Mourning With Hope

David Baggett | Easter Roundtable

The death and resurrection of Jesus is the central-most Christian doctrine with implications spanning in ever so many directions. The one slice I’d like to talk about briefly is the way it effected victory over death—enabling us, when we face death ourselves or lose a believing friend or relative, to mourn with hope.

When my siblings and I lost our parents—my dad when I was 27, my mom when I was 46—I gave the eulogy at each of their funerals. I’d like to begin by sharing just a snippet from each. First, from my dad’s:

Yes, we mourn today. Having been given much in my father, we have lost much, and none more than my mom. But we don’t mourn as the world mourns, as those who have no hope. For we know that blessed in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. And this earth is not our final resting place. This is not our home.

We hoped for dad to recover and be able to come home to us, but now our eyes have been opened to see that it is he who is waiting for us to come home to him, but only when our task on this earth is done, just as his is done.

Mourn, yes, but with hope, through Christ. So live your lives fully, as my father did, cherishing every day, honoring his memory, conducting your lives according to those values for which he stood, identifying God’s will for you and doing it.

For soon the skies will unfold, and those in Christ will see my dad again, not with a body racked in pain, but a glorified body. For death has been swallowed up. It’s been drunk to its bitter dregs and defeated. Corruptible has put on incorruptible, and mortality immortality. My father has gone home, to that place in the heavenlies where there is fullness of joy in the presence of Christ, a place where there is no more sin, no more sickness, no more death, no more pain, no more tears.

After my dad died, my mom lived without him for twenty years, until finally, at the age of 82, she too died. We were with her in the hospital those last days. I wrote this series of lines in the hospital as things looked bleak near the end: “Stalwart of strength, you from whom his life emerged, whose own life now ebbs away, by your side his vigil keeps, mindful that these labored breaths are few remaining. He would save each one and hold it to the ear and listen to the echoes of the past, all pushed into this moment. Under a canopy of brilliant summer sky, you taught him how to tie his shoes. You held him tight when he was hurt and never stopped believing. Lean on him now, no need to be strong. Time for him to hold you. A few fleeting moments of more affliction and all will be forever light.”

A few nights later, with me and Marybeth there, and a sister and brother of mine having been there just before, my mom breathed her last, very peacefully. I had prayed to see an angel when she passed, and really believed I would, but alas, nothing. After she passed, we told the nurse on duty, and she came down and confirmed that my mom had gone. I thanked the nurse for all she’d done, and asked for her name. It was Angel. Sometimes we have not because we ask not, and sometimes because we don’t ask specifically enough.

Here’s a portion of the eulogy I gave a few days later:

But so it is. All things forever light. My mom is draped with joy and attired with glory. So many of us here remain in her orbit and ever shall; the space around us has been permanently bent by her presence, despite her momentary departure. Though we mourn, we do so not as those without hope.

I so look forward to seeing her again. To experience the joy of which the unbridled happiness of a Christmas morning with her was but the merest foretaste. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, death has lost its sting, and she too will be raised, by that same power that effected the death of death, and the same power that can be at work within us even now. And we will see her again, after our work is done, as she has finished hers.

Where, O grave, is your victory? You got nothing. Death may have won this little skirmish, or appeared to, but I loved it when my mom defied the dire predictions and subjected death to ridicule; with every breath she made a mockery of death. And what death doesn’t realize is that it has lost the war.

We all have a kiss waiting for us in heaven, where the sufferings of this world pale into insignificance, and mortality has put on immortality. I can’t wait to see her dance and hear her sing. God does all things well.

A few years before my mom died, she lost a daughter, my oldest sister, Sharon. The Stoics taught that death was of no account, not all that bad after all. Christian theology disagrees, and rightly so. Death is awful. It’s irremediably awful, it’s ugly, it’s tragic, it’s unnatural. Yes, we all have to die, but death is no less horrific as a result. Death is a fixture of a fallen world, but not the way it was supposed to be.

This is why death ought to bug us. There’s no sugarcoating it. There’s no whitewashing it. Death grates against every ounce of our being that yearns for eternity and for life. Death flies in the face of every such impulse, threatening to thwart our every desire for immortality. Death tears at the fabric of our being, making us say early goodbyes, sometimes not giving us a chance to say goodbye at all, snatching our loved ones away at inopportune times and cutting short a plethora of potentials and possibilities, breaking our hearts.

