When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews weeping who came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,
John 11:33 (WEB)
in its setting: John 11:30-38
1 Where we are
Madam Tan is sixty-three and she clears tables on the evening shift at the mall. At half past ten on Thursday she is at the burner at the foot of her block with the last of the paper, the second year since her son died at thirty-one. She feeds it in slowly, one sheet at a time, and she does not want the pile to end. Tomorrow the month is over and the shops turn to mooncakes. What frightens her is not the ash. It is that when her hands have nothing left to do for him, she will have stopped being his mother. The young colleague who drove her home stands a few steps back, keys in his hand.
2 What the passage is doing
In Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days. Jesus arrived late, knowing already that within the hour he will call the man out by name. Martha meets him with an accusation dressed as faith. Then Mary comes and falls at his feet crying, and the whole crowd is crying with her. He does not tell them the good news yet. He does not shorten it. He asks where they have laid him, and he goes to the grave, and he weeps there too.
ἐνεβριμήσατο
enebrimēsato · snorted, groaned deeply, was stirred with indignation
The word was used of a horse snorting. It is not gentle sympathy but something hard and hot rising in the chest. John chooses it to say that when Jesus stood among people crying at a grave, he was angry — not at their crying, and not at how long it had gone on, but at death for being there at all. He never once tells them to stop.
3 Taking it with you
You may be the one standing a few steps back with the keys. You cannot burn the paper, and you must not sneer at it either. What you can do is not leave, and that is more than it sounds — because Christ went to the grave before anyone asked him to, and stood there and wept, and then went into one himself and came out. Your hope has a name, and that name has already gone ahead of you into the worst room. So you are not the one who has to fix her, or fix your own grief. Nobody is telling you to be finished by the weekend. Stay until the ash is cold. Say the son's name out loud on the way up.
A prayer you can pray
Lord Jesus, you cried at a grave you were about to open, so I know you are not impatient with me. I bring you the loss I cannot make useful, and the people I love who mourn differently from me. Teach me to stay near without fixing. Hold what my hands can no longer carry, and let me trust you with it tonight.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
