What could Mary do? Consider how Mary was forced to face what she couldn’t do anything about.

Do you think the words of Gabriel years before would have prepared her for the day she stood at the foot of the cross? Not likely…

Close your eyes for a minute – you folks online as well – close your eyes for a moment. Can you see her, Mary, now standing at the foot of the cross with two other Marys, the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene? Our heart breaks for her. None of this seems fair. Her Son, an innocent man dying for what? And yet there Mary stood, feeling the prophetic words of Simeon,

“A sword will pierce your own soul too”

— Luke 2:35

Place yourself there watching Jesus’ mother approach the cross. Can you see her tears and her grief? Is there anything that you could say to relieve her grief? 

We can consider those questions knowing the full story of Jesus, but do you think that all the realities of Who Jesus was and what He came to do would eliminate her grief as she helplessly watched her son suffer and die? I don’t think so. Mary was in the difficult position of seeing firsthand the business of her Father in heaven—the business that Jesus was all about. And it hurt like nothing had hurt before.

As I have already alluded to, we all have experienced loss in one form or another. In my experience, one of the most difficult things about experiencing loss is that we can’t do anything about it. I have been to countless scenes of real grief and loss over my 3 decades in the Fire Service and the most common question I heard was, Why? Why did this have to happen – we can’t make sense out of this. For us as Jesus followers there’s sometimes an additional layer to this too. We are simply told to submit our will to our Father in heaven and trust Him. And while that can be appropriate counsel, it maybe incomplete and we do so in faith, we still grieve, don’t we? Or at least we should as we are going to discover this morning. So why would Scazzero’s next chapter invite us to consider that there may in fact be treasure buried in our grief? Well, the simple answer to that is because there is. There is treasure to be found buried in our grief.

Scazzero makes this statement:

“Our culture and sometimes our churches are loss denying and grief phobic. Our society has trained us well to pay attention to success but not to loss and pain. In order to keep these feelings at bay, we develop a variety of coping strategies to redirect our attention away from whatever painful reality we might be facing.”

Even after Mary discovered her son was alive, I can’t imagine that she would ever forget what the grief of THAT Friday felt like. 

I think very few Christians in the Western world fully understands loss and grief, especially as it relates to God, our spiritual maturity, and the expansion of Jesus’s mission. We mistakenly believe that embracing our grief is going to slow us down and hinder us in some way, when actually, the opposite is true. Embracing our losses, God’s way, actually betters our live and advances His mission. The question, then, is why are we so allergic/scared to recognize loss and grief and the many treasures buried within them? 

There are two primary reasons:

1. our resistance to losing control and
2. a faulty theology that interprets losses as interruptions.

We resist loss and grief because we resist losing control and we have a faulty theology that interprets losses as interruptions.

Western culture as a whole devalues loss and grief because it places such a high value on control and continued upward climb through life. In contrast, dealing with grief and loss require surrender and a willing descent. We like things going “up and to the right”—whether that be the stock market, the economy, the numbers in our Church, or even a sense of mastery in the spiritual life.

So, when pain enters our lives, we’ve been trained to minimize it by distracting ourselves. Sometimes, maybe even blaming others. The world works very hard to have us believe the illusion of control rather than facing up to the fact we were never really in control to begin with. It is not an exaggeration to say that our culture, and sadly, our churches as well, are loss denying and grief phobic.  Our society has trained us well to pay attention to success but not to loss and pain. And yet, let me assure you from personal experience, loss demands to be grieved and pain cries out to be felt. But, in order to keep these feelings at bay, we develop a variety of coping strategies, many of which take the form of substance abuse. That substance could be almost anything—work, movies, drugs, alcohol, shopping, food, busyness, sex, unhealthy relational attachments, even serving at church—as long as it redirects our attention away from whatever painful reality we might be facing. So, in our society, the result has become a widespread inability to face pain. What we fail to realize in all this is that a refusal to embrace our sorrows and to grieve them fully keeps us from the spiritual growth that we seek. Which brings me to the second point of why we do this:

