An Unforeseen Kiss
How in Christ our grief is channelled into hope.
The first time I remember kissing a girl, I was six, and she was six. She kissed me. I was standing by my desk getting ready to leave, packing my stuff to go. She came straight to me, but surprised me as much as coming from behind me. She grabbed my face and kissed me. This wasn’t my first kiss when I was four, a pastor's daughter laid an unforeseen kiss on me as our family was leaving. I don’t remember this, but my mom and dad have irrefutable photographic evidence.
I don’t remember her name, just how shocked six-year-old me was. I didn’t kiss her back; I punched her in the stomach. I don’t know why I did. I think I was scared. It was a moment like Peter and Malchus. Now, looking back at my overreaction, I'm thankful that I was skinny and small and had no idea how to punch. She bent over, and I felt awful. I said I was sorry, but the damage was done.
There is something about death that sneaks up behind you right in front of your face and kisses you when you don’t expect it. Moving as much as I did, I never saw a dead person before. When you move that much, you only get veniettes of life but not a lot of death.
I was in college, and one of the students had cancer. He died, and I went to the funeral with the entire student body. Being my first funeral, I didn’t know what to expect when the service started. The pastor stood before a table covered with a cloth. I turned to a friend to ask if we were having communion. I didn’t know that Protestants did communion at funerals. He said, “They don’t, why would you ask that.” I told him because the cloth was covering the communion elements behind the pastor. He said, “That’s the body.”
Matthew McCullough, in his book Remembering Death, describes our reaction to the idea of death as a reality.
“If modern medicine has given us the space to live as if death is not inevitable, it has also ingrained in us a powerful expectation, even a sense of entitlement, that comes to the surface when we do finally confront some life-threatening problem.”
He says that “our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something.”
When we are surprised by sickness, sorrow, or the occasional love-struck six-year-old classmate, we fight. We fight like Peter, who fought to keep death and injustice from his Messiah, who had just been kissed by a friend. We believe that we can forestall what is coming. That is, if we eat the right foods, find the right doctor, or get the proper treatment, death will not sneak up on us and kiss us on the lips. But it will.
Peter learned that the God he was defending with his small sword that removed the ear of Malchus, only to have that ear replaced by the author of life, who was willing to walk to death, without a fight. It was because Christ’s hope was fixed that he endured the cross.
McCullough again helps remind us of what that hope looks like.
”There is a kind of grief that leads to despair. In a New Yorker essay titled “When Things Go Missing,” Kathryn Schulz draws a fascinating comparison between what it feels like to lose some objects—your keys, your phone, your wallet—and what it feels like to lose what you love through death. “With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner.” You just have to figure out where you left your phone, or who might have picked up your wallet. “That’s why the defining emotion of losing things isn’t frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope.” We feel that what’s lost is merely on the way to being found. But when it comes to relationships lost to time, or precious people lost to death, “loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.”
Schulz is exactly right about what death means without the hope of an afterlife. There is no recovery. No redemption. No possibility of finding what you’ve lost. It’s a terminal condition, not a transitional one. Finding, having, loving, enjoying—those experiences are unusual, transitional. Only loss is normal, terminal. And this means that grief over what has been lost is always tethered to the past. It is a prison that traps us, keeps us chained to what was, and bars us from joy in what is. Or, to shift metaphors, grief is like a paddle we use to fight back against time’s ever-rolling stream.
But if Jesus can offer eternal life to those who are losing everything, then oh how different our grief becomes. It doesn’t go away, because it shouldn’t. But it is channeled into hope. In Christ, our grief gains an aim, a new direction: grief gives rise to hope.
Driving home this Sunday from preaching at a church, an hour and a half away. Stuck in a 40-minute traffic jam on a freeway. I usually say a brief prayer. Traffic jams on freeways in Upstate New York are never for good reasons. Today I was tired, so I fought sleep in the moments we were standing still. As the traffic merged into one lane, I could see numerous lights, cars, and people. As I slowly drove by the scene I saw the black bag being zipped and a hand drained of it’s life. A hand that belonged to a man kissed by death.
I said a prayer after I passed. I pray that he knew Christ. I pray for his family that their grief be channeled into hope. This is my prayer for them and me. That when death and the shadow of death sneaks up and kisses me, I will not be surprised and react in fear or anger, but respond like Christ, with the hope that nothing in this world can take. Because if Jesus can offer eternal life to those who are losing everything, then oh how different our grief becomes. It doesn’t go away, because it shouldn’t. But it is channeled into hope. I pray that in Christ, my grief would have this new aim.
This is very good . Thank you for your writings. So insightful full of wisdom. So grateful for the hope we have in Christ.