Grief as a Theological Virtue

Over my years in ministry, I’ve seen a lot of theology be done in and alongside grief. The pain of loss is evocative. It evokes questions. It calls for answers. It can enrage and soothe, hurt and heal. When we are hurting, we want answers for why we find ourselves in this pain and how we can get ourselves out of it. We Americans, especially, tend to want to microwave our grief, truncating it into a manageable package that somehow fits into our busy lives. Grief, as I’ve often seen it, is considered an intrusive presence, an unwelcome guest that must be dealt with as efficiently as possible. Have we, however, ever considered the possibility that grief may be a kind of theological virtue? Could the way we grieve help us to know God better?

These are the questions that motivated my turn to Martha and Mary in Walking the Theological Life. (If you’d like to help launch this book, along with a fuller exploration of this post, please let me know.) The longer I sat with them in their grief, the most astounded I became at what opened to them, and what they now open to us.

These women were sisters, if you’re having trouble recalling them, and they lived in a town called Bethany with their brother Lazarus (John 11). When Lazarus got sick, word got to Jesus, who makes some enigmatic comments about Lazarus sleeping and how a delay in going to Lazarus’s side was somehow going to help the disciples who followed Jesus with their belief. In short order Lazarus died, and it was only then that Jesus decides to make his way to Bethany.

On his way into town, Martha goes out to meet him. She leads with a question, familiar to those who have ever sat with grief: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I don’t think we should read that softly. “Where were you?!” is probably just as likely a way to communicate her question. Grief often evokes questions of where God is when a loved one has died.

In the conversation that follows, Martha checks all the boxes for orthodox belief. She voices her ascent to some of the convictions that have become pillars in Christian faith: resurrection from the dead, Jesus as the Messiah, and so on. None of her answers were wrong. In fact, she’d probably ace my course in systematic theology. But there is virtue beyond affirming all the right answers, and in fact, there is more to be known of God beyond naming ‘correct’ answers to theological questions. By no means are Martha’s responses bad. Her affirmations don’t press Jesus further away from Bethany, but her belief in resurrection isn’t going to raise her brother back to life.

Mary is next. She finds Jesus at the outskirts of town and leads with the same opening line: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Though the conversation opens with the same line as her sister, it takes a different kind of turn. Jesus, seeing her tears, asks where Lazarus has been laid to rest, and Mary’s response continues to astonish and shake me. “Come and see,” she said.

“Come and see” is a repeated phrase in John’s account, loaded with significance. It’s a repeated invitation that not only taps into John’s light/dark, sight/blind motif, but also has been reserved as an invitation for people to learn about Jesus – until now. This is the only time it’s directed at Jesus. He is being invited into the heart of Mary’s grief. It’s an invitation that opens the way for Jesus’s own tears. And, of course, I can’t resist the theological implications: what kind of a God weeps over the death of a beloved friend? If our concept of God doesn’t have room for the tears of Jesus, I fear something has gone wrong in our theological formation. If we don’t see the tears of Jesus, we’ve probably got God wrong.

What might have happened if Mary had not invited Jesus into the heart of her grief? Is it possible that grief, rather than an unpleasant and unwelcome houseguest, could be stewarded virtuously, in a way that helps us know God better and make startling discoveries, even if those discoveries shake our concepts of God? We can put it another way: the pain of loss can be stewarded toward theological virtue, or it can be aimed at vice. When it’s a vice, I think it looks like grieving in isolation, trying to ‘get over it,’ or even stuffing it down so we don’t have to acknowledge the loss we’re enduring. Grief as theological virtue, on the other hand, is probably something more like inviting God’s presence into the very heart of our grief, and when we do so, being astounded by what we see God do there. “Come and see,” Mary teaches us to say. “Come and see the heart of my grief.”

