But His calmness was not attained without an efifort. We read that He " groaned in the spirit and was troubled " and the words indicate a physical commotion, a bodily trembling which might be perceived by the witnesses of this scene. Such grief would have been excusable in view of all that the present scene meant to Jesus, but He mastered His most bitter grief. " Jesus wept," but the tears have nothing in them of weak or unreason- able anguish; Jesus by the grave of a dead friend, amidst the sorrow of the world, in the shadow of His Passion, could still weep calmly.
Grief should be
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate;
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free;
Strong to consume smaU troubles; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.^
2. Jesus wept reservedly. — In the sorrow of our Lord there was no ostentation. It was necessary that our Lord's grief should be manifested for the comfort of the mourners, and for the trial of the hearts of the spectators ; but beyond this He had no wish to exhibit His sorrow. The affectation and vain-glory which court applause for any quality whatever, were utter strangers to His meek and lowly mind.
^ St. Francis is said to have shed so many tears that they affected his power of vision. Of a certain St. Abraham it is
^ Aubrey de Vere.
490 THE TEARS OF JESUS
recorded that no day passed after his conversion without his shedding tears. Bishop Andrewes's Devotions were so blistered with tears that his editors could scarcely read them. Of an old Scotswoman, turned from a life of great sin, it is told that she actually "wept her eyes out." From all such tears, of course, our Saviour was free.^
3. Jesus wept unashamedly. — Jesus wept and was not ashamed of His human weakness. He could have repressed His tears — many men do so habitually. No doubt there may be great sorrow, very great sorrow, where there is no open expres- sion of it. The Saviour could doubtless, if so He wished, have hidden His grief; but He did not choose to do so, for He was never unnatural. Jesus wept, as the mourners about Him wept. The sight of such sorrow overpowered Him, and He could not refrain. That was a true manhood which felt this touch of nature, and broke into tears. There was no stoicism in His con- stitution. There was no attempt to restrain His sympathies, and educate Himself into a hard and inhuman indifference. Neither was He ashamed of possessing our ordinary sensibilities. He felt it no weakness to weep in public with them that wept.
^ It is no part of heroism to affect insensibility to suffering. The strongest manhood has its roots in tender feeling. The ideal man's emotional nature is as quick, powerful, urgent, undeniable as his intellect is lofty and his will unbending. The patriarchs are all represented as men of tender feeling. "Abraham came to weep." "Jacob lifted up his voice, and wept." "Joseph fell upon his father's face, and wept." ^
^ The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears ; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight.^
III.
The Lesson of Christ's Tears.
1. They are a pledge. — Christ's tears speak about the future, and show us what Jesus will always be. Everything done by
* T. Marjoribanks, In the Likeness of Men, 41.
' J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 176. ' G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
ST. JOHN XI. 35 491
Christ on earth was done for all time. The meaning of His actions was not confined to the persons and the places of the hour. They stand out as parables to teach the world. When Jesus wept with Martha and Mary, His tears promised that all His suffering followers to the end of time should have His pitying regard.
1[ Job's rebellion came from the thought that God, as a sovereign, is far off, and that, for His pleasure, His creature suffers. Our own theory comes to the mourner with the assurance, " Your suffering, just as it is in you, is God's suffering. No chasm divides you from God. He is not remote from you even in His eternity. He is here. His eternity means merely the complete- ness of His experience. But that experience is inclusive. Your sorrow is one of the included facts." I do not say, "God sympathizes with you from without, would spare you if He could, pities you with helpless external pity merely as a father pities his children." I say, " God here sorrows, not with but in your sorrow. Your grief is identically His grief, and what you know as your loss, God knows as His loss just in and through the very moment when you grieve." ^
^ It is our great mistake, I think, to set Divine suffering in a bare fact of history come and gone, an episode of once and no more, and to preach our sharing of it only as an emotional trans- action and an effort of the good will. It is this, but more, far more. I share all my pain with God, and He bears our griefs whether we see Him or are blind. Not over against me, holding back a hand which might help, but side by side, nay, " closer than breathing," within the inmost hiding-place of my suffering self. He suffers too and bears all pain with me. Therefore, if I will, His strength may be my strength. His love may succour me ; new life and light may arise within me to be and to remain my own, and to turn even suffering into joy.^