Let’s start with a little bit of Bible trivia. Do you know what the shortest verse is in the Bible? It’s John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” I’m willing to bet you already knew that one. Now, do you know why Jesus wept? The answer: grief. Jesus’ friend Lazarus had died, and Jesus was grieving the loss with others.
According to some earlier verses in the chapter, Jesus and Lazarus were close. Verse 2 even gives some context that Lazarus was the brother of Martha and Mary in Bethany—the same Mary who anointed Jesus’s feet with oil and washed them with her hair. When Lazarus fell ill, the women told Jesus, “The one you love is sick.” Days later, Jesus found that Lazarus had already died and had in fact been dead for four days.
Mary and Martha were both mourning in Bethany with several Jews from Jerusalem, and it was when Jesus saw them and the company they had to support them that he wept. Verses 33 and 38 both say that Jesus was deeply moved and troubled, and he could apparently no longer hold back his tears for the loss of his dear friend, the care and faith of his sisters, and the support of the Jewish community in their time of need.
What Is Grief?
Grief is a normal response to various kinds of loss—not just loss of physical life but maybe also loss of a job, a friendship, a place, an identity, or something similar. In the play Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, which explores grief from several angles, one character gives what I believe to be the best description of grief:
“It turns into something you can crawl out from under and carry around, like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: ‘Oh, right. That.’ Which can be awful. But not all the time. Sometimes it’s kinda . . . not that you like it exactly, but it’s what you have instead of [what you lost], so you don’t wanna let go of it either. And it doesn’t go away, which is . . . fine, actually.”
The Bible has much to say about grief. And while there are several cultural differences in the ways people of the Bible dealt with grief and how we might today, there is still much to learn from the Bible on grief.
“Grief is a normal response to various kinds of loss—not just loss of physical life but maybe also loss of a job, a friendship, a place, an identity, or something similar.”
Grieving Together
For example, in this story of Jesus, Martha, and Mary grieving over Lazarus, the Jews were practicing public mourning, a custom common at the time, when people would wail in a public place with others. Public mourning served as a way to honor the dead by showing how much the person was loved and missed. (Some would even hire people to mourn for them to make them appear more important, as is mentioned in Jeremiah 9:17.)
Public mourning also allowed the mourners an opportunity to lament and move through their grief freely, which is typically healthier than bottling up the emotions and trying to keep up appearances. And finally, public mourning welcomed others to come and support those who were hurting, allowing there to be a strong sense of community and camaraderie, even in the midst of such difficult times.
A few years ago, a precious coworker invited some of us to attend her husband’s funeral, as, in her words, we were her family because the rest of her biological family lived in another country. Her husband was from Iran, a country that also demonstrates public mourning even to this day. I thought it was a bit unusual to be invited to a funeral of someone I didn’t even know, but I wanted to support my coworker, and I was really touched by what she’d said. And to my surprise, I found myself crying at this funeral, too. It was an unusual experience to learn about someone at the time of their death, but it was clear this man was deeply loved by his family.
“Public mourning served as a way to honor the dead by showing how much the person was loved and missed.”
Our group from work attended the service and the graveside burial (where, by the way, the men of the family removed their coats and took the shovels from the cemetery workers to bury the man themselves), and even went to the home to join in the wake dinner. I’ve thought about this a lot and how it was so different from many Southern U.S. funerals I’ve attended. The public displays of grief were strangely refreshing, and to be able to share in that was oddly intimate. I felt my friendship with my coworker strengthened a lot after that.
In the Old Testament, grief and mourning were often accompanied by certain rituals, such as wearing certain clothes (sackcloth, for example, Genesis 37:34), ripping garments (Genesis 37:29), uncovering one’s head (Ezekiel 24:17; or the opposite: covering one’s head and/or face, as in 2 Samuel 15:30), neglecting one’s personal appearance (Daniel 10:3), fasting (2 Samuel 1:12), walking barefoot (2 Samuel 15:30), lamenting (Lamentations), lying on the ground (Job 2:13), putting ashes on one’s head or sitting in ash (Joshua 7:6), and others. Almost all of these traditions were to outwardly show the inner turmoil and grief being felt and/or to show humility in the face of God’s ultimate power over life and death.
