Why Did Jesus Cry for Lazarus?

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, George Inness, 1867

NOTE:  I WROTE THIS THREE MONTHS AGO, ON THE NIGHT OF A FUNERAL, AND FELL ASLEEP AS I WAS WRAPPING IT UP. I WASN'T GOING TO PUBLISH IT, BUT I RECENTLY CHANGED MY MIND, CLEANED IT UP, AND FINISHED THE FINAL THOUGHT. HERE IT IS...


Jesus wept.
Why did Jesus cry for Lazarus? After all, he knew that the recently deceased Lazarus would shortly be resurrected.
John 11:35 reads, "Jesus wept."
Eight versus later, Jesus says, "Lazarus, come forth," and it's all over with. Lazarus is back.
Why did Jesus cry?
There's an easy answer here. It's the go to answer:
Jesus is empathetic. The trio of siblings, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, were three of Jesus' closest friends. Seeing Mary and Martha in great, personal pain in turn caused Jesus to feel great personal pain.
He cried because his friends were sad.
Right.
I don't buy that.
Maybe I'm in a mood. My good friend Sam Sublett died a few days ago. He was 36. Funeral was today. Autopsy results pending. He lost his daughter almost exactly three years ago. The summer has been tough for him ever since. His wife is 20 weeks pregnant.
He lost his faith in his late 20's, long before he experienced the death of his child. That pained me for quite a while.Then one day, back before he met his lovely wife, Dorothi, he was recounting an awful blind date he went on. When I say awful, I don't mean like, "accidentally spill your drink on her awful," I mean like, "this might be a shakedown where I get murdered awful." However, the telling of this story was causing Sam to unleash his incredible, boisterous, infectious laugh. And as he started to shake the room with laughter, I started to laugh, as well. At that moment, all I could think was, Damn, if I love Sam this much, how much more must God love him?
I cried so hard in front of Sam's casket today, I needed help to stand.
Jesus wept.
If I could have said, "Sam, come forth," and resurrected him, I damn well would have done it. But I couldn't. I'm not Christ.
So Nicholas wept. And that's it. There's no verse 43.

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Jesus knew Lazarus would die. Jesus is told that Lazarus was deathly ill days before Lazarus passes away, but Jesus makes no rush to get there. Jesus is in no hurry, and when he finally does get there, Lazarus' siblings complain to Jesus that Jesus could have healed Lazarus before Lazarus died,  if Jesus had just come faster. Jesus chastises them, saying first to Martha, who seems to be his least favorite, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" Martha says that she does. Now when Jesus is told the same thing about arriving earlier by Mary, who he seems to have more of a soft spot for, he starts to display some emotion...not sadness, but indignity. He doesn't preach his identity to Mary, but all of a sudden he seems angry. The only thing he says in response is, "Where have you lain him?" When the crowd tells him, "Lord, come and see,"...then he cries.
Why did Jesus weep?
Jesus knows Lazarus' death is a temporary state. He's resurrected dead humans already by this point, and he's Jesus Christ, so he's got no concern that suddenly his divine power is going to let him down in this instance. Jesus knows this entire moment has been ordained. Lazarus is going to stumble out of that tomb when Jesus calls for him.
When I was younger, when I had any issue of any sort with anything, I was told to just look in the Bible, and I'd find the answer. That's stupid. The Bible is the divine revelation of God to man. It is not a magical answer guide.
However, five years ago, during one hell of a rough patch, while re-watching my favorite scene from Ingmar Bergman's 1963 classic, Winter Light, I had an epiphany. In the film, one character recounts the crucifixion story to another, and points out that Jesus' most painful ordeal was not physical, but spiritual. All but one of Jesus' disciples abandoned him, none could even stay up to pray with him during his last free night on Earth, and to add insult to injury, the disciples even seemed to have misunderstood Jesus' teachings. Worst of all, though, according to Matthew's account, in the moments before Jesus' death, he seems to no longer feel the presence of God, his father. In desperation, with his last breath, Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
My epiphany, while fairly simple, shored up my faith in a time of hardship: at one point, even Jesus felt like God abandoned him.

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But why did this prospect of death, abandonment by God, break Jesus' spirit so badly? He could have just said "All good, I'm just gonna come back in three days." Nope, instead, he quotes his ancient ancestor, David, who in the Psalms sometimes felt like God had abandoned him, too. That warrior Jesus with a sword evangelical narrative of the 00's and 10's doesn't really seem to jibe with the Jesus who was in so much trepidation about dying, that in Luke 22:44, it says Jesus' sweat was like great drops of blood.
Early on, the Bible seems to set up Satan as God and Mankind's greatest antagonist. After Satan gets mankind kicked out of the Garden of Eden, which you can either take literally, or as a metaphor for the way evil's temptations will always keep mankind from achieving any type of Utopia, Satan makes a handful of sparse appearances in the Old Testament, before popping up in the flesh in the New for a failed attempt at tempting Jesus toward evil, just like he did the archetypal man so long before. In Revelation, the Bible's final book, we get word that Satan's got a lake of fire waiting for him. Turns out maybe he's just the secondary villain.
If you remember, when Adam and Eve fall to Satan's temptation, they get kicked out of the Garden of Eden...and when they get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they become mortal...and when they become mortal, they suddenly become susceptible to death. 1 Corinthians 15:26 doesn't say, "The last enemy to be destroyed is Satan." It says, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." Yeah. That guy.

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Satan never seems like that great of a foil for Christ. What the hell is a fallen angel in the face of the Eternal Almighty, Creator of the Universe? The devil instead seems like the foil for mankind, causing division, the father of lies...he's stuck down here with us, after all.
When Jesus fasts for 40 days in the desert, and is in a near catatonic state, Satan can't even tempt him with the promise of the entire world. After humoring Satan's three attempts, Jesus essentially just tells the wayward angel to get out of his face. Jesus never say...gets so angry about Satan's very existence that he weeps. He never frets so hard about having to face him that he sweats blood. He never cries out to God in desperation in the moments before making Satan's acquaintance.
The very existence of death makes Christ angry. Death is Christ's ultimate adversary. Jesus came to Earth to surmount death. He hates death so supremely, with an anger so righteous, it makes him cry.
Up to that final moment on the cross, despite the fact that Jesus had rescued others from death's jaws, he hadn't himself yet been between the teeth.
Christ was there at the beginning of time, before life existed, and he, more than anyone who ever drew breath, knew the true cosmic horror of what awaited him.
Death is eternal. Christ is eternal. What else was there other than God at the beginning but that goddamned abyssal void we can't help but stare into? The Mississippi up to my ankles at midnight, levee silhouetted behind me, lonely call of an unseen boat through the fog, shards of moon's reflection broken and swallowed through oily rushing currents. Take another step.
Sounds like a pretty fair fight.
Jesus wept.