The Entire Thought

Love is Stronger Than Death

It was a full five years after my father’s death. I was driving across Alligator Alley in southern Florida, traveling from Naples on the west coast to Boca Raton on the east coast. I was going to my parents’ condominium. My mother was going to sell it the next day.
As I drove, I began to think of my father. Suddenly, I began to cry and I could not stop. I cried so effusively and unrelentingly that I had to stop at a rest station and change my shirt.
When I resumed driving, I thought is was over. Only it started again, and I was powerless in its grip. When I arrived at my mother’s condo, I had to change my shirt a second time.
I told my mother what happened. She simply said, “Oh, you’ll have days like that.”
Grief is a wild ride. People may map its faces,
predict its stages, and schedule its duration. But those are
people who, for the moment, are not in grief. They have the luxury of observation. But when the loss of a loved one inhabits your soul, you are an occupied territory. Resistance is futile.
That is why I like this emotionally troubled, weeping Jesus being swept toward the tome of the one he loves. It is his love that is causing him the grief, just as it is the love of Martha and Mary that is causing them their grief. If Jesus had not loved Lazarus and his sisters, he would have been
unmoved but philosophically interested at best. We are all
eager for love. But as a distraught young widow once said to me, “Someone should have told me that all marriages end
either in divorce or death.” The truth of eternally grounded
people trafficking in time is: the deeper the love, the deeper the grief.
This is a truth we seldom think about when we give our heart away. In the temporary, perishing world we all inhabit, the advent of love is the seed of grief. Gabriel Marcel said, “To love someone is to say, ‘Thou shalt not die.’" Even if we do not say it aloud, even if we only whisper it in the cellar of the heart, love readies us for weeping. Our first kiss and our first tear are linked.
However, this same love that causes our grief can console us. But we must trust the love and follow it to its root. We must not see it as a futile rebellion against mortality but as a hint that there is more, more than meets the eye and more than conventional knowledge will admit. This love that makes us accompany the ill and even visit their graves after they die may be showing us something of God’s love. Our reluctance to let people go may touch upon the truth of Lazarus’ resuscitation. The love that troubles Jesus and makes him weep at the loss of Lazarus also makes him go after Lazarus and free him from the imprisonment of death. The love of God in Jesus will not let Lazarus go, and so death has to release him. The love that causes our grief is, at root, the love that consoles our grief.
Consolation ultimately comes from realizing love is stronger than death (cf. Song 8:6). This is not an easy realization to embrace. As Martha knew, the stench of death is strong. Sometimes our minds focus on the
unyielding fact of physical death and we speculate about how some form of continued existence is possible.
However, the story suggest another way to proceed.
Jesus is “the resurrection and the life," and those who can enter into him can participate in eternal life now. In this relationship with Jesus we find that the love of God that sustains and raises people is an intimate presence at the center of our own identity. The more we contemplate this presence (Mary) and integrate it into our lives (Martha), the more we realize its gentleness is an enduring strength. Sustained by this presence, we can grieve greatly the physical loss of our friends and hope greatly for their continued life in God. Love generates both grief and consolation. As St. Paul said, “do not grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thess 4:13). I assume he meant we should grieve as those who have hope. It is the weeping Jesus who cries in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

Entire list of Thoughts While Pastoring