We who care for souls, traffic in tears. We covenant with the crying, we wait with those who weep.
Sometimes we have the joy of sharing “happy” tears — the joining of two in marriage, a newborn baby has come into the world (reminding us that God is not done with this world), a couple celebrates their long-awaited dream of owning their own home, a bitter and broken relationship is reconciled. In joy we witness these beautiful sacred tears.
Joe Alain
But often we are privy to the tears of sadness, sorrow or a hundred other things that happen in our lives because we are human and we live in a world that as amazing as it is, is filled with dangers and bears the scars of age-old brokenness. And yet these tears are beautiful and sacred too.
The aging, weathered woman weeps because she is all alone, and she wonders if and how she will be able to walk again. “What will I do?” Only God knows, her tears revealing the anxious fears of the unknown.
The young man barely an adult himself, who describes himself as the one-time “bubble boy,” who has had enough physical problems and hospital stays for several lifetimes, yet concerned and praying and teary-eyed for his father, worried for him, and praying for estranged family members. It’s OK to cry ,I tell him, and it’s OK to pray for yourself too.
And then there are those mysterious, maybe even otherworldly tears.
Standing with a family in the final moments of the death of their loved one, the machines stop humming as his heart pumps its last, and the circuit of blood runs its final lap, I see a tear roll down from his left eye.
“I want to believe it was so much more as we stand in silence in this thin space, this sacred ground.”
Maybe I am witnessing something purely biological, a leaky vessel finally at rest, letting go its last secretion of tears. But I think, or at least I want to believe, it was so much more as we stand in silence in this thin space, this sacred ground. Maybe he, like the young man earlier, was thinking not of himself but of his family standing statuesque around the room, conscious of their presence, feeling a kind of selfless sadness that they were hurting for him, when he was no longer hurting or in pain. Or just maybe it was the tear that is shed, that we all will shed upon gazing at the glory of the “Holy,” “wholly” other; he was crossing over, the thin space dissolving before our eyes. Perhaps no longer was he seeing through a “glass darkly,” but “face to face,” and no longer did questions or theories or sickness or tragedy even matter, “knowing” now in that instant as he had always been known.
“Jesus wept” is a famous verse not only for being the shortest verse in some English translations of the Bible, but also because of its ease to remember. It was Tom Sawyer’s “go to” verse because it meant he had something to pull out of his pocket should he be questioned at church. But more than an easy verse to remember (although that it is), it runs deep in the theological stream.
“Jesus wept,” God incarnate, God with us, weeping real tears for his friend Lazarus who had died. God weeping. God identifying with us in our sorrow, our loss, our grief. God weeping with us as we walk through the dark, rocky, stump-filled valleys. God weeping with us, speaking “peace, be still” when the storm waters are raging around us causing us terror. God weeping with us when we feel all alone and cast away. God weeping with us when we are downcast, when we feel we have no reason to move another step. God weeping with us, and God filling us with renewed hope, hope unimaginable, hope that we did not think even possible — but there it is, appearing like a shaft of light penetrating our darkness.
“Not one tear, not one, falls that our God does not take notice of.”
Not one tear, “not one” falls that our God does not take notice of, according to Psalm 56:8 — “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”
It may not be coincidence that the second shortest verse in the English translation of the Bible is 1 Thessalonians 5:16, “Rejoice always.” Weeping and rejoicing, seemingly incompatible, but like bookends. This is our life, one of incredible beauty, of joy and of love but also tinged with sorrow and pain.
Yet even in our tears of sorrow and sadness, we weep not as those who have no hope, for our hope, our confidence, our peace is in the Lord — the Lord who has entered into our experience and weeps with us, the God who is Immanuel, God with us.
Even in our dark moments, faint as it may seem, we hold on to hope that God will have the last word and “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In God’s eternity, God’s kingdom, our tears of sorrow and sadness will flee away, for fear and sorrow have no audience in the presence of the Holy One. From Revelation 21:4 — “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Until the new order is here, until the “tearless” kingdom in its fullness is present, we who care for souls will continue to stand, or sit, or sometimes kneel and, “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” And we will continue to long for and fervently pray, “Lord, please let ‘your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Joe Alain serves as lead pastor of Carrollwood Baptist Church in Tampa, Fla. He is finishing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at Tampa General Hospital, a Level 1 trauma hospital. He also has served as an adjunct professor for New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he received the Ph.D.