No Casseroles Required: What the Women of Scripture Knew About Grief

Grief doesn’t arrive alone. It brings everything you’ve ever lost with it. And the church has rarely known what to do with that.

 In this episode, we sit with the women of Scripture who grieved loudly, honestly, and without apology, and ask what they knew that the church has largely forgotten.

 The Women We Cover:

•  Naomi | who insisted on an honest name for her pain and refused to perform wellness

•  Rachel | whose grief was so vast God responded to it with promise

•  Rizpah | whose months-long vigil over her sons’ bodies forced a king to act

•  Martha, Mary & Mary Magdalene | who brought their grief directly to Jesus and found he entered it rather than bypassed it

•  Hannah | whose desperate, silent prayer was mistaken for drunkenness by the priest in front of her

We also talk about what happens when grief goes underground, why the impulse to fast-forward through pain causes real harm, and how to hold devastating loss alongside a God who is supposed to be good.

This episode isn’t about getting over grief. It’s about what happens when we grieve anyway.

 Scripture References:

Ruth 1 · Jeremiah 31:15-17 · 2 Samuel 21:10-14 · John 11 · 1 Samuel 1:9-18 · Psalm 13 · Psalm 22 · Psalm 77 · Psalm 88 · Psalm 23

 Resources:

Grief support with Dr. Quanny Ard

Mother’s Day reflection | We See You: 

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Transcript

Episode 17: No Casseroles Required: What the Women of Scripture Knew About Grief

The women of Scripture grieved loudly, honestly, and without apology. And God didn't correct them. He met them there. What did they know about grief that the church has forgotten?

 OPEN 

Welcome back to Jesus, Justice, and Mercy. Today, we are talking about grief, which is a bit ironic for me because historically, I have been the queen of bypassing my own grief. Long process, story for another time.

But grief has been on my mind lately. Not just because lament has come up on this podcast before, or because everyone seems to be grieving something, but I recently found myself doing grief work with a local nonprofit. Sitting with people who are still numb and still raw.

And what stayed with me from those rooms is this: grief doesn't arrive alone. It brings everything you've ever lost with it. Every trauma. Every old wound. All of it surfaces at once. And that made me wonder how many people the church has quietly harmed by not knowing what to do with that.

This episode isn't about getting over grief. It's about what happens when we grieve anyway, and what God might be doing in the middle of it.

What we were taught

Let's start with what most of us were taught.

If you grew up in the evangelical church, you probably learned, not always in words but in practice, that grief has a shelf life. And before we go further, I want to clarify something, because when most of us hear the word grief, we think of death. We think of funerals and flowers and the weeks after a loss when people show up and check in. But grief is not only for death. Grief is the response to any significant loss — and some of the most crushing losses we can carry are ones the church has never learned to hold.

The woman who cannot get pregnant, sitting in a congregation that celebrates every baby shower like a sacred milestone. The person who never married in a community that quietly treats partnership as the finish line of faithful adulthood. The marriage that fell apart, the very covenant the church held up as its highest expression of love. The dream that closed before it opened. The diagnosis that rewrote everything. The child who walked away from faith. The friendship that ended without explanation, the job that disappeared, the version of yourself you had to bury quietly with no one around to witness it.

There is no end, and those are real losses. They are grief. And some of the heaviest ones people carry are the very things the church has been loudest about calling blessings, which makes the isolation unbearable.

And since this episode is dropping right after Mother's Day, I want to pause and acknowledge that for a lot of people, this Sunday is not a Hallmark holiday. It is a day of sitting in a church service, wondering if you belong in the celebration at all. A day of scrolling past smiling photos and feeling the weight of what isn't. A day of loving your kids while grieving the mother they lost before they became a part of you. I wrote about this a few years ago, and if that resonates, I will link it in the show notes. But I put it here because it belongs here, because Mother's Day is one of the places the church most clearly shows us how little room we have made for grief that doesn't fit a tidy category. And you deserve to know that you are seen. Whatever Sunday holds for you.

Here is the thing: Mother's Day is just one Sunday. But for a lot of people, every Sunday carries some version of that same weight. Walking into a community that celebrates what you are grieving. Performing because the alternative feels too costly. And the way the church can respond to that grief, however lovingly, often makes it worse.

What that communicates to a grieving person, even when it's said with love, is that your pain is a problem to be solved. That if you just had enough faith, enough perspective, enough trust in God's sovereignty, you would move through this faster. And we have taken it even further than that. In evangelical culture, we have made it a badge of honor, “how quickly can you move? How fast can you find the purpose in the pain? How soon can you stand up and say God is still good after the worst moment of your life?” 

