How the Resurrection Changes How We Live—and Even How We Grieve

May 11

My mom’s body laid flat on the hospital-style bed in her bedroom. My dad, sister, and I removed her soiled clothes and put clean ones onto her lifeless body. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Her frail frame felt unexpectedly heavy—heavy in my arms, heavy in my soul. Then we waited for her body to be picked up.

Eventually, two men arrived. But they came earlier than we had anticipated, so we asked for more time. Don’t take her. Not yet. We’re not ready.

They kindly came back a few hours later, wrapped her in a black bag and carried my mom’s body out the front door. Just like that, gone. We stood in the entryway for who knows how long hugging, sobbing, clinging onto each other.

I remember that moment as if it were yesterday. I remember what death felt like in my arms as I held my mom one last time. I remember feeling, as Leif Enger wrote in Peace Like a River, “a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long.” That scraping hurt like nothing else I’d ever experienced.

I remember how the hope of healing disappeared with her body in that bag. She’s actually dead. We prayed for healing, and God said, “No.” Despite our pleas, grief, and tears, my mom’s lifeless body left our home, carried out the front door in a black bag.

But more than anything, I remember wondering—with more than a hint of unbelief—whether God could actually raise the dead.

DO I BELIEVE THIS?

Even now, I think back to that day my mom died and I can’t help but shake my head in disbelief. God, can you really do this? Can you really raise her from the dead? And then somewhere in the middle of the swirl of questions, I ask the central one.

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Because if Jesus was really a dead man who came back to life, then he could do the same with my mom. And that changes everything.

If you’ve held death in your arms, you know how unbelievable this sounds–and is. When I held my mom’s body that day, I looked at her wrinkled, graying skin, and the idea that she could come back to life seemed utterly preposterous. There’s no way. It’s impossible.

But thanks be to God, because the impossible is also true.

I’m not going to give an apologetic argument for the truth of the resurrection. But we have to reckon with its reality. I want us to ask the question, Do I actually believe this? If you’ve grown up in the Church, maybe the familiarity of the story of Jesus rising from the dead has caused it to lose its luster. Or maybe you’re newer to the Christian faith, and the resurrection still seems too outlandish to believe.

But this is the question the entire Christian faith hinges on, and how we answer it, whether or not we believe Jesus rose from the dead, changes how we live our lives. And it certainly changes how we grieve.

WE CAN FULLY GRIEVE

Paul writes, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:55-57). Do we believe that? Do we believe he was victorious over sin and death, we get to share in that victory, and one day he will one day raise us to life as the Scriptures promise (2 Cor. 4:14)?

If so, then we do not have to minimize or dismiss our pain. We don’t have to put Band-Aids on it or repeat pithy phrases in a vain attempt to comfort ourselves. Rather, we can face our heartache head on, lamenting this is not the way it’s supposed to be. We can fully grieve the losses we experience, allowing ourselves to feel the weight of our pain. We can cry out to him on our knees, because the God who took all our sins and our sorrows upon himself knows firsthand the grief we feel (Is. 53:4).

WE CAN CLING TO HOPE

As we weep, we also know the sting of death, the scraping of grief in our souls, will be nothing in comparison to the glory to come (2 Cor. 4:16-18). We can unreservedly pour our tears out before our God, before the One who puts them in a bottle (Ps. 56:8), knowing he’s also the One who will one day wipe them away for good (Rev. 21:4).

In the years since my mom died, and as I’ve grieved and wept over other tragedies and losses, the truth of the resurrection has become all the more beautiful, all the more hopeful, all the more life-changing. Because just like when we understand the depths of our sin, we understand grace all the more—when we see the grotesqueness of death, oh how much sweeter is the hope of resurrection!

Isaiah 25:7-8 says, “And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth.”

We serve a Savior who rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, and reigns victorious. That is a hope we can desperately cling to, a hope that reminds us that for those in Christ, death may be inevitable.

But it is not final.