We lost another school parent this week, a beautiful, wonderful mom who everyone loved dearly. Right after it happened, I broke the news to another school mom, still mourning the loss of her husband two years ago. We discussed how it often seems strange and unusual when someone young passes away.
It seems strange because we live in a modern technological society, and in the mid-to-upper socioeconomic end of that culture, with access to the greatest medical care the world has ever known. For us, it seems like death is and should be a painful yet distant memory. And yet, if I’m counting correctly, the mom we lost last week is the third parent lost from this relatively small class at Grace. She is also the third friend I’ve lost this week, two of whom I thought were “too young to die.” Even in this culture, where women rarely die in childbirth and we no longer produce 12 kids and lose 7 of them before they reach maturity, death is still a constant, unwelcome companion.
And it never becomes commonplace, does it? You’d think by now, with death regularly depositing tragedy on our doorsteps, we’d just get used to it. You would think it wouldn’t rip out our hearts, rending apart our minds and souls. Every. Single. Time.
The fact that death is so invasive and offensive, and feels so extraordinarily wrong tells you something–that even though death is normal and necessary, it’s not the way it was intended to be. We were created to be eternal, everlasting, immortals. We were made to live forever. Death was foreign to our original design. Death and the suffering it begets—the grief, the pain, the emptiness—is a symptom of a deep disease that has infected all of us, a sickness of our own making. The painful truth is that we, collectively, are the reason there is death. Our decisions—our rebellion, our pride, our selfishness—not only the fatal choices of our first parents but the ones we make individually every day–are the cause.
Seen through this frame, to ask God why death (or any suffering) happens, to ask him why he would allow it, to blame him or accuse a good God of “causing” death, is nonsensical. It’s like a child breaking a toy and blaming the loving parent who gave it to him for being broken, then demanding that it be repaired exactly when and how the child wants it, even if when and how he wants it is probably exactly the wrong way and thing.
The beautiful reality is that our loving Father did fix it; he set in motion the plan to solve death the minute our first parents broke it. To the serpent who misled them, he said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen. 3). Our loving Father cured death the only way it could be fixed, redeeming our sin and paying the catastrophic price it demanded, the only cost that could be paid—the most precious life he had, that of his son. His excruciating death put death to death in the sense of its permanence and finality, its ability to make those who were formerly immortals truly mortal.
We became immortal again. Even though we live in the “now, not yet,” the gray zone between what was and what will be when Christ returns and restores everything, and still pass through this vale of tears on the way to physical death, our demise is only a passageway, a portal to immorality and perfection in Jesus. God brought the ultimate fix. We should spare ourselves from blaming him or asking why he didn’t fix death according to our childlike, naive imaginings.
But this doesn’t mean death doesn’t hurt. Oh, how painful it is! Every. Single. Time. When Paul quotes Hosea in asking, “O Death, where is your sting?” our hearts cry out, “Right here!” (I Cor. 15). The fact is, death brings deepest pain. It sends us reeling, grieving for years, and creating scars we bear for the rest of our lives on earth as death takes our loved ones from us.
In this mortal coil, as it is now, the pain and grief of death is the price of love. Love is to be all for another, and you can’t be all for another without sacrificing so much of who you are for the other: their well-being, their joys, their hearts, their dreams, their hurts, their desires. And, sooner or later, death is going to either take them from you or you from them. Death has a perfect track record on that account, leaving pain and grief in its wake, and the only way not to feel it is not to love, and we all want to love because to love is to live. This is what one of my favorite artists, Phil Wickham, means when he sings, “Life is a war fought with tears,” one we Jesus-people all win, but with terrible wounds.
There’s no denying the pain of death, and God never asks us to. We serve a God who lived and died as the Man of Sorrows, who experienced every kind of pain, loss, and suffering known to man, and some that were previously unknown. Far from asking us to deny the pain, he steps into it with us, meets us in our grief, weeps with us, and provides comfort and empathy for every tear we shed.
What’s infinitely more, we serve a God who not only empathizes but empowers with hope. Every moment of pain we feel leads to our ultimate good. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9). Paul David Tripp notes that death leads to life. We can’t live for ourselves and God at the same time. Yet, our human natures, the flesh we still war against while simultaneously redeemed sons and daughters of God, call us constantly to selfishness, self-righteousness, and self-rule.
God isn’t content to let us stay there. As Tripp says, coming to Jesus is not a negotiation. It’s not a contract. It’s a death—your death. The death of yourself so that Jesus might live in you. He calls you to die, even while you still live, because you stand in the way of you having life. Every time we suffer, every time we lose someone we love, every day we grieve their passing and learn to live without them, we have an opportunity. Every moment we choose not to curse God as the petulant child with the broken toy, but instead as the broken, sad, loving child willing to redefine our expectations of what God’s goodness looks like, trusting in that goodness all the same, we have the chance to become something, someone new, less like us and more like Jesus. We also get to prepare ourselves for our day, the day we’ll pass from this vale of tears through the portal of death and into immortality with Jesus.
This is the truth I watched play out in the life of that sweet mom who passed away this week, and I rest confident that she now rests with Jesus. And, through dying daily and surrendering to Jesus through it all, we are becoming what she is now.
Leave a Reply