I understand that impulse. I have felt it myself. There is something in us that wants to demonstrate that our faith is strong enough to withstand the hit. But what we have actually created is a culture where people feign healing long before it arrives, and where the most praised response to tragedy is the one that gets to gratitude the fastest. The ones who can't get there yet learn to fake it very quickly. Because the alternative is being seen as someone whose faith isn't quite strong enough. Grief gets treated as a faith problem rather than a human necessity. And I think that is a mistake.

Here’s what I've learned, both personally and in sitting with people in their rawest moments of loss: you cannot spiritualize your way around grief. You cannot pray it into submission or worship it away before it's ready. Grief is not a lack of faith. Grief is what love looks like after loss. And when the church doesn't have room for that, people don't stop grieving; they just learn to perform being okay, which can cause real and lasting harm.

I also want to mention what happens when our grief goes underground, because it does not disappear. Grief that is suppressed, rushed, or outrun does not resolve quietly. It mutates. It resurfaces, sometimes years later, as anger that seems disproportionate to the moment. As bitterness that settles into your bones and colors everything. As cynicism toward God, toward the church, toward the people who were supposed to show up and didn't. I have seen it. I have lived some version of it myself. The person who seems fine and then one day isn't. The one whose faith didn't slowly erode but suddenly collapsed. The one who is angry at everyone and can't quite explain why. Grief that was never given permission to exist doesn't stay buried; it just finds another way out.

Of course, anger and bitterness can be part of grief, even when you are doing the work. They are not signs that you are grieving wrong. But there is a difference between anger that moves through you as part of the process and anger that has calcified because the grief beneath it was never touched. One is grief in motion. The other is grief with nowhere to go. And the church's insistence on fast resolution, or the badge of getting to gratitude quickly, is not just unhelpful. It is actively creating the conditions for that second kind.

What's strange, and honestly a little convicting, is that the Bible is full of grief. Like, full of it. And not tidy, resolved grief either. The Psalms alone contain over 40 laments, songs of raw, unfiltered anguish directed straight at God. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? That's Psalm 13. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's Psalm 22, and if that line sounds familiar, it's because Jesus quoted it from the cross. The language of lament is woven into the very fabric of Scripture. It is not a detour from faith but a form of it.

But somewhere along the way, the church quietly stopped teaching it. We kept the praise songs and sidelined the laments. And here is what that cost us: we lost an entire tradition that Scripture itself never abandoned. There is a psalm, Psalm 88, that I want you to know about if you don't already. It is a lament. A raw, unfiltered cry of someone in deep anguish. The author is alone and desperate. And here is what makes it unlike almost anything else in Scripture: it does not resolve. There is no ending in praise. There isn't, "but I will trust you" as it wraps up. The psalm ends in darkness. The very last word in the original Hebrew is machashakkim, Mah-khah-shah-KEEM “darkness” That's it. No bow. No silver lining. Just darkness.

And God put it in the Bible.

The God who inspired Scripture looked at a song of unresolved, unfinished grief and said, yes, this belongs. This is sacred, too. This gets to stay. Which means that somewhere along the way, the church decided it knew better than the canon it claims to follow. We edited out the darkness that God left in. And the people sitting in our pews, carrying losses that don't resolve on a Sunday morning timeline, have been paying for that ever since.

 She Grieved Anyway, The Women

Here is what I want us to see. The women of Scripture didn't get that memo.

They grieved, loudly, bodily, publicly, and God didn't correct them. He met them exactly where they were. And I think if we sit with their stories long enough, we begin to understand that grief, held honestly, is not the opposite of faith. It might actually be one of its most courageous expressions.

Let’s walk through a few of these women, not as a Bible study, but as a witness. Because you might see these are not distant figures. Their grief is recognizable, and you may find yourself in one of their stories.

Naomi and Rachel, Grief That Renames You

Most of us know Naomi from the book of Ruth, chapter 1. She leaves Bethlehem with a husband and two sons and returns with neither. Everything she built her life around is gone. And when the women of the city see her and call out her name, she stops them. Do not call me Naomi, which means pleasant; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.

Naomi insists on an honest name for her pain. She refuses to perform what she doesn’t feel. She blames God. She refuses to let the community paper over what she has lost with a more comfortable narrative. And Scripture doesn't rebuke her for it. It just records it. Holds it. Let’s her be Mara for a moment.

