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Why did Jesus cry when he saw the tears of Lazarus’s sisters and his friends? After all, Jesus already knew Lazarus was dead. In fact, his purposeful actions allowed that death to occur. So why, when faced with the mourning of Lazarus’s loved ones, did Jesus cry? The account of the raising of Lazarus brings to the fore Jesus’ humanity and the reasons why Jesus came to conquer death.

Lazarus had two sisters, Mary and Martha, who “sent a message to Jesus” that their brother was ill. Jesus decides not to attend to his sick friend immediately, but to wait for two extra days, until Lazarus has died, and then go to “awaken” him from his “sleep.” Physical death, Jesus will demonstrate, is not the end of our lives, but a “sleep” from which we awaken through God’s power. In fact, Jesus has allowed this death to occur—he is “glad” he was not there—in order that the disciples “may believe.”

Jesus and his disciples travel to Lazarus’s home, where he has already been in the tomb for four days, but Martha intercepts them along the way. Martha says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus responds, “Your brother will rise again,” she comprehends that Lazarus will rise up in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus affirms this as the bedrock of faith in him: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” And Martha declares her belief in Jesus.

She is soon joined by her sister, Mary, who comes out to meet them. A number of friends, who thought Mary was going to Lazarus’s tomb to cry, join her to console her. It is here that the story is grounded not just in the divine power of resurrection, but in the human heartache of death. Mary says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” This sentence Mary speaks in verse 32 is identical to the words of Martha in verse 21. But Mary begins to cry at Jesus’ feet when she speaks these words, unlike Martha, who consoled herself with the hope of resurrection.

When Jesus sees the weeping of Mary and her friends, he does not respond, “Your brother will rise again,” as he did with Martha. Instead, he becomes “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” But why? He has caused this very scene, and was “glad” that Lazarus had died so that he could evoke faith in his disciples and perhaps others who knew Lazarus. Yet confronted by the searing loss that physical death brings, Jesus himself begins to cry. Again we ask why. He knows he can raise Lazarus from the dead; he knows that death will not have the final say over his life, or any other human life.

Yet at this time, in this moment, the human reality of death affects Jesus in a way it had never done before. In this encounter he does not simply know death in an abstract way but in the fabric of his human life, in his bones. He sees his friends mourn, even those who believe that death will one day be conquered; he feels the cold sting of a loved one laid in a tomb.

Ray Jasper, an inmate of death row in Texas who may be dead by the time this column appears, described empathy this way: “Empathy gives you an inside view. It doesn’t say, ‘If that was me’; empathy says, ‘That is me.’” Jesus cried because he felt our pain, shared our pain; he could say, “That is me.”

Jesus experiences the suffering of death as a human being, feels the loss shuddering through his friends. He knows the ravages death has wrought, returning us to the dust from which we have come. We remember during Lent that for our sake he would take on this same death in order to save us from death, for he saw the tears of others and cried tears of mourning. He did not have to die with us and die for us, but he wanted to wipe away our tears forever. He said: Away with death, for we were made for eternity.

This article appears in March 31 2014.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.