Octavius Winslow on the Incarnation: Jesus Wept!

Meditate often upon the sensibility of Jesus––it will quicken, sanctfy, and soothe your own. If you are an artist––study it. If you are a poet––chant it. If you are an orator––extol it. If you are a divine––preach it. If you are a disciple––imitate it. If you are a mourner––bring to it your keenest, loneliest, deepest grief. “Jesus wept!” “Was there ever a more interesting portrait than what the evangelist has here drawn of the Son of God ? If the imagination were to be employed for ever in forming an interesting scene of the miseries of human nature, what could furnish so complete a picture as these words give of Christ at the sight of them––’Jesus wept!’ Here we have at once the evidence how much the miseries of our nature affected the heart of Jesus, and here we have the most convincing testimony, that He partook of all the sinless infirmities of our nature, and was truly and in all points man, as well as God. We are told by one of the ancient writers,(Chrysostom) that some weak and injudicious Christians, in his days, were so rash as to strike this verse out of their Bibles, from an idea that it was unsuitable and unbecoming in the Son of God to weep. But we have cause to bless the overruling providence of God, that though they struck it out of their Bibles, they did not from ours. And why those groans at the grave of Lazarus, if tears were improper? Precious Lord! how refreshing to my soul is the consideration that forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, Thou likewise didst take part of the same; that in all things it behoved Thee to be made like to Thy brethren. Hence, when my poor heart is afflicted, when Satan storms, or the world frowns, or Thy waves and Thy billows go over me, oh, what relief is it to know that Jesus looks on and sympathises! Then do I say, ‘Will not Jesus, who wept at the grave of Lazarus, feel for me? Shall I look up to Him, and look in vain? Did Jesus, when upon earth, know what these exercises were, and was His precious soul made sensible of distress even to tears, and will He be regardless of what I feel, and the sorrows under which I groan? Oh no! The sigh that bursts in secret from my heart is not secret to Him; the tear that is my meat day and night, And drops unperceived And unknown, is known And remembered by Him. Though now exalted at the right hand of power, where He hath wiped away all tears from off all faces, yet He himself still retains the feelings and the character of the “Man of sorrows, and of one well acquainted with grief.” Help me, Lord, thus to look up to Thee, And thus to remember Thee’ “(Hawker). Precious And holy is the divine precept, illustrated and enforced by so divine an example-”Weep with them that weep.” Oh, it is the richest luxury on earth to share by sympathy the sorrow, to soothe by gentleness the grief, to wipe away by kindness the tears of another. This Christ did, and we are to prove our discipleship to Him by imitating His example. “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them “-sharing their chain; ” and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body”-exposed to like weaknesses and assaults, calamities and griefs. Oh, aspire, beloved ! to be a drier of human tears; to have a hand always ready to wipe them away! Who can estimate its worth? To have soothed one human sorrow, to have met one pressing want, to have unbound one crushing load, to have dried one tear of grief, to have shed one beam of light upon a dreary path, to have reclaimed one wanderer, to have made the widow’s heart to sing for joy, to have befriended and soothed an orphan, oh! It is a work to be measured in its importance and its blessedness only by a life. Again, we repeat, let your life be an out flowing sympathy with the distressed and the needy, the widow and the fatherless. Be Christ-like, “who went about doing good;” raise the fallen, strengthen the weak, comfort the feeble-minded; and if tears of compassion and sympathy will soothe and mitigate the tears of penitence and adversity, then be it your mission and your privilege to “weep with them that weep!”