For Christians, the Easter season is a celebration of new life. In practice, it can often feel like a springtime festival. This year, for our family, it was not. The sudden death of Joanne, at the beginning of Holy Week, confronted us in a new way with the sorrow of Good Friday and the promise of the Resurrection.
The wife of my youngest brother, Joanne was beloved by everybody in our extended family. As we gathered for her funeral, we realized that all 13 of her nieces and nephews were there, some from long distances and agendas crowded with workplace appointments. Three generations of our family also came, along with many friends, neighbors and colleagues.
The funeral liturgy, with its ancient texts, managed to capture some of Joanne’s buoyant spirit and gifts of personality. One nephew read from chapter 31 in the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible. There, the writer speaks of the ideal woman, one filled with wisdom, practical know-how, love of her husband and children, and reverence for God.
This text is about 2500 years old, and society has been profoundly transformed in the interim. But the “valiant woman” of Proverbs can still be found in our own day.
Joanne, whose Thanksgiving dinners were legendary, and who could create Halloween costumes on five minutes’ notice, was surely a cousin of the biblical wife who rises early, provides food for her household, and puts her hand to the distaff and the spindle.
Joanne’s radiant presence was evoked for us in the verses: “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.” And, like her predecessor, Joanne was loved and honored by her family: “Her children rose up and called her blessed; her husband, too, and he praises her.”
Joanne’s niece read from the First Letter of John, which teaches that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” One family historian claims that the same passage was read at Joanne’s wedding 30 years ago. In any case, it was appropriate then and now. Her love embraced her immediate family and reached beyond, to her nonagenarian aunts and to the children at the local school who were struggling with learning disabilities.
The third reading was the most challenging: the passage in the Gospel of John in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. When the dead man comes forth from the tomb wrapped in linen bands, Jesus says: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
For the pastor commenting on this passage, and for many of us present, Jesus’ words suggest that, like Lazarus, the human soul is liberated, set free, beyond the grave. Our childhood catechisms took this approach almost as a matter of course. But when we are confronted by the sudden loss of one we love, nothing about our belief is routine.
In preparation for Easter Sunday this year, I had taken as my own the view of an Orthodox theologian who emphasizes how radical the resurrection faith of Christians really is. It is not the same, he says, as believing philosophically in the immortality of the soul.
Instead, the Easter event whereby Jesus rises from the dead calls Christians to a faith in bodily rebirth comparable to the birth that begins our life on earth. Our emergence from the womb may be the experience that comes closest to the reality of Easter.
Confronted with the sudden death of Joanne, however, I felt challenged to find this meaning in our loss. I could not deny that she had gone from this world along with all of the gifts that belonged uniquely to her. I struggled to hold on to my faith in the promise of the Lord to bring her to life once more in an entirely new and unimaginable way.
As we continue to grieve for the loss of Joanne, I commit myself to this Easter faith more deeply. This faith goes beyond believing in the soul’s survival; it looks toward our rising as embodied human beings. Standing in the darkness of Easter morning, I look forward in hope to Joanne’s rising as did the resurrected Christ in whom she believed.
Richard Griffin