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TODAY I want to talk about
grief, because we all experience grief at some time in their
lives. Christians experience grief, and, if you are not a Christian,
you will also experience grief. It is part of human experience.
Shakespeare’s play, The
Tempest, tells of a group of well-to-do Italians cast away
on a desert island after a shipwreck. Some of the passengers
and crew were drowned, and most of the survivors lost family
members.
Gonzalo, a wise old advisor to the prince, tells him,
“Beseech
you, sir, be merry; you have cause,
So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe
Is common; every day some sailor’s wife,
The masters of some merchant and the merchant
Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle,
I mean our preservation, few in millions
Can speak like us: then wisely, good sir, weigh
Our sorrow with our comfort..."
In other words, “Cheer
up! You’ve lost your father, your wealth and all your hopes
for the future, but you’re alive, so don’t complain.”
And so he goes on, with his tales of woe, hoping to make his
employer more cheerful.
Is it any wonder that Alonso says to him,
“Prithee,
peace.”
In other words, “Shut up,
Gonzalo!”
Only Gonzalo is on a roll now, and he's not ready to stop yet.
Sebastian, who is looking on, says,
“[Alonso]
receives comfort like cold porridge.”
I think you know exactly what
this is like. If you are over ten, I'm sure you've lost a boyfriend,
and a well meaning friend says, “Forget about him: he's
now worth it.” Or your girlfriend left you, and a wise counsellor
told you, “There's plenty more where that one came from.
So start looking somewhere better.”
I've even heard a conversation like this. A young couple had
just lost their baby to cot death. An older lady they knew said,
“There, there, dear. It's sad, but you’re young enough
to have another one.”
Grief is so much part of life that we have formulas for coping
with it. It doesn't matter much if the formulas are wrong, as
long as we do something.
What is Gonzalo doing to Alonso? Is he giving him true comfort?
Or is he only saying, “Don't come complaining, Alonso.I
don't really want to hear.” What was that woman telling
that couple? If you reworded what she said, do you think she'd
agree? Did she really mean, “One baby is as good as another;
it doesn't matter if you lose one; just get another one.”
But that's what she said, isn't it? In other words, “I don't
care that you've lost a baby. Your pain doesn't trouble me. Get
another one and stop making me feel uncomfortable.”
When you face grief, there are an awful lot of people out there
who will rub your face in it and go away telling themselves what
a good job they have just done.
I know a pastor — he's
not from our denomination — and one of his first assignments
was to a country church.
What made it very hard for him and his wife was that they had
just lost a baby when they arrived there.
I’ll call him Reg. One of his first responsibilities was
to support a family in the congregation whose little girl was
in the capital city in a major children's hospital, being treated
for cancer.
Reg had to drive them to and from airports several times, and,
because the family lived beyond the reach of telehones, Reg became
the main contact between the hospital and the family.
One day a call came. It was the hospital. They were dreadfully
sorry... the little girl had died. Reg had to go and tell the
parents.
On his way, he remembered all the verses of scripture he had
learned for helping in times of sorrow; he reflected on the manual
his church gives ministers to help them in visiting; he had it
all worked out.
He knocked on the door. The girl’s mother came. She looked
at Reg. “Is it...? is it...?” she asked. Reg nodded
and burst into tears. The mother burst into tears and ushered
Reg into the lounge room. The father heard the crying, and came
and joined them. They just sat there, hugged each other and cried
together.
Then Reg left. He didn't say any of the comforting things.
He didn't even pray with them. He felt an absolute failure. He
conducted the funeral with a heavy heart, condeming himself all
the way for what he had failed to do on the day.
After the funeral, the parents came to him and said, “We
will never forget what you did for us the day you came to tell
us our daughter had died. You left us absolutely convinced that
someone cared, someone understood. That was more precious to
us than any words.”
You know, grief is all through
the Bible. Do you remember when King David was getting old, and
his son, Absalom, raised an insurrection and had himself crowned,
and there was civil war for a time?
David was driven out of his palace. Absalom did everything
he could to establish himself as King and humiliate his father.
He even raped David’s concubines in public.
Yet David still loved his boy.
One of the most powerful passages about grief in the Bible
is about David’s grief when Absalom is killed.
The battle had turned to David’s side, and Absalom rode
away on a mule. He passed under a thick oak tree, and caught
his head in the branches, so he hung there while his mule kept
going. I imagine his neck was broken, because he hadn’t
been able to get down before David’s men arrived. One of
them thrust three javelins into Absalom's chest, and the soldiers
with him pulled Absalom down and hacked him to death.
When David gets the news, all he can do is wail,
“O my son
Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of
you—O Absalom, my son, my son!” (II Sam 18:33)
The grief is terrible. It is
real. That's how life is.
We see grief in the New Testament, when the mothers of Bethlehem
weep for their slain children. And we see Jesus’ grief when
he wept over Jerusalem. He longed to bring Jerusalem into his
care, and it just refused to accept him. He could see that it
faced destruction, and there was nothing he could do for the
people because they had hardened their hearts.
Another time we see Jesus’ grief when his friend, Lazarus,
died. It's the shortest verse in the Bible, it's in John 11:
Jesus wept.
