Jesus Goes to the Tomb

Jesus Goes to the Tomb
John 11.28-37
John for Everyone Part 2


28With these words, Martha went back and called her sister Mary.
‘The teacher has come,’ she said to her privately, ‘and he’s asking for you.’
29When she heard that, she got up quickly and went to him.
30Jesus hadn’t yet got into the village. He was still in the place where Martha had met him.
31The Judaeans who were in the house with Mary, consoling her, saw her get up quickly and go out. They guessed that she was going to the tomb to weep there, and they followed her.
32When Mary came to where Jesus was, she saw him and fell down at his feet.
‘Master!’ she said. ‘If only you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!’
33When Jesus saw her crying, and the Judaeans who had come with her crying, he was deeply stirred in his spirit, and very troubled.
34‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked.
‘Master,’ they said, ‘come and see.’
35Jesus burst into tears.
36‘Look,’ said the Judaeans, ‘see how much he loved him!’
37‘Well, yes,’ some of them said, ‘but he opened the eyes of a blind man, didn’t he? Couldn’t he have done something to stop this fellow from dying?’


One of the greatest cultural divides in today’s world is the different ways in which we do funerals.

In many parts of the world people still mourn their dead in much the same way that they did in Jesus’ day. There are processions, carrying the coffin along the streets to the place of burial or cremation. Everyone, particularly the women, cries and wails. There is wild, sad music. The process of grief is well and truly launched. One person’s grief communicates to another; it’s part of the strange business of being human that when we are with very sad people their sadness infects us even if we don’t share their particular grief. (The psychologists would point out that we all carry deep griefs of one sort or another, and these come to the surface when we are with others who have more immediate reason for sorrow.)

In other cultures, not least in the secularized world of the modern West, we have learned to hide our emotions. I well remember visiting an old lady whose husband had died after more than forty years of marriage. She was busying herself with arrangements, making phone calls, sorting out clothes, wondering what she should wear at the funeral. On the day itself she was bright and perky, putting on a good show for her family and friends. She was with us as we went for a cup of tea afterwards, chatting cheerfully, not wanting anyone else to be upset. I couldn’t help feeling that the older way, the way of most of the world to this day, is actually kinder. It doesn’t do any good to hide grief, or pretend it doesn’t exist. When Paul says he doesn’t want us to grieve like people who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4.13) he doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want us to grieve at all; he means that there are two sorts of grief, a hopeless grief and a hopeful grief. Hopeful grief is still grief. It can still be very, very bitter.

As though to rub this point in, we find Jesus in this passage bursting into tears (verse 35). It’s one of the most remarkable moments in the whole gospel story. There can be no doubt of its historical truth. Nobody in the early church, venerating Jesus and celebrating his own victory over death, would have invented such a thing. But we shouldn’t miss the levels of meaning that John intends us to see within it.

To begin with, we should not rest content, as some older writers did, with treating Jesus’ tears as evidence that he was a real human being, not just a divine being ‘playing’ at being human. That is no doubt true; but nobody in Jesus’ world imagined he was anything other than a real, flesh-and-blood human being, with emotions like everyone else’s.

Rather, throughout the gospel John is telling us something much more striking; that when we look at Jesus, not least when we look at Jesus in tears, we are seeing not just a flesh-and blood human being but the Word made flesh (1.1–14). The Word, through whom the worlds were made, weeps like a baby at the grave of his friend. Only when we stop and ponder this will we understand the full mystery of John’s gospel. Only when we put away our high-and-dry pictures of who God is and replace them with pictures in which the Word who is God can cry with the world’s crying will we discover what the word ‘God’ really means.

Jesus bursts into tears at the moment when he sees Mary, and all the Judaeans with her, in tears. ‘He has borne our griefs’, said the prophet, ‘and carried our sorrows’ (Isaiah 53.4). Jesus doesn’t sweep into the scene (as we might have supposed, and as later Christians inventing such a story would almost certainly have told us) and declare that tears are beside the point, that Lazarus is not dead, only asleep (see Mark 5.39). Even though, as his actions and words will shortly make clear, Jesus has no doubt what he will do, and what his father will do through him, there is no sense of triumphalism, of someone coming in smugly with the secret formula that will show how clever he is. There is, rather, the man of sorrows, acquainted with our grief and pain, sharing and bearing it to the point of tears.

What grief within Jesus’ own heart was stirred by the tears of Mary and the crowd? We can only guess. But among those guesses we must place, not a grief for other deaths in the past, but a grief for a death still to come: his own. This passage points us forward to the questions that will be asked at Jesus’ own death. Couldn’t the man who did so many signs have brought it about that he himself didn’t have to die? Couldn’t the one who saved so many have in the end saved himself? John is telling us the answer by a thousand hints and images throughout his book. It is only through his death, it is only through his own sharing of the common fate of humanity, that the world can be saved. There is a line straight on from Jesus’ tears in verse 35 to the death in which Jesus will share, not only the grief, but also the doom of the world.

But there is also a hint of what will then follow. ‘Where have you laid him?’ Jesus asks Mary and the others. ‘They have taken away my master,’ says Mary Magdalene just a week or two later, ‘and I don’t know where they have laid him’ (20.13). Listen to the echoes between the story of Lazarus and that of Jesus himself. That’s part of the reason John has told the story at all. (The other gospels don’t have it; some have suggested that they were anxious to protect Lazarus from the sort of unwelcome attention indicated in 12.9–11. Presumably this danger was past by the time John was writing.)

‘Come and see,’ they respond, as Jesus had responded to the early disciples’ enquiry as to where he was staying (1.46). It is the simplest of invitations, and yet it goes to the heart of Christian faith. ‘Come and see,’ we say to Jesus, as we lead him, all tears, to the place of our deepest grief and sorrow. ‘Come and see,’ he says to us in reply, as he leads us through the sorrow to the place where he now dwells in light and love and resurrection glory. And, even more evocative (21.12), ‘come and have breakfast’. The new day is dawning; and, though where we live the night can be very dark, and the tears very bitter, there is light and joy waiting not far away.


Taken from John for Everyone Part 2 – by Tom Wright