The God Who Weeps: A Sermon

"Jesus Wept,” by James Tissot (c. 1886-96)

In my sermon this past Sunday at our church, I tried to make the case to our congregation that Jesus weeps not merely because it represented the way that grief in an ancient Mediterranean world was a public and shareable good, which no doubt is at play.

Jesus is recorded weeping, more importantly, because this is precisely what it looks like for Jesus to be Immanuel, the God who is with us; this is what with-us-ness looks like in physical form; this is what the empathetic love of God looks like in lachrymal and proximate manner.

In our case as human beings, crying is a manifestation of the physical passions for the sake of, amongst other reasons, com-passionate response. Emotion, in this case, is all about motion: it moves us towards others and it invites others to move towards us as well.

Tears, to the point, are not a lack of so-called manly strength, as many in our culture may suppose; they’re a God-made sign of physical vitality and relational health.

I also posed a series of questions at the end, which could apply to any church which takes John 11 seriously:

What if we became a place where vulnerability was cherished because we so fully believed it was one of the most Christlike ways to show love to one another?

What if we got the reputation for being a place where people were free to be transparent with each other because we so resolutely believed that God’s strength was truly made perfect in weakness?

What if we were the place where people wept with those who wept, precisely because we believed, as Jesus tells us in Luke 6, that the blessedness of the kingdom of God is found in such an exchange?

And what if, when guests visited our small groups and children’s ministry and missional ventures, they encountered the empathetic love of Jesus in and through you.

Achilles, in the end, may have been the great hero of Greek mythology because he bore the griefs of his people, but Jesus is the Salvator Mundi because he bears all of our griefs and he makes all of them his own, from the inside, empathetically, vicariously and redemptively. 

You can listen to the rest of my sermon here (I begin preaching at minute 31).