We View Losses as Interruptions

For a long time, we’ve be taught to believe that grieving was an interruption, an obstacle in our life’s journey, even an obstacle in my path to serve Jesus.  The thought never enters our mind that grief and sorrow are things we need to experience. Our losses too often remain locked inside of us. And we have no idea how to free them. Sitting with what we do not understand is hard, but necessary. We prefer to skip what we don’t understand, don’t we? And when we do that, we fail to discover the treasures waiting for us, riches that can only be ours when we trust God with our losses. God, however, has another pathway for us, one He has clearly revealed in Scripture and that Scazzero reveals for us in the next chapter. That pathway has three phases to it:

Scripture describes three biblical phases to process grief and sorrow: 

1. Pay attention to pain,
2. Wait in the confusing in-between, and
3. Allow the old to birth the new.

Each of these three phases has distinct characteristics, and they don’t necessarily happen in a step-by-step fashion. In fact, if you deal with this regularly, you find that they frequently overlap. And, as we shall see, it is also possible to experience all three phases at the same time! But the process begins with paying attention to and feeling the pain of our losses.

Pay attention to the pain

When a loss enters our life, we often become annoyed or angry at God and treat it as something new, that we didn’t expect. We forget that attending to the pain of grief and loss has been a distinctive of God’s people since the beginning. Consider a few examples. 

• The ancient Hebrews expressed their laments dramatically and physically by tearing their clothes, putting on sackcloth, and sitting in ashes (Esther 4:1–3; Daniel 9:3).
• Jesus himself prayed with “loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7 NRSV). In Gethsemane, Jesus was anguished, sorrowful, and spiritually overwhelmed, not emotionally frozen or shut down (Luke 22:39–44).

From Genesis to Revelation, the Scriptures invite us to integrate seasons of grief and sadness as a vital aspect of the spiritual life. To reject these seasons is to live only half of life, and to live a spirituality that is false. This is not only dangerous to our health but to our Souls. Half to two-thirds of the 150 psalms are classified as laments. They were gifted to us in order to teach us how to pray our emotions and struggles back to God. The laments never flinch in paying attention to the reality that life can be hard, difficult, and even brutal. They even mourn over the apparent absence of God. They take notice when circumstances seem to say that God is not good. They cry out to God for comfort and care, and wrestle with their doubts about God’s loyal, faithful love:

“Tears have been my food day and night”

— Psalm 42:3

“Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?”

— Psalm 43:2

“You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.  You have overwhelmed me”

— Psalm 88:6–7

The Psalms operate in the certainty that God does allow His people to experience great pain, even if we don’t always understand the reasons why. When our pain and grief goes unexpressed or unfelt, it gets buried alive. Eventually, the feelings we bury claw their way back up through our lives and show up as symptoms like depression, anxiety, emptiness, and loneliness. Friends, it is critical we do pay attention to our pain and do so in God’s presence as an expression of prayer to Him. This both overlaps and takes us into the next phase in God’s grieving process for us, waiting in the confusing in-between.

Wait in the confusing in-between.

Loss and grief force us to stop, to wait, to change our plans. That can be especially hard for those of us who live in a culture that esteems busyness, productivity, and predictability. For this reason, learning to wait is perhaps one of the most difficult lessons we learn as followers of Jesus.

Moses waited forty years in the desert before receiving God’s call to lead His people out of Egyptian slavery, and then waited another forty years before reaching the promised land.

Job waited years, not months, for God to reveal Himself and usher him into a new beginning.

The apostles waited, confused and bewildered, between the cross of Good Friday and Pentecost.

What makes waiting so difficult is that we are not sure where God is, what He is doing, or when this waiting will end—if ever. We are helpless and waiting on Him in total dependence. We can’t see the future and there is no way back to the past where we had a sense of stability and order. We are face-to-face with the cross, with the refining fire of what sixteenth-century spiritual writer John of the Cross described as the dark night of the soul. A dark night is not merely suffering, but a crisis experience of spiritual desolation. We may feel helpless, weary, empty, and consumed by a sense of failure or defeat. John says of the Cross’s great insight about this confusing-in-between phase is that it is the ordinary way we grow in Jesus. No exceptions. 

