There’s no way I can follow my brother in eulogizing my father, so I’m not going to try. I’m not going to speak as a son on the passing of my father. I do want to tell one story about my dad, but before I get to that let me tell you what I want to talk about today. I want to speak to you as a minister of the gospel. I want to give you a message about tears and hope. I want to talk about sorrow and the end of sorrow. Two things I know are true: Jesus wept, but he will also wipe away every tear. Two things are important: tears and the end of tears. We are all powerless in the face of death, and it comes for us all.
Grandchildren, you are young, and your death seems like it is a long ways away. The passing of Grandpa, while sad, is an opportunity to reflect on the fact that middle age, later middle age, older age, your last breath, and your last heartbeat will come far sooner than you can imagine. Take it from someone who still feels like the youngest of six children who rides in the back of the station wagon; think about how you want to live your life in the light of your coming death.
I am a minister of the gospel, which means I am a messenger. I am someone sent from the front lines of a great battle to bring to you news—news of a great victory. I want to portray to you the reality of death and point you to the only one who is not powerless in the face of death—the one who conquered death by dying in our place. We have already heard his words today: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” He alone has the words of eternal life. To whom or to what shall we go for any greater comfort? To whom or to what shall we go for any comfort in the face of an enemy, a foe as horrible, as implacable as death? It is his message, his words, that I want to convey to you.
There are just two points: First, death is a horrible and unnatural thing—that is why Jesus wept, and that is why we should weep at the grave. We should weep. We may need to learn to weep, but we should weep in the face of death. The second point is that there is hope in the grave. Not because the benefits of death outweigh its costs, but because death has been defeated, and very soon, death will be no more.
Dad Taught Me to Cry
I said that I would tell you a story about my dad, and here it is. The first time I saw my dad cry was when he relayed the news to me and to my family that our brother, his son, had died. It was July 19, 1981. He had heard the news privately from a police officer, and he came to the family and he broke down. I wept when I saw my dad cry, because I didn’t know why he was crying. It’s Dad. He’s a rock.
But in the coming days, I struggled. I stopped crying; I bottled it up. I was only nine years old, about my daughter’s age now. By the time the funeral came and went, I had gone a few days without any tears. Death disorients and terrifies us.
Dad was softer than he let on—he didn’t want us to know how soft he was. He saw my distress; I was literally sick in my stomach. He took me upstairs into his bedroom, into that gold swivel chair we liked to spin around on, and he set me on his knee and said, “It’s okay to cry. I miss David too.” He started crying. I started crying. We bawled. We just bawled together, and I instantly felt so much better, because I knew, and I felt the love and compassion he had for his children and his family.
Dad taught me to cry. He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew this: the death of his son was horribly wrong. So it is good for us to cry today, because the death of a father is horribly wrong. Dad taught me that tears are necessary to get through the grief, because they open us up to the reality of how bad death really is. It might sound silly that we need to learn to cry in response to death, but it is true. There is an opposite force at play when we encounter the death of a loved one, a force working against sorrow at the grave. That force is fear—when we look at the grave of a dad or a son or a brother or a friend, we see our own grave. That’s terrifying—so terrifying that we flee it. We ignore it. We pretend it doesn’t exist.
We live in a death-defying age where eighty-year-old women can recover the luster of their twenties by putting plastic in their face. There are no more “cemeteries” and “funerals”; we “celebrate life” when someone dies. We rarely see death, because people don’t die in their homes anymore. (We are thankful for hospice care, for all they did to make my dad comfortable in his final days and keep him close to us as he died. I strongly encourage it for those who know they are drawing near to the end.) We rationalize the grave. And we have been doing this for thousands of years—the ancient Greeks said bodies are bad and the soul is good. If we can just escape the body, everything will be better. In the soul, we can be free; we can live forever. But if that’s true, then why do we cry when bodies die? Why do we cry when the soul is torn apart from the flesh it has inhabited for a lifetime?