Something we often miss when we read these stories is that Naomi is not grieving from a place of stability. There is a famine. She left Bethlehem in the first place because there was no food, and she is returning with nothing. No husband, no sons, no income, no security. Her grief is not a singular loss dropped into an otherwise manageable life. It is loss compounded by scarcity, compounded by displacement, compounded by survival-level uncertainty about what comes next.

And she is not alone in that, in this list of women. The Widow of Zarephath loses her son in the middle of a famine so severe that she had already resigned herself to cooking her last meal before she and her son starved to death. Rizpah is keeping vigil over her sons' bodies in the aftermath of political violence; she has no power, no protection, no advocate. These women are not grieving from a soft place. They are grieving while the ground beneath them is already shaking.

I say this because I think it matters enormously for how we show up for grieving people. Grief rarely arrives in a vacuum. For a lot of people, it arrives when they are already depleted, already stretched thin financially, physically, relationally. Already running on empty before the loss hit. And when the church responds with a timeline, a casserole, and an expectation of recovery, it often fails to account for how much was already being carried before the grief arrived. A trauma-informed approach to grief has to ask not just what you lost, but what you were already holding when you lost it.

Then there is Rachel, who appears in Jeremiah 31:15 not as herself but as a symbol, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Her grief is so vast, so inconsolable, that the prophet reaches for her image to capture what no words can.

And what happens next matters. God doesn't ignore her weeping or rush past it. He responds to it directly. In Jeremiah 31:16-17, he speaks into the middle of her grief with a promise: her children will return; there is hope for her future. The invitation to restrain her tears is not a dismissal. It is God saying, I have heard you. What you are carrying is real. And I am moving. He doesn't demand that she stop before he shows up. He shows up because she was honest about her pain. He enters her grief and speaks into it. 

What if naming our pain honestly, refusing to call ourselves fine when we are not, is an act of faith, not a failure of it? If you want to read these stories this week, Ruth 1 and Jeremiah 31:15-17 are worth your time.

Rizpah, Grief That Refuses to Look Away

Rizpah is one of the most unforgettable figures in all of Scripture, and almost nobody knows her name. Her story is in 2 Samuel 21.

In that passage, her two sons are killed, executed by order of King David, and handed over to the Gibeonites as an act of political appeasement. They did not die of illness. They did not die in battle. They were taken and killed, and their bodies were left exposed, unburied, a deliberate act of dishonor in a culture where proper burial was sacred. Rizpah had no recourse. No court to appeal to. No advocate. Just a mother and her grief.

And so she takes sackcloth, spreads it on a rock, and keeps watch. For months. She drives away the birds by day and the wild animals by night. She will not let their bodies be dishonored. She will not look away. This is a mother's grief that takes her completely out of everyday life; there is no going home, no returning to routine, no pretending for the comfort of those around her. There is only this. Her children. Her vigil. Her refusal to abandon them even in death.

And here is what we see: her vigil eventually reaches King David. He hears what she is doing, and it moves him to act. He gathers the bones of the dead and buries them properly. One woman's grief, held with stubborn, unflinching dignity, forced the powerful to respond.

Grief held with dignity becomes a form of witness, and sometimes it becomes a form of advocacy. Rizpah never gave a speech. She never wrote a letter. She just refused to abandon her children even in death, and the world had to reckon with her. Read 2 Samuel 21:10-14 this week if you want to meet her.

Martha, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, Grief in the Presence of Jesus

These three women give us perhaps the most intimate picture of what it looks like to bring grief directly to Jesus, and what he does with it. Their stories live in John 11 and all four resurrection accounts, Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20.

Martha meets Jesus on the road before he even reaches the house and says what she's been holding: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That is not a polished theological statement. That is grief that questions. That is the ache of someone who believed and still lost. And Jesus doesn't rebuke her. He engages her. He meets her question with presence and promise.

Then Mary falls at his feet, weeping. And the text says the famous two-word verse: Jesus wept. Not because he didn't know what was about to happen. Not because he had lost hope. But because her grief moved him. He entered it with her rather than skipping it to get to the miracle. Jesus knew the miracle was coming, yet still felt the loss.

