“When Jesus drew near to Jerusalem, and saw the city, He wept over it,...”

In another state, some years ago, a traditional priest preached a sermon that men do not cry.  It began something like this, “Men do not cry.  It is unmanly for any man to shed a tear.  Women may cry, children may cry, BUT never should a man be like this.”

I hope no one here agrees with this stoical assessment of men.   For, if this were true, if it were inordinate for a man to weep over some strong movement in his soul, never would Christ have shed a single tear - but He did, and on more than one occasion.

Today we will speak on the tears of our Savior and what is worthy of our own.

First, let us leave no room for semantics.  To weep, to cry, to shed a tear, or any such other term referring to the release of moisture from the tear duct induced by some great stress, pain, even joy... to me are all the same thing.  Our primary concern is not crying but what is cried about.

Second, let us understand history contains other counterparts to our stoical priest.  In the Haydock Bible Commentary on this passage, St. Epiphanius of Salamis (monk and Bishop of Constantia (Salamis), ‘Oracle of Palestine’, +403) writes that some of the orthodox of his time, offended to read that our Lord wept, omitted this passage from their copies of sacred scripture as they thought to shed tears was a weakness unworthy of Christ. The true reading, however, is found in all other copies and, having been received by all the faithful, the liberty which those took who changed the wording was never accepted by the Church.

St. Epiphanius goes on to say that these tears do not argue for anything unworthy of Christ neither in His supreme majesty nor wisdom.  For our Savior possessed all the passions, but without their defects.  Finally, this saint faults stoic idealists because they condemned the passions as witnessed in their statues made without emotion to express their idea of the ideal man; and praises the true philosophers because they sought to govern and regulate the passions and not destroy them... which is the proper attitude.

Now, from this same commentary, St. Dionysius is cited as saying our Lord wept on six occasions during His life on earth.  1. At His birth, according to many doctors; 2. at His circumcision, according to St. Bernard and others; 3. when He raised Lazarus to life, as is related in chapter 11 of the Gospel of St. John ; 4. in His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; 5. during His agony in the Garden when His sweat became as drops of blood; 6. during His passion when He wept often especially on account of His great stress of mind, knowledge of man’s sin, and foresight that many would never accept the salvation which He was now winning for them by His cruel torment and death.

 Again, St. Dionysius tells us sometimes our Lord wept because of physical pain, i.e. at His birth and circumcision and during His passion; sometimes He cried because of moral pain, i.e. the painful knowledge that His own people would reject Him as occurs in today’s Gospel and the pain He felt in others as in the raising of Lazarus wherein we read, “When Jesus saw her (Mary) weeping, and the Jews that were come with her weeping, he groaned in His spirit and troubled Himself... and wept.” (St. John 11:33-35).

Now if our Lord wept on account of these reasons, surely it is no sin, nor inordinate movement in our own body, to do the same in these circumstances.

In fact, I will go further and say that if, indeed, Christ is the perfect man, these instances for tears more perfectly express man’s humanity.  Let us look at today’s Gospel on this point.  During our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, why does our Savior weep?  He wept because of sin. 

Recall that in this procession, the Savior rides upon an ass towards Jerusalem; attending crowds lay palm branches for a path while exclaiming with joy, ‘Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord;’ finally, the Savior crests a hill which overlooks the city, golden domes and pinnacles shining in the sun and fortress walls rising from the earth give the appearance of an indestructible city.  Christ takes all this in, and sees with a divine gaze 40 years hence and all that the Romans would do to His people because they had rejected Him, and sighs, ‘If thou hadst but known, in this thy day, the things that are for thy peace! But now they are hidden from thy eyes.  For the days will come upon thee when they will throw a rampart about thee, and surround thee, and shut thee up on every side, and dash thee to the ground...because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.”

And here we have a good reason never to be ashamed of tears, namely, when Christ is rejected.  Christ died for all men; saving grace is given every man for his salvation; rejection of this  visitation of His saving mercy spells eternal ruin.  Just so, amid the false joy of the world, we should consider it fitting to shed tears for those who have rejected Christ in some way: for everyone who does not know Christ, for every non-Catholic who needs to know Christ more, for every bad Catholic (who is the worse off), and, of course, for our own numerous sins - past and present - because they too have been or are so many rejections of Christ in our own life.

These are some proper things to weep over.  Ah!  And how much the world would induce our tears if we had the heart of the Savior... perhaps it is His mercy that we do not!  Over his distress, the just man Job wept so much his face became swollen; St. Peter wept so much over his three-fold denial of Christ that his tears carved channels down his cheeks.  We would be wrecks if we lived so.  Many saints, however, were given the gift of tears.  God chose them and infused them with a greater measure of His love and compassion for mankind and because they loved more intensely so did they pain more bitterly; for when one loves more, the rejection of that love is most sorrowful and such victim souls suffer terribly. 

In fine. Let us not make Christ something He is not.  He is not sterile of emotion; He is not a sniffling pansy... which is perhaps what our stoic priest wanted to safeguard Christ against.  But if we think about it enough, it makes all the difference that we adore a God who is not just all powerful, all knowing, and ever present, but infinitely compassionate... even to the point of weeping with us and for us.   Allah would not do that!