“Four score and seven years”: Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at those killing fields of Gettysburg, the time between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. For eighty-seven years, my dad’s soul was not some spirit floating around; but it was the life force of a heart and lungs that worked together to keep a body warm, to feed a family, to fly people all over the globe, to love people. That’s what life is. Life is meant to be lived in a body. We are meant to love one another in our bodies.
Is Death a Better Place?
We say the dead are in a better place, but how do we know? When the doctor came in to talk to my dad about palliative care, about how medicine could make him comfortable in the face of his death, she asked him what his spiritual state was. My dad said, “Well, I’m kind of an atheist, and I’m kind of a Methodist.” I think he was just being descriptive. He was baptized a Methodist, and for a long part of his life, he was a professed atheist. When I was a kid, I asked him, “Dad, what do you think is going to happen when you die?” He answered, “My body is going to go into the grave, and it is going to rot and that’s that.” That’s what he believed. I’m sure some of you here today believe that.
That is a terrifying thought, no matter how hard or painful your life is—and life is hard and painful. The idea that the end is just darkness and silence and worms is a terrifying thought. I don’t think many of us can actually wrap our heads around that idea and consistently behave like that. People have been burying their dead for thousands of years, because they believe there is something more. But what?
Death Ends Relationships
Let me give you just one good reason why death is a horrible, unnatural thing. It’s because death ends relationships. Human beings were made for relationship. The God of the Bible is a God of relationship—he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; a Triune God that was (and is) eternally loving, even before he made us. The Father loving the Son; the Son loving his Father; the Spirit drawing together in perfect, obedient, eternal love. We were created to join them in that love, because God loves us too.
But death cuts us off, putting a stop to that. God did not create us to stop loving or living; he created us to join his eternal love. He did. He didn’t create us to say goodbye to our fathers. He did not create dads to say goodbye to their sons or moms. That’s why it is so hard, so tragic, when parents bury their child. Death tears us away from those we love.
“Jesus Wept”
Let me give you a biblical argument. If you want to be an expert and memorize Bible verses, then John 11:35 is the one for you. It’s just two words; the shortest verse in the Bible (and probably the easiest): “Jesus wept.” (You should read the whole chapter—you might not believe in God; you might not believe the Bible is his inspired word; but as a piece of literature, the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel is one of the most remarkable stories you will ever run your eyes over.)
Jesus wept at the sight of his friend’s grave. That’s what moved him to tears. Remember, this is Jesus! The story itself says, “He could have healed Lazarus, he healed so many.” Why didn’t he do anything for his friend? It took him a long time to get there. They came and told him, “Your friend is sick,” and it took him four days to get there! He didn’t arrive until Lazarus was cold in the tomb. Lazarus’s two sisters, Mary and Martha, came out to him, and Mary said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” (John 11:32). God, why did you let them die? Isn’t this the same question we ask in the face of death?
Such a true, human story. And John, who wrote this down, tells us that Jesus saw Mary weeping. His dear friend was dead, and he was “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled” (v. 33). The English translation we read here is highly sanitized—Jesus was outraged. In the original language we see that he was furious and trying to hold it in. When he wept, it was not a little “Precious Moments” tear curling its way down its cheek. He wailed like Middle-Eastern mourners around the dead body. He raged out loud at death.
The crazy thing is that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus up in just a few minutes. He knew that Lazarus’s death this first time around was a death and a resurrection, a foretaste of what Christ himself was going to do a few weeks later on Easter Sunday. He knew he was going to raise him up; and yet Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, couldn’t stand to not cry at the grave. Death is a horrible thing, and he knew he would soon join his friend Lazarus in the grave.
Take it from Jesus. Take it from my dad. It’s okay to cry.
Not Without Hope at the Grave
And yet, as the apostle Paul says, “We may not—as those who believe in Jesus—we may not grieve as others do, as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). What’s our hope? What’s your hope?
