The Preciousness of Tears

The Preciousness of Tears--September 18, 2018

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." [Matthew 5:4]

You know what is of great value to Jesus?  Your tears.  They are infinitely precious in the sight of God.  

The wounds in your heart and mine, the grief from losses, from defeats, from failures, and from regrets, these things are of great worth to the living God.  Enough that even the ancient poets of Israel imagined that God keeps bottle full of our tears and writes down the stories of our pains in a diary, treasuring them because God loves us, and because that means God chooses to share even our heartaches.

Now, that is a powerful and beautiful statement to make about God.  But I should warn you, you can only dare to say such things about how God values our tears if you grant, too, that God is vulnerable to tears, too.  An impersonal force, a la Star Wars, will not care about your suffering, because it cannot.  A stoic picture of the almighty who cannot be hurt is incapable of empathizing. If we dare to believe Jesus' promise that God comforts the brokenhearted, there will be a cost for faith in such a God--a cost to God, and the loss of all of our idolatrous mental pictures of an invulnerable, impassive, unfeeling deity.

A God who comforts the mourning has to be capable of mourning, too.  A God who tenderly wipes away the tears from our faces and puts them in a bottle must be capable of weeping as well.  A God who knows the weight and worth of our sorrows must know what it is to have your heart laid bare to the raw sadness of this world.

A God who promises to bind up the broken-hearted must have a breakable heart, too.  The only way Jesus' words can hold any water is if the God for whom Jesus speaks is vulnerable, too.

That may make us uncomfortable, because many of us have been taught to idolize the stoic stiff-upper-lip routine.  We imagine that if our God is really a respectable deity, then nothing should be able to get through God's armor--God should be the toughest and biggest thing around.  The medieval theologians got it in their heads (and I had plenty of theology professors in college who nodded in approval) that God couldn't be vulnerable, that in fact, God could not feel anything at all, because (they said) feelings are susceptible to change, and God cannot change, since God is eternally perfect and timeless.  Well, that wrapped their picture of God up in a neat and tidy little bow of logic, but it also tied the hands of the actual God we meet in the Scriptures.  Never mind, of course, that the idea of a God that cannot bleed owes more to the Greek philosophers and their idea of an "Unmoved Mover" than to the covenant-making God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Call it whatever you like--the "Unmoved Mover," the "Invisible Hand," or "the Force"--if it is an it in the first place (rather than a who), and if your Ultimate Whatever is invulnerable to rejection, to heartache, to suffering, and to unrequited love, then it cannot offer comfort to anybody else who mourns.  And such a "force" cannot treasure our tears or share our sorrows. Such a force cannot see the use in comforting those who mourning.

That is the double cost our God pays to keep the promise Jesus makes here.  It costs God to comfort those who mourn, first because it requires God to be strong in our weakness as the One who will wipe away our tears.  But second, it cost God because the ability to comfort is possible only if God's own heart can be broken for the love of us.  This statement of blessing, "Blessed are those who mourn," is particularly precious and expensive to the God who stands behind Jesus' words.

But if the Bible is to be believed, God is willing to pay that price.  Look at Jesus, moments before he raises Lazarus from the dead (a sure comfort to Mary and Martha, who were literally mourning for their dead brother)--there is the life-giving Messiah, who claims to be "the Resurrection and the Life," weeping himself even while he knows what he is about to do.  There is that same Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem in an earnest offer of unrequited love to the city and the people who kept rejecting him. And again, there he is in the garden, weeping tears and sweating under the pressure of what is before him on the night of his betrayal.

Ours is the God who casts himself as the broken-hearted lover when faithless Israel went astray trusting in their wealth and armies, running after other gods and foreign alliances.  Ours is the God who tells a prophet to go out a marry a cheating spouse so that the people will have a clear picture of the heartache that they have put their Lord through.  Ours is the God who said, "I taught my people how to walk and took them in my arms and healed them, but they did not know that it was me, and the more I called to them, the more they kept turning away" (see Hosea 11:1-3).

To hear the Scriptures themselves tell it, our God has mourned over us.  And our God knows what it is both to bleed for us, dying on the cross in the human life of Jesus, and at the same time, what it is to grieve over a lost Son.  And none of us stuck around to comfort God on that fateful Friday.  Nevertheless, Jesus says, God was never in the business of returning volleys we served first.  God is always the One to risk loving without being loved back, and who follows through even when we are fickle.  So you can take it to the bank when Jesus promises that there is comfort for those who mourn, and you can count on it that the God for whom Jesus speaks will ultimately bring such comfort, because this same God has mourned over this sin-sick world and over the Son lost and raised to redeem it.

Do you want to know what is of infinite value to God?  You and your tears--because the living God knows what it is to weep, too.

O Lord our God, let us dare to trust that you are mindful of our sorrow, that you have shared it with us, and that you will be both strong for us and willing to suffer for us, so that we might be comforted.