“Jesus wept"

Your weekly Dose of Spurgeon


The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from the lifetime of works from the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.  The following excerpt is from The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, volume 35, sermon number 2,091, "Jesus wept." 



There is infinitely more in these two words than any sermonizer, or student of the Word, will ever be able to bring out of them, even though he should apply the microscope of the most attentive consideration. "Jesus wept." 

Instructive fact; simple but amazing; full of consolation; worthy of our earnest heed. Note, too, that his pure body and his sinless soul were originally constituted as ours are. When his body was formed according to that Scripture, “A body hast thou prepared me,” that holy thing had in it the full apparatus of grief: the lachrymal gland was in his eye. 

Where there is no sin, one would say there should be no sorrow; but in the formation of that blessed body, all the arrangements for the expression of grief were as fully prepared as in the case of any one of us. His eyes were made to be fountains of tears, even as are ours. He had about his soul also all the capacity for mental grief. 

As I said aforetime, so say I yet again, it would seem that there should be no tears where there are no transgressions; and yet the Saviour’s heart was made to hold sorrow, even as an amphora was made for wine. Yea, more, his heart was made capacious enough to be a reservoir wherein should be gathered up great floods of grief. 

See how the sorrow bursts forth in a mighty flood! Mark the record of that flood in these amazing words, “Jesus wept.” Beloved, have a clear faith in the humanity of him whom you rightly worship as your Lord and your God. Holding his divinity without doubt, hold his manhood without mistake. Realize the actual manhood of Jesus in all lights. 

Three times we read he wept. Doubtless he sorrowed full often when he was not seen; but thrice he was known to weep. The instance in our text was the weeping of a Friend over the grave of a friend. 

A little further on, after a day of triumph, our Lord beheld the city and wept over it: that was the weeping of a Prophet concerning judgments which he foresaw. 

It is not recorded by any evangelist, but Paul tells us, in the Epistle to Hebrews, that with strong crying and tears, he made appeal to him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared. This third record sets forth the weeping of our Substitute, a sacrificial weeping, a pouring out of himself as an oblation before God. 

Treasure up in your mind these three memories, the weeping of the friend in sympathy with bereavement, the weeping of the Judge lamenting the sentence which he must deliver, and the weeping of the Surety as he smarts for us, bearing griefs which were not his own, for sins in which he had no share. Thus thrice was it true that “Jesus wept.”

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