Please join me in a place of prayer as we seek illumination for the taking to heart of God’s spoken Word –
Lord God, source of all bright reality for heaven and earth, by your Word both written and living you spread truth and light upon all Creation. So, as we re-discover sacred scripture in this moment, pour upon us the spirit of wisdom and understanding. Open closed minds, melt hardened hearts, and loosen stiff necks! Teach your beloved people to recognize and cherish all blessed things that chart paths of faithful discipleship – in Jesus and by the Spirit.
[According to the Gospel of John,] when Mary – the sister of Martha and Lazarus – reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother Lazarus would not have died.” … When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit – adding to their groans of anguish, sharing in their anger and confusion. … “Where have you laid him?” Jesus asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept. (Selected verses of John 11)
Jesus wept. Tears in
divine recognition and
public acknowledgement of
bitter pain.
Jesus wept, words escaping, when
clouds of death again loose acid rain upon
the everyday-ness of earthly life.
Jesus wept, words escaping, a waterway of tears.
The rescue worker’s voice begins to crack – a thick lump of heartache choking his throat – as he tells a TV reporter about hearing the muffled cries of terrified children trapped beneath the rubble of their tornado-ravaged apartment building. How on God’s green earth can anyone manage to stand in a place as dark and foreboding as that?
And how do you stand on the days that follow?
Come next morning, though a new day of fresh mercy had dawned, you can’t just plop a jug of milk on the breakfast table and stand there watching your own kids eat their Cheerios and guzzle their juice – morning sunlight dancing on freshly combed and pony-tailed hair.
With sleep still lingering in your eyes, you simply can’t help but stand there in agonizing solidarity with that parent whose heart pounds deep in the chest, whose tears gush the cheeks like a rain-swollen river, waiting for firefighters and guardsmen to dig the precious remains of his or her crumpled and broken child out of the mangled and twisted rubble of the world’s fury.
When you stand in such gut-wrenching, agonizing solidarity with another, how do you not kiss your child gently on the cheek – and point her out the door and off to school – without wondering just how it is that the sky suddenly starts to spin like an angry behemoth on a muggy afternoon in the middle of side-street America.
And suddenly a bunch of school kids will never come home again to their mom’s peanut-butter sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies. How does the sky just churn, and rage, and turn inky black – then pelt flat a whole neighborhood or lay waste to entire community?
That teary-eyed rescuer tells the TV reporter that they found seven littles all drowned in a pool of water. Nearby, another two huddled tightly – holding hands, caring for one another in life and in death. Crews attacked the heap of broken concrete and shattered timber at the fastest pace that safety allowed, all the while hearing their stifled cries for a parent’s comfort slowly fade to dead quiet. They were too late. On that manic Monday, they simply couldn’t make it in time.
How in the world does anyone stand there – or here?
How do you swing your feet out of bed in the morning and start a new day, when the aches and pains aren’t just coming from overworked muscles and joints, but also ooze and bubble from a heart that moans and groans in searing, red-hot agony – and further from a mind chocked full with memories of scenes exploding straight from the depths of hell?
How do you stand and face the day when your heart’s flooded with such searing agony about past, present, and future? Here, then, is the Good News of the Gospel for those shaky Tuesdays that always follow dreadful Mondays:
Even God’s heart overflows with pain – and not just a few drops of discomfort, not just a slow drip of sadness. God’s whole-massive heart fills, swells, and burns with raw, relentless pain, too. In the midst of violent storms, life’s bloody battles, and their carnage-strewn wakes, all the immense vastness of God floods with pain, too.
What grieving survivor of nature’s fury or war’s wrath wakes up today and forgets her little one? Forget the way she smelled, the way his hair fell? Forget the way her arms felt around the neck, the way his voice sounded in her ears? Who ever forgets their ever-always baby boy or girl? And to the one whose heart is forever bound to another, God whispers, hoarsely, “My heart is forever bound to you.”
Jesus wept. And Jesus weeps! The Lord of the Universe – he’s lashed himself to us!
He didn’t need to do that; he wanted to do that. The Lord God tied the knot himself. The One who hung the stars and spun the planets takes unbreakable yarn and knits heaven’s heart to yours – tied so tightly that, when you feel pain, the heart of Father, Son, and Spirit so also hurts. In response to your cries, “If there’s a God who really cares, then he’d look at this world, and his heart would break!” God points to the Cross and simply says, “My heart did.”
On that Cross, they speared the side of the Son of God – they pierced straight into his already pain-stricken heart, and from it gushed the water and blood of sin and brokenness. That’s the quantum physics of God – one broken heart always breaks God’s heart in two. Thus, we never cry alone. And the Lord catches each of our teardrops in his bottle of grace, gathering every falling bead, because he’s keeping us from falling apart, which more and more feels like an everyday occurrence.
The glow of TV, laptop, and smartphone burns horror into the eyes. But please don’t pull away from the screen permanently, forever turning away from the one brushing away tears. Muster courage from the comfort of knowing that the Lord has ever-so-tightly bound his broken heart to the brokenhearted. Which assures that the Lord binds his heart to mine and yours, so also to grizzled and wounded veterans of life’s many battlefields.
Sometimes, the only solace I find lies in the assurance of faith that the tears of God and all Creation are the essence of time.
Time soldiers on – in this impossibly suffering world, because the Great God Almighty is willing to abide in suffering the unthinkable with us. That ought to be our shared truth – that God grieves at our side, that God joins us in the pit. Human reasoning is often cold, but God’s embrace is always warm.
The farmer says they’re calling for rain again this week. Somewhere in the South or Midwest, they’re calling for storms. And as dark clouds again gather and swirl, as sabers continue their rattling, as ongoing wars and rumors of war fester and aggravate, I can only offer the farmer a nod of response, not trusting my voice not to break, but trusting only in God’s broken heart – trusting only in how it comes in storms – these, the falling tears of God.
When news that twists my innermost being into the tightest of knots arrives in my living room from near and distant places – from the St. Louises and Plattevilles of our moment, or I try to imagine that dreadful day when word of death arrived on the doorstep from faraway places of battle like Gettysburg, Bull Run, Bellou Wood, the Ardenne; Dunkirk, North Africa, Normandy, Iwo Jima; Pusan, Porkchop Hill; Da Nang, Hamburger Hill, Long Tan; Baghdad, Phallusia, or Kandahar –
In the aftermath of such death and destruction, and all I feel like doing is doubling-over and collapsing into a quivering heap in the face of so much searing pain, I struggle to my feet by the power of remembrance: Jesus wept. And he continues to weep.
I somehow manage to stand, because I definitely do not stand alone.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 25, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. The weekend also marked celebration of Memorial Day in in the United States. The message is adapted from “When You’re Wondering: How God Feels About Storms?” by Ann Voskamp.