The Tears

There is a kind of weeping that Scripture does not merely permit but counts among the gifts of God, and we have very nearly lost the knowledge of it. We know the tears of grief and the tears of pain and the tears of frustration, which come to everyone whether they will or no. But the tears the psalm speaks of are different. They are sown. They are deliberate and fruitful, cast like seed into the ground with the sure expectation of a harvest. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. The weeping is not the whole of the matter but the beginning of it, the planting whose flowering is joy, and the man who goes out weeping and bearing precious seed shall doubtless, the psalm says with no hesitation at all, come again rejoicing and bringing his sheaves with him.

The Lord himself set his blessing on such tears. Blessed are they that mourn, he said, for they shall be comforted, and he did not mean only those who mourn their dead. He meant a mourning that goes deeper, a grief over sin and over the great distance between what we are and what we were made to be, a sorrow that the apostle carefully distinguished from every counterfeit. Godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation, he wrote, not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. There are two sorrows, then, and they must never be confused. The one turns a man toward God and softens and heals him. The other turns him in upon himself, into bitterness and despair, and hollows him out. The tears that are a gift are the tears of the first kind, and they are worth asking God for.

THE WEEPING THAT HEALS

See how such tears run all through the Gospels, and always toward mercy. On the night of his denials, when the cock had crowed and the Lord had turned and looked upon him, Peter went out and wept bitterly. Those bitter tears were not the sorrow that works death, for they did not end in Judas’ rope. They were the melting of a proud man’s heart, and on the far side of them stood a restored apostle by a charcoal fire, asked three times if he loved his Lord and given three times his work again. Or consider the woman who came to the Pharisee’s house and stood at the feet of Jesus weeping, and began to wash his feet with her tears and wipe them with the hairs of her head. She said nothing that is recorded. Her tears were her whole confession and her whole love, and the Lord received them and said, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. Her weeping was the door through which her love came out and mercy came in.

The old fathers had a name for this holy weeping. They called it compunction, a word that means a piercing, and that is exactly what it is, the piercing of a heart that has grown hard and no longer felt its own condition. A hard heart cannot weep, and that is its great danger, not that it feels too much but that it has stopped feeling at all, and so cannot be reached. The tears of compunction are the sign that the stone has begun to soften, that the man has seen himself truly and been moved by the sight, and by the greater sight of the mercy held out to him. Such tears are not weakness. They are the first liquefying of a frozen soul, and God does not despise them. A broken and a contrite heart, the psalmist sang out of his own great sin, O God, thou wilt not despise.

WHY THE SOLITARY WEEPS

This is why weeping belongs so naturally to the shut door and the quiet hour. When a man sits still long enough to see himself as he truly is, without the flattering noise and the constant motion that keep the sight at bay, the honest response is not despair and it is not self-hatred, both of which are the sorrow of the world. The honest response is tears, because two things become clear at once in the silence, the depth of our own poverty and the height of the mercy that meets it, and the meeting of those two is more than a dry eye can hold. The saints who wept most were not the most wretched of men but the most clear- sighted, those who saw furthest into both their sin and their Savior. Their tears were not misery. They were, strange as it sounds, a kind of sweetness, the sweetness of a heart at last unfrozen and able to feel both its need and its rescue.

Guard, then, against the dry eye, which is a graver peril than the wet one. It is possible to read of the cross a hundred times and remain entirely unmoved, to confess sins by rote without ever grieving them, to go through the outward motions of repentance with a heart as hard and cold as the day it began. This is the true danger, not that we should weep too much, but that we have forgotten how to weep at all over the things that ought to break us. Ask God for the softened heart. Do not manufacture tears, for forced tears are only another performance, and God is not deceived by them. But do not resist the tears he sends, and do not be ashamed of them. Let the slow reading of the Scriptures pierce you. Let the remembrance of the cross do its work. And when the piercing comes and the eyes fill, do not hurry past it back to your distractions, but stay in it, and sow it, and let it go down into the ground.

JESUS WEPT

We are not asked to weep a tear the Lord himself refused to shed. The shortest verse in all the Scriptures records that Jesus wept, and he wept standing before the tomb of a friend he was about to raise, so that his tears were not from ignorance of the outcome but from the sheer weight of death and grief pressing on a heart that felt everything fully. And another time he wept over a whole city, beholding Jerusalem and weeping over it because it did not know the things that belonged to its peace. The God who took our flesh took our tears with it, and wept them, and by weeping them made holy weeping holy. When you weep over sin and death and the lostness of those you love, you weep in the company of your Lord.

And your tears are not wasted or unseen. The psalmist, in the depth of his trouble, asked God to keep them. Put thou my tears into thy bottle, he prayed, are they not in thy book. It is a startling picture, that God should gather up the tears of his people and store them and account for every one, but so the Scripture says. Not a tear sown before him falls to the ground and is lost. He who numbers the hairs of your head numbers also your weeping, and keeps it, and will answer it. The nights the psalmist watered his couch with his tears were not empty nights. They were poured out before a God who was counting.

The fathers went so far as to call the tears of true repentance a second baptism, a washing given to the soul that has fallen since the first, by which the fire of sin is quenched and the heart made clean again. There is a strange sweetness in such sorrow, so that they even joined two words that seem opposite and spoke of a joy-bearing grief, a mourning shot through with consolation, because the very tears that grieve the sin are already the sign of the mercy melting the heart. To weep so is not to be miserable. It is to be washed.

TEARS FOR OTHERS

Nor are these tears only for our own sins. The deepest weeping of the saints was often for others, for the church, for the lost, for a world that will not turn. Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, the psalmist cried, because they keep not thy law. The apostle reminded the elders that for three years he ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears. This is intercession gone down into the body, prayer that has stopped being words and become weeping, and it is among the most powerful pleadings a soul can offer, to carry another before God not with arguments but with tears.

Yet guard even here, for the enemy can corrupt a good thing. Beware the tears that are only sentiment, a passing softness stirred by a sad tale and gone by evening, changing nothing. And beware, more subtly, of taking a secret pride in your own weeping, counting your tears as proof of your depth, until the weeping becomes one more performance staged for the self. True tears are humble and forget themselves. They are not admired, even privately. They are simply offered, and then the soul rises and goes on, softer than before, and says nothing of them.

For the tears are sown, and sown seed does not stay buried. This is the whole hope of the psalm and the reason such weeping is not morbid but full of expectation. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing. The joy is not a vague possibility held out to cheer us. It is doubtless, certain, promised. And at the very end, when the sowing is done and the last harvest is gathered, God himself shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, for the former things will have passed away. That is the comfort promised to those who mourn, and it is no shallow cheerfulness pasted over unhealed grief. It is the deep and final consolation of God, and it is reached only through the valley and not around it. So do not despise the tears God gives you. Sow them in hope. The One who counts them and keeps them in his bottle will not fail to bring in the harvest, and the reaping will be joy.