Verse 33 He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. This account of Jesus being so overwhelmed with grief, at the grave of a friend whom he knew that he was in a few moments going to recall again to life, is one of those representations appearing at first view at variance with probability and the laws of the human mind, but, on closer examination, found to be entirely in accordance with them, which constitute a strong internal evidence of the honest historical fidelity of these narratives. Imagination would have pictured the Savior, under such circumstances as these, calm, composed, and, in consequence of his anticipation of the result, rising above all the emotions and sufferings of the scene. But this idea would rest on a superficial view. Grief is not of the nature of regret, its for a loss or a disappointment. It is a form of affection. It is love, as modified, when the object of it lies silent, cold, and lifeless,--a victim of the merciless destroyer. Grief may be mingled with regret for a loss, and with many other painful feelings; but it is, in its own nature, distinct from them all; and it rises spontaneously at the simple contemplation of a beloved object, dead, whatever may be the other circumstances that attend the bereavement. A mother, while dying herself, will mourn the death of her infant child, though, by the event, she expects to preserve, not lose, its society. And so the feelings of Jesus would naturally be as strongly moved to grief by this event, and by witnessing the scene of suffering and sorrow which it occasioned, as if he had been a Sadducee, and supposed that his lost friend had been blotted out of existence forever. In the pictures which the sacred writers have drawn, there are many such touches as this, so profoundly true to nature, in fact, and yet so apparently unnatural, that they would have required far greater knowledge and art, than these simple historians possessed, for their invention, as elements of interest in a fabricated story.