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“Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus?”

This week has been hard. An unsaved friend of over 30 years is on his way out of this world. He can’t communicate directly anymore, and his younger sister, the “baby” of the family, has been passing messages back and forth to me. I have every confidence the Judge of all the earth will do justice with respect to my friend, but his poor sister has no clue. Her desolation when she talks about losing her brother would break your heart.

Am I grieving for my friend? Absolutely. But I’m grieving even more for his family, who do not have the resources I do.

Grief is not a new thing for me. It probably isn’t for most of our readers. Yes, we lose more people we love as we age, but death is always with us. It’s a major “given” in the experience of being human. By the time I hit the age of 33, the grave had claimed three of my close relatives, one dear friend and several fond family acquaintances. In two cases, extended suffering was involved, and the pain and confusion experienced by those left behind will be with me forever. At 16, my horror of a painful exit from this world was vivid.

Jesus and the Experience of Death

My memory is not what it once was, so I am probably estimating my early-life losses on the low side. That was in the late twentieth century, pre-MAID and pre-COVID, when healthcare in Canada was probably among the best in human history. Can anyone seriously speculate that at age 33, with first century healthcare and average lifespans being what they were, the Lord Jesus had never experienced death among his friends and family? By the time he went to the cross, I’m guessing he had outlived many he loved, far more than I ever had at that age. One of them may — I say may — have been his stepfather Joseph. We hear nothing of the man in the gospel accounts after the early days of our Lord’s life.

So then, I am quite confident death was no new experience for the Son of Man that day he visited the burial site of his friend in Bethany.

Moreover, the Lord Jesus was not experiencing grief for the first time at the tomb of Nazareth. Not by a long shot. The prophets tell us he was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. For a perfect man in a fallen world, grief was a daily experience. He was at the tail end of his ministry, only a few days from the cross. From the rejection and persecution he experienced constantly from his own people, it is evident he understood the human condition and the fallen-ness of our planet a great deal better than we do.

The Bosom of Abraham

Furthermore, anyone who could tell the story of the rich man and Lazarus (a different Lazarus) knew perfectly well that when he approached the sealed tomb, he was doing Lazarus no favors yanking him back into this side of the great divide. The spirit of Lazarus was at that moment in the bosom of Abraham, though his body lay in the tomb. He wasn’t suffering. He was “comforted”, as that passage teaches. Jesus also knew what he had intended from the beginning: that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He told his disciples as much at the beginning of the chapter.

All to say this: I do not believe for a moment that the Lord wept for Lazarus, or that he was expressing his personal grief for a lost friend. You might. I might. But the Lord Jesus was in a very different place than we are with respect to his knowledge of death and the hereafter. His teaching makes that evident. Killing the body, he taught, was no great thing. So let us not read into his reaction at the tomb of Lazarus our own emotional baggage in dealing with death.

What Does the Scripture Say?

Rather, we should read what the text says in John’s gospel:

“When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept.”

John attributes the Lord’s grief to the pain and confusion of those left behind, especially Mary. That’s the force of the Greek adverb translated “when”. It connects cause and effect. It associates the deep moving of the Lord’s spirit with the weeping of Mary and her friends. Jesus wept because he sympathized with their weaknesses. As the KJV puts it, he was touched with the feeling of their infirmities. He knew they lacked the resources he had. He knew they did not understand what was happening or why. He wept with those who weep, as the only man in history so perfectly qualified to be our great High Priest must surely do. I trust I may have his help in doing the same for my friend’s family.

See How He Loved Him!

Those around misunderstood, as some still do today. They said, “See how he loved him!” They assumed Jesus was experiencing exactly what they would have experienced under the same circumstances: personal loss, confusion, despair, perhaps even the questioning of God’s goodness.

Of course the Lord loved Lazarus. The passage plainly says so. But Lazarus was not the one in need of sympathy in that moment, and I don’t think our Lord wept for his friend. Even less do I imagine he wept for his own loss in the very last moments before he remedied it.