How could death be nothing or negligible when it left, in my sister’s case, a 12-year-old boy without a mother? Or calls on a 79-year-old mother to bury a child? These questions don’t admit of easy answers; they’re questions for which superficial platitudes and pat answers simply don’t suffice. There are aspects of this world that are exceedingly difficult for us to make sense of. Sharon’s life itself, for example, was filled with pain. She was hit with one malady after another, one affliction and sickness after the next. Hers was, in many ways, a life of suffering.

I gave my sister’s eulogy too, and here’s part of what was said:

But a word about hope. If life is so filled with pain, and death is so senseless, killing our fondest dreams and crushing our spirits, how can we retain hope at all? How is hope possible without being dishonest about life’s tragedies and travails? How can we be both honest and hopeful?

I think there’s only one answer, one way to retain both hope and honesty. One way to see life as a comedy and not a tragedy, one way to laugh in the face of death. Inherently, there’s nothing about death or suffering that speaks victory. From the cold body to the shallow grave, death to all appearances is an unmitigated disaster. It’s horrific. In and of themselves, death and pain are senseless.

But there is a larger story to tell, and it’s a story that Sharon was very familiar with. She was raised on this story, and it’s a story that continued to inform her and imbue her life with meaning, even to the end, despite the feet of clay she shared with us all. It’s a story that says that despite the badness of death, there’s something greater. Not because death isn’t bad. It is. But there’s something greater that can defeat death, and has defeated death, removing its sting—if the story is true.

The story came to a point at a cross at Calvary, where Jesus Christ took the sufferings and sins of humanity on himself, making possible our forgiveness and reconciliation, our redemption and salvation. And after he died, three days later, he rose again. He drank suffering and death to its dregs, and he emerged victorious. He died, and came to life again, dealing death a death blow. Death still has its say and has its day, but it’s been defeated. Maybe it doesn’t know it yet, but it has, and it won’t be long before the death of death is made manifest for the entire world to see. Corruptible will put on incorruptible, and the dead in Christ will rise again.

In the meantime, for all of us, our prayer should be that of St. Paul’s in Philippians 3:10: “That I might know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings; being made conformable to his death.” The power of his resurrection sounds good, but don’t skip past the part about the fellowship of his sufferings. Suffering and pain are real, but they are not beyond redemption.

Indeed, somehow through the pain God works his purposes. Even Jesus learned obedience through suffering, we’re told. Get your minds around that one. Suffering is somehow crucial to the coming of God’s kingdom. Suffering and death are not the last word; they are not what’s ultimate, despite their painful reality. Christianity is not about a plastic Jesus or an artificial cross, but about a God who knows the loss of a child because of real nails, but who was willing to endure that loss because he so loved the world. Pain and death are not the last chapter.

As my friend Jerry Walls once put it, if Christ is raised, if the resurrected one is also the crucified one who knows firsthand the power of temptation, the agony of real nails, and the pain of betrayal, then indeed, we can understand evil in a way that is both honest and hopeful. Life is a comedy, not a tragedy.

And we can hold on to this too: Nothing we may be called on to suffer will compare with the glory and joy to come. So, like Job and David when they lost children, mourn and mourn deeply, and then worship, like they did, and then laugh, with your whole heart. Weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

I close with a quotation from Lament for a Son, a book by Nicholas Wolterstorff, who lost his twenty-something-year-old son in a mountain climbing accident: “To believe in Christ’s rising from the grave is to accept it as a sign of our own rising from our graves. If for each of us it was our destiny to be obliterated, and for all of us together it was our destiny to fade away without a trace, then not Christ’s rising but my dear son’s early dying would be the logo of our fate.

“God is love. That is why he suffers. To love our suffering, sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that he gave his only Son to suffering. The one who does not see God’s suffering does not see his love. God is suffering love…. So suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is. Suffering is the meaning of our world. For Love is the meaning. And Love suffers. The tears of God are the meaning of history.”

— David Baggett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University. He is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture written with Marybeth Baggett.

Image by Kanenori from Pixabay

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