By Rev Charles Seet

Preached at / Published Life BPC 10:45am Svc, 2009-07-19

Text: John 11:17-44

You may have noticed that the title of our message is just 2 words: 'Jesus Wept' - These words come from v.35 of our text, which is the shortest verse in the Bible. But even though this verse is very short, it is full of profound meaning and has much wonderful instruction for us. And our message will be focused on this.

Above all things the statement that 'Jesus wept' shows us His humanity and His compassion. Although Jesus is fully God in the flesh, the second person of the Trinity, He was also fully man. And like all of us frail human beings, He sometimes cried and shed tears. This morning we are going to learn why our Lord Jesus Christ wept on this occasion. We will find out what feelings and emotions caused Him to weep, and why this is so important to us.

Before we actually deal with that, let us first re-enact in our minds the events surrounding this verse. The occasion was the death of Lazarus, who was the brother of Mary and Martha. This family that Jesus loved lived in a village called Bethany located about 4 km from Jerusalem on the road to Jericho and very near to the Mount of Olives. Jesus and His disciples found good hospitality in their home and often stayed with them whenever they came to Jerusalem.

It was about 3 months before Jesus went to the cross at Calvary. While Jesus was ministering in a place across the river Jordan, Lazarus became very sick, and his sisters therefore sent a message to Jesus to inform Him, hoping that He would come and heal Lazarus. But before Jesus arrived at Bethany, Lazarus died and was buried. Mary and Martha were deeply grieved that their beloved brother had passed away. 

Then, as they were still mourning for the dead, Jesus finally arrived. The first to meet him was Martha and her first words to Him were 'Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.' If you look at v.32 you will see that Mary said the very same words to Jesus later on. It sounds like they both regretted that the Lord had not come in time 'Why were you not here, Lord? What took You so long to come? Look, our brother is now dead because You were not here.' It is quite natural for those who are in great grief and sorrow to react like this.

Have we not thought something like this before? 'If only someone had done this or that, or not done this or that, our friend or loved one would still be alive today.' A new cure is discovered for a previously incurable terminal illness, but it came a little too late to save someone you know. And so you say, 'If only that cure had been available then, he would not have died.' A person dies of stroke or heart attack and you say, 'If only he had watched his diet more carefully, he would not have died.' Or 'If only someone had been with him when it happened, he would not have died.' But please do not forget this: The ultimate cause of death is sin. It is far better to realize, 'If only there had been no sin in this word, this death would not have occurred.' And a little later in this sermon we will see that this was one of the reasons why Jesus wept. 

Continuing with the account, we see that after Martha came to meet Jesus, Mary also came out to meet Him, and this time many other people came along: These were friends of the family who had come from Jerusalem to comfort the bereaved sisters. Let us try to reconstruct carefully this emotional scene in our minds, as given in vv.32 to 34. Here was Jesus standing outside the house with His disciples. And here comes a very tearful Mary who runs to Him and falls down at His feet, all-heartbroken, and moaning aloud in great sorrow and grief. Behind her was Martha and also many others who were crying aloud. The street was filled with sounds of wailing. The whole atmosphere was charged with grief and sadness. 

I think most of us have experienced being in such a situation before, when someone who is very close to us dies. We feel an intense grief and our hearts are filled with indescribable sorrow, especially when we cannot understand why that person has been taken away from us. We cannot understand why a man is cut down in the prime of his life leaving a poor widow behind, or why a young mother is taken from her home, leaving her small children with no one to look after them. We cannot comprehend why a promising student is smashed to death in some road accident. 

One Saturday 10 years ago, as I was on my way from one speaking engagement to another, I received a call from my wife saying that my mother who was supposed to arrive at our home had not come for 3 hours. She tried to call my mother but no one picked up the phone. I headed for my mother's flat and found that she had gone to be with the Lord. This happened quite unexpectedly. Just 3 days before, I had seen her and she looked perfectly healthy and well, able to commute by bus to and from her place. 

And though she had been widowed for 8 years and was living alone, she was always so happy to come over and see her grandchildren. At the age of 69, her high blood pressure was under control, and she had never mentioned any pain or discomfort. So when I arrived at my mum's place that evening and saw her lying motionless on her bed, apparently having suffered a heart failure in her sleep, I could hardly believe that she had gone. I still remember that moment very well. It was a time of grief and tears for my family. She had been a wonderful mother who loved the Lord and had brought up 3 children well. How we wish she could have lived longer. 

In moments of deep grief like this, the question that is often asked is: Does Jesus understand my grief? Does He care that I have lost someone very dear to me? If He does, how do I know that He really understands and cares? This is when we can look in our Bibles and see that He does understand our grief, He cares for us, in the same way that He cared for Mary and Martha when Lazarus died. He sympathises with us and feels for us. Let us see how deeply Jesus was moved for them: According to v.33 - He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and then in v.35 - He wept. Let us take a closer look at these 3 verbs: He groaned, He was troubled, and He wept.

