Grief as Temptation: When Bad Theology Speaks to Pain

"Death has been swallowed up in victory."  Isaiah 25:8 

"Where, O death, is your victory?Where, O death, is your sting?"  Hosea 13:14 

"The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God!  He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."  1 Cor. 15:56-57

Our culture and our churches handle grief in some strange ways.

Culturally, we expect people to basically become Stoics in their time of loss.  Be strong, buck up, and press on.  You can do it!  We use words like "meltdown" and phrases like "He's really not handling it well" when people we know continue to cry after several days, refuse to get back into their routine, and seem "stuck" in their grief.  In other words, if your grief is radically altering your life and making you a different person, something must be wrong.  You are not grieving properly.

What about churches?  Church can be a whole different experience in grief, because in church we have regular people shaped extensively by their culture trying to view things through a lens of faith, and many times the words and actions that come out of this collision of culture and faith are messy, strange, and unhelpful.  "God just wanted her to come home."  "This was His will."  And what's interesting is that what's behind those well-meaning but horribly-worded platitudes is, many times, the same message behind what culture says:  "You need to move on."  "Come on, be strong, you'll get through it."  It's a cultural message covered with, frankly, a cheap Christian veneer.

Suddenly everyone at church becomes a trained theologian, each with a word of wisdom to answer the questions you're not really asking and to help you move quickly through the feelings that you're not supposed to dwell on.

Many of us as Christians seem to equate a strong faith with the ability to be Stoic in times of grief and loss.  The less crying and more "inner strength" someone has, the stronger their faith must be.  And I think that comes from the subconscious view of "loss" as a kind of "test"- like a kind of temptation.  God has either given us or allowed us (it doesn't really matter) to go through this time of "testing" in the loss of someone we love, and He is waiting to see how we handle it.  Does our faith bring us to simply trust, smile, read our Bibles, and wait to see that person in Heaven?  Or does it bring us to our knees as a sobbing, uncontrollable mess, where we go for weeks in moods of depression and fear and sadness?

Surely the former is the result of a strong faith, and the latter is what comes from a weak faith.

Right?

I wonder why we feel this need to view death and loss as a kind of "test", automatically ascribing it to God.  And when death is merely a test and grief is the "temptation" we are to avoid, then our response to this test determines our level of faith.

 Perhaps what is really going on is that we are afraid to be real about death.  We are afraid to ascribe death to its true master- Satan.  Perhaps we are afraid to talk frankly about death, to be real about the immense pain it causes and the hurt that it brings.  Maybe we are afraid to call death what it really is- the great enemy and destroyer!  Death is destructive!  Death is a terrible, awful, life-changing experience!  Are we afraid to describe death like this?  Do we think that perhaps to describe death in this way is somehow to give it too much power?  Is this why try so hard to dance around it and try to give God the "credit" by making death a test that He sends us instead of the enemy that Christ came to defeat?

Downplaying that which Christ came to defeat, Death, isn't just bad counseling- it's bad theology.

Being real about Death means we can be real about the Victory that defeats it!

It means we can rejoice in the knowledge that Christ has redeemed us from spiritual death that separated us from God.  It means we can know with confidence that this loss is not permanent.  And it means we can look forward to a day when death will be no more!

But being real about death is a double-sided coin.  Being real about death also means we don't downplay the heartache or the grief that accompanies it- because grief and heartache are not signs of a weak faith, they are signs that someone we love has died!  Being real about death means that we don't seek to "fix" mourners, we seek to accompany them.

And being real about death means that we can talk openly about death as it really is- a *defeated but still hanging around for now* enemy.