Death seems to be rampant this week. It is Holy Week, a time Christians remember and mourn Jesus’ death on the cross. It is also Passover, a time Jews recall their rescue from slavery in Eqypt- a freedom won only after Pharaoh watched every Egyptian firstborn die. More recently agonizing, a friend of mine lost her baby this week. 8 months pregnant, then a lost life. As if she needed more emotional and physical pain, she had to endure the full induced labor experience to deliver the baby, knowing that at its completion she and her husband would only be mourning a lost little girl. Even the weather seems to join in mourning with days of cold, steady drizzle.
In some ways there doesn’t seem to be much to say in this post. I have no solution for present grief; it is not a fictional story line that I can somehow resolve with the right character climax/catharsis. And yet somehow both Christians and Jews are able to look back on a time of death and celebrate rather than mourn. But how?
Part of the story is knowing the ending; to understand that death on Good Friday is followed by new life on Easter Sunday. To remember that death for the Egyptians meant deliverance and freedom for the Jews to a new Promised Land. But even the knowledge of renewed life later cannot (and should not) erase our grief for lost time on Earth. Rather it mutes the extent of our grief, allowing us to shed tears and memories over the graves of loved ones, without becoming lost to raging, inconsolable hopelessness.
For there is hope. Hope that in the short term that we will leave the world a better place behind us through our service and love for others. Hope that our grief will make us more thoughtful towards life, more understanding towards our fellow man. And underneath everything, a foundational belief in the long term that one day death itself will pass away, that evil will lose its grip on the Earth, and that the world will awake to the full glory it was originally intended to have. (See Revelations 21:1-5)
With knowledge of final victory, we mourn for now. But we mourn with perspective, which makes all the difference.
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov:
"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."
