Grief and loss. That’s a good way to describe what people throughout the world are experiencing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Loss of normalcy. Loss of connection. Loss of church life. Loss of vacations. Loss of school. That’s a lot of loss.
I remember a few weeks ago when I began to feel the loss in my own heart. Once I began to realize what was going on with the pandemic, I realized also that my normal American life was going to be severely interrupted. I did not like it. I was grieved. I realized that church would not be the same, and I love going to church! It was a loss, and I was going to miss it.
We need to talk about these losses, and we need to recognize them for what they are and the grief they cause. We need to let them soak in and wait patiently for the time when we will adjust. That time does come, and God speaks comfort to our hearts.
When we experience grief and loss, it’s easy to think that God is distant or far away from us. However, the Bible teaches us that grief and loss are part of God’s plan.
Jesus’ Experience of Grief and Loss
Jesus Himself entered into the world of grief and loss. I want to look at one particular example of that in His life: the Garden of Gethsemane. It was a time when Jesus contemplated the severe grief of the cross and struggled with it in the depths of His being.
When we consider Jesus’ death, we might think that this was one time where God was not in control. After all, this was a completely innocent man suffering at the hands of evil men. How could God be in the middle of that?
But this is not how Jesus looked at it. He said, “The Son of Man goes as it has been decreed” (Luke 22:22). He called His death His “appointed time” (Matt. 26:42). Jesus told Pilate, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11). Jesus’ followers recognized this and said to God that what happened to Jesus “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (Acts 4:28, cf. 2:23).
So, Jesus knew that the ultimate issue in His death was not the people who would hand Him over or put Him to death. It was His Father who ultimately brought about this situation.
That’s no doubt what Jesus had in His mind as he entered the place called Gethsemane. He went there with Peter, James, and John and asked that they pray. Jesus “began to be sorrowful and troubled” (26:37). He told the disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (26:28).
Then, Jesus went a little further away. He prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” As we listen in to Jesus’ prayer, we are face to face with one of the most mysterious and profound moments in Scripture. The great Bible scholar Alfred Edersheim says, “We are here in full view of the deepest mystery of our faith.” He goes on to ask, “Was there, then, any thought or view of ‘a possibility,’ that Christ’s work could be accomplished without that hour and Cup? Or did it only mark the utmost limit of His endurance and submission? We dare not answer; we only reverently follow what is recorded” (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 846).
Here Jesus confronted the anxiety of grief and loss. The loss was not yet experienced, but it was coming.
After Jesus prayed to His Father, he went back to His disciples. There, he found them, sleeping, in His great hour of need. He encouraged them for their own sake to keep praying: “Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation!” Even in His great hour of sorrow and death, His thought was for the welfare of others.
Then, He entered the second time and prayed the same thing: “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” Once again, He entered into the fear of what He was about to do: drink to the dregs the cup of the wrath of God for our own sins. While facing the fear, He rose up committed to do His Father’s will. “Thy will be done.”
Once again He returned to His disciples who were sleeping. Once again, He went away to pray. Matthew tells us that He prayed “saying the same thing.” Like in His earlier three temptations, Jesus considered His awful fate and committed Himself to the will of God. “Thy will be done.”
Having faced the specter of grief and loss, He was now resolved to move forward into the deepest depths of suffering. “Rise! Let us go!” Jesus was now prepared to lay down His life for the sheep according to the command that our Good Shepherd had received from His Father (John 10:18).
The Lessons of Jesus’ Grief and Loss
As we think about this event it teaches us something powerful about Jesus and about ourselves.
When we think about the existence of grief and loss in the world, this is one of the greatest challenges to our faith. How could God allow such terrible grief into the world?
There is an intellectual answer to this question. God could take away all grief and loss, and yet God is good. How do we put these things together? Answer: He has good reason for it, and He knows what that reason is. This answers the logical dilemma.
But there is a more profound answer. When God brings us to grief and loss, He is not asking us to experience something that He Himself is unwilling to experience. In the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane and the death of Jesus on the cross, we see God experiencing the worst sort of suffering that one can experience in the world. He puts Himself right in the center of grief and loss.
We may still wonder after seeing Jesus’ suffering, why does God allow suffering in the world? We may not know the whole answer; however, as Tim Keller notes in his book The Reason for God, “we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition” (31).
This can provide us great comfort. As the author of Hebrews put it, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (4:15). As often as we experience the pain of loss, we know that Jesus has already been there.
The second lesson we can learn is that we are to follow the example of Jesus in grief and loss. This means, first of all, that it is legitimate to be afraid. It is legitimate to feel anxiety. It is legitimate to weep over losses. It is OK and even good to grieve.
We live in a society that often wants to paste over grief, but this just freezes grief in place. We need to acknowledge the things we have lost and the grief that causes us. We should talk about those things that grieve our hearts.
But this should not be our deepest response. Grief is a legitimate response to loss, but beneath the grief, we need to have the same mind as Jesus, “Thy will be done.” We may say, “I feel sorrow at this great disruption to my life and all the things I miss. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”
This mean that in the depths of our being, we keep our hearts fixed on God the Father and His will. It means that we grieve, but we can still serve others in the midst of our grief.
How can we get the strength to do this? Well, we have the presence of the Holy Spirit to empower us, and the Holy Spirit motivates us to do this by showing us that the will of the Father in heaven is better than everything else. As the goodness of the Father’s will motivated Jesus, so it can motivate us. It may lead to sorrow for a night, but joy will come in the morning. It may lead to the cross, but the end will be the crown. It may lead to suffering, but the end will be glory!
People often say to me when they are going through hard times. “I’m trusting the Lord. I know He has a purpose for this. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
I know what it is. The purpose is to teach you to trust the Lord. There is no better outcome you could possibly have that would be better than learning to trust the Lord more, than learning to say, “Thy will be done.”
Why? Because if we can accept and assent to the will of the Father and His government of the world, we will have access to a joy and peace that the world cannot take away and that is a foretaste of heaven itself. That is a joy that we can experience, even if we have to experience sorrow to the point of death. That is a joy that arises from a heartfelt cry at the core of our being, “Thy will be done!”