Still the One Who Cries at Weddings

He cries at weddings. He cries at airports, at arrivals rather than departures, which he thinks is unusual and has never checked.

He cried at a school concert in November at a song he did not know sung by a child he is not related to.

He is fifty three.

His father said something to him once, at seventeen, at a funeral, that he has never repeated to anybody. It was not cruel and his father was not a cruel man. It was four words and it was about being a bit soft, and it was said with some affection, and he has carried it for thirty six years.

He asked to be filled at forty nine. He would tell you plainly that it was the most significant thing that has happened to him as an adult.

And he cried at his niece's wedding in June, at the point where her mother stood up, and he had to look at the tablecloth for a while.

Here is what he has never said and would find difficult to say.

Some part of him expected the filling to give him a firmer face. Not a hard one. Just a face that could be relied upon in a room, the way his brother's face can be relied upon, and it has not come, and at fifty three he has started to think it is not going to.

The sentence, unsaid: I asked for God and I was also asking for composure, and I got one of them.

You may know that tablecloth. The thing your face does, and the four words you have carried about it.

The shortest verse in the book

There is a scene at a grave where Jesus already knows how it is going to end, and He does the thing anyway.

He has said out loud, minutes earlier, that this sickness would not end in death. He is about to call the man out of the tomb. There is no version of this where He is overtaken by events or does not know what is coming next.

And then this.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

Two words in English and it is the shortest verse in the Bible, and generations of children have learned it because it is short, and almost nobody stops to notice what it is doing there.

He cried at a funeral for a man He was about to raise.

You are doing the thing that verse records, and John 11:35 has Jesus weep at a graveside minutes before the outcome He had already announced, and it is the Spirit of God who takes two words out of a chapter about a resurrection and lands them on a man looking at a tablecloth at a wedding in June.

And notice what the crowd says immediately afterward. Behold how He loved him. Nobody in that scene reads the tears as a failure of composure. They read them as information about the state of His heart, and the account preserves their reading without correcting it.

Nothing there is a loss of control

Consider what is actually happening, because it matters for a man who has been carrying four words since he was seventeen.

Jesus is not overwhelmed. He is not swept by something He cannot manage. He knows the ending, He has stated the ending, and He weeps, and then He does the thing He came to do without any interval in which He has to recover Himself.

Which means the tears in that verse are not a lapse in a capacity. They sit alongside the capacity, in the same minute, in the same person.

You have not been losing anything when your face does that, because the written word puts weeping and complete composure in the same scene in the same person, and the Spirit of God is what turns two words into thirty six years reread.

And there is a second scene later in the same Gospel where the same thing happens over a city rather than a person. It is not one occasion and it was not an exception. It appears to be how He is.

Which puts a question the other way round for a man who has spent thirty six years quietly wanting a firmer face. If the one person in the account who could not be accused of a shortage of anything is also the one who weeps twice on the record, then a face that stays still through everything is not obviously the mark of somebody further in. It is a different face, and that is all that can honestly be said about it.

You are shaped the way the account describes Him, and John 11 records the weeping without one word of apology or explanation anywhere around it, and the same Spirit who was in Him is the one who fills.

The four words were not a diagnosis

Now his father, and this has to be done properly because his father was a good man.

He said four words at a funeral at a moment when he was probably holding something himself, and a seventeen year old heard them and filed them permanently. That happens in families and it happens without malice and it is nobody's crime.

But they were not a diagnosis. His father was not a physician of souls and he did not intend those words to run for thirty six years, and if he had known they would he would almost certainly have taken them back.

And it is worth putting the two sentences beside each other honestly, because one of them has been doing all the work. Four words from a man at a funeral, said once, thirty six years ago. Two words from God, written down, preserved, read in every language there is, and describing exactly what a fifty three year old man does at his niece's wedding. Only one of those has any standing, and it is not the one he has been carrying.

You were never given a verdict at that funeral, because John 11:35 puts the same behavior in Jesus without any correction attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than a criticism of a man who has been dead a long time.