“For since we believe,” Paul continues, “that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (v. 14). Because Jesus has gone into the tomb, into the grave and died and risen, he will bring everyone who believes in him up out of the grave. He doesn’t just give us something better after death: he undoes death and he defeats it, which are two different things.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future, and a hope” (Jer. 29:11). We have a hope even in the darkest valley of the shadow of death. Our future hope is not that on the whole it is better to just be a spirit free-floating out in space. Our hope is in the defeat of death.
Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. (Isa. 43:1–3)
“I have redeemed you,” Jesus says, “I am your Savior.” This is our hope. Jesus died for us. He entered the grave to free us from it. He paid the price for our selfishness. One of the most difficult things the Bible says is that death is the wages of sin. We all deserve this horrible end, and deep down, we know it. We all live a lot of our lives pretty selfishly—I know I do. My dad was often selfless, but he could be a selfish man. He was selfish every time he threw one of those caustic remarks that were a little more stinging than funny. He took some perverse pleasure in inflicting that pain. The greatest curse of our selfishness is that we get what we want. We end up all alone in the grave.
That’s what Dad deserved, but it’s not what he got. My dad was not, and is not, alone in death.
A Friend in the Grave
Allow me to get a little graphic for a moment about the hospice care experience with my father. Dad died, mercifully, at home, surrounded by his family. As a result, his body was with us in the living room for a few hours after he breathed his last at 2:34 pm on March 14, a Tuesday. Over the course of that time, before the mortician came, Dad’s body began to cool; and the evidence of that precious vital union between soul and flesh, which is a living life here on earth, began to fade. As I touched his cooling forehead, I thought about Jesus. I have never before thought so tangibly, so concretely, about the death and resurrection of my Lord. I thought about how Jesus must have grown cold in that tomb for about forty hours of darkness, in a way no one has experienced death. His death was far more horrible, because he bore all of our iniquities, all of our sorrows, all of our pain. He who had eternally dwelt in loving communion with his eternal Father took on all of our selfishness, and he became alone, forsaken in the grave. I touched my dad’s cooling forehead and thought, “You’re not alone in the grave,” because he knew his heavenly father loved him, and he received that love.
Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, went into the grave to be with you. To be in relationship with you even in the darkness of your death, that you might not be alone, that he might rise from the grave and bring you with him. The story of Jesus and Lazarus is the story of Jesus and Clare. Jesus and Brian. Jesus and you. When Jesus wept, they said, “See how much he loved him!” (John 11:36). See how much he loves you.
When you get up in the morning and you lift your head off the pillow, the rest of your body follows. It has to because they are united. The Bible uses this image that Jesus is our head and that we are his body, united to him. When your head leaves the pillow, your flesh is surely leaving slumber for the light of a new day. Jesus’ departure from the grave was like our head lifting off the pillow, shaking off death, the defeated foe, and walking into the light of the new day, bringing us all along with him.
This might sound odd to say at a funeral. My dad was a good man, hardworking and ethical. But he was not a Christian man. So I’m not going to paint a romantic picture of a life well lived. Being a Christian won’t save you from death—only Christ can save you from death. Jesus himself said, “Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:26). That’s what’s important.
We don’t grieve for my dad as those without hope, because despite a life full of many sins and sorrows, he seemed to stumble his way toward faith, to be transformed, to grow. He stumbled toward a faith, a weak faith that clung to a strong Savior, a strong Christ. Our hope is in nothing less than a new creation, a new heavens, a new earth, where there will be no more tears. Where Dad will once again be shooting hoops in the yard. We await that body; we await that vital living union of body and soul. We confess that we believe in the resurrection of the dead.
Whether you are young or old, ask yourself if you want to be alone in the grave. You need not be alone in the grave; you need not be without hope; for Jesus went to the depths of hell to deliver you from it. And that is our only hope. That is the amazing grace of which we are going to sing as we close our service today.
Rev. Brian Lee is the pastor of Christ Reformed Church (URCNA) in Washington, DC.
