Hope for the Christmas Season

As we come to the end of the year and the celebration of the birth of Jesus, many of us will welcome friends and family into our celebrations. Our time will be filled with catching up on the year’s events and celebrating the joy of Christ with one another.  I think that’s why we love classic Christmas songs like “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” These songs remind us of gathering together and being with people we can be ourselves around—a community of love and belonging.  Christmas often brings these welcome visitors to our doorstep. However, many will not experience the welcome visitation of community, belonging, and joy; the visitor they will welcome is grief. The grief of a loved one who has passed, a missed opportunity, a relationship that has soured, or a tragic and hurtful circumstance can alter the way we experience the joy of the season.  Where do you turn when grief shows up? I pray this chapter from Gospel Shaped Emotions points the way to Jesus who will weep with us and still lead us despite where we find ourselves this season.

When Grief Shows Up

Then Martha said to Jesus “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” —John 11:21–22

Grief will show up on your doorstep at one time or another, and death will not always be the delivery man. We can grieve several experiences in our lives. The loss of a relationship, the choices our adult children make, the lost opportunity or the promotion that passed us over—these may well cause our hearts to grieve. The emotion of grief is one of the most powerful that we will experience in our lifetimes. Notice it’s not a matter of if we will experience grief; we will experience grief. There is a silver lining to the darkness of grief, however, that we will explore in the following chapters.

When Grief Knocks at Your Door

I can recall the early morning moments of March 3, 1999, very well. It’s hard to remember the events of just a typical day from the past, but this day was far from ordinary. On this day, my older sister passed away due to a drug overdose. My sister and I were very close when I was in elementary school; she was twelve years older than me, so she was assigned the task of looking after me, the youngest in the family. On summer days, we would swim in our pool until the evening hours. She married when I was nine and moved into a small double-wide on an acre of land, nestled behind our parents’ home. The early part of her marriage was uneventful. She gave birth to a son, the first grandchild in our family, and began her new life with her husband and child, but over the years, sin crept into their lives as she began to change.

The changes were subtle at first—sleeping in on the weekends until the early afternoon hours, not showing up for family events, and other abnormal behavior. Slowly, our family noticed other changes to her moral character. My parents caught her stealing money and lying to cover up her actions. Over the years, she had become addicted to methamphetamine, or “meth.” The drug is highly addictive, and without intervention, users’ lives usually end horribly. I watched my parents, who are believers, support and love her despite her addiction, but in the early hours of March 3, 1999, she died of an overdose.

That year I was away at college, so my parents called the church I was attending, and one of the pastors drove to my apartment to break the news of my sister’s passing. When I heard the story, I was shocked but not surprised. I can still envision the bathroom where I was standing when I heard the knock on the door, and Bill, the pastor who broke the news, asked if he could talk to me. Grief has a way of amplifying every part of a situation.

Almost twenty years have passed since my sister died, and time has healed so much, but I can still feel the sting of what could have been. She never attended my wedding, never knew my wife or children; they only know her from family pictures and stories I tell. Grief has a way of stealing the moments in our lives and replacing them with the reality of living in a broken world.

In John 11, Mary and Martha experience the existence of a broken world. John 11 starts with these words: “Now a man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.” John does not give us the reason why Lazarus was sick, but we are given a few important details. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair. Jesus heard about the sickness before Lazarus died. Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

The last detail listed above is an important one. Jesus loved everyone who was affected by the imminent death of Lazarus. More amazing are the words Jesus spoke when he found out about the condition of this man he knew and loved.

This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. (John 11:4)

Notice Jesus said “sickness will not end in death.” God doesn’t promise his children a life far from the effects of death, sin, and the fall, but he does promise a better ending. Often, the effects cloud the promise of a better ending.

C. S. Lewis said that the view we have in a broken world is one of being “on the wrong side of the door.”^[i] The wrong side of the door is a scary place; we don’t know what is coming up, and fear and anxiety can grip our hearts, shaping the emotions we experience. Yet the words of Jesus give us the eternal perspective needed. God can take moments filled with grief and show his children the glory of God within those moments, not outside of those moments. God doesn’t need to change what is happening; he can hold you through your grief and use it to shape you with his gospel.

