NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
29 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_024,01] ‘And Jesus wept.’
[Ste.01_024,02] This passage is exceedingly short, consisting of three little words. Yet for all its brevity it says and signifies so much that, if I unfolded this passage to you even to some degree, you would have a whole world full of books to write. As for its full disclosure, you will surely never be able to grasp its full depth in all eternity!
[Ste.01_024,03] The conjunction ‘and’ occurs countless times in Scripture, yet nowhere does it join so much as here. Here it joins two infinite things into one: infinite love and God's infinite wisdom, strength and power. For Jesus is the wisdom, power and strength, and thus the ruler over all that fills eternity and infinity, spiritually and naturally.
[Ste.01_024,04] Yet this Jesus wept. How and why? Because He became One in fullness with the Father and with eternal love. For in Moses' time, when he desired to see God, it was said, ‘No one can see God and live at the same time!’ But in Jesus many saw God, and He became their life. They did not die because they saw Him.
[Ste.01_024,05] In Moses' time the Godhead did not weep. It judged the transgressors of the law unto death, and no one once given over to death was awakened. Here was the same Godhead. But it no longer kept its love and mercy hidden in its unsearchable centre. It wept, was stirred, and loosed the bonds of death from the one decaying in the tomb.
[Ste.01_024,06] Do you now understand something of what the weeping of Jesus means here? The weeping here means the infinitely deep mercy of the infinite love in God!
[Ste.01_024,07] On whom does it have mercy? On the one already decaying in the tomb for four days.
[Ste.01_024,08] Who among you has enough wisdom to grasp this picture so full of boundless meaning? Do you think Jesus performed only a local miracle here, first to give the two grieving sisters back their dearly loved brother and second to prove to the Jews that no one before Him had ever done such a thing?
[Ste.01_024,09] Look, these are wholly incidental circumstances. In the first place, Jesus had already done miracles in abundance that were as weighty as this one. As for comforting the two sisters, He who holds all human hearts in His hand would surely not have been at a loss to make them so blessed with a glance, or even the slightest sign, that they would scarcely have thought of their dead brother again with mourning, only with rejoicing!
[Ste.01_024,10] So that was not the chief reason. What was it, then? Here indeed lies the true depth of this deed of God, which you cannot grasp! I can indicate it to you only by distant hints and cannot explain it fully, for full light in this matter would cost you your life. It is said of this very deed that it happens so that the Father's glory may be made manifest in the Son.
[Ste.01_024,11] What do the two grieving sisters, Martha and Mary, represent? They are pictures of the earlier and later times, the one more outward and thus prefiguring, the other more inward and therefore spiritual, of a kind full of truth in itself. In the wider sense, ‘Martha’ represents the whole natural creation and ‘Mary’ all heavenly, spiritual creation. See, these are the two grieving sisters!
[Ste.01_024,12] For whom do they grieve? For a brother who has been decaying in the tomb for four long days. The four days signify four states of creation.
[Ste.01_024,13] Who then is the brother? But from here, no further! Whoever among you has even a mite of wisdom may reckon it out. A closer disclosure from Me would endanger life!
[Ste.01_024,14] From what has been said you can at least gather how great a depth and what unsearchableness lie in the three words ‘And Jesus wept!’ If you consider who Jesus is, you may at least be able to sense that His tears mean something quite different and greater than the tears of a woman half blinded by reading novels. Jesus' heart had not been made sensitive by reading. It was eternal Love itself as Father in the Son!
[Ste.01_024,15] As an example to follow, these tears show that you too are to be merciful out of the true depth of life. Soft-heartedness and pity brought about by reading novels have no value with Me and are little better than blind love and marriage on a stage. To such ‘merciful’ people I will one day give the reward that was the ground of their mercy. In the world beyond they shall also find great libraries of countless novels. They shall not leave them until they have learnt in living experience that written love and written life are no love and no life at all.
[Ste.01_024,16] Whoever does not love out of Me and does not learn from Me does all he does as a dead man. He will not rise from his tomb until Jesus weeps over it. Understand this well. There is a great depth in it, so let life be your Amen!