The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the world's oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is "the _land of forgetfulness_!" Not so with the Lord of Life, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in appalling vividness before Him.--Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own,--vessels freighted with immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!
Yes! we can only understand the full import of these tears of Jesus, as we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great--the grassy sods of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy--the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye--the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the young exulting in the prime of manhood; the pious and benevolent, the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable decree; the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried away in the midst of scorned mercy--Oh! as He beheld this ghastly funeral procession moving before Him, the whole world going to the same long home, and He Himself alone left the survivor, can we wonder that _Jesus wept_?
(3.) Once more, JESUS WEPT _when He thought of the impenitence and obduracy of the human heart_.
This may not be at first sight patent as a cause of the tears of Jesus, but we may well believe it entered largely as an element into this strange flood of sorrow.
He was about to perform a great (His greatest) miracle; but while He knew that, in consequence of this manifestation of His mighty power, many of those who now stood around Lazarus' tomb would _believe_, He knew also that others would only "despise, and wonder, and perish;" that while some, as we shall afterwards find, acknowledged Him as the Messiah, others went straightway into Jerusalem to concert with the Pharisees in plotting His murder. When He observed the impenitence of these obdurate hearts at His side, He could not subdue His tenderest emotion. We read that, when He saw the sisters weeping, _and the Jews that were with them weeping_, Jesus wept. These Jews could weep for a fellow-mortal, but they could not weep for _themselves_, and therefore _for them, Jesus wept_!