Funerals are so agonizing. They're sad, confusing, and so absolute. My Dad died unexpectedly when I was ten years old, and there was just no way for me as a young boy to wrap my mind around such finality. I avoided funerals for six years until one of my best friends, Paul was struck and killed by a drunk driver.
A year before, Paul had convinced me and my best friend Jim to go with him to a Jesus Festival, where we were both saved. Paul was a few years older than us, and that summer he and a few close friends focused most of their time and evangelism on us. It was no easy task since we both thought we were already saved. But they were the kind of friends that become closer than family almost immediately. We never felt judged, just challenged and loved. It was the time of the Jesus Movement, and God was so near. The festival was the perfect place for us and we traded our religion in and found Jesus; forty years later that fire still burns bright.
Jim and I returned to that same festival the next Summer where we received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Paul couldn't join us because he was starting his freshman year of college. We helped him move and then headed across the state to the festival. Paul was hand in hand with his fiancée crossing a street when a speeding car careened toward them. Paul had just enough time to push her to safety. We returned from the festival on a spiritual high only to come crashing down as we stood beside Paul's hospital bed where he lay in a coma. We prayed for weeks, as his parents struggled to come to terms with unplugging a now ineffective ventilator. Their strong faith was shaken and eventually, they bid their son goodbye this side of heaven.
It was a funeral I could not avoid, no matter how painful. Jim and I were pallbearers, and it was painful but comforting to commit him to the Kingdom that he helped us discover. Paul's family and fiancée spent years grieving his loss and trying to understand God's will. Eventually his father attended seminary and became a Pastor far away in another state. It was a new vision along with new surroundings, but his joy and peace were still shaken. He was able to reconcile his grief with his faith in the God who was always good, and still sovereign in the worst of times. But everything changed for everyone. Funerals just tend to do that.
Despite my many experiences with grief, I can't imagine how the friends of Jesus endured such confusion and agony. This time of year, we remember the death of Jesus, the price He paid for us to know Him, and the emotional roller coaster His friends experienced because they expected Him to stay dead.
There were probably many unexpected funerals after the cross, as people tried to come to terms with what they never expected. The Roman guards found themselves trembling in terror as they discovered they had killed the Son of God. A few brave Disciples sat silently at His grave in shock, still covered in the blood of their Messiah after carrying His bloody body from the cross to the tomb.
Days later, the Apostles refused to believe their testimonies of the resurrection, "because their words seemed to them like nonsense" and hid terrified behind locked doors until the risen Jesus literally crashed their private wake.
The funeral that turned into a celebration should have infused their faith, but the realities of life always snuff out that hope. Lazarus was alive, but not forever. There would be another funeral in the years to come. We all want to get past the grief of loss, and funerals are supposed to help, but they all end while the tears, loneliness, and emptiness do not.
Why would God say those words? Why was the God who had no limits, who created and sustained all things, and made all the rules suddenly telling Himself, "no" as He sweated drops of blood? This was God's funeral, dying to Himself, because He had no intention of staying in the grave. Of all the funerals, it was the most important. There was grief, there was sorrow, and there were tears of blood. But most of all there was truth. The truth that sets free.
We all want to be free from sadness, lack, fear, and the things we can't change. It has been God's favor over my life that helped develop in me the faith that makes me stand. When I pray and the answer never comes, it still shakes me. As a leader I love having confidence in God's provision and the consistencies in life that come from walking with Jesus. But provision and protection doesn't always come when and how we ask, and life has whole seasons that get real inconsistent. These are the funeral moments when we need to know how to embrace suffering as Jesus did.
God promised David, "I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed." Jesus promised His Disciples, "My Father's house has many rooms…I am going there to prepare a place for you." We all search for a place, not realizing that we are really trying to get what we want, to make our own way. Ironically, the Hebrew word for "place" also means "to stir up trouble".
Is the reason we trip and fall into sin because we feel God owes us something and we desire that thing, so we do what is needed to get what we have been deprived of? Are we looking for a feeling, a pleasure, something that we deserve? Are we thinking like Eve, "It will do me good?" Do we believe that if it's good, then it must also be God's will, therefore, He must grant it? Are we confusing faith with temptation?
Do we have a King in our lives leading us or are we looking for a place? Do we think our actions ensure that "God will do us good?" Have we fallen into the trap of thinking that the means and motivation aren't as important as the end? Is our life or ministry a means to an end? Has God become a means to an end for us? Are we so confident that we are "saved by grace", that journeying obediently "through faith" is no longer necessary? Are Salvation and Heaven the end, and Jesus just a means to get to it?
Jesus left Heaven, not to find a place, but to make a place for us to be near to His Father. So, when God judges sin and casts it into the Lake of Fire, will our life be free of sin, or will we be clinging tightly to sin while only reflecting the appearance of true religion? Are we living so that our lives, while suffering or rejoicing, might give Him glory? Are we His reward or are we still looking for a place for us?
Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved… I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive. Martin Luther King Jr.
What a powerful word. Thank you!
I want to thank you for this article. I was Jewish for many years, came to accept Jesus after a bitter divorce, moved to Atlanta Ga, that's when my life turned around.
I still have some issues, but now I know that Yeshua is my Savior.
Thank you so much to help us Jews to find Jesus.
Woow,.. I never heard the Gospel and especially a message for this Easter season presented this way,..
This is so powerful and I bless the name of God for you.