Courage as Theological Virtue

For generations, courage has been thought of as virtuous.  But what makes courage a theological virtue?  In other words, how might we enact courage in particular ways for the sake of knowing God well?  Miriam, I think, has a lot to teach us about this.  She’s one of the figures I’m examining in a soon-to-be-released book called Walking the Theological Life, and if you’d like to join the launch team, please let me know!  Miriam, especially, demonstrates that a theological virtue of courage is more than dogged determination; it names God’s activity in the face of an unknown future. Theological courage sings the song of God’s faithfulness as we face a frightening wilderness.

The waters of the sea had just receded into place, swallowing the world’s most powerful military force, hot on the trail of a terrified and exhausted group of newly freed slaves, clinging to whatever they could carry with them. Against all odds, Israel survived their escape. Against every expectation, a vulnerable and frightened people watched the waters of the Red Sea cover up their pursuers, drowning the threat of their swift, violent, and immediate destruction. It was then that Miriam began to sing.

“Sing to the Lord,” she begins with tambourine in hand, “for he is highly exalted. Both

horse and driver he has hurled into the sea” (Ex 15:21). Her song is short, but it is courageous. With the Red Sea at their backs and the vast mystery of wilderness in front of them, Miriam’s song is what sets the tone for these first steps into an unknown future. Without food or water, this people’s path is anything but certain. While they may not have certainty about the days to come, they have Miriam’s song, singing them into a wilderness journey with no lack of theological courage. Her song recalls the past events of divine faithfulness, propelling them into God’s future. I like to imagine Miriam, tambourine in hand, boldly carrying their song of deliverance out into an unknown wilderness. There, between nearly certain destruction and the unrelenting possibilities of danger, Miriam sings. In her song, we find a virtue of the theological life.

The Courage to Sing

Theology can be worshipful proclamation of God’s activity in the face of an unknown future. At times, theology is a summons to dance to the hope-filled song of God’s salvation. In Miriam, we see the courage to sing of God’s activity and dance boldly between the realities that threaten to unmake us. Her life reminds the theologian that our work, in part, is to have the courage to sing of God’s salvation so that God’s people can dance into the future. It is to create an eschatological culture by staring down uncertainty with a song of God’s faithfulness on our lips, calling people to dance defiantly in the presence of possible destruction. It is to step boldly into the days to come, propelled forward by a song of God’s past faithfulness.

The philosopher Aristotle famously defined courage as acting to grow, move, or become. For the musician, practicing one’s instrument is an act of courage. For the student, courage is found in picking up a book and challenging oneself to learn. A failure of courage, Aristotle argued, was to stay as one was, to be stymied in the status quo. Letting Miriam’s witness go to work on Aristotle’s understanding of courage offers us a perspective that sees theological courage as the virtue of proclaiming God’s actions into the way things are, expecting that God’s actions will change them in an uncertain future. In Miriam’s case, it is staring down a reality where her people have no home, no food, and no water, and speaking of what God has just done to the world’s most powerful military force, bent on her destruction. Her circumstances were real. The threat of annihilation was a bona fide possibility. But the things Miriam saw God do will not let that possibility be her reality. God’s activity gave her a song, and to that song she courageously and joyfully danced into the wilderness. When the very real circumstances of our world press in, sometimes it takes a theologian to remind the community of God’s action, pick up the tambourine, and invite others to join the dance into God’s future.

Courage At the End of the World

To live with theological courage is closely related to eschatology, the theological study of the purposes and conclusions of history. Eschatology has taken many forms in both ancient and contemporary theology, and it is important for us to remember that there is not a single approach to eschatology that has come to be officially recognized as the orthodox approach. When we are setting out to do the work of theology, though, it is important to raise a level of self-awareness of how our eschatological leanings will shape the kind of the theology that results.

In a salvation-historical approach, theologians often draw a link between God’s past activity and the unfolding of events yet to come. In other words, the reality God is bringing about will be consistent with God’s past activity. For theologians who take this approach, eschatology is not as much about predicting forthcoming events as much as it is about recognizing the type of reality God is bringing into being. This also signifies that the future God is bringing will be a good and fitting conclusion to God’s previous and ongoing work of creation rather than an arbitrary destruction of the creation God loves. While eschatology does study the end of the world, it often has a keen eye to the fulfillment or completion of the world rather than its cessation. As I often remind undergraduate students, there are two ways to end one’s college career. One of them involves withdrawing from school, while the other ends in earning a degree. Both are an end; only one is a fulfillment.

