I’m Such A Baby That Shrek Makes Me Cry (November 9, 2003)

A reference in Sunday School to Jacob weeping out loud over meeting Rachel (Genesis 29:11) led to a discussion about what makes people cry.

Crying varies from culture to culture and person to person. In Middle Eastern cultures people cry a lot more than Westerners do, and you will find the Bible full of unabashed weepers like Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Peter, John, Paul and Timothy - to name a few. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over rebellious Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). The king of biblical criers has to be David, who wrote, "I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears." (Psalm 6:6)

Crying is at least partly voluntary - like a cough it can be suppressed or faked. Jewish funeral custom required that even poor families hire at least one professional wailing woman to weep and howl at a loved one's burial. Clearly such women could spout for pay for people they didn’t know. And of course, any good actor (or even a bad one like Jimmy Swaggert or Tammy Faye Baker) can cry on cue.

Western culture has traditionally shamed men for crying (as in Friar Laurence's rebuke of Romeo: "Thy tears are womanish...By my holy order, I thought thy disposition better tempered"), and that contempt has evaporated many a man's tears before they ever left the ducts. But attitudes are changing. Sportswriters point out, for example, that Hall of Fame inductees never used to cry on the lawn at Cooperstown - but now they gush buckets. Tom Hanks' comment about there being “no crying in baseball” belongs to the bygone era of Joe Dimaggio.

My own tears are a mystery to me. For some reason I don't cry at funerals, but the animated film Shrek had me rubbing huge wet drops from my cheeks when Rufus Wainwright sang,

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelu---jah

There is a time to cry. When my sister received bad news last year (following a string of other tragedies), I called my brother Dave and he responded with Malcom's words from Macbeth, "Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there weep our sad bosoms empty." God sees our tears, and bottles each one. (King David wrote, "Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll - are they not in your record?" Psalm 56:8.) But God also knows that our tears are not forever. Eric Clapton was right when he sang, "I know there'll be no more tears in heaven." Scripture promises as much in Revelation 7:17 where it says, "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Though this life can be a valley of woe, the ultimate destiny of God's loved ones is joy, not sorrow; fellowship, not solitude; fulfillment, not loss; and laughter, not tears.