Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 154 · June 3
Jesus Wept
“Jesus wept.”
We come to gravesides with the ending already in our mouths. We can say the right verses on demand, and this is one of them: "Jesus wept." Jesus came to this grave knowing the ending too.
He carried no doubt with Him. Before He set out, He told His disciples, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep." On the road He told Martha, "Thy brother shall rise again." He was minutes away from doing it. Then Mary came and fell at His feet, weeping, and the friends who came with her were weeping too. "He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled," and He asked where they had laid him. Then, "Jesus wept." Then some in the crowd said the thing that always gets said: "Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?" He gave them no answer. Isaiah had written that He would be "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," and at this grave you watch it happen.
Lord Jesus, You stood at that grave holding the answer, and You cried anyway. We do not understand all of that, and we will not work it out today. Hebrews says You prayed "with strong crying and tears," so we bring our tears to You without tidying them first. Stay at the graveside with us for as long as this takes. And when the time comes, speak over our dead the word You spoke to Martha, because You are "the resurrection, and the life." Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 154 is Ordered Steps (Psalm 37:23).