“Jesus wept.” John 11:35
These are among the most wonderful words recorded in the Bible. They mark the most exquisitely tender, touching, and expressive incident in His whole life. “Jesus wept”—wept from emotion, wept from sympathy. Is there a more consolatory, soothing view of Christ’s love than this? It is a compassionate, sympathizing, weeping love!
The sympathy of Jesus never wearies or slumbers, it never chills or forgets. It entwines with our every cross—attaches to our every burden—and frosts with sparkling light, each darkling cloud. It is not the vapid sentiment of fiction, nor the morbid sympathy of romance. It is a divine-human reality. It is the sympathetic love of the Incarnate God!
Let your faith, then, repose with confidence on the reality of Christ’s sympathy with your grief. Oh how sacred and precious are the tears of divine love—the tears of Jesus! Soothed and sustained by such a sympathy as Christ’s, we may well drink meekly the cup our Father mingles—we can well afford to be severed from all other sympathy, and weep out our sorrow in lonely places—Jesus sympathizing with us by the couch of languor, by the bed of darkness, and at the grave of buried love.
O afflicted one, tossed with tempest and not comforted, refuse not this cup of consolation which the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, would give you—the sympathy of your Lord and Savior, your Friend and Brother in the time of your calamity. Yield yourself to its irresistible power, and it will draw you submissively to His feet, and hush to rest your sobbing heart upon His bosom!
THE TEARS OF JESUS! by Octavius Winslow