Bereavement is a very poignant human experience. However firm our Christian faith may be, the loss of a close relative or friend causes a profound emotional shock. To lose a loved one is to lose a part of oneself. It calls for radical and painful adjustments, which may take many months. When his 21 year old son died, Leighton Ford wrote, “The struggle is to bring our faith and our emotions together.”
In First Thessalonians four Paul is addressing the saints who were apprehensive about their Christian friends who had died. They were also apprehensive about themselves and their own readiness for the day of reckoning. Paul is once again clear that the solution to the Church’s problems is to be found in the Gospel. He aims to stimulate their Christian hope by developing the theology on which it rests. This hope is the confident expectation of the arrival of Jesus, and this theology is the truth that the Christ who is coming is the same Christ who died and rose again, in whom they had put their trust.
Bereavement also occasions anguished questions about those who have died. What has happened to them? Are they all right? Shall we see them again? Such questions arise partly from a natural curiosity, partly from Christian concern for the dead, and partly because their death reminds us of our own mortality and undermines our security. In addition, the Thessalonians had a theological question to put to Paul. He had evidently taught them that the Lord Jesus was going to reappear, in order to take His people home to Himself. Paul taught what Jesus had taught, namely that He might come (“Maranatha”) at any time, on account of which they must be ready. At all events, they seem to have been expecting Him so soon that some had given up their jobs, while others were totally unprepared for the experience of bereavement. Relatives or friends of theirs had now died before Christ’s advent. They had not anticipated this; it took them by surprise and greatly disturbed them. How would the Christian dead fare when Jesus came for His own? Would they stand at a disadvantage? Would they miss the blessing of the Parousia (“appearing”)? It seems clear that the Thessalonians had addressed such questions as these to Paul, either directly or through Timothy.
Before the apostle responds to their enquiries with positive instruction about the Lord’s return, he makes two preliminary and negative points.
First, he writes, “we do not want you to be uninformed [ignorant]…about those who are asleep.” Expressions like ‘I want you to know’ and ‘I do not want you to be uninformed’ (i.e. ignorant) occur a number of times in his letters. He traces many problems of Christian faith and life to ignorance and regards knowledge as the key to many blessings.
Secondly, “we do not want you … to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope.” We see that Paul does not forbid us to grieve altogether. Mourning is natural, even for a while emotionally necessary. It would be very unnatural, indeed inhuman, not to mourn when we lose somebody near and dear to us. To be sure, it is appropriate at Christian funerals joyfully to celebrate Christ’s decisive victory over death, but we do so only through tears of personal sorrow. What Paul prohibits is not grief but hopeless grief, not all mourning but mourning like the rest of men, who have no hope, that is, like the pagans (unbelievers).
Was the ancient world absolutely devoid of hope in relation to death and the hereafter? Ernest Best wrote: “It is wrong to say that the rest of men had no hope whatsoever.” The fact is that a few Greek philosophers speculated about the immortality of the soul, and there was a vague popular concept of the dead as ‘shades’ enduring a flimsy existence in a dismal Hades. But such notions could not possibly be graced with the Christian word ‘hope’ which means ‘a joyful and confident expectation of eternal life through Jesus Christ.’ On the contrary, there was in antiquity, in the face of death, neither joy nor triumph nor celebration, nor any defiant challenge like ‘O death, where is your victory?’ Instead, there was a ‘general hopelessness’. Theocritus wrote; “hopes are for the living; the dead are without hope.”.
Bishop Lightfoot presented Christian and pagan attitudes in a sharp antithesis: “The contrast between the gloomy despair of the heathen and the triumphant hope of the Christian mourner is nowhere more forcibly brought out than by their monumental inscriptions. The contrast of the tombs, for instance, in the Appian Way, above and below ground, has often been dwelt upon. On the one hand, there is the dreary wail of despair, the effect of which is only heightened by the pomp of outward splendor from which it issues. On the other, the exulting psalm of hope, shining the more brightly in all ill-written, ill-spelt records amidst the darkness of subterranean caverns (i.e. Roman catacombs).
This, then, was Paul’s introduction to his answer to the Thessalonians’ question. He wanted them neither to be ignorant about the Christian dead, nor to grieve over them in hopelessness. He saw that these two things were closely related. Sub-Christian mourning was due to ignorance; only knowledge could inspire true Christian hope.
What, then, is the Christian hope, in contrast to pagan hopelessness, for those who have died in Christ, which does not eliminate mourning altogether, but which comforts and fortifies us in the midst of grief?
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org