This is a season of turning: leaves turning colour and time turning back. It’s also a mystical time when our hearts turn to reflect on loss; to intentionally affirm those we desire to remember. Perhaps we are willing to see this as a ‘thin’ time of year when earth and heaven intersect.

“Grief”, paraphrased our late Queen Elizabeth II, “is the price we pay for love”. To remember is to continue the healing power of grief: a human experience as powerful as love. The one is not the opposite or absence of the other: grief is a continuation of love, one heart still aching for another.

Jesus grieved when he heard of the death of his friend Lazarus. But for Jesus death was not the end. Jesus, we are told, went to the tomb and said “Lazarus, come out”.

In St. John’s Gospel Jesus’ authority is demonstrated by ‘signs’. The first at a wedding, this last after a funeral: both events being signifiers of love. Lazarus was raised from the dead as a sign of the new order of things. To emphasise this Jesus said ‘I am the resurrection and the life, whoever comes to me shall never die but have God’s life’. Death is defeated by Jesus. Jesus Christ himself becomes the ‘thin place’ straddling earth and heaven, time and eternity.

We humans mourn and grieve, it is our God-given grace. We love extravagantly and mourn passionately the loss of one we love. But Jesus’ sign assures us that our grief, which he shared in the story of Lazarus, is not the end: ‘Love never dies’ St. Paul reminds us.

Jesus willingly gave up his life so that we might have a new kind of life, one energised and inhabited by God — the Source of eternal life and love.

First published in the Derby Telegraph Faith files 29/10/2022