Jesus Wept at a Funeral He Was About to Cancel

A note to our Christian family before we start.

We're writing this from inside the house. Everything described here is something we have done ourselves. Glenn and Phyllis Hill, who started Connection Codes and have been married more than forty years, are as guilty as anyone. Glenn has reached for a Bible verse to bring a hard moment to a close faster than it wanted to end. Phyllis has been handed one. We love the Church, and we believe the verses people quote to each other. We also think most of us were trained badly in one particular skill, and that skill is the only thing this piece is about.

You tell somebody you're not doing well.

They find a Bible verse before you finish the sentence. All things work together for good. Rejoice in the Lord always. He won't give you more than you can handle.

And then you do something strange. You start comforting them. You say yeah, you're right, thank you, I needed to hear that, because you can see on their face that they need this conversation to be over.

Nobody was lying to you. Every one of those verses is in the Bible and every one of them is true, which is exactly what makes them impossible to argue with. You can't push back on a true thing without sounding like you're pushing back on God.

So you went home and cried in the car with the engine off, so that nobody inside the house would hear you.

Most of us learned somewhere along the line that another person's sadness is an emergency that needs to be handled. When somebody we love goes quiet and heavy, we feel it in our own chest, and finding something true to say is the fastest way to make that feeling in our chest stop. The Bible verse gets handed over so that the room can feel better, and a lot of the time the person in the room who needs to feel better is us.

There is a story in the Bible about a man who walks straight into a moment like that. He does none of what we do.

He knew how it ended before He got there

The story is in the eleventh chapter of John, which is one of the four accounts of Jesus' life that open the New Testament. A man named Lazarus, who is a close friend of Jesus, gets sick. Lazarus has two sisters, Mary and Martha, and they send word to Jesus asking Him to come.

What Jesus does next has kept people arguing for two thousand years. He stays where He is for two more days.

He is not confused about what is happening. Before He leaves, He says out loud that this sickness is not going to end in death. He tells His disciples, the twelve men who traveled with Him, exactly where they are going and why.

By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days. Martha walks out of the village to meet Him on the road, and she says the sentence that almost every grieving person eventually says to somebody: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." A few minutes later, when Jesus wants the grave opened, Martha objects that after four days there is going to be a smell.

So picture the situation. A man is walking toward a funeral that he is about to cancel. He is the only person there who knows that the dead man is going to be alive again within the hour.

"When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 'Where have you laid him?' he asked. 'Come and see, Lord,' they replied. Jesus wept." — John 11:33–35 (NIV)

Look closely at what actually sets Him off in those verses. It is not the death. He has already said the death is temporary. What breaks Him open is the sight of Mary crying and the neighbors around her crying. He is four days late, He is on His way to undo the entire situation, and He stops and cries because the people in front of Him are sad.

His tears had nothing to do with the facts of the case. He had the facts. He had them a week early. He cried because He loved these people and they were in pain.

The crowd standing there understood it perfectly well. They said, "See how he loved him." Not one person in that scene read His crying as a sign that His faith had slipped.

Two words, and John never explains them

Jesus wept. It is the shortest verse in the Bible, which has turned it into a piece of trivia and cost it most of its weight.

John, the man writing this account, normally explains things to his reader. He tells us what events mean and why they matter. Here he writes two words and moves on. He does not add that Jesus wept briefly, or that He wept while keeping His composure. He also never tells us that Jesus pulled Himself together first and then taught the crowd something. The order of events in the chapter is that Jesus cried, He was troubled, He walked to the grave, and then He raised Lazarus from the dead.

The comfort came after the crying. Most of us do it the other way around. We hand people the happy ending while they are still standing at the graveside.

What it costs to skip the crying

There is real research on this, and it says something more useful than "it's healthy to cry."

Some people habitually suppress their emotions, which means keeping a feeling off their face while it is happening inside them. Those people report having fewer close relationships and less support from the people around them (Gross & John, 2003). The feeling itself does not go anywhere when you do this. What changes is that nobody else ever finds out about it.

