Finding Grace in Disappointment (Lessons from Lazarus)Sample

 When disappointment meets compassion.

Mary and Martha had pleaded for Jesus to come. 

“Lord, our brother Lazarus, the one you love, is very sick. Please come!” (Jn 11:3 TPT)

Yet Jesus had remained, and not come. And their beloved brother and Jesus’ beloved friend had died. By the time Jesus arrived, Mary and Martha were broken. So broken that when word came that Jesus was approaching Bethany, Mary did not even go out to meet Him, and Martha met Him outside the village—she did not wait until He reached the house. Mary only came later, when Martha returned and said that Jesus was asking for her.

You can hear the grief, anguish and disappointment in Jesus in the words both women greeted Him with: ‘My Lord, if only you had been here sooner, my brother wouldn’t have died.’

For Mary, the softer of the two, these words came out in a flood of tears as she fell at His feet and cried and cried. Jesus. Why didn’t you come when I asked? How could you stay away? Why did you let him die when you could have healed him? Why do you perform miracles for others, but not for me?

“When Jesus looked at Mary and saw her weeping at his feet, and all her friends who were with her grieving , he shuddered with emotion and was deeply moved with tenderness and compassion.” (Jn 11:33 TPT)

The Aramaic for the word ‘emotion’ can literally be translated, ‘His heart melted with compassion.’ Our Jesus is not a cold and distant faraway God. When He looks at us bringing our brokenness and grief, His response is to be deeply, deeply moved with a compassion that stirs action. He does not despise or rebuke our honest brokenness before Him, but rather responds to it with tender love and a revealing of more of who He is.

The writer of Psalm 51:16-17 TPT discovered this same beautiful truth:

“For the source of your pleasure is not in my performance or the sacrifices I might offer to you. The fountain of your pleasure is found in the sacrifice of my shattered heart before you. You will not despise my tenderness as I humbly bow down at your feet.”

Mary and Martha’s great reward was found in being able to be honestly broken before Jesus. They did not hide their emotion, and in return Jesus did not hide Himself.

“Then tears streamed down Jesus’ face. Seeing Jesus weep caused many mourners to say, ‘Look how much He loved Lazarus!’” (Jn 11:35-36)

This wasn’t just a little sympathy tear in the corner of His eye. Tears streamed down His face, and He shuddered with emotion. But Jesus had already revealed to His disciples that He knows the end of this story. He knows that in just a few moments, Lazarus will live again. But this does not prevent Him from entering into this present pain.

These tears were not for the loss of a friend, but for the ‘felt’ pain and anguish of the people in front of Him who loved, and now have lost. For the broken woman crying at His feet. The tears on Jesus’ cheeks that day held a mirror reflection of the same pain in the grieving ones before Him, and an agony and anguish at the consequence of a sinful, fallen world that leads to death.

As long as we rise to a new day, new hard things will find us, and death can come in many more shapes than a physical death. We can live, but not be truly alive. These things that have suddenly become dead as we find ourselves thrust into a circumstance not of our doing—goals and dreams we had for this year, visions of things we believed God spoke to us about this year, disappearing incomes and savings, sickness of mind and body and soul—these things are not separate from our Jesus. He does not stand on the outside of our pain and wait for us on the other side. 

He enters in and bears it.

Isaiah 53 is a stunning prophetic picture of Jesus. In vs 4 and 5 we are given a picture of this very thing, of Him entering in and bearing our pain.

It is the miracle of Jesus that He not only knows about our pain, but He has borne it. He carried it. He knows it because He has experienced it. Don’t ever let the enemy lead you to believe you are alone in your pain. You never, ever are. Jesus’ compassion is such that He is not content to be a bystander; He came and took it upon Himself so that we could be joined with Him, be one with Him. One with Him in our suffering because it was His suffering too. He is not on the other side of our pain. He is in the midst of it with us. And that is also the place of our healing. Being one with Him leads from suffering to healing, to wholeness in every way. For He never will rebuke or despise our brokenness; rather He responds with deep emotion, deep compassion and rushes to enter in.

Aren’t you grateful we have a God like this? 

Take a moment to tell Him.