The shortest verse in the New Testament is John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”
It’s too easy to skip over. After all, what can possibly be communicated with only two words? Well, frankly, I think there’s quite a bit there we can learn about Jesus and even about ourselves.
Previous to this verse, Jesus’s friend Lazarus fell ill. His sisters, Mary and Martha, grew worried about his condition, so they sent word to Jesus. After abiding near the Jordan River for a couple of days, close to where he was baptized, Jesus left for Bethany to see Lazarus, taking his apostles with him.
When he had first received word from his friends, he knew that the sickness wasn’t serious—“This sickness is not unto death.” (v. 4)—so when he received the impression that Lazarus had died, he said that “Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.” (v. 11)
By the time he arrived, Lazarus had already been entombed for 4 days. Both Martha and Mary told him that if he had arrived sooner, perhaps Lazarus would still be alive. He tried to assure them that he wasn’t actually dead.
The fact that he knows that he could revive Lazarus provides important context to the verse, “Jesus wept.”
When Mary told him that had he been there sooner he could’ve prevented Lazarus’s death, she was weeping. The others who had been at her home to comfort her were also weeping. And when Jesus saw this, “he groaned in the spirit” (v.s 33), was troubled, then wept himself.
In response, those there to comfort Lazarus’s sisters said he wept because he loved Lazarus. Presumably, they thought he was weeping because he loved Lazarus and now he was gone—he would miss him.
And while I’m sure he did love him (as seen in verses 3 and 5), I’m not sure that was why he wept, at least not in the same way his sisters wept for him out of love.
Remember, Jesus knew that Lazarus wasn’t dead, that he only slept, or at least that he could bring him back from the dead at any point. He wasn’t weeping for the same reason many do when they lose a loved one. Lazarus’s death was temporary; Jesus knew he wouldn’t be missing him. Why would he; Lazarus would be returning shortly.
You see, it wasn’t Lazarus’s death that prompted the weeping. Otherwise, he would’ve been weeping when he arrived in Bethany, when Martha and Mary came to him, or even when he had first received word of the sickness or when the impression came that Lazarus had died.
In fact, his weeping didn’t seem to occur until he saw Mary and the others weeping. Their weeping seemed to trigger his own.
I think his weeping was not one of mourning or grief, but one of compassion and empathy. He wept not because Lazarus was dead and would be gone forever, but because others mourned that loss. He delayed resurrecting Lazarus, temporarily, to take time to weep with them in solidarity. He mourned with those who mourned (Mosiah 18:9).
And that, I believe, is the most important lesson from this story. It’s not that Jesus was so powerful that he could raise people from the dead, or that we should have sufficient faith to draw on the powers of heaven to have someone restored from death. It’s that we should be compassionate to the burdened.
To me, the idea that we should express love to others even when it’s entirely unnecessary is at the core of what Mormon called “the pure love of Christ” (Moro. 7:47).
If there ever was a moment from Jesus’s love that stands as a model for us to emulate in our actions towards others, it’s this one.
It is this example that has molded my perspective regarding those who society has disenfranchised. That perspective dictates how I respond to such things as the drug crisis, or homelessness, or even crime. It also helps guide me as a I catch my previously-held prejudices surfacing and helps me know how and why they’re now wrong.
Rather than judge those experiencing disenfranchisement as making bad choices and their experiences a consequence of their agency, as I used to—as King Bejamin counsels us not to do, in Mosiah 4:17—now I am led to sit in reflection on their circumstances, to ponder not on how they are worsening society but on how they ended up here.
Too often I see people who profess to follow Christ cast dispersions upon the downtrodden, instead of expressing compassion and empathy. Quick to decry the drug debris left in parks but slow to understand the life that led to that debris being there. Quick to label those sleeping on the street as lazy and unmotivated but slow to open up their hearts to love them in unconditional ways.
Judging others is unproductive. It makes us prideful by leading us to think we’re better than them because their “sins” are different from ours. It dehumanizes them because it forces us to see them only as the source of our inconveniences and ignore their entire life’s history, which makes them a unique person. It wastes our time because our energies are spent on checklisting all the ways others should improve their lives, which reduces the energies spent on improving our own lives.
The more our hearts are filled with the judgement we place on others, the less room there is for us to love them.
