Taking his inspiration from a reading from the gospel of Luke where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, the “closed” city that “kills the prophets and stones those sent” to it, Pope Francis’ homily reflected on some of the moments of weeping during Christ’s ministry. He explained that Jesus had the tenderness of His Father looking at his children when he wept over the city of Jerusalem in the gospel account saying: “How many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling.”
“Somebody said that God became man in order to be able to weep, to weep over what His children had done. The weeping in front of the tomb of Lazarus is the weeping of a friend. This is the weeping of the Father.”
In the same way, the Pope continued, we can look at the behaviour of the father of the prodigal son and what happens when this son asks for his inheritance and leaves home. He said the father did not go to his neighbours to say “Look what has happened to me! This horrible thing he did to me! But I will curse this son…” Pope Francis said he is certain that the father did not do this although maybe he went “to weep alone in his bedroom.”
“And why do I tell you this? Because the Gospel does not talk about this, it says that when his son returned home, he saw him from afar: this means that the Father was continually going up onto the terrace to look at the road to see if his son was coming back. And a father who does this is a father who lives in tears, waiting for his son to return home. This is the weeping of God the Father. And with his weeping, the Father recreates through his Son all of creation.”
Turning next to the moment when Jesus is carrying the cross to Calvary, Pope Francis reflected on the pious women who were weeping, saying they were not weeping over Him but over their own children. He stressed that this weeping like that of a father and of a mother is one that God still continues to do in our times.
“Even nowadays in front of the calamities, the wars waged in order to worship the god of money, the many innocent people killed by the bombs launched by those who worship the idol of money, God still weeps and He also says: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, my children, what are you doing?’ And he also says this to the poor victims, to the arms traffickers and to all those who sell the life of people. We’d do well to think both about how God our Father became man in order to be able to weep and how God our Father weeps nowadays: he weeps over humanity that ends up not understanding the peace that He offers us, the peace of love.”