And Jesus wept.

Jesus told Gertrude of Helfta, a 12th-century monastic scholar, that He couldn't bear to be separated from her now that they "knew" one another.  He used the analogy of an adult who loses a limb in later life compared to someone who had been born without the limb, saying that the adult would always sorely miss what had once been part of him, whereas the baby would never have known what it was like to function with that arm or leg.

He showed Gertrude the depth of His love for her in the pain that separation would cost Him.  Now, we don't usually think of God experiencing the "pain of separation," but anyone who has been separated from a loved one, either by death or by emotional separation, knows what Jesus was talking about.  C.S. Lewis said after the death of his wife that it was not even like losing an arm or a leg, but like one's heart being ripped out.  Anyone experiencing this kind of loss would do anything to experience being re-united with the one "lost."

Maybe this is why God was willing to "give His only begotten Son so that the world would not perish, but have everlasting life."  The Cross is God's vulnerability to the love/ affection of mankind:  You can't make me stop loving you; no matter what you do to me, I will continue to love you beyond all measure and continue to do good to you forever.  "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

Jesus wept at seeing the pain of Martha and Mary when they lost their brother, probably their only source of protection and subsistence in that culture, in addition to the love they bore for him.  He wept over Jerusalem because they "did not recognize the day of their visitation"---much as Sodom and Gomorrah did not recognize the presence of angels in their midst---saying, "How often I wanted to gather you as a mother hen gathers her chicks (to protect them from harm). 

What God does is eternal and unchanging; today He weeps because we will not also be "gathered" and united as a family, as lovers, as children of the same God and Father.  He weeps at our pain of separation from Him and from one another.  And still our hearts are hardened......