Jesus Wept
God's love, mercy, passion, compassion, grief, and anger are chiseled down to two words
Mark Buchanan & Photos by Adam Buchanan | posted 3/05/2001 12:00AM
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I carried it across the lawn and fetched a shovel from behind the garden shed. It was a gray, cold day, drizzling. I dug a hole in the wet earth of my garden and then laid the bird at the bottom. I gave it a sharp hit with the shovel's edge to make sure it was dead. And I covered it with earth.
Walking back, a huge sadness swept down on me. This is a world where robins die, and sparrows, and people: the ones we love, the ones Jesus loves. All of them. They fall to the ground, they are enfolded into the earth. And most times, Jesus doesn't come to raise them up, not in our lifetime, not so that we see.
If you had have been here, my brother would not have died.
And where is Jesus—this one "who was to come into the world"? What does Jesus think? What does Jesus feel about a world like this?
Jesus wept.
Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere
In the print issue of Christianity Today, this article was accompanied by photographs from Mark Buchanan's brother, Adam, a freelance photographer in Shoreline, Washington. Adam's photographs illustrated the themes of poverty and suffering, especially as experienced in Africa. To subscribe to our print magazine, click here.
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library's World Wide Study Bible offers historical references, commentary and comparative texts for John 11.
The Text This Week offers similar links, but also has contemporary references (such as modern sermons and journal articles), images of the raising of Lazarus, and other resources.
G. Walter Hansen's "The Emotions of Jesus | And why we need to experience them" appeared in the February 3, 1997 issue of Christianity Today.
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