Thought for The Week 30 March 2024

The other day Jonathan was walking around the house singing ‘Don’t   worry, be happy’ It’s so catchy I joined in with him. But despite societies clamouring for the need to always think positively, we know deep down that grief and loss can’t be papered over or sugar-coated.

The Bible gives voice to the full range of human experiences and emotions, including grief. The honest poetry of the Psalms and other writings like Job and Jeremiah show us that nothing is off-limits when talking to God. God’s people rail against injustice,  illness, abandonment, death and sometimes, even against God. Nothing is out of bounds. It seems that God is big enough to shoulder our grief.

Theologian Walter Brueggeman says that these writings are not faithless, but are an “act of bold faith … because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way.” To deny the effects of our suffering does not make us more pious. I humbly suggest that it risks making us less human.

While God’s people know that not all is as it should be in the world, we also know God has done and is going to do something about it in Christ. This hope is also embodied in these ‘Psalms of darkness’. Often in an explicit expression of confidence and trust in God to do what only God can. But even in a psalm seemingly without hope, like Psalm 88, the very fact it is addressed to God expresses hope in God’s faithfulness.

Rather than denying the reality of one or the other, God helps us to hold grief and hope together so that we may begin to find healing and wholeness in our being.

Luke