Jesus' Tears and Our Suffering

In the chair that night, I didn’t get a miracle, or at least not the kind I thought I needed. And I didn’t get a big explanation of what was going on. I certainly didn’t get a message from God telling me just to suck it up and remember the cause of the glory of God. But I did get something—tears. Both mine and His. 

That’s the kind of Jesus we follow. He is not one who sim- ply barks orders onto the battlefield of life, telling us to go here or there, do this or that. We do not follow an ivory-tower Jesus.

The Christ we follow knows the full range of human experience. He is not an isolated God but one intimately acquainted with the pain of the human condition. He is Immanuel, God with us. We may rest assured that whatever situation we find ourselves in, God is emotionally involved there too. When we weep at the death of a loved one, our Jesus weeps as well. When we rejoice because all is well, His shouts of joy eclipse our own. And when we fall in the dirt before Him—so sure of theological facts yet emotionally destroyed by the circum- stances of this sinful world—He falls down and weeps with us.

This is our God. This is the God who knew the end before the beginning. He is the One who knew the resurrection before the crucifixion. He is the One who knew the glory before the pain. Because He knows those things, He can make grand promises about the eternal glory that awaits all those who are His. Yet His response to us in the pain of the human condition is not, “Just believe! It will all be over soon. This is nothing compared to what awaits you.” Instead, His response is to walk through the pain with us. His response is to offer His abiding presence in the form of the Holy Spirit until the day God
receives the glory He deserves.

At the end of this life He will still be there with us, but we will be seated together beside the throne of the Father, scarcely able to remember those times when He knelt in the dirt beside us and wept.

But until that time maybe sometimes what we need more than just another explanation, another cliché, or another prom- ise of heaven . . . is tears. Tears of the One who understands. Tears of the One who empathizes. Tears of the One who doesn’t just tell us that everything will be OK in the end but of the One who feels our pain as deeply as we do.

- Michael Kelley, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal, p. 70,71