Jesus didn’t say anything at all in the moment of one particular verse, which is famous for being the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” The least words for the largest sorrow. It’s hardly a paradox. What is a paradox, though, is that Jesus weeps even though he knows what is going to happen: he will raise Lazarus from the dead. His knowledge spares him nothing. It’s almost as if “what is going to happen” is contingent upon human grief, as if fact had to pass through feeling in order to be fact.

That the fact here is a miracle only intensifies the strangeness.