What Does the Bible Say About Grief? The Mourners, the Words and the Whole of 1 Thessalonians 4:13

The people the Bible shows grieving

When Sarah died at Hebron, "Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her" (Genesis 23:2). When Jacob was shown Joseph's bloodied robe and believed his son dead, he refused comfort and said, "For I will go down to Sheol to my son mourning" (Genesis 37:35). When Jacob himself died, "Joseph fell on his father’s face, wept on him, and kissed him" (Genesis 50:1), and the family mourned him in Egypt and again on the road to his burial.

When King David heard that his son Absalom had been killed, he went up to the room over the gate and wept: "My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! I wish I had died for you, Absalom, my son, my son!" (2 Samuel 18:33). When Job heard that his children had died, he "tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell down on the ground, and worshiped" (Job 1:20).

At the tomb of Lazarus, with his sister Mary weeping, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). And after Stephen was stoned, "Devout men buried Stephen, and lamented greatly over him" (Acts 8:2).

Where to start reading tonight

If you want one passage rather than a survey, the one Bible Nudge offers for grief is Psalm 34:18:

Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves those who have a crushed spirit.

The verse before it reads, "The righteous cry, and Yahweh hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles," and the verse after, "Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but Yahweh delivers him out of them all." The psalm speaks of deliverance on either side and sets no timescale for it.

One way to use it: read verses 17 to 19 once, then verse 18 on its own, and stop there. The page on losing a parent reads it in full with its psalm, and if a line or two is all you can manage, short Bible verses for grief keeps each one brief.

One verse, read slowly, is a real place to begin.

The whole of 1 Thessalonians 4:13

If someone has quoted this verse to you as "do not grieve," here it is whole:

13 But we don’t want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope. 14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. 15 For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with God’s trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, 17 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. So we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore comfort one another with these words.

Paul is writing to a young church asking about its members who had died. He answers with the resurrection and ends by telling them to comfort one another.

Three traditions read verse 13 in much the same direction. David Chapman, for the Reformed Gospel Coalition, writes, "It is not that Christians deny grief during earthly separation from deceased loved ones, but we grieve in ways consistent with hope in their coming resurrection at Christ’s return." The Catholic Haydock commentary reads Paul as forbidding grief out of keeping with resurrection hope, not all grief. And John Chrysostom's Homily VII says Paul wrote to people who "did not disbelieve the Resurrection, but nevertheless bewailed."

Because it can so easily be heard as a rule about grieving correctly, Bible Nudge set this verse aside as a first passage for grief. The page on grief and healing reads it too.

The words behind grief

In Hebrew, safad, which Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses "wail, lament", is Abraham's mourning for Sarah. Bakah, "weep", is in the same verse and in the weeping for Aaron and Moses. Qînâ is a lament or dirge.

In Greek, pentheó, "mourn", is the verb in Matthew 5:4, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). Klaió, "weep", is used in John 11:33 and in Romans 12:15, "Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15). Lupéō, "grieve", is the verb family in 1 Thessalonians 4:13. The words alone do not tell you whether a passage is about a death; the setting decides that.

How long the Bible records mourning

The lengths in the text are records of what was done after particular deaths. For Jacob, "He mourned for his father seven days" at Atad (Genesis 50:10). For Aaron, "they wept for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel" (Numbers 20:29). For Moses, "The children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days" (Deuteronomy 34:8).

GotQuestions, a Protestant evangelical publisher, says "a particular time is not mandated by Scripture." The Orthodox Church in America calls its forty-day observance "very ancient and somewhat widely-practiced." And Cruse Bereavement Support puts it from the side of the bereaved: "Grief is individual; the processes of mourning are never the same between two people."

How traditions mourn

In Jewish practice, My Jewish Learning describes shiva as the first seven days after burial, when mourners receive visitors, a practice of rabbinic law and custom. The Catholic Catechism, in paragraph 1032, grounds prayer for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12:46. The Orthodox Church in America lists prayers on the third, ninth and fortieth days, at six months and each year, with a prayer beginning "O God of spirits and of all flesh." The United Methodist Book of Worship offers A Service of Death and Resurrection. Of these, the Catholic and Orthodox churches pray for the dead; the Methodist service does not.

Lament is prayer too

Psalm 88 ends, "You have put lover and friend far from me, and my friends into darkness," and stops there. Lamentations 3, a lament after Jerusalem's fall, moves through bitterness and darkness to "For the Lord will not cast off forever" (Lamentations 3:31-32). Ecclesiastes 3:4 holds "a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." And Job's friends sat with him in silence for a week, "for they saw that his grief was very great" (Job 2:11-13).

Job's friends did their best work before they said anything.

Does grieving hard mean weak faith?

None of the mourners above is told that grief shows weak faith. The Adventist church's page on grief quotes Ellen G. White: "He weeps with those that weep."

These studies describe groups of people, not you. Becker and colleagues reviewed 32 studies, found mostly positive links between belief and bereavement, and still concluded, "Available data do not allow for a definite answer." Walsh and colleagues' 2002 BMJ study found that relatives with strong spiritual beliefs "resolved their grief progressively" over 14 months, an association among 135 people at one London palliative-care center. Wortmann and Park's review treats religious comfort and religious struggle as both present after a death.

What people hear, and what hurts

One person on Reddit's r/GriefSupport wrote, "People keep saying things like ‘she’s in a better place’ or ‘God needed another angel,’ and I know they mean well, but it makes me feel worse." On r/TrueChristian, somebody wrote, "I hate being ‘Bible versed’ after a loss, like I'm supposed to be instantly happy." On r/atheism, another described nurses saying prayer could cure their mother, "the implication being I guess that my lack of prayer was killing her?" The page on what not to say to someone grieving takes those phrases one at a time.

The first of those Reddit posts was titled "I lost my 10-year-old sister, and I don’t know how to grieve when I don’t know what I believe." If that is closer to where you are, the passages on this page are open to you as you are.

When grief stays very intense

The World Health Organization's ICD-11 describes prolonged grief disorder as lasting "more than 6 months at a minimum," and the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5-TR "at least 12 months (6 months in children or adolescents)." Both also require grief that clearly exceeds the person's cultural and religious norms and impairs daily life. Long grief alone is not a disorder.

Questions people ask

Is it wrong to cry at a funeral? No passage quoted here says so. Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb, and devout men "lamented greatly" over Stephen.

Does 1 Thessalonians 4:13 tell Christians not to grieve? Read whole, it says "so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope." Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox writers read it as grief shaped by hope.

Why does Paul say "fallen asleep"? It is his way of speaking about believers who had died. Chrysostom, in the same homily, reads the word "asleep" as carrying consolation.

Where to go next

Start with Psalm 34:18 and the verses around it, or let Bible Nudge take a line about what you are carrying and come back with one passage and what surrounds it. Find a passage.

If grief has turned into thoughts of ending your life, please reach a person tonight. In the United States, call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In Canada, call or text 9-8-8. In the UK and Republic of Ireland, Samaritans is on 116 123, and Cruse offers bereavement support in the UK on 0808 808 1677. In Australia, Lifeline is 13 11 14. In New Zealand, call or text 1737. Anywhere else, Find A Helpline and Befrienders Worldwide list services by country.