"Why, God?" you scream at the One Who seems to be absent. "I don't understand. How can I possibly understand why You'd let this happen to someone I love so much. Why did you take this one I can't live without away from me?"
When someone you love - or yourself - becomes ill with a life-threatening disease, your heart goes into a nose-dive, spiraling out of control. Your hands are permanently icy; you're living in a zone where you perpetually fend off an anxiety attack. "God! God!" you moan. "I can't take this. Why now? Why this sudden terrible illness? I don't understand!"
We don't understand death, illness, divorce, disabilities. We don't understand any of the catastrophic changes that punctuate our lives.
Our fragile, limited selves don't understand God. That's the truth. We can yell that at Him, and we'll always hear God Our Father's patient answer:
"My ways are not your ways....Be still and know that I am God."
We may not understand God. But God, in the Person of Jesus, completely understands us. When we see Jesus, we see the Face of God the Father; we hear God the Father's Voice. Jesus came to us so that we would truly know Who God is. And Jesus, Face and Voice of God, is Compassion Incarnate. God, in Jesus, lives in loving solidarity with us. Jesus, in his human condition, understands grieving because he has grieved. In Jesus, God grieves.
Since Joseph is not mentioned in Scripture past Jesus' boyhood, scholars presume that Joseph died before Jesus began his public ministry. Joseph was provider, protector and guide for his much-loved wife and foster son. He taught Jesus what it meant to be a mature man; he taught Jesus about his faith; he taught Jesus his trade. Surely Jesus grieved over the death of Joseph, and grieved watching his mother's suffering at the death of the good man who had loved her and known her deepest secret: the identity of the Child she bore.
John the Baptist, the prophet, was Jesus' cousin. As Fr. James Martin, S.J. tells us, "Before Jesus stepped onto the public stage, John the Baptist had his own flourishing ministry, his own circle of disciples, and his own distinct style of preaching....Jesus...would have had a deep appreciation for John's message; many biblical scholars posit that Jesus was, for a time, one of John's followers."
But John was neither jealous of Jesus' popularity nor threatened by him. Humbly he said that he was simply the forerunner of one more powerful who would come after him, whose sandals he was not worthy to untie, and who would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit. After Jesus' Baptism, John even pointed some of his disciples in Jesus' direction, calling him "The Lamb of God." When Herod beheaded John, his disciples sought Jesus out to give him the news, and Jesus had to take time by himself to grieve the loss of his cousin, mentor, and friend.
Understanding human grieving, Jesus uses his power to raise the dead. Seeing the Widow of Nain following the coffin of her only son, he stops, touches the coffin, and the bearers halt. Jesus says "Young man, I tell you, arise." The young man sits up, begins to speak, and Jesus gives him to his mother. He also raises the twelve year old daughter of Jairus from the dead, in front of her weeping parents, and sensitively tells her family to give her something to eat.
When Jesus' good friend Lazarus dies, and Martha and Mary admonish Jesus for not coming sooner and preventing their brother's death, Jesus tells them "I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." Jesus - and Faith - tell us that once we pass through death, eternal life awaits us. We know that our loved ones who died aren't just "at peace." They are experiencing life to the fullest! They have become fully the persons that they were meant to be. We can't shed tears out of sorrow for who they are now; they have reached the home that Jesus has prepared for all of us some day.
I am so comforted when I remember a compassionate Jesus weeping before he raises Lazarus from the dead. Yet, whenever I hear the stories of Jesus raising someone from the dead, my heart breaks and I weep. "Jesus," I whisper, "why weren't you here to prevent my son Peter's death? Why didn't you raise my forty year old son from the dead?" Yet I know, deep down, that Peter is perfectly happy in Heaven and that I am grieving for myself, for the broken one whom I am now.
"Blessed (happy) are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh," promises Jesus in the Beatitudes, in Luke's version. Matthew has Jesus saying "Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted." If we have faith, we believe Jesus' promise, and joy begins to stir in our hearts.
Faith promises us that somehow, some way, Jesus can bring good out of evil, and gifts out of suffering for we who are broken. Jesus can and will, because Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus can and will because he is also the human son of Mary, flesh of her flesh, and he has suffered and grieved and he has been transformed by suffering. The death of his foster father has helped him become a mature man, the mainstay of his mother. The death of his cousin reminds him of his cousin's affirmation of his identity and reminds him forcefully of a prophet's destiny: death.
"Beatitude" comes from the Latin "beatus" which can be translated either as "blessed" or as "happy," or even as both. God in Jesus tells us that we are blessed, that we will experience joy. We need to have faith in God's Word, Jesus, because society often tells those who suffer and grieve a different story.
Those who mourn or weep for whatever cause are often avoided by society because grieving makes many people uncomfortable. People remember you at the time of the funeral (or in the case of illness, at the time of the diagnosis,) and often forget you afterwards. Some expect you to "get over it" within a too-short time. There can be no more bitter isolation than the one endured by the person who weeps and mourns, for whatever cause.
But God, through Jesus, tells us that He blesses us because He never forgets us. He is always near to the broken-hearted. And one day, we WILL laugh; one day we will receive complete comfort, because Faith assures us that we will be re-united with our loved ones in Heaven. That in Heaven we will be healed of all the infirmities we have suffered through our illnesses. That the wounds of disabilities and divorce will be hugged away by God, Who is perfect Love and Affirmation.
But Jesus, in himself, also institutes the reign of God NOW. He watches over us through those He sends us. For there are those who are Jesus' hands, arms, feet, and voice who somehow know the right words to say, who know how to pull us out of the caves we bury ourselves in because of grief, who put a dinner on the table or invite us to their homes, ready to put up with our distracted silence and tears, who listen patiently when our grief spills over into words. Now, right now, God comforts us through Christ's Body of disciples on earth. There are many who comfort us who may not be Christ's followers but who understand the healing power of love. God sends them as well, whether they consciously know this or not.
Jesus also speaks of those who mourn as being models for disciples. How can this be? When we grieve, we have a choice: either our hearts can become hard and bitter and shrink, or our hearts can become wiser and softer and expand. The wise one whose heart expands is the model for disciples; a heart broken open can now hold so many more people inside.
If you are a disciple with a broken, expanded heart, you have deeper faith in God and self because God has stayed with you, and you're a survivor; you have deeper faith in the power of community, because others have stood by you, and now you know how precious a support system is; you have deeper compassion for others and deeper, more mature love. Through a grieving imbued with faith, we can be transformed by God into literally new people. We can't, and don't want to, go back to the less aware, less compassionate person we were before we suffered loss.
Suffering in not good in itself. Sin has afflicted us with illness, suffering, and death. Yet, Scripture gives us a vivid portrait of Satan being crushed beneath the heel of our Savior, Son of God, Jesus the Christ. And the human Jesus, who has grieved with us in solidarity with us, forcefully promises us that even though we suffer, we will be able to laugh again, to be comforted again, to love again, not only in Heaven but in this world. We may not understand God, but God in Jesus understands us and has grieved with us. In faith, we can trust in his Word and trust that our broken hearts can and will be healed and transformed. We will be comforted. And we will laugh again!