28 After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” 29 When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there. 32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.35 Jesus wept. 36 Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”37 But som e of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus showed not only showed compassion, but passion as well.  He not only showed His love to the family (in His coming to them in their grief), but weeps with them. He is among the mourners. Do not deny even for Jesus the human experience of grief.  We have just read one of the most marvelous words recorded regarding the hope of the believer who faces death, but that does not deny the reality of human loss and the sharing of emotional empathy with those we love.

Do you ever wonder if the reason Jesus wept was because He called Lazarus back.  He had to come back to the world of this life with its pain and sorrow.  Lazarus had to die again.  Lazarus was better off before he was called back from the dead. As Christians,  when we leave this world, it is a far better than anything doctors or medicine can do. But for now, it pleased God to show off the power and glory of Christ by raising Lazarus so people can be saved.

Grief is reaction to loss. There is nothing wrong with it. There is something right with it. Not all people experience grief in the same way and to the same degree.  A lot depends on the closeness of the relationship, on the personality of the person, the change in the future habits, and the nature of the death. Wailing, weeping and fainting are seen sometimes to an excess, in our opinions, on the television when we see the Eastern people experience death. The expression of grief may be more cultural than we think.

Passion is the expression of deep feelings.  One can be passionately in love, or passionately angry, or passionately excited. At times of death there are stages of grief, psychologists tell us, most people go through.  I think they are demonstrated in this story.

After the initial shock stage, when your body numbs itself to tragic news, it is easy to slip for a time into denial.  It may take a while to process the reality of a death of a loved one. We get a hint of this when both Mary and Martha repeat the same phrase independently in the presence of Jesus. Martha said, "If you would have been here, my brother would not have died."

Certainly, this is an expression of the faith they had in Jesus as Lord. He could have healed Lazarus, but it is also saying (to me) they repeated that again among themselves emotionally, trying to think of other ways in which death would not have to have happened.  They are playing out in their minds the alternatives, as if there was a solution that would keep someone from dying.

Examples might be: 
"If only we didn't take this car the accident wouldn't have happened.” 
“If only the doctor caught it earlier, he wouldn't have died.”
“If only I would have warned him to stop smoking maybe he wouldn't have died of lung cancer." 

This is our psychological way of trying to think of alternatives to reality, but it still doesn't change the reality.

Dale