There is, in the Bible in Revelation 21, an image of tears being wiped away. And no more tears or death or mourning or crying or pain. It’s a fixture in funerals, it’s a last reading.

I hear it, from time to time, used as a reason to stop feeling bad. “Because of that then, you should feel better now.”

What if the one who wipes tears away is one who also cried tears?

imagine Jesus on a hill, looking over Jerusalem and weeping.

Imagine Jesus walking near a town and seeing a funeral procession, stopping by the bier for a moment, deeply moved, and then healing the man.

Imagine Jesus on a hill outside of town listening to a friend weeping and then starting to weep himself.

In the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how grief might be acceptable, how it might be part of being human.

What if grief is how we are built to respond to loss?

We take comfort in the belief that Jesus put on a body and walked around. We take comfort in the description of Jesus responding with compassion.

And then we tell people that they should be happy that their loved one is in heaven and is in peace, AS IF it’s somehow showing a lack of faith to be sad, to feel the pain.

If we believe it’s morally wrong, if it’s spiritually questionable to experience grief, then we are in trouble theologically. Because we’re suggesting that Jesus was morally wrong.

What if, instead, we thought about grief as a feature, not a bug. As a response we are built with rather than a problem to be fixed. What if Jesus, by putting on humanity AND weeping with, reminds us that we don’t have to repent of being sad, of missing those we love, of struggling while we remember 49 years together?

The way that Jesus lived shows what’s foundationally human about being human. And so, perhaps, being made in the image of God isn’t just a moral sense, as we often hear, or a creative sense, as Dorothy Sayers suggested. Maybe it includes the capacity to weep.