Weep

“Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.”  Luke 23:28

Weep – Is it a warning or a proclamation of great compassion?  On the surface, we might hear a warning.  “Don’t weep for me.  I am not the one who will really suffer the consequences of this event.  You, Jewish mothers, will see God’s hand punish you and your children because you have rejected me.”  There is truth in this warning.  Jesus would die that day.  His death liberated those who heard his message.  These Jews did not understand his purpose.  They could not imagine a suffering Messiah.  They judged themselves because they refused to believe. 

But they still wept over him.  They wept because pathos gripped them.  To see the inhumanity of men toward another man, to witness the stark reality of human brutality is more than enough for any mother of any son to fall to her knees in agonizing shock.  It is the pathos of human connection – mother and child linked by blood and body. 

Jesus understood that pathos.  He knew the feelings of a vital relationship ripped away.  He knew what it was like to weep over those who were about to be lost.  The word is klaio.  The daughters of Jerusalem wept because they saw the inevitable procession toward crucifixion.  They saw one of their own being lead to death, brutalized, tortured and helpless.  They could not see beyond that wooden stake on the hill.  They could not see the fulfillment of God’s glory in the suffering of His Son.  For this blindness, Jesus wept!

Klaio is the word of pathos and of judgment.  Like the mixture of blood and water, the sacrifice of the Son brought the grief of humble acknowledgement before the saving God and the wailing discovery of God’s sword separating the self-sufficient from the insufficient.  Klaio is the word for both sides of the coin.  If we know what it means to stand behind Him and weep, we understand both the deep sorrow over our past and the deep relief over our fate.  If we see only as far as the top of the hill, we will experience klaio when our eyes are opened to the eternal horizon hidden in the cross.  And then it will be too late.

“Weep for yourselves and for your children”, says Jesus.  Weep as I wept when I saw you from that hillside.  Weep as I wept when I witnessed your rejection.  Weep as I wept when the prophets were spurned, when the signs were ignored and the when the Son was trampled under foot.  The heart of the Father is broken over you.

When you stand before Him, will you recall the times of weeping as He wept?