Grief With Something Ahead

The funeral home chapel is full, which he had not expected, and people keep turning round in the pews to see who else has come. Somebody's phone goes off during the first hymn and forty people pretend they did not hear it. There is a smell of rain on wool coats. His daughter is holding his arm with both hands, and he keeps thinking, distantly, that she has her mother's grip.

The minister reads the passage. The one everybody reads. Those who have fallen asleep, the trumpet, the meeting in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. He has heard those words at nine funerals in his life and believed every syllable of them at all nine.

Today they go straight over the top of his head like weather.

He is not angry about it. That is the strange part. He simply stands there in a suit that no longer does up properly, forty one years of marriage in the box in front of him, and the words come across the chapel and do not touch him anywhere at all. Later, in the car, he will wonder whether that means something is wrong with him. It will worry him more than the funeral did.

If you have been there, or if you were there last week, then you already know the second grief that sits on top of the first one: not just that she is gone, but that the comfort everybody keeps handing you goes through you like a draught. Sit down here with me. Nobody in this piece is going to hurry you. There is a reason those words did not reach you yet, and it is not that you failed at them.

Written to people who were crying

Start with what Paul was doing when he wrote it, because almost nobody is told this and it changes everything.

He was not writing a diagram. He was not answering a curiosity question in a study group. A church in Thessalonica had buried people, and they had got frightened, and the fear was specific: that the ones who died had somehow missed it, that death had taken them out of the story. The letter goes back to them with a pastoral answer, written the way you write to somebody whose hands are shaking.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.1 Thessalonians 4:13

Read that carefully, because there is a word in it that most people skip.

He does not say do not grieve. He says do not grieve as those who have no hope. Grieving is assumed. The tears are taken for granted. He is not asking anybody in that room to stop crying; he is telling them what is true about the ones they are crying over, and then he sends the letter into the middle of their weeping and lets them go on weeping with something else in the room.

So take this exactly as it is meant. You are permitted your grief. Not tolerated in it, not on a clock, not expected to be further along than you are: permitted, by the same word that carries the hope. That is not me being soft with you. It is what stands written in 1 Thessalonians 4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a comfort for the bereaved inside a passage people now use as a puzzle.

And the passage ends with a job that has nothing to do with timing.

Therefore encourage one another with these words. Verse 18. Whatever else that chapter is, Paul says what it is for, in one line, at the bottom: it is for the comfort of people standing beside a grave. So we will not do anything else with it here. There is no chart in this piece, no date, no season, no reading of anything happening in the world. I am not going to tell you it is near or far, because I do not know and neither does anybody who says otherwise, and a mourner does not need a schedule. A mourner needs to know that the person they love has not fallen out of the story, and that the God who wrote it is not far off.

Now the part about the words not touching you.

Jesus stood outside a grave He was about to open, knowing exactly what He was going to do in four minutes, and He wept. John 11:35. He did not lead with the doctrine. He did not tell Mary that this was temporary, though it was. He cried with them first, in front of everybody, and only then did He speak.

That is what tells you the truth about your chapel. God is not standing over your numbness with His arms folded. The written word shows Christ crying at a graveside, and the Spirit He gives is called the Comforter, which is a strange name to give somebody unless He plans to spend a great deal of time with people who cannot feel anything yet.

You have not failed the passage. The comfort of God is not a substance that requires the right emotional state to be absorbed. Paul calls Him the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort in 2 Corinthians 1:3, and He comforts us in all our affliction, which is a wide word that includes the affliction of standing in a chapel feeling nothing while a good man reads a good verse.

And this is where you may open your mouth, whenever you are ready and not before.

You do not have to be moved to speak. Faith the size of a grain that would sit unnoticed in the seam of a suit pocket is enough, and Matthew 17:20 sets the measure that low on purpose, because what makes it work is not how much of it you have but the One whose word it agrees with. You have standing to say these things because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries them rather than the strength in your voice. Saying them will not hurry your grief along, and it is not meant to.