I do want to acknowledge something we have to be honest about. Lazarus was raised in that story. But not everyone gets a Lazarus moment. I say that not to steal hope but to honor the people who prayed with everything they had, and the miracle did not come. The pregnancy that didn't happen. The marriage that didn't reconcile. The prodigal who hasn't come home. The diagnosis that progressed anyway. The dream that the window closed on before it ever opened. Sometimes time passes, and what was possible is no longer possible, and we have to grieve not just what we lost but what will never be. 

I do not have a clean theological answer for why. I often sit with that question myself, and I have sat with others in it.  I won’t insult your grief by pretending I have an answer. What I can tell you is this: the absence of the miracle does not mean the absence of God. His presence in your grief does not require a resurrection at the end of your particular story to be real. He is with you in the waiting. He is with you if the waiting never ends the way you hoped. And that is not a consolation prize. That is Emmanuel. God with us. In the middle of it. All the way through.

Next, we come to Mary Magdalene. After the crucifixion, after the burial, after the Sabbath silence, she comes back to the tomb. There, after everyone else has gone home. Still weeping. Still refusing to leave. She is not there because she expects a miracle. She is there because her love didn't know what else to do with itself after loss. She comes to finish the burial preparations; to do the last small, tender thing she can do for someone she lost. It’s grief in its purest form. Showing up anyway. Staying anyway. Loving beyond the point where it makes any practical sense.

But then, she is the first to see the risen Christ. The first to hear her name spoken by the one she thought was gone. The first to be commissioned to carry the news that changed everything. The first resurrection witness in human history was a woman who was too deep in her grief to give up and go home.

I do not think that is accidental. I think Jesus went looking for the one who stayed. And I think that matters enormously for how we understand what grief can hold. Mary Magdalene did not bypass her grief to get to the resurrection. She walked straight through the middle of it, and the resurrection met her there.

Jesus does not sidestep grief. He enters it. He always has. He always will.

Hannah, Grief Mistaken for Weakness

Hannah's story is in 1 Samuel 1 and 2, and it is the kind of grief that doesn't get a lot of sympathy even today, the grief of longing, of an empty womb, of a desire so deep it becomes desperation. She is taunted for it. Her husband tries to comfort her in ways that miss the point entirely. And when she finally brings it to God, weeping so hard, praying so silently but with such intensity that her lips are moving but no sound comes out, the priest Eli looks at her and assumes she's drunk.

She has to defend her own grief to a religious leader who can't recognize sincere anguish when it's right in front of him. I am not drunk. I am a woman deeply troubled. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. I Samuel 1:15

That line. I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord is not weakness. It’s one of the most honest, most courageous acts of prayer in all of Scripture. And God heard her. Read 1 Samuel 1:9-18 this week and then read her song in chapter 2. It will change how you see her.

These women, across centuries, across losses, across impossible circumstances, show us that honest grief has always been holy ground.

 What I've Witnessed

The women of Scripture are not the only witnesses to bring to this conversation. I told you at the top of this episode that I've been doing some grief work with a nonprofit recently. 

Despite my master’s in counseling, I am not a licensed therapist. But I have sat with people in some of the heaviest moments of their lives, in my coaching work, in my consulting, at church, and, most recently, with this community trying to figure out how to hold the loss of someone they loved and worked alongside every day. And three things I witnessed stayed with me.

The first is loneliness. Grief is one of the loneliest experiences a human being can have, even when you are surrounded by people who love you. Even when they are grieving the same situation. Because the loss is yours. The specific shape of it, the exact weight of it, belongs to you in a way that no one else can fully enter. People show up, and you are grateful, and you are still alone in it. And if the church around you doesn't know how to sit in that silence, if every visit comes with a scripture and a silver lining, the loneliness gets heavier, not lighter.

The second thing is that grief never arrives clean. I said it in the opening, and I want to come back to it here: grief brings everything you've ever lost with it. Every unprocessed trauma. Every old wound that never fully healed. Every loss you thought you were over. It all surfaces. And this is why a trauma-informed approach to grief support matters so much, because the person sitting across from you who just lost their mother may also be grieving a childhood they never had, a marriage that fell apart, a version of themselves they buried a long time ago. You cannot separate those threads. They are all part of the same grief.

Often, the church rarely gives people permission to hear something else: it is okay to be angry at God. It is okay to not understand. It is okay to have no resolution, and with some grief, resolution may never fully come, and that is okay, too. The Psalmist asked in Psalm 13 how long God would hide his face; that is not a faith crisis. That is faith in conversation with pain.

