John 11:35

THE TEARS OF CHRIST

‘Jesus wept.’

John 11:35

The emotions of Christ were perfectly true to nature. The Saviour dissolved in tears, presents a spectacle of apparent effeminacy of character not in keeping with His dignity and greatness. Yet, was it really so? Tears are not always marks of weakness, they are oftener evidences of power. Springing from the depths of the soul, they are sometimes the exponents of great thoughts, of mighty purposes, of manly feelings, and have a language and a meaning more eloquent and effective than ten thousand tongues. Such were the tears of Jesus.

I. They were tears of sympathy.—We must not omit the sympathetic in Christ’s present emotion. His heart was not only touched with a sense of His own personal affliction, but it was also touched, deeply touched, with sympathy for the sorrows of others: He wept because the mourning sisters wept. He mingled His tears with theirs. This is true sympathy, ‘ weeping with those that weep,’ making their sorrow our own. How really our Lord does this with His people! Our present griefs are so entirely absorbed in Him, that, softened by His love, soothed by His sympathy, succoured by His grace, trial is welcome, affliction is sweet, and the rod of a Father’s chastening buds and blossoms into delectable fruit.

II. Bereaved mourner! the sympathy of Christ is yours!—The Saviour who wept at the grave of Bethany, now shares your grief and joins your tears. Deem not your sorrow is lone, or that your tears are forbidden or unseen. You have not a merciful and faithful High Priest Who cannot be touched with your present calamity. There exists no sympathy so real, so intelligent, so deep, so tender, so sanctifying as Christ’s. And if your heavenly Father has seen it wise and good to remove from you the spring of human pity, it is but that He may draw you closer beneath the wing of the God-man’s compassion, presence, and love. O child of sorrow! will not this suffice, that you possess Christ’s sympathy, immeasurable and exhaustless as the ocean, exquisite and changeless as His being? Yield your heart to this rich compassion, and then, ‘ though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold.’

III. Learn a lesson from the practical sympathy of Jesus.—Compassion is as luxurious an emotion of our nature as it is manly and graceful in him who shows it. ‘ To him that is afflicted pity should be shewed from his friend’ (Job 6:14). What a sacred privilege to imitate Him ‘ Who went about doing good’! To visit the widow and the fatherless in their distress, the prisoner in his dungeon, the bereaved in their grief, the sick in their solitude, the poor in their need, the fallen in their self-reproach; in a word, to be an angel of comfort to some child of woe from whose bosom hope has fled—this, oh! this is sympathy.

Rev. Dr. Octavius Winslow.

Illustration

‘Tears of love! behold them flowing

From the Elder Brother’s eye!

See Him as a mourner going

To the grave at Bethany!

He, Who through its shadowy portal

Summon’d back the freed immortal—

He, Whose all-commanding word

Sheathed the gloomy victor’s sword—

There, where buried friendship sleeps,

He, our own Immanuel, weeps.

‘Tears of pity! see them gushing

From their pure and sacred fount!

Angels! your hosannas hushing,

Bend ye from the holy mount.

Stoop to read the wondrous story,

How the “Father’s brightest glory”

At a sinner’s grave can stand,

Mourner ’mid a mourning band,

With the heart, the voice, the eye

Of a perfect sympathy!

‘Tears of Jesus! while I ponder,

Blessed comfort let me reap;

“That same Jesus” liveth yonder

Who on earth was wont to weep.

Though His brow the rainbow weareth,

Yet my thorny crown He shareth;

Yet that loving heart Divine

Throbs responsively to mine:

Not a struggling sigh can rise,

But ’tis echo’d in the skies.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

TEARS OF SYMPATHY

There is scarcely a more precious gift of God than ‘tears.’ How precious, none know but those who would give the world for ‘tears,’ and cannot find them.

I. It is a blessed thing to have a ‘tearful’ nature.—We all have ‘tears’ in childhood. Why does the man weep less than the babe? Has he less cause to weep? Is it a stern law of nature that is given to infancy, and denied to our maturity? Or is it the hardening process which has been going on ever since we left our mother’s knee? The rough contact of life, the schoolroom, the playground, the associations of early life, the habits of youth, the infection of the world: of its money, its dissipations, its cares, its hardness? Softness is a bud which needs cherishing, and which will go if it is not carefully watched, and if it does not find itself in a genial atmosphere! It is a bloom which must be protected, or it will be brushed off! I speak earnestly to those who are just passing out of childhood. Keep jealously—jealously—that sweetest treasure which you carry with you from your nursery—an eye that can weep, a cheek that can blush, a heart that can melt! A poor bargain will it be, if you barter those ‘tears,’ for all the excitement that amusement can ever give; or for all the possessions which money has ever bought! Young man! never be ashamed of ‘tears.’ It is the highest honour of a man—to have a man’s strength with a woman’s softness!

II. ‘Tears’ belong to Jesus.—It was His unfallen humanity that was so exquisitely ‘tearful.’ It is by union with Jesus that you will get back ‘tears.’ You will recover your childhood, and so you will partake in Christ’s gentle, gushing nature. Is not this part of what is meant—that ‘you must become as a little child’—that you may cry? ‘The world, the flesh, the devil,’ kill ‘tears.’ Every sin you do kills a ‘tear.’ Jesus is their resurrection. You must not only go to Him—you must be in Him. Still do you say, ‘I have no tears’? Think of Jesus. Perhaps one of those many ‘tears’ He shed on earth is for you. ‘Tears’—yes, blood; for that dear Lord wept blood! At this moment, if you could see Jesus—as He looks on you even in heaven—I believe there would be a ‘tearfulness.’ ‘But still no tears?’ What, and if Jesus’s ‘tears’ may stand for ours, even as His righteousness is our righteousness? Then, in Him my ‘tearless’ being has ‘tears.’ Those ‘tears’ are mine. I do not weep, I cannot weep; but I weep in Him, and God accepts the weeping.

III. You will do well distinctly to understand that Jesus’s ‘tears’ at the grave of Bethany were purely ‘tears’ of sympathy. Jesus’s heart beat at once with the hearts about Him. He ‘wept’ because others ‘wept.’ Not Mary and Martha only, but many. ‘When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid Him? They said unto Him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.’ It would be a beautiful and Christ-like thing to go about life with a tearful sympathy, carrying everywhere—to the sad and the sorrowful—not words, not comforting—‘tears!’ To the sinner—not words, not reproaches, not preaching—‘tears!’ There is a sympathy which is hard to rouse, and which very soon goes to sleep; which has in it more of duty than feeling; which fixes objects; which is very capricious in its work; which seldom rises to any loving height; which has a great deal of self and pride in it. I am not speaking of that. I speak of a sympathy which has fine, delicate cords running into every one’s heart, which goes out, in a moment, to any one; to the happy, as to the unhappy; to the wicked; to the repulsive; which is set to every nature; which has a word, a thought, a feeling, which fits into every part of our common manhood: which can ‘weep with all that weep,’ and, higher still, which can ‘rejoice’—however dull itself—‘with all that rejoice’: nay, which can also still, in purest sympathy, rejoice with the weeper—for every weeping has its rejoicing; and weep with the rejoicer—because every rejoicing has its sorrow. The soul that does that—for Jesus’s sake—has an immense amount of Jesus in it. Do not be content with a low level of sympathy. Sympathy is not worth much unless it bring a ‘tear’ to the eye.

Rev. James Vaughan.