When God Wept
Au Clair de Lune by John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1882
I have known what it is like to get ‘the call’. It is often unexpected and in less than a minute, one is informed of the death of a close loved one. The future that was taken for granted just minutes before is now utterly gone, leaving your soul gaping at the sudden void a loved one leaves behind when they are taken from this world.
I am a philosopher who has published papers on the problem of suffering and the existence of God, in peer-reviewed journals of philosophy … but when ‘the call’ comes, no philosophical argument can take away the pain. Philosophers deal with the mind and intellect, not so much with the heart and the emotions at the very core of our being. Philosophical arguments, no matter how brilliant, seem pathetically inadequate to speak to the heart.
With this in mind, when it comes to God, does he grieve with us? Has he felt the anguish of seeing someone he loves in agony as they struggle to cope with the aching emptiness a loved one leaves behind in their life as they privately weep?
It was not until the funeral of one of my granddaughters that I remembered something - Jesus wept when he saw the grief of those he loved.
The obvious kind of grief:
I have lived long enough to have experienced ‘the call’ several times and with increasing frequency as the years go by. I found out about each one through ‘the call’, which might nowadays take the form of a text. The shortest notification was simply, “She’s gone.”
This obvious kind of grief has somehow changed me in a positive way - making me a more thoughtful, compassionate person, and giving me a deeper perspective of the shortness of life and this world, and a growing connection with eternity. As for this first kind of grief, there is something I can ‘do’ about surviving and coping through the months after the call. I think about eternity, how this life is only the beginning, not the end for those who have eternal life, and I stay busy in whatever mission God has given me for this life. But at the funeral of my granddaughter, Anastasia, I experienced a very different, more brutal kind of grief, that I was helpless to ‘do’ anything about other than just be there for her.
A more brutal kind of grief:
As I looked at the face of my own youngest daughter during the funeral of her daughter, I was blind-sided by another, more brutal kind of grief that I never saw coming. She was in agony. All her life I had tried to raise and protect my daughter, but now I felt utterly helpless to make her pain go away.
This second kind of grief is brutal - one is helplessly forced to witness a loved one in anguish; there is nothing one can do but be near, give the occasional hug, and try to serve them in some way. I know that in going through this extremely difficult chapter in life, she will emerge a more wonderful, thoughtful, wiser, and compassionate woman because of it - but it tore my heart out to have to watch her endure the loss of her child.
I could fight back the tears for the first kind of grief, at least in public, but this second kind of grief - it was beyond my will power and capability to restrain, and I quietly and as discreetly as I could, wept as I tried to hide my face from those around me. It was an intense grief over the anguish of someone I love. This, more brutal kind of grief was much harder to bear. Has God experienced this second kind of grief?
It was at that moment, as I quietly wept, that the shortest verse in the Bible seared itself across my mind - I think it was God himself that did it, and I then I understood that we do not weep alone.
When God wept:
It was a lonely day when Jesus arrived at the outskirts of the town named Bethany. He had close friends there that he would stay with - Mary, Martha, and Lazarus - two sisters and their brother, and we are told that he loved the three of them. But this day Lazarus was gone - having died four days earlier. As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was at the entrance of town, she ran alone, found Jesus, and cried, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus attempted to console her and she ran back to let her sister Mary know that Jesus wanted to see her.
It was the same Mary who, in happier times, had sat at the feet of Jesus, soaking up his words and, later, would anoint the feet of Jesus with an extremely expensive perfume known as Nard, wiping his feet with her hair. She loved him dearly.
She ran out of the house, with the mourners following her, and fell down at the feet of Jesus and in anguish cried, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
“When Jesus saw her 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 11:33-35)
Jesus did not weep over the death of his close friend Lazarus - he knew he was going to raise him from the dead in a few minutes. But when he looked upon the anguish in Mary’s face, heard the agony in her and her sister Martha’s voice, and witnessed the grieving of those who wept with them, he was deeply moved in the most powerful way within himself.
Then Jesus wept. The one who is I AM, and who transcends time, the Creator of the Universe - he wept.
Implications for you and I: Jesus, who said he will one day raise up to immortal, eternal life every person who has put their hope and trust in him … he has been here and lived among us. You can know that he not only personally endured the loss of close loved ones, but he grieves for we who grieve. He knows that we will become more thoughtful, more compassionate, and wiser for it - but he still wept.
I find this brings enormous solace to my soul.
A last question:
If God grieves for we who grieve, why does he not simply take our grief away?
I do not know the answer to that question, I can only say what I have glimpsed. As I think back over my life, every time of grieving has made me a better person - more thoughtful, compassionate, wiser, less obsessed with this world, and more strongly connected to God and eternity. God often speaks of the need to refine us as gold. The refining fires of life can be enormously difficult to go through. But what sort of person will I turn out to be in the end without those refining fires? I think C.S. Lewis put it well after the passing of his wife. He wrote,
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’ … Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.” (1)
And so in times of great grief, it helps to know that God knows our pain and that Jesus wept over the pain of those who grieve. But he has promised that when it is all over,
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.(2)
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References:
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.
Revelation 21:4