Martha’s reaction is twofold. First, she struggles to align what she knows to be true—that Jesus loves her—with his tardiness. She laments, “Lord if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” One can hear the grief in her voice. John 11:6 states that upon hearing of his friend’s sickness, Jesus stayed two more days in the place where he was. John 10 puts Jesus’s location on the eastern side of the Jordan River, maybe a day’s walk from the village of Bethany. Why did Jesus tarry? Why didn’t he come when he heard of his friend’s condition? It is possible Martha struggled with the same questions that we do when God doesn’t seem to answer our despair. The “Where are you, God?” question is one people have struggled with through the years.

David begins Psalm 13 with the following: “How long Lord? Will you forget me forever?” The prophet Habakkuk writes, “How long, LORD, must I call for help and you do not listen” (Habakkuk 1:2). We see a similar passionate plea when those who gave their lives for the faith cried out to God for justice: “They cried out with a loud voice: ‘Lord, the one who is holy and true, how long until you judge those who live on the earth and avenge our blood?’” (Revelation 6:10).

At one point or another, we all question God’s timing, especially when our hearts are squeezed by grief. During these times, we will hold on to our convictions about the nature of God, or we will allow our circumstances to dictate who we believe God to be at the moment of our grief.

Everyone is a theologian, but not everyone is a good theologian. We all have thoughts about God—how he should act and reply to the problems that occur in the world, how he should answer when we call, and especially the timing of his answer. Martha had a dead brother and a tardy Lord, and this did not compute with her. Still, even in her grief, she does acknowledge the overall sovereignty of Jesus, especially the relationship he has with the Father.

The second reaction we see from Martha centers on her acknowledgment that Jesus is still in control. John 11:22 states, “Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Such great faith! Her brother is dead, and she still can see the power of the Son of God standing before her. Remember, grief puts us on the “wrong side of the door.” While we occupy this earthly home, we will not be immune to hurt and pain. Creation is groaning from the effects of the fall of man, and as Paul said, “The whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now … we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22–23). Paul stated in theological terms what Martha experienced on this temporal plane.

We yearn for God to make everything better, to redeem the hard things in our lives, and to make something useful from our grief. Martha understood that while she felt the sting of grief and death, one stood before her who could do something about it. But Jesus wants us to see something that goes beyond our grief. He desires for his children to see him not only as the comforter and the one in control but the one who is life itself.

We see the power of the gospel in the reaction and dialogue Jesus has with Martha. Jesus tells her, “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23). This amazing statement is one that should have dispelled her grief, yet Martha does not catch the reality of Jesus’s words. She answers Jesus, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection as the last day” (John 11:24). Martha believed in the resurrection, but just the resurrection of the last day, not today.

We say to those who are grieving, “Time will heal your heart.” But what about the grace we need for the present? Martha had given up on her situation. She had come to grips with the death of her brother, and it never occurred to her why Jesus was standing in front of her. Maybe he came to the town to comfort his friends or to pay his final respects. In reality, he came because he is King over death. Jesus did not come only to comfort those who grieve; he also came to give hope to those who mourn. And in the case of Martha and Mary, he would not wait until the last day. Hope happened on this day.

God doesn’t always take our grief away quickly, but the truth we find in John 11:25–26 is what every grieving heart needs to hear and believe: “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.’” Jesus’s words are the key to the gospel’s radically transforming the way we live and the way we approach grief. Death only held the decaying body of Lazarus because Jesus allowed it. There is life and power in the name of Jesus but also in what Jesus declares. Jesus plainly said, “Lazarus, come forth,” and death and decay had to let him go.

Our grief may not always be fixed, but it can bow at the feet of Jesus. The reality and dynamic of this family changed with one word from Jesus. Jesus may not change our circumstances, but his cross and gospel radically change our perspectives.

I still grieve my sister, and I have lost others since her death. But I do not grieve as one who has no hope. Because of the sin and decay of this world, I will experience grief again, but it does not have to shape who I am. I know the one who has conquered everything, who brings me grief and pain, so I lay my grief at his nail-pierced feet.

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^[i] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harper Collins, 1960), 155.