Grief and Loss

Reading these passages

One verse on this page is not consolation and was never meant as any: Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.

It is read at funerals, and it is a strange thing to say to the bereaved. The word rendered precious is yaqar, which means costly — the word used of gemstones and of things whose price is high. It appears in the psalms for what is rare and not to be spent lightly.

So the sentence is not describing a death as beautiful. It is describing it as expensive, from God's side. Whatever comfort is in the verse comes from that rather than from any suggestion that the loss was small or the timing right.

That sets the register for the rest of this page. These passages are unusually careful about what they do not claim.

What the beatitude actually promises

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Read slowly, the promise is not that mourning stops. It is that the mourner will be comforted, which is a different thing and a slower one. The tense is future — shall be, not are — and Jesus does not say when.

Notice also who is called blessed. Not the people who have moved on, or coped well, or found the redemptive meaning. The ones still mourning, in the present participle, while they are doing it.

The Greek for mourn is pentheo, the strongest of the several words available. It is used of grief that cannot be hidden — the kind that shows. Jesus did not reach for the mild term.

Near, which is not the same as mending

The verse most quoted to the newly bereaved is more specific in Hebrew than in English: The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.

Both adjectives are words for breaking. Broken is shabar, used of shattered pottery and snapped bones. Contrite is dakka, from a root meaning crushed to powder. This is not a verse about being a bit low.

And what it promises is proximity. It does not say he mends the broken heart, or explains it, or shortens the condition. It says he is near it — and the person is still broken-hearted at the end of the sentence, with nothing about their state revised.

Psalm 147 does go further, and the vocabulary there is medical: He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. Bindeth up is what you do with a bandage. The two psalms are not saying the same thing, and the page holds both without reconciling them.

A season, not a failure

Ecclesiastes gives weeping its own slot in the catalogue, listed as flatly as the rest: A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

Nothing in the passage suggests one is a lapse from the other. The whole chapter is built on the idea that things have their proper time, and grief is given the same standing as joy — not as an interruption of normal life but as one of its scheduled conditions.

The psalm most often set against it is usually read as a promise of speed, and it is not: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

The verb behind endure carries the sense of lodging — of spending the night somewhere as a guest. The weeping is given a room. What the verse does not do is tell it to leave early, and the morning it names is not specified as tomorrow.

Comfort that has to move

Paul opens his second letter to Corinth with a chain, and the last link is the surprising one: Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.

The comfort is not given as a private possession. It is given that — purpose clause — it can be handed on, and the sentence completes a circuit rather than arriving at a destination.

Which explains something most people notice without being able to account for. The person who is any use to the newly bereaved is almost always someone who has been there, and what they offer is not insight. It is not that they have understood grief better. It is that they are carrying something that was given to them for this.

The word Paul uses throughout is paraklesis, built from a verb meaning to call alongside. It is the same root as the name Jesus gives the Spirit in John's gospel. Whatever it describes, it is spatial before it is emotional.

The tense of the last promise

Revelation is where the New Testament puts the resolution, and the verb is worth watching: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Every clause is future. Nothing here is offered as available now, and the passage is honest about that in a way that quotation often is not.

The image is also domestic rather than judicial. Wiping tears from a face is something done at close range, by someone within arm's reach, and it is the sort of thing done for children. Whatever else the sentence promises, it does not promise an explanation. Nobody in it is told why.

Which may be the most useful thing on this page. The Bible has a great deal to say to the grieving and almost none of it is an argument. It offers company, a season, a bandage, a future, and the flat statement that the loss was expensive. It does not offer a reason, and it does not pretend to.