There's no description, no
explanation. Lazarus had died, and Jesus wept. The account is
the more powerful for its economy of words.
There is suffering, there is
death, there is pain and sorrow, right to the very end of the
Bible. In Revelation, John sees God, speaking from his
throne:
Then I saw a
new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first
earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully
dressed for her husband. 3
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the
dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They
will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be
their God. 4 He will wipe every tear
from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying
or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Whilever this present heaven
and this present earth remain, there will be tears, there will
be death and mourning, there will be crying and pain. But when
the new heaven and the new earth come, there will be no more
tears, there will be no more death, there will be no more mourning
or crying, there will be no more pain. The ocean of separation
will be dried up; the old Jerusalem, the seat of the whore, gives
way to the new Jerusalem, the bride dressed for marriage to the
Lamb.
What a day!
So grief is with us, but where do we stand as believers?
Sometimes when I was younger,
pastors used to talk as though the New Jerusalem had already
arrived. They said, “Jesus died to give us eternal life.
Those who die are not really dead. They are absent from the body,
but the blessed truth is that they are present with the Lord.
You detract from the Lord’s glory if you don’t rejoice
and be glad that a fellow believer has been promoted to glory!”
It sounds great. It is reassuring to know that those who die
in the Lord go to be with him. But the Bible talks about grief,
even among believers, so should we believe the theories of men,
or the plain words of the Bible?
I’ll go for the Bible,
thanks.
I often heard the words we
read earlier.
...we who are
still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly
not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven,
with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with
the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
17 After that, we who are
still alive and are left will be caught up together with them
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be
with the Lord forever.
Aren't they great words? It's
no wonder Paul said,
Therefore, comfort
one another with these words.
They are words of comfort.
This morning, we handed out
a tract down in Marrickville, and it talked about a third way
of grief. It talked about how we usually react to grief, and
it said there is a third option. And that’s the option held
out in our passage. We also read there,
...we do not
want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve
like the rest of men, who have no hope.
We have essentially three choices
in grief. We can despair, we can be stoical, or we can be hopeful.
Paul says, “We don’t want you to grieve like all
the people in our world who have no hope.”
That clearly doesn’t imply that Christians don’t
grieve. What it does say is that Christians are never defeated,
not even by grief. And the reason we are not defeated is that
we have hope.
Several years ago, I conducted
a funeral for a teenager who had been killed when he was writing
graffiti on a train. He had forced the door and was hanging outside,
spraypainting, and he didn't notice the bridge abutment just
near Villawood station. It was horrible.
I was called in because I knew
the boy. He had lived opposite my in-laws. Our kids had played
with him and his sisters. He was basically a nice kid, but very
reckless.
I experienced one of the other aspects of grief: anger. I wanted
to give the kid a good hard clout and say, “You stupid kid!
What did you think you were doing?”
We need grief, because we have to find ways of letting that
anger out; we have to find ways to bargain, to protest, to tell
God how we feel. We need to go through the process.
But we don’t give way
to despair. In many cultures, the grave has terrors because demons
are waiting there to snatch up each new soul committed to the
earth. In our culture, it is seen as the place of nothingness,
of no further interaction with anything or anyone.
For us, though; for us who
believe, it is a far better place. It is an end, but not the
end. It is a separation, but not final separation.
Jesus has died, Jesus has risen,
Jesus will come again. And that makes all the difference. We
grieve, but we have hope as well.
Sometimes we think of the stoic,
who faces all difficulties with steely reserve, and we imagine
that he is the opposite to the person who collapses in despair.
Think about it! Both the desperado and the stoic essentially
believe the same. They each believe their situation is hopeless.
It‘s just that one reacts completely and one does not react
at all.
If you know Jesus Christ, if
he is more than just a few words, more than just an historic
figure, then you will know that he died, that he took on himself
the sins of the entire world. You will know it and rejoice at
it. And that will make all the difference.
A number of years ago, more
than ten years ago, a good friend of Chris’ and mine moved
overseas to live. I figured then that we would probably not see
her again. So far, I have been right.
It was a good move for her. It opened up a lot of opportunities
she would never have had here.
I was very glad for her. I rejoiced to think she was finding
what she wanted in life.
But I was also very, very sad that she was leaving.
We can have such a mixture of feelings.
But Jesus is alive, and, like Paul, we can say,
I know whom I
have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep what I
have committed to him against the Day.
In Christ, we know that death
is never the end, that hope can always transform the situation.
Your grief might be from losing your favourite pen, or from
losing your favourite country. It may be from the loss of what
you hoped for in life. Or it might be from the loss of someone
you love — or from the anticipation, even, of some future
loss.
In Christ, there is always the possibility of transformation.
In Christ there is always the hope of eternity with him. We are
often knocked down, but we are never knocked out, because Christ
died, and now he is alive!
So hope in God, and strengthen
your arms; trust in Christ, and straighten your backs. Grieve
in hope; mourn with hopeful hearts; be glad, because our God
reigns and nothing, not even death, can win against him in the
end.
May his joy and peace be with you forever,
AMEN |
