Why do you think Jesus wept even though He knew He was about to raise Lazarus?

Theology
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This moment has always moved me because it shows that knowledge of the outcome didn’t cancel compassion. Jesus wasn’t detached from grief just because He knew resurrection was coming.

I don’t read His tears as doubt or despair, but as deep solidarity. He stepped fully into human sorrow, into Mary and Martha’s pain, into the brokenness of death itself, before transforming it. Love doesn’t skip grief just because hope exists.

It tells me that faith doesn’t require emotional distance. Even when God’s purposes are certain, grief is still real, and compassion is still appropriate. Jesus’ tears validate human sorrow rather than bypass it.

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From the Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD). Our Lord Jesus Christ is “like us in all ways, but without sin”.

The Divine Logos, the only-begotten Son of the Father, when assuming humanity did not merely wear humanity like a mantle or a costume. He became fully, entirely, totally human in every way. The only way the Lord was different from us is that He was entirely without sin.

Like all human beings, our Lord experienced pain, including emotional pain. The death of a friend doesn’t become less painful, even though we–with the confidence of faith–know that death is not the end, that those who are in Christ will come through the other side of death to the resurrection of the dead. So, here, our Lord too felt the simple and ordinary pain of the death of a friend–he experienced and empathized with the grief of those mourning. Our Lord was not a stoic, He wasn’t like a Vulcan from Star Trek–but stood in the midst of suffering and felt it. The emotional suffering of Lazarus’ family, His own pain from the death of a friend, He stood in it, knew it, empathized with it–because He was not an outsider of the human experience, but a full real human being. Even as He remained truly and really God.

As St. Ignatius of Antioch says in his famous poem,

”He that was impassable became passable.”

Passability is the capacity to suffer, to experience pain, to be affected. God, in His Eternal Divinity is impassable–we can’t hurt Him or affect Him. He is Eternally Immutable, “I, the LORD, do not change” “In Him there is no shadow of turning” etc. Yet Christ, being fully God and fully human was passable–He not only could suffer, He did suffer: He bore the suffering and shame of the Cross, He was beaten, cursed, and nailed to the Cross and He bled, in pain, and died for you and for me. So God, who cannot suffer, suffered because Christ our God is truly human.

So we see that too here at Lazarus’ tomb. We see it also on the night He was betrayed when He was in Gethsemane praying. We see it time and again, the God-Man who feels, who knows, who stands in our midst–in our hurt and even in our ugliness. And His response to us is love, mercy, forgiveness, and the superabundance of His own Divine Generosity.

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The context as always can give us insight into the reasons he wept at Lazarus’ tomb, @ellenvera:

Joh 11:32 Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Joh 11:33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.
Joh 11:34 And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”
Joh 11:35 Jesus wept.
Joh 11:36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
Joh 11:37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

Notice that Martha and Mary, of course, are grieving the loss of their brother but that a number of the Jews visiting them are skeptical unbelievers, who later reported Jesus’ raising of Lazarus to the religious authorities.

The conclusion that I draw from the context, therefore, is that Jesus’ wept in sympathy for the sisters but also in his sadness about the people’s unbelief that would eventually lead to his own death and resurrection. After all, he also wept loudly over Jerusalem’s unbelief on Palm Sunday:

Luk 19:41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it,
Luk 19:42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.
Luk 19:43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side
Luk 19:44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

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Yes, love this! It also reminds me of when Jesus looks out over Jerusalem and says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matt. 23:37).

Though Jesus knows there will someday be a New Jerusalem and all tears will be wiped away and everything will be made right, he grieves over a city and people he loves.

I think this is one area where Christians often fail to emulate Jesus. Many Christians and churches seem to be very good at talking about our victory in Jesus, the power of prayer, etc., etc., but I’ve found this is often at the expense of walking alongside people in their very real grief, pain, loneliness, etc. Jesus never washed over grief and sadness, though, which is very comforting.

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I completely agree with you, @ellenvera, that we need to face and express our grief rather than ignoring it. I buried my anger and anxiety about losses in my life, because of our culture’s false idea that “big boys don’t cry,” deep in my unconscious mind for the first 43 years of my life. It brought me down to major depression, from which God healed me according to the pattern in Philippians 4:6-7, after which God healed me with that peace, which is hard to understand but true, for the next 40 years until today:

Php 4:6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Php 4:7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.