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That painting I saw gives not the slightest hint that any of this is so. Behind Jesus, in the backdrop, is an idyllic (and lakeshore!) Jerusalem. Jesus' face, in angled profile, is coolly serene, aloof almost. His eyes have a far away, dreamy look. His body, perched on a rock, is held with prim straightness. His hands rest on his lap like the front and back covers of a stiff-spined book laid open, face down.

The artist has managed somehow to make those hands look both boneless and rigid, soft as dough and brittle as porcelain. Could these hands cut dovetails and mortise joints, wield the saw and plane and hammer, touch lepers' sores and blind men's eyes, braid and lash a whip, spread wide to grasp nails? No, not these hands. These hands are good for petite point or finger-wagging but not much else. Behind Jesus' head, encircling his sleek, smoothly combed hair, is a piercing-white light.

Jesus is perhaps contemplating. Or he is posing, in a stilted way, for a portrait, maybe this one. Or he is daydreaming. But one thing the portrait could never make you believe is that Jesus is weeping, or even capable of such a thing.

But Jesus wept. Maybe that frightens us, or threatens us, or embarrasses us. Before I preach, I try to work through my deeper emotions in solitude, in my study. If there is weeping to do, I do it there. That way, I reason, my preaching can be masterful, controlled, persuasive but not manipulative, and not ambushed or sabotaged by stray or unruly emotions. I am critical of the bad art and bad theology in that portrait of Jesus, but I carry it anyhow, a version of it, like an icon inside me: the serene and savvy man, facing danger, crisis, loss without even flinching. If my emotional range and display is an indication of the Jesus I follow, Jesus doesn't weep. He's too cool and too tough for that.

But Jesus wept. That one line, John 11:35, is the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend, the one he loves. And, in truth, never has so much theology been so cleanly distilled as here. Never have such riches been rendered with such economy. The fullness of the Incarnation, Christ's coming among us—to be with us, to be one with us—is gathered up and pressed into a single subject and verb.

The starkness of it contains a cosmic pageantry; the sparseness of it holds a theological galaxy. Here is love, mercy, passion, compassion, grief, and anger over our condition, our frailty, our vulnerability, chiseled down to two words: Jesus wept.

John 11 begins with a description of Lazarus, the man who is sick and whom Jesus loves, and his two sisters, Martha and Mary. "This Mary," John says, "was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair" (v. 2), described fully in the next chapter. At a dinner that the resurrected Lazarus and his sisters give in Jesus' honor, Mary "took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume" (12:3).

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4