorrow of His earthly and rebellious people He could say: "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them."
Still the same heart today
He is no longer standing at a graveside in Judea. Writers insist that the change of place has not changed the heart.
An Outline of Sound WordsThough the Son of God is now in heaven, His heart is still touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, and His sympathy and compassion are as real and as great as when He wept by the grave of Lazarus. When His own go through bereavement they lean on the divine comfort of the One who knows the deepest depths of the human heart, whose love and wisdom arrange everything for their greatest good.
Summary
- Yes — visibly. At the tomb the tears were real tears, and commentators read them as divine compassion coming out through human eyes.
- Yes — personally. The One weeping is the eternal Word, the Son of God; the feelings are not borrowed from a second, separate person inside Him.
- Yes — for you. He cried not over the dead man but over the grief of the living standing there.
- Yes — widely. The same eyes wept over the city that was rejecting Him: tears for friends and for foes alike.
- Yes — still. Seated in heaven, His sympathy is as real now as it was at Bethany, until God Himself wipes away every tear.