The God who knows our pain

[script]

Jesus wept 

A two-word independent clause that speaks so many volumes that it stands alone as its own verse 

We’ve become tethered to this belief that faith and sorrow don’t belong together

And Jesus wept sounds like a paradox to us

Because how can the man who brought life and love stand there with tears in his eyes  

Maybe we’re caught off guard by this statement because we translate becoming a Christian as an erasal of suffering 

This image we have of God waving a magic wand and making life a walk in the park  

Is skewed by the life of Paul who because his home address was a broken world and his savior was Jesus, suffering was like a thorn penetrated into his side that he carried with him in every stride 

We can’t equate the presence of tears as the absence of faith 

Dry eyes were not possible for a fully human, fully God savior with a distraught spirit over the reality of death 

It broke his heart to see Lazrus’s sisters mourn and cry out because their brother’s bed that gave him a place to rest his head, had its job replaced by a cold, dark tomb 

It broke his heart that sin demands death 

And it broke him knowing that the only way for us to escape brokenness is for him to be broken in our place  

And he cried for their to be another way, but he still went to that cross 

Jesus shows us that sometimes tears are the only response

He didn’t buy into the notion that men weren’t supposed to cry

He didn’t teach that we should hide our pain on a shelf in our hearts that no one else is allowed to see 

Because telling ourselves that Jesus was happy in everything he did on earth is a failure to 

understand who he was and what he did 

Not acknowledging his sorrow creates distance between us a Savior who knew what it felt like to be utterly broken over suffering 

You think he can’t relate to us? 

What do you think he felt that night alone in the garden on his knees, crying out in agony to his Father 

Pleading to not experience this pain, this rejection, this brokenness 

Sweating blood because he knew the trials, the lashes, the humiliation, the thorns  he was about to endure 

He knew he was about to have the pain of the whole world nailed into his wrist 

Don’t try to tell me that Jesus and his followers are exempt from suffering  

John 11 is the story of Lazarus 

The story of Jesus raising him from the dead  

And what threw me so much just moments before the celebration and rejoicing over renewed life, the life Jesus knew he was just about to renew  

before that was when Jesus wept 

Why would Jesus do that? Why would he let pain affect him that he knew wouldn’t last? 

Why would Jesus cry over this situation when he knew he would embrace Lazarus in a few moments?

Then I heard my own question in a different light

Why do we cry over situations and suffering when we know we’ll embrace a God who will soon wipe every tear from our eye and will classify sorrow as a dream that we will one day wake up from and 10 minutes no longer be able to describe any detail of  

We know the end result 

We know that Lazarus will walk out of that tomb  

We know that since Jesus chose to suffer that night paying our cost abandoned and broken on a Roman cross 

We know that this broken earth is not our final destination 

Jesus knew that death wasn’t the end of Lazurus’s story 

But he still chose to weep 

Because even though we have the promise of eternal life That doesn’t make our pain insignificant 

It doesn’t make emotion less real  

But it does bring hope to a people that were once hopeless 

Because even though Paul felt the effects of the thorn in his side

 he knew that it was not worth comparing to the glory that is to come 

Because even though weeping may endure for the night 

Joy will come in the morning.