There is also a physical bill for it. When you hold an emotional expression in, your cardiovascular system works harder even though less is showing on the outside (Roberts et al., 2008). Both of those studies are correlational, meaning they show two things happening together without proving which one caused the other, so they cannot tell us whether suppressing made life harder or whether harder lives produce more suppressing. What they do establish is that keeping a feeling off your face does not get it out of your body.

Glenn watches the slow version of this happen in his counseling office all the time. A husband who has been perfectly reasonable for eleven years sits down and cannot work out why he feels so alone in a marriage to a woman who genuinely loves him. Nothing was ever hidden on purpose. It simply never made it out of the room where it happened.

Crying is doing something, and it does more when somebody is there with you

Crying is not a wasted gesture. It is a full-body event with its own machinery. As the crying builds, heart rate and sweating go up, and then both drop away as it passes. On the way down, your parasympathetic nervous system takes over, which is the branch of your wiring whose whole job is to calm you back down (Bylsma et al., 2019). Researchers describe crying as genuinely self-soothing, meaning it produces physical recovery you can measure on instruments rather than a mood you talked yourself into (Gračanin et al., 2014). Your body knows how to bring you down off distress, and crying is one of the ways it does that.

Then there is the finding that changes what you do with all of it. Whether people say they feel better after crying is inconsistent from study to study, and one of the strongest predictors of whether they do feel better is whether somebody comforted them while they were crying (Rottenberg et al., 2008).

That is worth understanding clearly, because it is the whole reason this article exists. The crying itself is working. Your body is doing something real and useful. But how much good it does you depends heavily on whether another human being was there for it. Crying is partly a signal to other people, and a signal that reaches nobody leaves you carrying the whole thing by yourself.

Which is what makes that car with the engine off so expensive. You did the hardest part of it, and you did it in the one place where nothing could reach you back.

It also explains why Jesus did not stand on that road and hand Martha a piece of theology. He asked where they had put Lazarus, He walked to the grave, and He cried alongside the people who were already crying. He made himself the person who was there with them.

There is a name for handing somebody a Bible verse

Therapists and counselors have a term for this: spiritual bypass. It means using spiritual language, or prayer, or Scripture, to get around emotional work instead of going through it.

This is not a word somebody invented on the internet to score points against Christians. Researchers built a proper measurement scale for it, because the pattern kept showing up in counseling rooms often enough to need naming (Fox et al., 2017). People who score higher on that scale report more depression, more anxiety and more stress (Fox & Picciotto, 2019), and longer-term studies find that spiritual struggle left unattended predicts worse psychological adjustment over the following years (Bockrath et al., 2022).

None of that is an argument against faith, and none of it means the verses are wrong. Every verse anybody has ever quoted to you may be completely true. Spiritual bypass is about when those words arrive, and about who they are really serving when they arrive that early.

When your sister is crying on a road outside a grave, there is a stretch of time before the good news. Jesus stood in that stretch with her instead of skipping it. He did not hurry her through it, and He did not need her to stop crying so that He could be comfortable.

That stretch of time is the thing most of us have never been taught how to stay inside. It is roughly twenty seconds long, and it feels considerably longer than that when you are in it.

How to be the person who is there with them

This is the part worth learning properly, because somebody you love is going to cry in front of you this month, and the research above says your presence changes how much good that crying does them.

There are two things to do. The first is that you do not try to fix the problem. The second is that you do not try to improve the feeling.

Almost everything we say in that moment is an attempt to improve the feeling. At least she didn't suffer. God has a plan. She's in a better place. Those sentences might all be true, and they are all doing the same job, which is moving the person off what they are feeling before they have finished feeling it.

Instead of saying any of that, make a sound. The sound is "Oooo."