The first word: 'Jesus groaned in the spirit' surprisingly comes from a word that means 'to be indignant.' The word groan here actually portrays the sense of being stern or angry. The same word is used in Matthew 9:30 'And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See [that] no man know [it].' The words 'straitly charged' here comes from the same word that is translated as 'groaned' in our text. But why should Jesus be angry? Surely He could not have been angry at Mary and Martha whom He was trying to comfort and for whom He had nothing but great compassion.

Perhaps this groaning was an expression of His resentment against the ravages of death that had entered the human world because of sin. When He looked at all the sorrow of Mary and Martha that was caused by death, and heard all the wailing and crying by mourners around Him, He was moved with great indignation against what man's sin had caused. So strong, in fact, were His feelings against sin that He actually wept. This brings us to our first point:

I. Jesus Wept in Indignation over What Sin Has Caused to Man

Suffering, sickness, pain, sorrow and death have become so much a part of life today only because Sin has entered into the world through Adam. Romans 5:12 says, 'Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.' If there had been no sin, there would be no death and sorrowing in our experience at all. And so, every time a person dies, and loved ones are lost, we have a grim reminder of how terrible Sin is. Sin is ultimately the cause of all the grief we feel in death, and all the anguish we experience in being separated from those we love.

And when Jesus saw how human life was so tragically troubled by these things, feelings of indignation arose within Him and He groaned in His spirit. Something must be done to put an end to the untold misery that death and sin have caused. It was this that moved our Lord with resoluteness to eventually die on the Cross for our sins. This alone could deal once and for all with sin and deliver human life from the suffering, sorrow and pain of death. It is worth noting that about 3 months after this event of Lazarus' death took place, Jesus Himself died and gave His life to save us from sin. And through His death and resurrection we now have eternal life. The sting of death is gone forever. And though we may still feel sad to part with loved ones who are in Christ, we now have the wonderful hope that we will be seeing them again in heaven, alive and well.

So now, whenever we encounter death, we should always be ready to proclaim that there is hope of deliverance from death through trusting in Christ. Within the past 2 months death has been very much in the news - On the 1st of June we heard of 228 passengers dying when an Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, and at the end of June, a Yemeni airliner crashed off Comoros, taking 152 lives. Last Wednesday an Iranian plane crashed taking 168 lives. Three weeks ago we heard of Michael Jackson's death at the age of 50 and just yesterday afternoon Singapore had its first H1N1-related death. All this reminds us how frail our life is and how easily death can come to anyone of us.

When someone dies, people around them are brought face to face with the awful reality of sin and its horrible results. Therefore whenever we conduct a vigil service our purpose is not only to comfort the bereaved, but also to broadcast the wonderful truths of the gospel to those who are still outside Christ, so that they would know that death is really the result of man's sin, and that through trusting in Jesus Christ alone, they can be saved from sin and eternal death. 

Let us now return to the study of text to look at the 2 other verbs that are used to describe Jesus' reaction. Besides groaning in His spirit, v.33 also says that Jesus was troubled. This word portrays an emotional state that is agitated, a state that is not calm at all but raging like a storm. The sight of His friends with agitated emotions within them caused Jesus Himself to also have agitated emotions within Himself. He felt what they felt. And so strong were those feelings that He also wept with them. This brings us to the second point of our message:

II. Jesus Wept in Sincere Sorrow for His Friends

To weep because one is able to feel the sorrow of others is what we call sympathy, or compassion. And this is one characteristic our Lord Jesus had that always brings tremendous comfort to us. Our Lord is One who can fully sympathise with us. Iskthere any sorrow, pain or grief in our experience that He cannot feel? No, none at all. He knows it well, and can feel it well for us because, according to Isaiah 53:3, Jesus was 'a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:' According to Hebrews 4:15, 'we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.'

But a person may ask, 'How is He able to do this?' And the answer to that i3 one of the most precious truths about Christ: The truth that Jesus had a full human nature as well as a divine nature: That besides being fully God, He was also fully man. Jesus was born into this world like anyone of us. He grew up like anyone of us. And like anyone of us, He experienced hunger and thirst, tiredness and pain. In every way except for sin, Jesus was one of us. And like anyone of us, He at times experienced intense emotions so strong that they even made Him weep and shed tears.

We who are Asians are usually less expressive in displaying our emotions. We are taught from young to control our emotional outbursts in public. The men are especially not supposed to cry and weep because they are expected to be strong in order to maintain the trust others have in their ability to lead. They would usually try to stifle or suppress any urge to weep. For if a grown man cries he would be regarded as betraying some weakness in his character, and we usually feel embarrassed and look away. And yet even the strongest of men at some point of their lives have been known to break down and weep like a little child, when their soul is troubled beyond measure. It is a natural part of human nature to do so. And so when Jesus wept, no one should interpret this to be weakness, but rather as demonstrating His full humanity. He wept like any human being would weep under such circumstances.

