A rock-cut burial cave at Horvat Midras in Israel. Although not the tomb of Lazarus, it illustrates the kind of burial setting described in John 11. Photo by Bukvoed, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The community center was packed.
My neighbors, Jim and Debbie, had asked me to share a few thoughts at the celebration of life for their son, Chris. The room was filled with people who had known and loved him as a son, brother, father, companion and friend.
His death was the loss that brought us together.
As I prepared my remarks, I kept returning to the danger of allowing the way a life ends to fill our whole field of vision. We revisit the final chapter, trying to understand what happened and wishing something could have been different.
But there was a whole life before this loss.
There was Chris.
Grief has a way of drawing our attention toward the end of a story. Love remembers the whole story.
Remembering someone fully does not require us to ignore the difficult parts. Love can bear the truth about a person and continue loving them. We do not have to settle every question before we can speak someone’s name with affection, remember what was good or remain grateful that they were here.
Afterward, during the meal, several conversations made it clear that something in those thoughts had resonated. I do not know what other losses people carried into the community center. We had not gathered to compare sorrows or turn Chris’s death into a lesson about ourselves. We were there to remember Chris.
Still, a loss of that magnitude reaches places in people that ordinary conversation seldom touches.
By adulthood, nearly everyone has stood before something that cannot be undone. A person dies. A marriage ends. A diagnosis divides life into before and after. A future we expected quietly disappears.
These losses are not equal, and it would be dishonest to treat them as though they were. But many of them leave us asking a similar question:
What are we supposed to do with something we cannot fix?
A difficult loss can arrive carrying more than sorrow. It brings questions, regret and an almost irresistible need to return to what happened. The mind revisits conversations, choices and ordinary days, searching for the place where a different word or action might have produced a different ending.
Grief can become a relentless investigator.
Some regrets reveal something true and deserve our honesty. But hindsight can also put us on trial using evidence we acquired only after the loss.
Love is not omniscience. Caring deeply for someone does not give us the power to foresee or prevent everything that may happen to them.
At the service, I spoke about Jesus and Lazarus.
The Gospel of John tells us that Lazarus had died. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, he had been in the tomb four days.
Both of Lazarus’s sisters met Jesus with the same painful sentence. Martha said it first. Later, Mary came to him, fell at his feet and spoke the same words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Jesus saw Mary weeping. He saw the people who had come with her weeping. John tells us that he was deeply moved and troubled.
“Where have you laid him?” Jesus asked.
Then Jesus wept.
He knew what he was about to do. The stone would move, and Lazarus would walk out. Jesus knew the end of that story before anyone else standing there did.
His own death was also drawing near. In fact, John moves from Lazarus leaving the tomb to the religious leaders making plans to put Jesus to death. Jesus was approaching suffering of his own, yet he did not step around the sorrow of his friends to attend only to what awaited him.
He entered their grief.
Jesus did not use what he knew about the future to diminish what Mary and Martha were experiencing in the present. He did not correct their tears with a theological explanation or call them toward a response that looked more faithful.
Jesus wept before the stone moved.
We are often less patient with grief. We offer explanations, search for lessons and reach for words that might make an unbearable thing feel manageable.
Usually, we mean well. Silence makes us uncomfortable, and another person’s pain reminds us how little control any of us actually has.
But some stones do not move.
The person remains gone. The relationship does not return to what it was. The medical report does not change. The apology never comes. No sentence can reverse those things.
Faith does not require us to pretend otherwise. Jesus knew resurrection was coming, and still he permitted sorrow to be sorrow. His tears did not reveal a shortage of faith. They revealed the depth of his love.
Maybe coping begins with that same permission. We can miss someone without a deadline, speak their name, admit that the loss still hurts and receive a good day without feeling that we have betrayed what was taken from us.
No one in the community center resolved the grief surrounding Chris’s death. People did something more human. They entered it. They spoke his name, remembered his whole story and stood beside those who loved him.
Jesus knew the stone would move. He still stood before it and wept.
Most of us will never be able to move another person’s stone.
But we can stay beside them before it.
Until next time,
George
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