Words Translated “Grief” in the Bible
Interestingly, Jesus wept, people grieve–and so did God, at least once. Genesis 6:6 says that, after seeing the wickedness of mankind, the Creator regretted making man and felt grief, which led to the restart of mankind through Noah and his family after the flood.
The word used here is the Hebrew word עָצַב, or asab, which, in all of its forms, is used nine other times in the Old Testament in the context of grief. There are twenty-one other Hebrew words that are all translated into English as “grieve” or “grief,” though asab is the one used the most. Another such instance is Genesis 45:5, when Joseph says to his brothers not to grieve the fact that they sold him into slavery because it actually turned out to be a good thing. Nehemiah 8:9-12 includes the well-known verse that says, “Do not be asab, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
“Joseph says to his brothers not to grieve the fact that they sold him into slavery because it actually turned out to be a good thing.”
In the New Testament, six Greek words are translated as “grief” or “grieve,” the most common of which is λύπη, or lype, and its forms, which is used eight times. For example, when the rich young man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus tells him to sell all of his possessions, he went away grieving (Matthew 19:22, Mark 10:22). When Paul writes his second letter to the church in Corinth, he tells them in verse 4 that he wrote to them not to cause grief but to spread love. When Jesus was approached by a man with a withered hand and the leaders of the synagogue thought it was unlawful to heal on the Sabbath, He was grieving at their hardness of heart and healed the man (Mark 3:5).
From Grief to Gladness
There are, of course, many synonyms for grief: sorrow, mourning, affliction, etc. And if we look more generally to the concept of grief in Scripture, we find much more to say. The Psalms, for example, have several examples of grief, such as Psalm 13, 22, 23, and 30. Psalm 13 starts by asking how long the Lord will turn an ear away from the writer’s sorrow but then ends, much like Job, by saying that he chooses to rejoice, even in the face of grief. Psalm 22 is similar and is such a comfort that Jesus quoted it on the cross as He felt distant from God. Psalm 23 speaks of God’s comfort while “walking through the valley of the shadow of death.” And Psalm 30 tells us that though we may weep through the night, “joy comes in the morning.”
Ecclesiastes similarly says there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance” (3:4) and that with more knowledge, there is more grief (1:18).
Lamentations is a book all about grief, but one important message of it is this: chapter 3 shares that, while the Lord may even cause grief (though He “does not afflict from his heart to grieve the children of men”), “He will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (3:31-33, ESV).
“Lamentations 3 shares that, while the Lord may even cause grief, ‘He will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.'”
And as a segue into the New Testament, Isaiah 53 tells about the Suffering Servant, who is “acquainted with grief” and “has borne our griefs.” Later, in chapter 58, we are told that if we call, the Lord will answer; if we cry, He will say, “‘Here I am’”; if we help those who need help, light will rise in darkness and “your gloom be as the noonday.”
In the New Testament, there is, of course, the beatitudes, which say that those who mourn will be comforted (Matthew 5:4) and that those who weep will laugh (Luke 6:21). Peter even says something similar in the beginning of his first letter, that the disciples may “have been grieved in various trials” but will soon rejoice because it will only make them stronger in faith (1:6-7).
There’s an important message about grief that specifically comes from the New Testament. Jesus says to His followers in John 16 that He will die, and that, by hearing this, “sorrow has filled your heart” (6), but He comforts them by saying, “‘You will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy . . . . You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you’” (20-22).
“You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Of course, Jesus said this to his apostles who did actually physically see Him after His resurrection. For those of us who were not so lucky, do we still receive such joy after grieving? 1 Thessalonians 4 says so:
“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. . . . The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.” (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, ESV)
Finally, in Revelation, it’s important to note that, in a new heaven and new earth, there will be no tears, no death, no mourning, no crying, and no pain (21:4).
Approaching Grief Biblically
So, yes, grieving is normal–so normal that even Jesus grieved over Lazarus and God grieved over the wickedness of His own creation. We can learn to express our grief through humility, embracing our emotions, and reaching out for support and comfort from others–even from God Himself, as the psalmists did.
And we can choose to rejoice, find peace, and praise God to ease our grief and know that grief is not forever. There will be laughter, there will be dancing, and the morning will come with joy.
Above everything else, we know that death is not the true end for those who follow the Lord; Jesus proved that death can be defeated, and because of His victory, the dead will be raised to life, and there is hope for eternity with Him where there will be no more grief.
