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The Tears of Jesus
Kevin Raedy on Augustine & Refusing to Grieve As Others Do
As Christians, how should we respond to the death of someone we love? Should we grieve openly or privately? A little or a lot? In defending the truth of Christ's Resurrection and articulating a theology of bodily resurrection, St. Paul exclaims to the church at Corinth that death has been "swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor. 15:54). To the church at Thessalonica, where some were worried about the fate of those who died before the return of Christ, Paul explains that the righteous dead will be raised at Jesus' second coming and gathered up into heaven, so that those still alive should not "grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thes. 4:13).
Paul's words suggest that our grieving should be attenuated, although in what way or to what extent is unclear. St. Augustine, ever immersed in Scripture, seems to have found little maneuvering room in Paul's words, as we learn in his recounting of the death of his mother, Monica, in Book IX of The Confessions. When Augustine's son Adeodatus erupted into tears at Monica's death, Augustine swiftly subdued him into emotional restraint, and he suppressed his own weeping by sheer force of will.
In The Confessions it becomes clear that, following his Christian conversion, Augustine wouldn't countenance crying when it functioned solely as an expression of sadness over the death of another Christian. With respect to Monica, whose life was so clearly marked by faith and so evidently imbued with the theological virtues that save, a pronounced display of grief was unacceptable to him.
On the one hand, it's hard to argue with Augustine. Convinced as he was that Monica died in God's friendship, an excessive display of lament might well have seemed incongruous. And yet, when Jesus was confronted with the death of his friend Lazarus, he wept. There's nothing in the biblical account to suggest that Jesus' weeping was unduly anguished. But he was fully divine, truly God, and still, at the death of Lazarus, he wept. Given the strictures that Augustine places on his own grieving (and perhaps ours?), it grabs the attention when we find Jesus himself weeping at the death of a friend. It makes us wonder whether Augustine might not be fully in sync with Jesus on the matter of grieving.
Something Intrinsically Human
The precise reason for Jesus' tears is, admittedly, a matter of some perplexity. The early thinkers of the Church offer a variety of explanations, many of them steering clear of the notion that Jesus' weeping was primarily an act of mourning over the death of Lazarus. Who, after all, understood better than Jesus that death was to be swallowed up in victory, that it would be deprived of its sting?
But there is another tack found in the Fathers, one that perhaps registers a little closer to home. Potamius, the earliest documented bishop of Lisbon, says that Jesus was moved to compassion by the sorrowful laments of Mary and Martha, such that his own weeping amounts to an act of comfort and sympathy. Hippolytus is of a similar mind, sensing that Jesus, with his flow of tears, is teaching us how to "weep with those who weep" (Rom 12:15). St. John Chrysostom, in a homily, takes things a step further, indicating that in his weeping we see that Jesus had been "mastered by grief."
These latter perspectives highlight a note that is sounded repeatedly within the larger patristic chorus: with his tears, Jesus was revealing his humanity—the fullness, the concreteness, the reality of his human nature. St. Irenaeus articulates this thinking in Against the Heresies, where he argues that if Jesus had received nothing from the Virgin Mary, he would not have hungered after forty days of fasting in the desert, he would not have been fatigued by the journey from Judea to Galilee so that he needed to sit down at Jacob's well, and he would not have wept at the death of Lazarus. There was, for the Fathers, something intrinsically human in the weeping of Jesus, in that tangible expression of sorrow—whatever its precise cause—that issued forth at the death of his friend.
In both the Roman Catholic Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary, the story of Lazarus is the assigned Gospel reading every third year on the fifth Sunday of Lent. In the Catholic Church, the Preface for that Sunday, read aloud by the priest during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, says, in part, that "as true man [Jesus] wept for Lazarus his friend and as eternal God raised him from the tomb" (emphasis mine). Thus, the notion that Jesus' humanity is made manifest to us in his weeping for Lazarus is still alive today.
As for Augustine, one gets the sense that he would rather that Jesus had done almost anything other than weep. In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine explicates the dying and raising of Lazarus verse-by-verse, word-by-word, teasing out insights by reading the text allegorically and by chasing down biblical word echoes. But the weeping of Jesus simply gets lost in his analysis. One doesn't even need to blink to miss it.
Kevin Raedy holds MTS and ThM degrees and writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and two children. He has published in the journal Nova et Vetera and at Aleteia.org.
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