Look at Jesus. He was perfect, right? And yet he goes around crying all the time. He is always weeping, a man of sorrows. Do you know why? Because he is perfect. Because when you are not all absorbed in yourself, you can feel the sadness of the world. And therefore, what you actually have is that the joy of the Lord happens inside the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the sorrow. It doesn’t come after the uncontrollable weeping. The weeping drives you into the joy, it enhances the joy, and then the joy enables you to actually feel your grief without its sinking you. In other words, you are finally emotionally healthy.
Tim Keller, “Walking with God through Pain and Suffering” (253)
In Luke 19, Jesus leads a merry band of followers who are celebrating his arrival in the capital city. We are told, “As he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near – already on the way down the Mount of Olives – the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen” (vs. 36-37).
The praise is appropriate. If it were somehow restrained, Jesus assures us that rocks would cry out at the coming of Jerusalem’s king.
You and I would bask in the adoration, would we not? But Jesus isn’t delivering a dismissive “aw-shucks.” Instead, verse 41 says that he bursts into tears. The verbiage suggests that this was no wistful single tear falling down his cheek, but audible sobbing. What could have upset this King so?
Well, touching his deity, Jesus peers into the future and sees the destiny of Jerusalem. Historian Josephus reports that Jesus’ prophecy is less than a generation away from fulfillment. Instead of prosperity, there will be barricades and battlements. Instead of peace, there will be death and infanticide. And as for the “wonderful stones” (Mark 13:1) comprising the city walls? None will be left on another.
“What a pity,” we might think to ourselves. But Jesus weeps for more than an ancient Near Eastern city. Jerusalem is regularly pictured in Scripture as the people of God. When God wants to address his people collectively, he often speaks in a metaphor of the city. Psalm 122:6 instructed an ancient people to, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!”
Paul picks up the theme in his letter to the Galatians. With Jesus’ advent, two Jerusalems result. The “present Jerusalem” (Galatians 4:25) is associated with Hagar in Arabia, of all places, because she is still in slavery. But the “Jerusalem above” (vs. 26) is free, having been redeemed by Abraham’s true Son.
The distinction between the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem is not yet clear as Jesus climbs Mt. Zion amidst the adulation of the crowds. Little do they know that at this time, Jesus is pronouncing what Christopher Ash calls “an ironic reversal” of Psalm 122:6-9. Now comes the time for judgment and purging.
Generations earlier, the prophet Jeremiah asked, “Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem, or who will grieve for you?” (Jeremiah 15:5a). Jesus is answering the prophet’s question. The King will cry. The King will wail. The King will take up the mantle and do what only perfect humanity can do and feel sorrow for what is, without question, the most profoundly tragic moral forecast there could be.
I once stood beside a husband who watched his spouse’s descent into addiction. In her wake were broken promises and broken relationships. Her alienated children could barely look their mother in the eye, so deep was her betrayal. Her body had been racked by years of destructive abuse, her face far more weathered than it should be for a woman her age.
At an intervention on her behalf, with family and friends gathered around, he unburdened his heart to her. His words were firm and resolved, but there was no way he could restrain the tears that filled his eyes. He explained that her bags were packed and the arrangements were made. She must leave now. And as she sulked defeated towards the open car door, he nearly collapsed under the grief of what he was doing.
This is the spirit of Jesus’ tears over Jerusalem. There’s no laughing here. This is not gleeful tyrannical judgment. Only pain and longing, the knowledge of occasion after occasion when things could have and should have been different.
A therapist friend of mine once said that until we learn to be sad, we will never heal our hearts. I still don’t fully understand what he means. However, if Keller’s quote above is to be believed, Jesus’ tearful breakdown, punctuated by the reality that he will deliver the very judgement he weeps over, makes him the most emotionally healthy person who ever lived. Jesus lets himself experience the depth of sorrow and pain so that he may also be able to feel the fullness of joy.
Contrast Jesus’ heartbrokenness with the cantankerousness that often characterizes the behavior of God’s people online. We should surely hang our heads in embarrassment. Can we ever deliver judgement without mercy when our Covenant Head behaved as nobly as Jesus has?
But even here, there is hope. Even in the grief of his march to Golgotha, he sees the salvation that his obedience will win for his people.
This is the “joy set before him” that gave him strength to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). Even in the midst of his tears, Jesus rejoices in the perfect plan of his Father. G.K. Chesterton found this powerful:
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, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. … There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.
Les Newsom serves as lead pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Oxford, Mississippi.