Jesus Wept First

He knew.

That is the thing that makes John 11 so strange, and it is stated in the chapter twice before the tomb. In verse eleven He tells the disciples He is going to wake Lazarus. In verse twenty three He tells Martha her brother will rise again. He is not surprised by anything that is happening and He is not uncertain about how it ends.

He is four minutes away from calling a dead man out of a cave.

And then this.

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.John 11:33-35, King James Version

Two verses, and there is more in them than in most chapters.

He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. The older English is doing its best with a word that carries anger in it, a kind of snorting indignation, the sound of somebody furious. He is not merely sad in verse thirty three. Something in Him is against what is in front of Him.

Where have ye laid him? He asks. He knows. He asks anyway, which is what a person does when they are entering somebody's grief rather than managing it.

And then two words, and they are the shortest verse in the whole Bible.

Jesus wept.

The one person who knew it was temporary cried anyway

Sit in the arithmetic of that for a second.

Everybody else at that tomb is weeping because it is over. Mary is weeping because her brother is dead and has been for four days. The neighbors are weeping with her.

Jesus is weeping while knowing it is about to be undone.

He is not crying because the situation is hopeless. He has the outcome in His hand. And He does not use the outcome to shorten the grief, His own or theirs. He does not say do not cry, watch this. He weeps first, and He raises him second, and the order is not an accident.

You are not being hurried. John 11:35 sits ten verses before John 11:44, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that gap from being closed by anybody who means well.

I want to name what has been happening around you, because I have watched it and I have done it.

People love you and cannot bear it. So they start moving you along. They tell you what God is doing. They tell you about the timeline. They say the true thing at the wrong hour, and the true thing at the wrong hour lands as a door closing rather than a window opening.

And then, because you can see they cannot take it, you start managing them. You give the short answer. You say you are doing all right. You schedule the crying for when the house is empty.

You have been managing the people who came to help you, and John 11 has the Lord of the resurrection standing there weeping rather than reassuring. The written word gives Him two words and no explanation at that graveside, and the same Spirit who kept it that short is the reason nobody has to be comforted efficiently.

Now, I want to be careful, because this passage is not saying grief is the whole story. He does raise him. Verse forty three is a loud voice and a name, and verse forty four is a man walking out bound hand and foot.

But the raising does not go back and cancel the weeping. Both are in the chapter. Nobody at that tomb was told afterward that they should not have cried.

You have permission that came from the only person in the room with the full information. John 11:35 was written by somebody who watched Him do it, and it is His Spirit who makes that a permission rather than a curiosity about His humanity.

There is one more detail I do not want to skip, because it is in verse thirty two and it is where the passage starts.

Mary says: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.

That is a complaint. It is the same sentence Martha said in verse twenty one, and it means you could have come sooner and you did not. It is said to His face.

He does not correct it. He does not explain the four days, and He does not defend the delay. The next thing recorded is the groaning and the tears.

You were allowed to say the sentence to His face, and there is no rebuke anywhere in the paragraph after it. John 11:32 records the complaint and John 11:33 records His response, and the same Spirit who put them next to each other is the reason honesty at a graveside is not a fault.

And when the raising comes, look at what He gives to other people to do. Take ye away the stone, and afterward, Loose him, and let him go. He does the part only He can do. He hands the stone and the graveclothes to the neighbors.