Day 25: John 11:28-44

“Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the Bible in the English language. For all of you out there wanting to start memorizing Scripture, this is the place to start. But for the people that were there that day, they saw Jesus weeping and they took it as a sign of his grief. Even today people read this chapter and think Jesus was weeping in sorrow. But it’s not sorrow, there’s another emotion that John records. Verses 33 and 38 both say that Jesus was angry. Jesus wasn’t sad that his friend Lazarus had died; he was angry that his creation had to deal with death at all. That was never the intention. God is life; death is the antithesis of who he is. We were never meant to experience death, and Jesus was fed up with it.

Jesus’ anger was so great in that moment that it came out in tears. His love for us is so great that when we suffer, he suffers. But there is hope! Jesus has conquered sin and the grave. He has restored to us eternal life the way that God intended it to be in the beginning. Because of his death and resurrection we now have the hope that death is not the end.