Is it socially acceptable for men to cry? Does it make them weak? Feminine? Progressive? The NY Times ran an article over the weekend observing the uptick in men who seem to feel comfortable crying. In the article titled, “It’s ok to cry, dude” they highlighted the outgoing speaker of the House, John Boehner, as he cried during the announcement of his recent resignation. They also included Kanye West, Jon Stewart, and Justin Timberlake as men who have teared up in public. The article notes the shift in public perception from 1972 when Senator Edmund Muskie got choked up during the presidential campaign. According to Muskie it was a negative moment for the campaign causing him to be seen as weak.
Now, according to the article men are just acting more human. “Crying is part of being human, and men are probably just as human as anybody else.” I would certainly not thrown anyone under the bus or insult their manhood because they are moved to tears over a matter (It would seem that it would be more of a violation of manhood to kick a man when he is down than to be down in the first place). But it did afford me to think about if and what I cry about. Are there things that are to be held so closely and dearly that it brings a man to cry? It would seem so (Rm. 12:15).
Tears are often irrepressible; forcing their way out of our souls, they communicate our hunger for another land where tears get wiped away and relegated to memory. Tears then are hunger pains as much as they are heart pains. We long because we are hungry and hurting.
The Christian has tasted something of the world to come and they are particularly hungry and sensitive to the feeling of the heart pains. In fact the Puritan Thomas Watson in his book The Godly Man’s Picture, marked weeping as one of the marks of a godly man. You might wonder why a godly man, one who has had his sin forgiven, would be marked by tears. While it may be a mark of being human that brings a natural man to tears, it is a mark of being impacted by the gospel that brings a Christian to tears.
I’ll summarize and interact with Watson below.
The godly man weeps because of indwelling sin.
He knows and feels his heart, it is poisoned fountain. The believer weeps because he carries about opposition to God. His heart is like a wide sea in which there are innumerable creeping things (Ps. 104:25) — vain, sinful, thoughts. Even though a child of God may forsake his sin his sin does not forsake him. Sin wars against the soul (1 Pet. 2:11). It is the prevalence of his corruption that causes him to weep. “For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do” (Rom. 7:19). “When David had sinned he steeped his soul in the finish tears of repentance. It cannot but grieve a regenerate person to think he should be so foolish as, after he has felt the smart of sin—still to paths fire in his bosom again.”
The godly man weeps because he is not more holy.
He is broken over the gap between what he is positionally (righteous) and what he is practically (still a sinner). He would say, “I love God with all my heart.” However, when he looks at his life he says, “I do not love God like I ought.”
The godly man sometimes weeps out of a sense of God’s love.
“Gold is the finest and most solid of all the metals—yet it is soonest melted in the fire. Gracious heats, which are golden heats, are the soonest melted into tears by the fire of God’s love.” When a man will contemplate the love of God to him in Christ he will often be overcome with emotion. As DA Carson has said, “God’s love for the world is not so amazing because the world is so big but because it is so bad.” This loving of the unlovely and the unloving melts the heart who knows this love to be real.
The godly man weeps because he sees his sin to be worse than what unbelievers do.
Having tasted of this love and having become personally aware of what it cost God to pay for his sin, he becomes sick with his pursuit of the forbidden fruit. Peter had been on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus and beheld the glory of Christ. And after all of the time with Jesus, the dazzling mercy, he would later deny him at the last hour. It was this ingratitude and selfishness that, in the face of Christ, that caused him to go out and “weep bitterly” (Mt. 26:75). “He baptized himself, as it were, in his own tears!”
I would agree with the writer of the NY Times article that it is part of being human to be brought to tears–male or female. But more to my point, it would seem to be part of being a Christian to weep over sin, the gospel, and the coming of the kingdom in its fullest. I would tend to agree with Watson that to be weeping only according to things of this world an its losses would seem to indicate a bit of staleness in our souls. He concludes his section with a reminder of the preciousness of repenting tears.
Repenting tears are precious. God puts them in his bottle (Ps. 56:8). Repenting tears are beautifying. To God—a tear in the eye, adorns more than a ring on the finger. Oil makes the face shine (Ps. 104:15). tears make the heart shine.
