Recognizing the hurt, the difficulty, the unwantedness of a situation doesn’t show you have no faith in God, or that you don’t trust he can help, or that he is not in control. Even Job’s friends took time to just sit in silence with him. When you or someone you know is hurting, even if you know these things are true, don’t forget to take time to weep with them. Jesus knew all of those things were true, far more than we can ever hope to know they are true, yet he still takes time to weep. While those things are true, I think we can sometimes use them as a shield to hide from the reality of our fear, hurt, sorrow, etc.
“God has a plan,” “God is in control,” “God works all things for good,” “God’s going to teach you through this and use it”. So often when we or people we know are going through a hard time, whatever that hard time might be, we just throw out cliché Christian sayings. Jesus knew Lazarus would be raised, he knew God would be glorified, he knew the end of the story and yet he takes time to weep. While Jesus is at the tomb about to raise Lazarus from the dead, we get verse 35, “Jesus wept”.Īs I read this story this last time it struck me (again) in this way. So, Jesus’ good friend is sick and going to die and rather than heal him Jesus lets him die. He also tells his disciples it was better that he wasn’t there to heal Lazarus so they would believe. During the story Jesus says that Lazarus’ sickness wouldn’t end in death but God’s glory. Reasonably, his sisters were upset with Jesus and tell him if he would have left sooner Lazarus would still be alive. Jesus took his time and Lazarus ends up dying. Lazarus’ sister came and found Jesus and begged Jesus to come and heal him before he died. Lazarus was a dear friend of Jesus who became ill. To catch everyone up, John is recounting the events around the death of Lazarus. This last time reading through the book of John I felt compelled to share.
For a while now I have appreciated the beautiful simplicity of the verse and what it shows us. Times have changed, in a lot of ways, and while I will still figure out a way to manipulate a system to get more pizza this verse has come to mean a lot more. Naturally, I went to the shortest verse I could think of, the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” At that time and honestly for a long time this verse didn’t have much meaning for me outside of an answer to a Bible trivia question. See, he didn’t clarify it had to be a verse from our books to pass a new section, just a Bible verse, and he never clarified that it had to be a new verse each time. Well, me being a pastor’s kid I had to find a way to “work the system” so to speak, so I found a loophole in the leader’s arrangement of a verse for a slice. In order to get a pizza you had to quote a verse. This pizza party was supposed to be used as a motivation for us to pass our “sections” by reciting more verses. For those unfamiliar, Awana is a children’s program focused on scripture memorization. Our leader decided we were going to have a pizza party. When I was around 10 years old I was in an Awana program.
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