I was surfing the Christian Facebook network and saw someone posted the scripture "Jesus wept."
There were 15K thumbs up on this scripture. I read some of the 182 comments and even added one of my own. None of them really seemed to take this verse in context.
"Jesus is weeping over the world right now."
"He weeps for me."
"He knows my sorrow."
"His tears made me whole."
"Amen"
I don't know maybe its me, I don't understand those comments.
In context Jesus had just gotten to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus.
He waited 4 days to make sure Lazarus was good and dead. Mary was cross with him for waiting, because Lazarus didn't have to die right then if only Jesus had come when she asked him to.
So Jesus waited for Lazarus to die, then he comes and he knows full well he is going to awaken Lazarus from the grave in a few minutes. He is going to glorify his Father in heaven and left everyone know the power of God!
Yet he weeps.
The hopelessness and helplessness of Mary and the people there are what touched him. He knew that their tears would be turned to tears of joy in a few minutes, but he had compassion on the masses. He could take on their pain like a true empath. When he touched people to heal them, he for a moment felt their infirmity. He walked in their shoes with a touch of his hand--that is how his vitality was poured out on a daily basis--he was truly laying his life down for us the moment his baptism began at Jordan and ended with his actual death a few days after this incident with Lazarus.
These people are despondent at the loss of Lazarus. Lazarus came from a well to do family. Their father, Simon ( Matt. 26:6; Mark 14:3; John 12:4) , was a Pharisee (Luke 7:37) as well as a leper (Mark 14:3). There was a big crowd gathered for this funeral or mourning.
There were 15K thumbs up on this scripture. I read some of the 182 comments and even added one of my own. None of them really seemed to take this verse in context.
"Jesus is weeping over the world right now."
"He weeps for me."
"He knows my sorrow."
"His tears made me whole."
"Amen"
I don't know maybe its me, I don't understand those comments.
In context Jesus had just gotten to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus.
He waited 4 days to make sure Lazarus was good and dead. Mary was cross with him for waiting, because Lazarus didn't have to die right then if only Jesus had come when she asked him to.
So Jesus waited for Lazarus to die, then he comes and he knows full well he is going to awaken Lazarus from the grave in a few minutes. He is going to glorify his Father in heaven and left everyone know the power of God!
Yet he weeps.
The hopelessness and helplessness of Mary and the people there are what touched him. He knew that their tears would be turned to tears of joy in a few minutes, but he had compassion on the masses. He could take on their pain like a true empath. When he touched people to heal them, he for a moment felt their infirmity. He walked in their shoes with a touch of his hand--that is how his vitality was poured out on a daily basis--he was truly laying his life down for us the moment his baptism began at Jordan and ended with his actual death a few days after this incident with Lazarus.
These people are despondent at the loss of Lazarus. Lazarus came from a well to do family. Their father, Simon ( Matt. 26:6; Mark 14:3; John 12:4) , was a Pharisee (Luke 7:37) as well as a leper (Mark 14:3). There was a big crowd gathered for this funeral or mourning.
These people had no hope. He had been with them for three years and just as the Apostles didn't get it, the masses didn't either. He had already pronounced the nation as cast off--it would take a few years to go into effect (AD 70).
He felt sorry for them. He says elsewhere he was like a mother hen to them, but they were having none of it. They didn't want to come under his protective wings, they rejected him and what he had to offer.
Later on his way to the crucifixion, he tells the daughters not to weep for him, but for what is coming.
I am sure a lot of things went through Jesus' mind that day. He knew in less than a week, he would be dead. When you know you are in the last days of your life, you tend to think more soberly (not that he wasn't sober before), but we find the night of his death just how sober he was, the literal weight of the entire world rested on his shoulders. One slip up, and the world was lost and so was he.
One brother likes to say, Jesus made his sacrifice personal. He laid his life down for his friends; Peter, James and John and the rest. When things got bleak, he thought of them. If he failed, Peter, James and John do not get a resurrection. Technically he died to "ransom" Father Adam--because it is through Adam that we are all condemned, and by ransoming Adam, we all get the positive benefit as well. But is was Peter and the others who Jesus had just spent three and a half years with and they were his family and he loved them.
We know Jesus also in the garden prayed for us--everyone who would come to him through the words of the Apostles, but those were the faces he saw.
With the knowledge of what was coming and the emotion of the circumstance, he wept. It was a lot to take in. He didn't get teary eyed, it was much more than that.
That is why it can be said that we have a "sympathetic high priest who can be touched with a feeling for our infirmities."
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