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Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Today's Frontline Devotion Saturday, June 28, 2003 "Jesus Wept" |
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Frontline Devotion for Saturday, June 28, 2003 By Fritz Foltz
John 11:35. That’s one verse I have memorized. “Jesus wept”.
Back in high school, my homeroom was composed entirely of basketball players. In those days we still had opening devotions with a Bible reading, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher was the coach who passed the leadership from player to player. So just about every day, one of my friends would open the school day by picking up the Bible and reading the shortest verse: “John 11:35: Jesus wept.”
I used to think it was a cop-out. It took a verse out of context and destroyed its meaning. To this day, I think that is the worst way to read the Bible. After all, most of it was written to be read as you would read any other book. After all, it was not written in verses at all. They were marked centuries later. In fact, one of the scholarly jokes is that some of the strange versification can be attributed to the editor doing his work on a train.
However, I do not think this shortest verse came about because of a bump on a train ride. I have to think the scholar was so struck by the thought that God’s Son would weep that he set it off by itself as a verse. We read it and are forced to stop and think about its tremendous significance. Lazarus is the only person described as Jesus’ friend in the Gospels. Here we have a wonderful picture of Jesus weeping at the death of a friend. Any belief that Jesus walks through life with the power to do anything he wishes and so unmoved by the tragedies the rest of us experience are erased in one short verse.
Today I look back on those homeroom devotions with different eyes. I see God teaching me a lesson I never lost through college, divinity school, and ministry: the true humanity of Jesus. Here is a God I can love, a God who weeps when tragedy strikes, a God who shares my pain.
Let us pray. Thank you, Father, for giving us Jesus to love. Thank you for showing us how much you love us as we remember his love. Fill us with his Spirit as we reach out to the people you have given us to love in this life. We pray in Jesus’ name.
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