“Why are you crying?” This is what we often ask a child wandering alone, lost and looking for his parents or guardians. The situation detaches us from whatever we may have been doing and delays us from getting to where we are going if only to help him.
Young as they are, they are in no condition to give us a clue about how to recognize or locate their parents. We stoop down to comfort them and try to extract whatever information we can from their clothes, bags and even toys. When all else fails, the most we could at least obtain is their name.
We calm the child and head for the paging system to ‘locate’ the parents. I amuse myself when this happens by wondering who is really lost: is it the child or his parents? The child restlessly continues to cry, and can only finally be comforted when he ‘finds’ his parents approaching the PA booth. Once again we hear the parents asking: “Why are you crying?”
Adults naturally know the answer to why children cry. The question is not demanding an answer because it is meant to bridge comfort and encouragement to a lost or hurt child. It really means: “Don’t cry because I’m here!” Children naturally weep when they are helpless and seek adults to give them security. But what happens when adults cry?
When adults –that is, you and me– cry, there is always a reason. When someone cries for no reason, then it is most likely that he has lost his wits or due to some uncontrolled burst of psycho-emotional reactions from stress or tension. Only man can cry, and crying in man is not a mere biological-chemical reaction, but is revealing of the deep inner longing in his heart seeking comfort.
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This was precisely what Mary Magdalene heard as she wept by the empty tomb where she supposed our Lord’s body remained. Her intentions were simple: to return through hidden and simple gestures the great things that Jesus had done for her, especially by freeing her from the demons that had enslaved her soul.
All throughout our Lord’s Passion we could imagine how this woman must have wept bitterly and continuously. There was nothing in this world that would contain her grief, with the exception of rendering for Jesus’ corpse simple burial rituals. But her ordeal was aggravated when she found the tomb empty. How this must have re-opened the wounds of her sorrows.
So great was her sadness, early Christian authors would amazingly observe, that she was not even consoled by the vision of angels in the tomb. Nothing in this world could now satisfy the love that had grown in her heart for Jesus. That was when our Lord approached her from behind and asked: “Woman, why are you crying?”
Again it is the same question but no longer asked by just any man but by one who is perfect God and perfect man. His question was not seeking a response, but was actually an answer to all of Magdalene’s longings: the only thing that matters in life is finding God and possessing Him. When this is attained then one would no longer have reasons to cry.
I find it strange that there are persons who deify science and technology. They seek to measure and quantify everything in life so as to reject God’s existence. Crying, they would very well explain, is due to glands, hormones, triggers and many other bio-chemical sources. But this why of science is nothing but a how of things. In reality science can only go so far as to elaborate on how things happen, but never why they are so.
Can you imagine trying to comfort someone weeping by expounding on the bio-chemical processes of his or her tear glands? No matter how scientific our explanation may be, it will not help a person confront realities such as sadness, love, forgiveness, loyalty and even death. This is why I believe that man’s tears, like prayers, actually contain eternal lessons.
When Jesus asked Magdalene, ‘why are you weeping?’ Our Lord was not saying that we should not feel sad, but He was reminding us through her that even in this life –although we may shed tears– there is really no room for the only sadness: of being without God, because Christ’s presence in our life, unless willfully rejected through grace sin, can never be removed.
Man’s earthly life, in this valley of tears, can never guarantee true and lasting happiness. Besides external trials, there is the burden of our disordered tendencies (i.e. our sinful condition), which we will never overcome without divine help. These are not merely negative obstacles or weights, they too remind us that our deepest longings (e.g. happiness, peace, justice, forgiveness, etc.) can only be fulfilled one day in Heaven where ‘God will wipe aware our every tear.’