When theologians take a fulfillment approach to eschatology, they tend to read God’s activity in history as moving creation toward a good and complete fulfillment of everything God intended for creation. Sometimes this calls for an act of theological courage in the face of daunting circumstances. We might think of the kind of theological courage that fueled Martin Luther King Jr. to proclaim a bold, eschatological future in his “I Have a Dream” speech. In those sixteen historic minutes, King cast a vision of a creation that was more complete, allowing for the flourishing of Black Americans, created in the image of God. He spoke boldly into an incomplete reality, singing a song of what God had done in the past and reminding a people that God’s activity would continue in the same direction, that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  With the Red Sea of slavery and Jim Crow at his back, King turned toward an uncertain wilderness with a theological vision of God’s future that remained unrealized, riffed on Miriam’s song, and invited a nation to dance.

These approaches to theology exhibit a Miriam-like virtue of speaking courageously into a real situation. Even as we await the fullness of God’s realized time, theological courage is boldly singing of what God has done in Jesus Christ, speaking it confidently into a world that is yet unfulfilled. The Christian life, we could say, is the dance Miriam teaches us, our bodies moving according to the hope of a God who has acted to bring salvation. In this way, hope is anything but wishful thinking about a favored future reality. Hope, rather, is the Christian act of living now in light of the reality that is yet to come in its fullness. It is looking toward the fulfillment of creation and living its dynamics now because of Christ’s empty tomb and the empowerment of the Spirit that Jesus breathed on his disciples (Jn 20). Hope is an approach to the work of theology that calls the Christian community to live now in light of the end of salvation history or, as it is sometimes called in theology, realized eschatology.

Tambourine in hand, Miriam sings us into an unknown future, confident of what she has seen God accomplish in the past. The saving acts that rescued them from the grasp of slaveholders will be consistent with the acts that will sustain them in the wilderness, where there is no food or water. Her theological act is singing of God’s salvation in real-life situations, even in the face of uncertainty. To be sure, the work of theology often involves proclaiming the goodness of God’s activity when we are faced with harsh real-life realities. It is to recall with boldness the activity of a faithful and living God rather than shrinking back in the face of difficult—even seemingly impossible—realities.

Wrestling as a Theological Virtue

Wrestling was never terribly attractive to me as a sport. While my friends in high school were encouraging me to join the team, all I could see was an opportunity to get a parasitic infection while taking on bizarre weight loss and weight gain practices, only to be rewarded by parading around in front of my peers in Spandex. Could there be any virtue in wrestling? What did my friends see that I didn't? More to the point, could there be any theological virtue in wrestling? Could it ever teaching me anything about knowing God well? What I couldn't have seen back in high school is being helped by Jacob.

Jacob’s story of wrestling, I think, offers us a glimpse of some theological virtues. I’ve worked this out in much more depth in Walking the Theological Life, a book being published soon. If you’d like to join the launch team and receive a copy of the full book, let me know!

The story of Jacob wrestling at the bank of a river is fascinating to me because of how oddly vague it is (Gen. 32). Overtaken in the middle of the night by some unknown adversary whose motives are unclear, Jacob wrestles until the sun comes up, refusing to let go until he’s received a blessing.

It’s not entirely surprising; Jacob is the conniving trickster who defrauded his disabled father to gain a blessing, and nothing about this story seems to suggest he’s departed those ways. In other words, we shouldn’t expect to find much virtue in Jacob, and that’s probably why this story has such a pull on my imagination. It’s almost as if it’s daring me to find virtue in it.

In the struggle, a few things happened: (1) Jacob refused to let go, (2) he became convinced that he met God face to face, and (3) it changed who he was forever. In other words, the riverbank wrestling in Genesis 32 is an enduring image that should come to mind time and again when Israel is overtaken by adversity, addressing how they might somehow meet God in the midst of an unexplainable affliction.

