No Map of the Valley

 

It occurs to me the Bible never offers us a map of the valley of the shadow of death. The places where the Wisdom literature, or the Psalms of Lament, run right up against our grief, pain, and loss are long on candor and short on answers. The Psalmists alternate between confession, complaint, and trust. Sometimes they curse their enemies. Job wants to file charges against God. Some of the Prophets wish God would just get it over with already. Some of them die in Exile, receiving no more than visions of Jerusalem restored.
 
Of all the things the Bible is, it most emphatically is not a self-help manual. There's no plan for walking through grief, no promise that if you do x, y, and z, it will all be better in the morning. What we get instead is a promise God will not abandon us, given to people who had lost everything. The Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and the exiles which followed shattered the Hebrews' world. Into such cataclysm, God speaks. The servant songs in Isaiah show us God's intention to restore and His determination to communicate in terms we can understand. The Man of Sorrows in Isaiah 53 is the perfect example of that. The Exiles' grief and pain don't vanish because the Man of Sorrows shows up. The Jews are still exiles, the Temple is still in ruins, and their physical reminder of God's presence is still gone. Yet, God continues to speak, transcending the loss off the place of God's presence. Arguably, Israel as a whole is the Man of Sorrows, though of course Christians, reading the Isaiah through the lens of the Gospels and Epistles, look at "Surely he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities" and discern Jesus' suffering.
 
Things big and small break our worlds every day. Waving our Bibles at our problems won't solve them. Quoting Scripture at our grief won't lessen it and shouldn't encourage us to pretend it's not there. When Jesus went to call Lazarus from his grave, He wept, too. "See how much he loved him!" the Jews exclaimed. If the Resurrection and the Life can weep at the grave of a man He is fixing to raise from the dead, we can face our grief as well, and let ourselves cry when it's needed. (We can also stop pretending the Bible is a box of band-aids.) He spared Himself nothing to meet us where we are and restore us to God.
 
There isn't a map of the valley, but there is a model, and a promise. Jesus descends into the deepest valleys with us. In the deepest darkness, we probably won't feel God's nearness. We might ask, quite directly, "God, where did you go? This is more than I can take! Why have you forsaken me?" (Sound familiar?) Still, God is there. Jesus shows us that. "I will never leave you or forsake you, even to the end of the ages," He said. "I will send you another advocate to help and be with you forever." Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit, Who seals us for God and unites us with Christ. United with God, hidden in Christ, we are never alone. 
 
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
 
Amen.
 

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