When I woke up this morning I saw that I had a phone message from my brother. He had called at 12:56 AM. I didn’t have to wonder why. Phones that ring in the middle of the night seldom bring good news.
I waited a couple hours before calling back, reasoning that if he’d been making calls at 1 AM, he probably wasn’t up early. When I reached him he confirmed what I already knew: sometime shortly after midnight my Father had “slipped away.” The hospice staff said that when they checked on him around midnight he was resting comfortably. When they checked on him ten minutes later he was gone. They told my Mom they were not surprised. They had heard that one more child was due to show up. Their guess was that my Dad would hold out until he last of the five kids had been in to say good-bye. Steve, my youngest brother, had arrived on Saturday.
How do we respond to the death of a loved one who knows Christ – and is thus promised Eternal Life? Some say we rejoice. I protest. That’s too simple of an answer. It’s not complete.
Death is ugly. It reduced my Dad to a shell of who he’d been. The man lying in the hospital bed was not the giant I knew as a child; not the man who hit more homeruns for the company softball team (of which I was the five year old bat boy) than anyone else; not the guy who got up early, worked hard and helped put five kids through college and grad school. Cancer and chemo diminished him. Death destroys. My Mom told me that he fought hard to maintain his dignity throughout his fight with cancer. “When he lost that I think he just gave up.”
Death is ugly. For those in Christ it has lost its sting, but it is still a sign of the curse. It has been defeated but not yet destroyed. We await that (I Cor. 15:26f).
It’s too simple to say that our response is “to rejoice.” There is that side of it, and not simply because it brings an end to suffering, but because it allows us to leave the world of the dying and enter the land of the living. It allows us to fully enter into the presence of God.
How do we respond to the death of a loved one? I turn to Acts 8:2 for direction. It’s an easy passage to overlook but it has much to offer. It comes immediately after the stoning of Stephen. As you may know, shortly after Pentecost the early church grew rapidly and enjoyed great favor with just about everyone….but then the persecution began. There was a 300 year, Empire-wide effort to wipe out Christianity. The first victim (martyr) was Stephen. He was stoned.
As you may know, his death came after he gave an impassioned speech to an agitated mop. For a while it looked as if he had won most of them over. He might have made it out alive had he stopped with the history lesson. But he kept speaking, directing his comments to them. Let me quote from Acts 7:51 and following, which I am taking from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, The Message:
“And you continue, so bullheaded! Calluses on your hearts, flaps on your ears! Deliberately ignoring the Holy Spirit, you’re just like your ancestors. Was there ever a prophet who didn’t get the same treatment? Your ancestors killed anyone who dared talk about the coming of the Just One. And you’ve kept up the family tradition—traitors and murderers, all of you. You had God’s Law handed to you by angels—gift-wrapped!—and you squandered it!”
At that point they went wild, a rioting mob of catcalls and whistles and invective. But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, hardly noticed—he only had eyes for God, whom he saw in all his glory with Jesus standing at his side. He said, “Oh! I see heaven wide open and the Son of Man standing at God’s side!”
Yelling and hissing, the mob drowned him out. Now in full stampede, they dragged him out of town and pelted him with rocks.
Stephen died under a shower of rocks. It was quite a way to go out: he offered powerful testimony to the work of Christ; he stood fearless in the face of an angry crowd; he saw Jesus (who was normally seated at the right hand of the Father) stand to welcome him into heaven; and then he died.
How did his friends response to Stephen’s death? Acts 8:2 gives us the answer. There we read:
Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him.
The translation I first memorized said, “Righteous men buried Stephen and wept.”
Did they cry for Stephen? Hardly. The King of the Universe had stood to welcome him into Heaven. They were believers. They knew it was all good for Stephen! They wept for themselves. His gain was their loss.
My Dad was not Stephen, and he would be the first to say so. But he was justified by the death of the King of the Universe, and so he has been welcomed into Heaven. There is no need to cry for him. But his gain is our loss. I’m glad his suffering is over, and thankful that he lived until I was in my 50s (few have that privilege). But it’s OK to weep.