JESUS WEPT

 

 

Jesus wept at the loss of Lazarus, His dear friend. The Master also wept as He witnessed the grief of the family and friends. God had made Adam and Eve from the earth, had breathed His own Life into the clay figures. We, descendants of the first parents, are joyful to be children of God, heirs of His Breath. 

Yet, God had not experienced what His creations truly feel at sorrow of death. God sent His only Son, to experience our lives to the fullest. Thus, Jesus wept. Why, in so many traditions, do we expect men not to weep? Do we not all feel? Men as well as women, boys as well as girls? Do not unshed tears come out later in our bodies as anxiety, unresolved grief, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress syndrome, heart attacks, strokes? 

Let us feel our grief, and shed our tears. As Jesus did.

Jesus Wept

Before the stone where sorrow lay,
Where death had seemed to claim its day;
Christ stood amidst grief's great depth,
And wept before the face of death.

For Lazarus, His cherished friend,
For love that seemed to meet its end;
For sisters bowed in aching pain,
And hearts that would not heal again.

The tears He shed were not in vain,
They fell like soft, redeeming rain;
For God who formed us from the sod.
Now wept among us - man and God.

From dust He shaped both form and face,
And breathed in us His living Grace;
From Adam’s line our lives began,
The breath of God in fragile man.

Yet though He made the heart to feel,
Its wounds, its breaking, and its heal;
He had not walked our shadowed way,
Nor wept as mortals weep one day.

So Love came down, in flesh and bone,
To claim our griefs as now His own;
Born of a woman, meek and mild,
The Holy One, yet Mary’s Child.

He knew our hunger, thirst, and loss,
The weight of sorrow, and the Cross;
Christ walked the road our feet must tread,
And wept beside the silent dead.

Then why do we, in hardened guise,
Forbid the tears within our eyes?
Why teach the heart to lock its pain,
As though true strength must still remain?

Do not those tears, if held inside,
Return as storms we cannot hide -
In trembling chest, in anxious breath,
In silent wounds that echo death?

O let us learn from Christ our Lord,
Whose tears no shame nor weakness stored;
For in His weeping love was shown,
As God who made our grief His own.

So let us feel, and not deny
The tears that fall, the inward cry;
For we are His - both frail and strong;
And in our tears, we all belong.

With thanks to Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMbE4Wf9rT4