Why did Jesus weep?

“Jesus wept.” This phrase captures the humanness of Jesus’ experience.

When he received the news about his friend Lazarus, Jesus was involved. He was vested in the relationship. He felt the hurt and the pain surrounding the death of his friend.

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch observe in The Shaping of Things to Come that Jesus was an “authentic human being” who engaged his world. In fact, they write,

 Jesus was Jesus precisely because of Mary and Joseph, his twelve disciples, the poor to whom he ministered, and all the others who interacted with him … He was changed in some way by all those he came in contact with in precisely the same way that we are changed by our relationships — for good or ill. To be a genuine human being, Jesus must have had such [interactions]… If this is not true, then his humanity was a sham (The Shaping of Things to Come, 36).

Jesus was moved by his friends’ experience. He wept.