He writes:

“God perceives the imperfections within us, and because of His love for us…is not content to leave us in our weakness, and for this reason He takes us into the dark night…no soul will grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.”

Yet, it is in these confusing in-between times that God uproots our self-will, strips us of layers of our false self, and frees us from unhealthy attachments. It is in these in-between seasons that we are emptied, and this emptying has one primary purpose—to make room for something new and better. Let’s face it: waiting on God in the midst of loss defies human instincts and quick solutions. It runs contrary to Western culture and our own bent toward self-will. That is why we so desperately, desperately need the Holy Spirit to sustain us in these times. When I have resisted God by simply getting busier and trying to hold everything together, I short-changed myself by skipping the preparation I needed in order to receive the new beginnings God had for me. When I have waited with Him, I discovered this in-between confusion was rich in insights and mercies. What looked like an empty, blurry, waste-of-time season turned out to be a surprising place of transition to God’s powerful, beneath-the-surface work in my life.

This is where we allow God to reframe our losses so that we can receive the treasures God has for us.

Allow the old to birth the new

The central truth of Christianity is that Jesus died a real death on the cross and rose from the dead. He is risen! This is what enables us to affirm that our losses and endings are gateways to new beginnings—even when we can’t see anything good that could possibly emerge from them. Our losses are real. But so is the resurrection our living God brings from our losses.

God invites us to trust Him with the many small deaths we experience in our lives. Jesus Himself said:

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds”

— John 12:24

This certainty of God’s promise anchors us even when we feel we have descended into hell and there is no hope for a good future. 

What makes this third phase so different from the previous phases is that we actually transition to something new. I know people who are good at paying attention to their pain (Phase 1) and waiting on God (Phase 2), but they do not let go of the old so they can transition into the new God has for them (Phase 3). I know this problem well because it is one of my temptations! My temptation is to return to control and working more/harder to gain control and when I do that, here’s what I miss…

God offers us revelation of Himself.

God gives us a greater revelation of ourselves. 

God makes us softer and more compassionate.

God makes us more of our true self in Christ.

God makes us more truly alive to His mercy.

We are not the same people after this final phase of the grieving process. We finally realize that, just as the risen Jesus showed His wounds to the disciples following His resurrection, He sends us into the world to show our wounds as well (see John 20:19–28). When we become disciples who learn how to grow through pain, our compassion toward others will flow from us to the world. Modelling our lives after Jesus who loved people in extraordinary ways now becomes a real possibility for us.

Summary

In the Bible, there’s an entire book about lamenting – about the search for treasure in loss and grief. That treasure is Hope. Jeremiah’s faith believed that God would restore the nation of Israel, but Jeremiah did not live to see that day. Jeremiah’s faith, however, would reveal its wisdom many years later, but Jeremiah was content in waiting for God to change things. Jeremiah’s faith kept him calling the people of God to turn back to the one who loves them with a loyal and zealous love. To the God whose compassion and unending mercy covered His people. 

Think about that treasure – the treasure of unending mercy.

We grow strawberries. Loaded with many berries upon one branch, with many stalks on a plant. Our raised garden beds are full of strawberries when in season. What amazes me about these plants is that as I pick a berry, it was replaced over and over by another & another and another.

You may think you have but one mercy, but you soon find it to be a whole garden of mercies.

When Marlee sends me out to pick, I keep finding them, you look here and then there and wow there’s another one.

Have you ever tried to count your mercies? I have often tried to count my mercies, but soon I have to cry out, wow, there’s another one! “I had no idea they were so many!”

Remember I said at the outset, we prefer to skip what we don’t understand, especially when it comes to grief and loss. And when we do that, we fail to discover the treasures waiting for us, riches and mercy that can only be ours when we trust God with our losses.