And in Psalm 77, the writer asks, Will the Lord reject forever? Has his unfailing love vanished? These are hard, raw, honest questions directed straight at God, and they are in Scripture because God can handle them. Because he would rather have your honest anguish than a fake peace. You do not have to tidy up your grief before you bring it to God. You can bring it exactly as it is, ugly and unresolved and angry and confused, and he will not turn you away.

The third thing is the fear. Almost universally, the people I sit with in acute grief have asked some version of the same question. Am I ever going to be able to pull it together? Not in those exact words, always. But that terror underneath, that this is permanent, that the fog will never lift, that they will never feel like themselves again, it is almost always there. And it is not a lack of faith. It is what happens when loss overwhelms your capacity to imagine a future.

And here is what I know to be true, both from what I have witnessed and from my own experience: we have to grieve to move forward. Not around it. Not over it. Through it. Even the 23rd Psalm, one of the most familiar passages in all of Scripture, doesn't say God removes us from the valley of the shadow of death. It says he walks through it with us. His rod and his staff comfort us in the middle of it, not on the other side of it. There is no shortcut. There is no prayer that rushes the process, no amount of faith that exempts you from the necessary, painful, sacred work of grief. And the church that tries to offer that shortcut, however lovingly, is not actually helping. It is just teaching people to carry their grief in secret.

What grieving people need is not answers. They need presence. They need someone willing to stay in the room when it gets heavy. They need a community that has learned, like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, that sometimes the most holy thing you can do is weep with someone before you do anything else.

If you are in grief right now, I want you to hear this: you are not faithless for struggling. You are not broken. You are not behind. You are human. And your grief is not a problem to be fixed. It is a love that has nowhere to go right now. And that is worth honoring.

Reconciling Grief with a Loving God 

So how do we hold all of this together? How do we reconcile the reality of grief, the kind we've been talking about today, the kind that levels you, that drags up everything, that makes you wonder if you'll ever breathe normally again, with a God who is supposed to be good?

Sit with that question honestly, because I think we have too often tried to answer it too quickly. And a fast answer to a hard question is almost always a sign that someone is more uncomfortable with the question than they are committed to the person asking it.

Here is what I believe. God is not the author of your suffering. But he is present in it. That is the Emmanuel thread that runs through all of Scripture, God with us. Not God above us, managing outcomes from a safe distance. Not God ahead of us, waiting at the finish line of our healing. God with us. In the middle of the mess. In the tomb on Saturday. In the weeping before the miracle.

The theological word for what we've been talking about today is lament. And lament is not the opposite of faith; it is one of faith's most intimate expressions. When you bring your grief to God, honestly, without tidying it up first, you are not failing. You are doing exactly what the Psalmists did. You are doing what Hannah did. What Martha did. What Mary Magdalene did as she stood at an empty tomb with nowhere left to go.

Lament says: God, I believe you are still there, and I need you to know that I am not okay. 

We see this clearly at the cross. In Matthew 27, when Jesus hung dying, he didn't quote a psalm of triumph. He quoted Psalm 22, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Son of God, in his most human moment, reached for the language of lament. If Jesus himself used the words of the grieving to express what he was carrying, then grief is not beneath your faith. It is woven into the very center of it.

Here is the part I don't want you to miss. Grief is not the end of the story. But it is a necessary chapter. You cannot rush it or skip it. The women at the tomb did not get to bypass Saturday to arrive at Sunday. They sat in the silence between death and resurrection, in the not yet, in the I don't understand, in the what do we do now, and that is not wasted time in the story. It is sacred time. It might be the place where something is being formed in you that cannot be formed any other way.

Resurrection hope is not the denial of grief. It is grief transformed. It is what happens on the other side of staying in the room. And the women we talked about today, Naomi who became Mara and then found her way to a new table, Rizpah whose silent vigil moved a king, Hannah whose pouring out became a prophetic song, Mary Magdalene who went from weeping at a tomb to running with the news, none of them skipped the grief. Every single one of them went through it. And every single one of them was transformed by what they found on the other side.

One more thing before we close, and it is directed to those of us who are trying to build communities that actually reflect the Jesus we see in Scripture. We have to become people who can stay. Who can sit in the grief of others without reaching for a resolution. Who have done enough of our own grief work, and yes, I am preaching to myself here, that we are not threatened by someone else's pain, or reacting from our own unsolved grief. We need to know the difference between presence and platitudes? and understand that the most healing thing we can offer is not an answer but a witness.

Because that is what Jesus offered. He could have shown up at Lazarus's tomb with an explanation. