The Tension of Hope and Grief
I took part in a wedding recently between two amazing friends from two different countries who had to delay their wedding because of COVID travel restrictions. Variant after COVID variant delayed the groom’s arrival to the USA, thus delaying their ability to schedule a wedding ceremony. So it was a beautiful moment recently to be standing on stage next to my friends as they traded vows and rings before God and their loved ones in the covenantal ceremony of marriage.
In her vows, the bride quoted Proverbs 13:12, which reads:
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
She then stated about how having her hope for their wedding perpetually deferred was heartbreaking, but that it made that moment on that stage so very sweet.
Her hopes were deferred no longer.
When a hope is fulfilled, it is wonderful isn’t it?
In Psalm 126 it states that fulfilled hopes are like “streams in the Negev”. This dry area in southern Israel is normally desert-like but it fills with raging water during the rainy season. So these streams in the desert - these “Streams in the Negev” - were not an ordinary phenomena. And, in a similar way, the psalmist here is reminding us that when hopes are fulfilled, it’s like a roaring riverbed in a desert after a sudden rainstorm.
You can listen to Psalm 126 here:
Hope fulfilled is a life-giving occurrence.
I’ve been personally feeling these “streams in the desert” recently because my sister and brother-in-law, who are parents to 4 amazing and crazy young kids, received some amazing news. After an almost four year journey, my sister and her husband received word that their adoption of two of my nephews was finalized.
Talk about fulfilled hopes!
And here’s the crazy thing, we found out this great news a full TWO WEEKS after the judge had signed the paperwork! These two amazing boys were officially and legally my nephews for 14 whole days before we came to realize that beautiful reality. (Now they’ve obviously been my loved and adored nephews for all intents and purposes for years, but now it’s irrevocably official.)
Do you feel the tension here? This timing gap?
Timing matters. And gaps in timing are something we feel acutely in life.
In the Christian faith, we feel this type of tension because we believe that Jesus defeated death and darkness and sin and brokenness on the cross but also believing in hope that this victory of life and light and holiness and wholeness is not yet fully realized. That will come at the second return of Christ!
To overstate the point in order to make it: the paperwork has been signed, you are adopted and you are free in Christ! But the gap - the tension - is there between the beginning of that freedom and the full embodiment of it at the end of time.
That’s one of the parts of hope that has me absolutely captivated right now. Christian scholars and theologians call this the “now and not yet” reality of the Christian faith.
Jesus’ victory is now and not yet. It is now in part and not yet in its fullness.
And yet sometimes our Christian conversation about hope can sound shallow when we neglect to acknowledge and face the mourning and grief that happens in life. The simple reality of life is that hopes are often lost, deferred, or shattered.
If we’re not careful, it can almost sound like Christianity is saying: You may be sad now but just give it some time - just have a little more faith and better worded prayers - and you’ll be smiling one day.
That rings hollow and false doesn’t it?
I mean, quite simply, the Gospels tell us that Jesus wept.
Being sad does not mean you don’t have enough faith. Mourning is the result of hope deferred. It is a part of the reality for us as people living in the “now and not yet”. Grief is real and legitimate.
We feel it sitting at the dinner table at holidays with empty seats around the table due to sickness or death or family conflict. We feel it sitting on the floor weeping with a friend when their spouse has left them.
Grief finds us holding neglected cups of coffee in the midst of hard conversations in the corner of a coffee shop and in McDonald’s drive-thrus at midnight on the road to a funeral. It finds us next to hospital beds and in goodbye hugs and in the back row of courtrooms, at the front altars of churches, and on country back roads screaming the question “Why?” to God.
The Christian author C.S. Lewis, in talking about processing grief with God, put it quite rawly when he said: “‘Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?”
Lewis, who lived during the first part of the 20th century and wrote well-known books like The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and the Chronicles of Narnia series, published a book near the end of his life entitled “A Grief Observed”. This book is a collection of journal entries written by Lewis in the wake of the death of his wife and his processing of grief in her loss.
In the book, Lewis goes on to say, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear….Perhaps, more importantly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”
Grief. It’s real. It’s normal. And throughout the Bible we see it held up in tension together with joy.
In Ecclesiastes, the author observes that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Proverbs 14 reminds us that even in laughter the heart may ache. And, perhaps the most well known Biblical statement on the matter, Jesus states in Matthew 5 in His Sermon on the Mount that: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
In the book Jesus through Middle-Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey states “Mourners endure suffering and the bless-ed ones among them experience the comfort of God….The one who is lashed by the storm is often the one who is grateful. It does not follow that we seek to stand in the path of destructive storms in order to learn gratitude. But the bless-ed who suffer and mourn deep loss can be blessed by God in that suffering and mourning.”
If mourning is the result of hope deferred, hope lost, or hope taken, then the road to joy may very well not be in avoiding grief. The road to joy may be through addressing it.
This is not to make light of grief or pain. But to acknowledge the truth that both are realities for us as humans and as followers of Christ.
Mourning and joy. Grief and laughter. They are held in tension. And you’ve seen pockets of this. In the meal after a funeral where you share funny stories of the deceased in the midst of crying over their passing. In sending a friend or child or sibling off to college or a new job in a different state and poking fun at them while you load up their car and then giving them a tearful goodbye.
It is not as simple as saying grief is erased when laughter shows up. Joy and mourning can and do overlap.
For those of us who follow Jesus, we live a life of hope. But even in that hope we live in a tension, the tension between the “now and not yet”.
The tension of hope and grief.
