Often peoples’ responses to “The Passion of The Christ” movie, involves weeping over Jesus’ sufferings. Billy Graham wept, the pope wept, well nigh everyone wept over Jesus and His suffering.
This is no new thing. When Jesus journeyed to the cross “there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him” (Luke 23:27). How did Christ react to this? Did He encourage it as genuine piety? “Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children” (Luke 23:28).
Spurgeon speaks of “weeping for Jesus” in a sermon on Luke 23:27-31:
You need not weep because Christ died one-tenth so much as because your sins rendered it necessary that He should die. You need not weep over the crucifixion, but weep over your transgression, for your sins nailed the Redeemer to the accursed tree. To weep over a dying Saviour is to lament the remedy; it were wiser to bewail the disease. To weep over the dying Saviour is to wet the surgeon’s knife with tears; it were better to bewail the spreading polyps which that knife must cut away. To weep over the Lord Jesus as He goes to the cross is to weep over that which is the subject of the highest joy that ever heaven and earth have known; your tears are scarcely needed there; they are unnatural, but a deeper wisdom will make you brush them all away and chant with joy His victory over death and the grave. If we must continue our sad emotions, let us lament that we should have broken the law which He thus painfully vindicated; let us mourn that we should have incurred the penalty which He even to the death was made to endure … O brethren and sisters, this is the reason why we souls weep: because we have broken the divine law and rendered it impossible that we should be saved except Jesus Christ should die.