It is one syllable, and it goes before any sentence you were planning to say. It sounds like mmm, or oof, or yeah, I hear that. It tells the other person that you are still present and still listening, it gives you about six seconds to catch up to what they just said, and it takes up the space where you would otherwise have explained or defended or reassured.

Then you ask one question, and which question you choose matters a great deal. Do not ask why. Ask "What happens?"

If you ask why are you still upset about this, the other person hears an accusation and starts building a defense. If you ask what happens for you when you think about her, you have invited them to describe their actual experience to you, and describing it is exactly what they need to be doing.

There is real machinery behind something that small. Brain imaging studies show that putting a feeling into words reduces activity in the amygdala, which is the brain's threat-detection system, while switching on the parts of the brain involved in calming yourself down (Lieberman et al., 2007). Saying a feeling out loud to somebody who stays put is how that feeling starts to move.

That is your entire job in the moment. You are not there to solve the thing they are crying about. You are there so that they are not crying alone, which is what the research above says makes the difference.

Which is roughly what Jesus does in that chapter, in what most of us would consider the wrong order. He asks where the body is. He goes to the grave. He cries with the people who are crying. Then, and only then, He speaks.

Two practices for this week

1. Stop saying "at least" for seven days. You do not have to stop thinking it, just stop saying it out loud. Every time you are about to say at least to your spouse or your friend or your child, say "Oooo, that's a lot" instead, and then stop talking and wait. You will be surprised how often you were reaching for it, and you will be more surprised at how much more people tell you once you stop.

2. Say the sentence you have been editing. Most of us have some hard thing we tidy up before we hand it over. I'm just tired gets said instead of I'm carrying a lot of sadness about my mom, and I don't want to be the heavy one tonight. Give your husband or your wife the untidied version this week. You are not asking them to fix it or to have an answer for it. You are asking them to be in the room while you say it out loud.

Paul, who wrote a good portion of the New Testament, gives the whole instruction in eight words. Most of us only ever practice the first half of it:

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn." — Romans 12:15 (NIV)

Read that second half again. It does not say mourn at people, or mourn about them, or mourn until they cheer up and let you off the hook. It says mourn with them, which means the instruction has another person built into it. You cannot carry it out on your own, and you cannot carry it out from a distance.

If you have been quietly worried that your sadness means something has gone wrong between you and God, the shortest verse in the Bible is two words long, and it was written about a man standing at a graveside He was about to empty.

What would change in your house this week if you stopped trying to improve people's pain and just stayed in it with them?

Get the Core Emotion Wheel for free

It is a single page with our eight core emotions on it, written in plain language. Most of us were only ever handed three or four words for what we feel, and people use this to finally name things they have been carrying for years without a name for them. It takes about four minutes to do with your husband, your wife, or anybody you love, sitting next to each other, and it is the most useful thing we give away.

Get the Core Emotion Wheel — free

References

Bockrath, M. F., Pargament, K. I., Wong, S., Harriott, V. A., Pomerleau, J. M., Homolka, S. J., Chaudhary, Z. B., & Exline, J. J. (2022). Religious and spiritual struggles and their links to psychological adjustment: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 14(3), 283–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000400

Bylsma, L. M., Gračanin, A., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2019). The neurobiology of human crying. Clinical Autonomic Research, 29(1), 63–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10286-018-0526-y

Fox, J., Cashwell, C. S., & Picciotto, G. (2017). The opiate of the masses: Measuring spiritual bypass and its relationship to spirituality, religion, mindfulness, psychological distress, and personality. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 4(4), 274–287. https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000141

Fox, J., & Picciotto, G. (2019). The mediating effects of spiritual bypass on depression, anxiety, and stress. Counseling and Values, 64(2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/cvj.12116

Gračanin, A., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2014). Is crying a self-soothing behavior? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 502. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00502

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Roberts, N. A., Levenson, R. W., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Cardiovascular costs of emotion suppression cross ethnic lines. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 70(1), 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2008.06.003

Rottenberg, J., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2008). Is crying beneficial? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00614.x