As a real human being, Jesus had real human emotions: he felt things as we do. He felt, more than we can ever do, the burden of the world's sin, the inability or the unwillingness of people to listen to him and to see the presence of God in his miracles. At times, as in today's passage from Mark, Jesus sighed in his emotion.

Reflecting on Jesus' sighing will help us to understand and respect his humanity more deeply and realize with greater clarity the almost incredible grace of the Annunciation. As always there are several ways of initiating this reflection on Jesus' emotions. We may pay more attention to those passages of Scripture which mention his sighing. Or we may reflect on our own experiences which have caused us to sigh. We sigh in sorrow, pain, tiredness, frustration, a loss of something, whether material or spiritual; we sigh at failure, our own failures, the failures of our society, even the failure of our church. We sigh at the lack of understanding or sympathy which others manifest towards us. We sigh at their demands which we cannot meet or which strike us as unreasonable. Jesus sighed as God sighed over Israel.