And His sorrow was sincere and genuine. He did not have to put on a show or act sorrowful. One observation we can make in our text is that there were perhaps some people on the scene with Mary and Martha, whose crying was not genuine but artificial. In v.33 when it says '...and the Jews also weeping which came with her' the interesting thing is that the word for 'weeping' in this verse is different from the word 'wept' used for Jesus in v.35. And this difference reveals that the Jewish mourners were wailing loudly, but Jesus quietly shed tears. In those times it was the custom at funerals to hire professional mourners who were skilled in crying out loudly. Their mourning was very loud, but it was all artificial. In contrast to that, the weeping of Jesus was quiet but it was real. It was not forced, but it was the natural outpouring of the sorrow He felt in His heart for His dear friends, Mary and Martha.

And this is not the only instance in the life of our Saviour when He experienced such deep sorrow. A few months after this event Jesus wept once more as He prayed alone in the Garden of Gethsemane. And He even disclosed to His disciples then, that His 'soul was exceeding sorrowful unto death' Our Lord was truly 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' Grief was familiar to Him, and because of this, He wept.

Thus far we have seen that Jesus wept in indignation over what sin has caused to man, and that at the same time Jesus was weeping in sincere sorrow for His friends, Mary and Martha. There seems to have been a mixture of at least 2 emotions expressed in His weeping. And besides these 2 there is one more reason why He wept. This is found in v.36, 'Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!' It was evident to all who were there that the weeping of Jesus showed how much love He had for Lazarus, who was at this time, still dead. What surprised the people and caused them to whisper one to another, 'Look at how He loved him!' was that Jesus was no relative or family members of Lazarus, and yet He wept for him as if he was his own sibling. 

And Jesus seemed to be compelled by this love for Lazarus to go right to the place where he was buried, to raise him from the dead, thus revealing God's glory in performing a great miracle. This is the third and final point in our message this morning:

III. Jesus Wept in Love Which Reveals God's Glory

If Jesus loved Lazarus that much, surely He longed to see him alive again and to enjoy the close fellowship they used to have before. In fact in the final days before Jesus was crucified, He stayed at Bethany and had much time of sweet fellowship with Lazarus. 

We see this in the first two verses of the next chapter: 'Then Jesus six days before the Passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.' We can imagine them sitting at the table together while people kept coming to the house to see Lazarus who had returned from the dead. And Lazarus must have been grateful that Jesus had loved him enough to have given him a new lease of life.

But the main thing that this love revealed was the glory of God. In v.40 Jesus said to Martha: 'Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?' And then, when the stone was rolled away from the entrance of the burial cave, Christ prayed and then called out to His friend inside, 'Lazarus, come forth.' Everyone gasped in amazement at what happened next. The physical body of Lazarus which had already started to decompose after 4 days, was reunited with his soul, and was even strong enough to walk out or to hop out even with hands and feet wrapped up in grave clothes.

For someone who had been very sick and had not eaten or had anything to drink for 4 days to be able to come out of the darkness of the cave by himself, without any help, is truly amazing. God's glory was revealed not just in the fact that Lazarus was restored to life, but more than that he was restored to a life that was both healthy and strong. We had seen a while ago that Lazarus would even become strong enough to sit at the table for hours and talk with Jesus later on.

But this miracle was not the only thing that revealed the glory of God in this event. Before Jesus even raised Lazarus from the dead, God's glory was already revealed right at the point when Jesus wept out of love for Lazarus. In this situation we can see exemplified, how the Lord Himself grieves and weeps for sinners who are spiritually dead in sins, because He loves them. We can see how He desires that we should also be revived from spiritual death to spiritual life. We can see how He then took away our sins and called us out of darkness into a new life.

Listen to what is written in Ezekiel 18:33. Here the voice of God speaks with great sorrow as He says: 'As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die,?'

What a great and glorious love God has for us sinners who deserve nothing but eternal death. Do you know that the Lord loved you so much that He wanted you to live, and that He gave His own Son that you might live? What must you do then in order to live? The answer is given in verses 25 and 26 which I believe Jesus is speaking to you today 'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?' If you have not come to Christ and believed in Him yet, please do so today - for then you will have the joy of heavenly bliss and not the hopeless grief of eternal torment when you leave this world.

And to all of you who are already in Christ, the final word of this message is this: Whenever your heart is filled with grief, whether it is grief for a departed loved one, grief over a broken relationship, grief over some personal loss you have endured, or grief for any other reason, come to the Lord Jesus Christ, and find all the comfort you need in Him. He is the Lord of all comfort. And You will find Him ever willing to receive you and to help you. Come to Him now and let Him deliver you from your grief.

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