The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

[Jesus] said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep." [John 11:34-35]

Jesus weeps.

He trembles. He cries. His voice cracks. And he has no teaching or parable to explain away the pain of this moment. For this moment--between the death of his friend Lazarus and the moment when Jesus summons him back to life--Jesus sits shiva and only laments the loss of his friend's life cut short. And for this moment, there are no words. Just tears.

We who have heard the story of Lazarus before, as many of us did this past Sunday, know that there will come a moment, very soon, in the story, when Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead, and that everyone will be all smiles again before the scene ends. But this moment--this moment of utter helplessness, of total vulnerability, of sheer lament--this moment is a hard one for us to bear. This, too, is what God is like.  This, too, is the Lord of all creation and Ground of all being. Jesus shows us a God who weeps, whether you and I like it or not.

Typically, we like our saviors to be active heroes, casting out demons and curing lepers in the blink of an eye, rather than weeping uncontrollably and drawing everyone's attention while doing it. But there is Jesus, melting into a million tears because his friend died too soon.

Generally, we want our saviors to be idealized generic supermen, descending from on high (whether from heaven or the planet Krypton) but keeping their distance. But Jesus shows up as an olive-skinned Jewish rabbi from the Middle East grieving the death of another olive-skinned Jew from the Middle East, as completely human as you and me.

Usually, we expect our saviors to point fingers at an obvious easy target for an enemy to hate, someone we can pin all the blame for when things go wrong, and then for the "savior" figure to obliterate those identified villains in order to save the day. But instead we are given Jesus, who doesn't vilify anyone nor make anyone out to be the bad guy at Lazarus' grave--he is simply grieving the reality of death. Jesus grieves, because God grieves over death--any death.

And honestly, all of that is hard for us. It is a challenge for us to allow Jesus to weep--it makes him seem somehow out of control, somehow too much like us for our comfort. We want to jump ahead to the miraculous moment of resuscitation when Lazarus comes out of the grave, just like we want to skip Good Friday and Holy Saturday right to the pastels and major-key anthems of Easter Sunday. But today the challenge of Jesus is to bear the moments when our only task is grieving, and where the only right words are lament. Today, our challenge is to sit shiva with Jesus, to be vulnerable with Jesus, to grieve with Jesus, and to hold our tongues before blurting out some faux-religious justification for the terrors that happen in this world or lobbing out some half-baked tough-sounding "solution" to prevent terrible things from happening.  If we belong to the found-family of Jesus and his beloved, then sometimes the thing we are called to do, as the Apostle Paul would write to the Romans, is to "weep with those who weep," even when it looks utterly weak and pointless.

Today, in other words, the challenge of Jesus is to weep with him--and therefore with God--over every death: those still grieving from terrorist attacks a few years ago in Israel, as well as those grieving in Gaza and Iran; those who have lost loved ones in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Sudan, and in our own neighborhoods.  We grieve over every death, never celebrating anyone's dying, because Jesus has shown us that there are tears streaming down God's face as well. And from there we cannot help but see this weeping God present also at the lynching trees of the American South while Confederate flags wave in the background, decades after the Civil War was over... and to see God there tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die... and to see God forced to flee from violence and disaster and taking up shelter among moving bands of refuge-seekers. We cannot help but see God in every place of suffering in all of human history--Jesus has shown us this about God.

We do not want to do this, but Jesus challenges us to weep with him, where he is, even though he keeps insisting on bringing the presence of God into all the places we do not think a respectable, strong, "winner" deity to be found.

So let us grieve today--with no trying to explain away the horror, or to minimize the evil, or to pretend that more weapons will keep us "safe" next time, or to skip past what feels like weakness and vulnerability. Let us sit shiva with our Jesus, who wept for Lazarus, and who weeps today for beloved ones still all over the world.

Lord Jesus, grant us to share your pain and to weep with you, rather than to avoid or ignore or to skip the necessary lament of this day.