Jesus Wept

You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book? Psalm 56:8 NASB

My tears – “How difficult it is to expose our heart’s core, our heart of hearts to anyone, even to God. So it is with God. He will not expose us to that core of His heart, His heart of hearts unless he can really trust us not to wound His heart. Do you really want to enter the core of God’s heart, His heart of hearts? If we do will we feel His grief, the grief that Jesus feels. For the sorrow that Jesus observed touch His heart, we know that because he wept.”[1]

In support of this sentiment, Bentorah cites John 11:35 (in the reference footnote). Unfortunately, it’s the wrong verse. John 11:35 is not about weeping for sorrow over the broken heart of God. In fact, the Greek verb, dakruo, is about shedding tears over something unsettling but not vitally important. That’s the point of John’s passage. Yeshua wept over Jerusalem, but the verb there isn’t dakruo. Yeshua wept over Lazarus’ death with the least emotional involvement. Lazarus’ death was temporary. Jerusalem’s apostasy was permanent.

Bentorah’s remark still has merit. It is difficult to expose ourselves. Vulnerability is frightening. God does weep. But I am not so sure that God only reveals His brokenhearted reality to those He trusts not to wound Him. Would you make that claim of Moses, Israel’s greatest prophet? Would you claim Jeremiah didn’t resist? Or Jonah? And what of Hosea’s tears? Was he chosen on the basis that God could trust him not to injure the fragile nature of the heart of God? Would we make the same claim about the disciples whom Yeshua called friends? Bentorah’s remark sounds elevating. It raises our eyes to heaven. But I’m not sure it’s actually true.

David says that YHVH has counted all his wanderings. David says that YHVH knows his tears, that in fact, YHVH has stored those tears in a container. In other words, all the agony, all the confusion, all the emotional distress of David’s life is reckoned in the Lord’s accounts. YHVH knows David, intimately, deeply, passionately. This is a very good thing. But it means that the Lord knows David’s misdeeds with the same intensity. Tears are not only signs of joy and rejoicing, as both David and you know. What matters is not the distress of those wanderings but rather the faithfulness of God. David, a man with much to regret, is still the man after God’s own heart. It seems to me that God trusted Himself to David, a sign of true hesed, despite the fact that David cried out “Against You and You only have I sinned.” If we really believe that YHVH will not put the expressions of His heart in us unless we prove ourselves to be perfect caretakers, we might as well resign the commission now. No, I would argue that YHVH shows Himself vulnerable in spite of the possibility of injury, and that this is the true sense of weeping.

Topical Index: weep, dakruo, John 11:35, Psalm 56:8, tears

[1] Chaim Bentorah, Hebrew Word Study: Beyond the Lexicon, p. 162.