Jesus Weeps on His Journeys to Jerusalem and to Lazarus’s Tomb and His Tears Help Us Understand How He Experienced the Triumphal Entry and Why We Celebrate Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday invites us to celebrate not only Jesus raising Lazarus and riding into Jerusalem as the crowds did, but also the tears he shed at both events that showed the lengths he went to for us.
Overly dramatic television is hilarious to me. Those moments when the camera zooms in on someone’s pensive face, tension building music plays in the background, and the audience holds their breath for what happens next. It’s mass manipulation at its finest and, once you recognize that fact, it becomes absurd. To highlight the absurdity, I like to supply insights into what the characters are thinking. Insights like, “I really don’t like this new deodorant” or “I should have worn other pants” or “row, row, row your boat….” My kids usually appreciate my insightful commentary. My wife often does not.
I’m not much better when it comes to watching sports. When the coach comes out to the mound to talk to the pitcher, they are plotting their order for Outback Steakhouse after the game. The golfers looking at their notebooks are reading the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid novel. NFL quarterbacks need the crowd to quiet before the snap so they can hear C-SPAN in their helmets.
My commentary has two purposes. First, to highlight the manufactured tension that entertains us whether that occurs in scripted shows or in athletic competitions that revolve around the movement of a ball according to agreed upon rules. Second, to emphasize that we don’t know what someone else is thinking at any given point in time. We may think they are focusing their mental energy on one thing while their mind is somewhere else entirely. This is not to say that we cannot make educated guesses about what others are thinking, but, absent them telling us explicitly, we should understand that even our best educated guess may be wrong.
Since Jesus did not leave a diary or other written record, we don’t directly know what he was thinking during the Triumphal Entry when he entered Jerusalem on a donkey to begin the week that ended with his crucifixion. Even so, Luke and John offer some insight into some of his thinking during that event.
Luke tells us that Jesus refused to tell the crowds to be quiet when they hailed him king, while shortly thereafter weeping over Jerusalem because it had rejected the path of peace and would be destroyed:
“As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’ And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.’
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.’”
Luke 19:37-44.
These verses depict a deeply troubled Jesus. He could not tell the crowds to be silent because they were right to proclaim him king and their proclamation marked the fulfillment of prophecy. He also could not join in their rejoicing because their rejoicing was based on a misconception of his kingship, as they were heralding him God’s choice to supplant Caesar and establish the supremacy of Jerusalem over Rome but he had no intention of doing either of those things. When he catches sight of the city the crowds had just anointed him king over, he weeps and declares it doomed as having rejected the way of peace in favor of a path that would lead to the destruction of the city and the death of them and their children. It’s a depressing inaugural address for a divinely chosen king, an address that is made more confusing by Jesus’s declaration that the reason for the death and destruction to come was because the city that had just declared him king did not properly recognize his visitation. Taken as a whole, then, the picture Luke gives us of Jesus’s state of mind is that of a newly hailed, long prophesied and divinely chosen king who knows that his coronation marks his capitol and subjects’ doom. No wonder Jesus weeps as his first official act as popularly proclaimed king.
John widens the lens on Jesus’s thinking during the Triumphal Entry, supplying a larger context that helps explain why he would weep at the moment the crowds recognized him as their ruler. Specifically, John returns us to a previous time when Jesus was moved to weeping as he navigated a mourning crowd on the way to Lazarus’s tomb. We know this because, just after Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey, John tells us that “[n]ow the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him.” John 12:17-18.
Further, the structure of John’s gospel emphasizes the relationship between Lazarus and the Triumphal Entry. John 11:1-44 recount Lazarus’s death and resurrection. John 11:45-57 depict the religious leaders plotting to kill Jesus due to his raising Lazarus. John 12:1-11 describe a dinner celebration where Lazarus’s sister Mary anoints Jesus with oil, Judas objects to the expense involved, and the chief priests widen their murderous conspiracy to include the just-raised Lazarus since people who saw him alive followed Jesus. John 12:12-19 then recount the Triumphal Entry and include the verses quoted above explicitly linking it to Lazarus. John clearly wants us to think that Lazarus would have been at the forefront of Jesus’s thoughts as he rode into Jerusalem.
What does John’s insight here allow us to infer about Jesus’s state of mind? First, parallel to Matthew, it was deeply troubled in the midst of everyone else celebrating. Lazarus’s resurrection was arguably Jesus’s greatest miracle since everyone knows that the dead don’t rise. Jesus’s tears just before that miracle, then, parallel his tears at being anointed king – both occasions should have been among the most joyful of Jesus’s life but were instead depressing to the point of tears. Second, Jesus’s tears flowed from his knowledge that his seeming gain from these two events was really a harbinger of doom for his friend Lazarus given the chief priests’ plot to murder him and for Jerusalem given its failure to recognize him for the divinely sent king he was instead of the earthly conquering king they wanted.
Third, Jesus was isolated in his clear-eyed understanding of the underlying meaning of the two linked events. When Mary anointed him at the celebratory dinner for Lazarus, John 12:2-3, she did so as a gesture of honor for bringing her brother out of his tomb even though Jesus alone knew her gesture would be immortalized as preparing him for his own burial. When the “whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen” and proclaim him king at the Triumphal Entry, Luke 19:37-38, Jesus alone knew that their celebration was short lived and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of who he was even though he had been with them daily for years. I think we are on safe ground then to infer that his tears on the journeys to Lazarus’s tomb and to Jerusalem for Passover reflected sadness over what was to come combined with tragically excruciating isolation since everyone else was justifiably excited over Lazarus being raised and God’s chosen king returning to Jerusalem.
If you have ever been in an impossible situation where you cannot win no matter what path you choose, then you have just an inkling about how Jesus felt as he rode into Jerusalem for his last Passover. He had proven himself to be the greatest miracle worker in history through Lazarus’s resurrection and the crowd’s recognition of his fitness to lead them was the culmination of years of work on his part to convince them he was sent from God for their salvation.
We celebrate Palm Sunday today and rightly so given that it leads directly to Easter. Our celebrations, however, should not be based on misunderstandings like those of the crowds in Luke and John. Instead, we should celebrate because we, like Jesus, understand what Palm Sunday portends – not the inauguration of a new Caesar but the beginning of the most difficult week in Jesus’s life, a week marked by tears and terrible isolation that he suffered through for our sake.