I met Robert Nicholson a few years back at a conference on global persecution of Christians. He is the publisher and one of the editors of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy. He's a former marine, the founder and director of an engaging non-profit organization and a man who came across as articulate and ready to speak out on things that matter. I was impressed with his passion for suffering Christians as I heard him speak as part of a panel discussion and have taken to reading the journal.
So, it came as a surprise to me when he wrote in January 2019 of the last time he cried.
“I was finishing a tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem,” he begins, “when I came upon a massive room lined with shelves stacked floor to ceiling. Each shelf was crammed with books, and, on reading the placard, I realized that each book was filled with the names of those murdered in Hitler’s death machine. Shelf on shelf, the ghosts towered around me. Not until that moment had I comprehended the meaning of millions. My knees went weak. I wept.”
Having met and talked with Robert, I can say that he is not one who is prone to tears. But there he was weeping and writing about it.
This is not the norm. A New York Times article “It’s All Right to Cry, Dude,” observes “the ability to quash or conceal sadness or pain is a virtue long prized by stoics, yogis, monks, kung fu masters and American he-men heroes. It is a foundation of cool. Even in this seemingly nonjudgmental age, men who depart from the script will hear about it. Some will receive a cheer for defying stereotype. Some will be mocked. But male tears in the public sphere still make news.”
Holding it together remains important. Composure. Control.
Yet as I get older, I find myself dealing with tears more often. Maybe this is prized by yogis and kung fu masters, but I think Jesus has a different perspective.
This last year I wrote an email to Tom Paulsen that brought me to tears in the middle of writing it.
“Tom, the Pictorial Directories are finally done. These always take so long—longer than they should, but we always struggle to get them updated, and the company changed hands in the midst of this project.
“But when they finally arrived, I called up the list of people who helped greet those coming to get their photos taken.
“Well the name that is listed more than any other is Carole.” [Tom’s wife]
It’s at this point in the email that it happened. The email wasn’t for Tom, really; it was for his wife, Carole, who died suddenly just a few weeks after we finished the directory. It hit me in a fresh way when I saw her name on the list. She was just here, helping out. Then she was gone. So fast. And now, just this week, it’s been a year.
“So now I'm crying as I write this to you” I continued my email to Tom. “I want to say thank you. Thank you. Her faithful and good help meant a lot to me. This is such a hidden sort of thing, and she was faithful.
“God knows her good service. I just couldn't not reach out to you and express my thankfulness, and my prayers for you, too, friend.”
Maybe it’s the memory of a person who is gone, unexpectedly, shockingly, or a disappointment with a loved one whose faith has gone cold or saying goodbye to a friend who is moving away. It could even be one of those television commercials where the father comes home from the war as a surprise to his wife and children just in time for Christmas.
There's global tears and personal ones. And there is so much bad going on in the world—to be overwhelmed by bad things seems almost inevitable or we fall into cynicism or just cut ourselves off to keep ourselves composed.
Somehow I want to keep my heart soft to the needs of other people. And so sometimes these tears happen.
But there is a lesser known sort of tears.
David Helm, one of the pastors of Holy Trinity Church (our church plant in Chicago), is a passionate preacher. When he preached here before moving downtown (this was a long time ago), and when I heard him preach in more recent years, he is often overcome by the immensity of God’s Word and the unfathomable greatness of Christ, that his voice falters and the tears can fall even in the midst of preaching. I love that about Dave. I think his heart is a role model for the rest of us.
We are all confronted with things in life that are far beyond us. Perhaps there is nothing more beyond us than Jesus himself. Beyond us, yes, and also like us.
B.B. Warfield’s The Emotional Life of Our Lord chronicles the emotions of Jesus—his compassion, affection, anger and other common emotions we experience as humans. Jesus knows them not from afar, but from the core of his holy and righteous being.
Of the “Jesus wept” passage before Jesus raises Lazarus Warfield writes “The spectacle of the distress of Mary and her companions enraged Jesus because it brought poignantly home to his consciousness the evil of death, its unnaturalness, its 'violent tyranny' as Calvin (on verse 38) phrases it. In Mary’s grief, he 'contemplates'—still to adopt Calvin’s words (on verse 33),—'the general misery of the whole human race' and burns with rage against the oppressor of men.”
Toward his conclusion, Warfield states, “When we observe him exhibiting the movements of his human emotions, we are gazing on the very process of our salvation: every manifestation of the truth of our Lord’s humanity is an exhibition of the reality of our redemption.”
When I consider Jesus, another kind of tear forms, not one of anger or sorrow or helplessness, but of wonder. To be without sin, yet mourn and weep, and then take all of it on himself at the cross. This, too, is far beyond us, but in a most wonderful and good, even glorious way. The cross of Jesus is also the most bare and intimate nearness of God—Son of God taking it all on himself and dying with words of forgiveness and paradise falling from his lips as he then commits his spirit into the hands of God himself.
And then.
When her eyes were open and she cried “Rabonni.” When they recognized him at the breaking of the bread. When the net suddenly filled with fish that morning and he knew who was standing on the shore. When Thomas touched him and knew. When their hearts were burning on the road with him as he opened the Scripture. When the prayers for release from prison were interrupted by the knock of the former prisoners at the door of the prayer meeting. Wait. What?
Tears of wonder.
Today, this day, has a wonder of its own. I don’t know what it is yet, but I pray for eyes to see, tears to shed if those should come, ears to hear.
If a television commercial can bring me to tears, why not this truth that’s beyond tears:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”