Refusing to Let Go

As much as I wish this were not the case, theology often happens in struggle, which means that wrestling can be a virtuous theological activity. While the work of theology often involves offering words about God, that work is usually preceded by wrestling with God. Theology can involve wrestling with an issue, a person, and even with ourselves. In wrestling whatever it may be, we may just find that we have met

God in the struggle. Most of us begin working out life-sized God questions while sitting in the ashes of tragedy, trauma, frustration, or confusion. Sometimes it is a decision in front of us that forces the issue of where God is and what God wants. Whether in pain or perplexity, we can, like Jacob, be overtaken when we least expect it by something that is ambiguously related to God. Was it God who caused this situation? Does God want a particular response from us when we are faced with this decision? Taking cues from Jacob, we are reminded that he spends no time attempting to identify whether this really is God. Jacob’s odd response is to grab on and refuse to let go, finally concluding that he met God in the struggle.

I’m struck, time and again, by the folks I’ve met in congregations and classrooms who exude this kind of virtue. They may have been overtaken by something they didn’t see coming and don’t understand, and they aren’t about to let go. They aren’t going to run from the complexity, the frustration, even the pain. Refusing to let go may be the mark of a virtuous theologian.

That’s a reminder I need when the church seems to messy, the situation to complicated, and the struggle too exhausting, especially when it’s a struggle I didn’t seek out and never saw coming. That’s probably when I need to take a page from Jacob and ask for a blessing. Blessings, after all, are only blessings if they overflow to others.

Meeting God In the Struggle

One of the things that makes Genesis 32 even more mysterious is that it never claims that the man who jumped Jacob in the middle of the night was God. And yet, Jacob comes away from the struggle convinced that in the wrestling match, he had met God face to face. That might be welcome news for anyone who has ever been overtaken by a struggle that they never saw coming. It might be even better theological news to not try to attribute every tragedy and affliction we endure to God’s direct intervention. But when we are overtaken and find ourselves in the middle of a wrestling match we didn’t ask for, is it possible that somewhere in the midst of the wrestling, we could meet God? That’s the case for Jacob, and I think there might be some virtue in it. We are people who are overtaken in the dark and forced to wrestle with things we never wanted, but in the refusal to let go, we might come away knowing that somehow – as mysterious as the text itself – we met God in the struggle.

Blessed with a Limp

Jacob came away limping. We might look at his limp as something of a tragic reminder, but I see it differently: Jacob’s limp is a mark of his theological virtue. It’s a reminder that he refused to let go and met God in the struggle.

I’ll admit that I’m a little suspicious of theology that’s done in an attempt to walk upright. It’s the kind of theology that has as its goal a well-adjusted, upwardly mobile person who walks with a flawless gait. For whatever reason, I can’t escape the images I’ve seen in photographs of seminarians of years gone by. They are, for the most part, pristinely groomed young men who are being trained to populate the pulpits of those finely kept brick churches that were the backbone of the mainline denominational boom in the 1950s and 1960s. It was almost as if centers of theological education became places to learn to hide our limp.

But limps are signs of people who have wrestled, refused to let go, and met God in the struggle.

The longer I am at the work of theology, the more I am coming to see that being named a theologian probably has more to do with wrestling than it does about the degrees I have earned or any answers I have. Being a theologian is more about the virtue of being willing to wrestle than it is about the tidy answers we have to life’s most perplexing questions. I have, after all, known some professional theologians who seem to walk with no evidence at all that they have wrestled with God. I have also known others with minimal amounts of academic training in theology who wobble along on hips that bear witness to their all-night wrestling matches. “I’m no theologian,” they will say again, but their limp tells me otherwise.

The theologians who draw my interest most are those who do their work as a tenacious, passionate refusal to let go of life’s messiest questions in favor of simplistic answers. God-wrestling simply does not settle for easy answers. It will not let go, even into the darkness of night, and when the dawn begins to break, the blessing we receive is a limp and a new name: theologian.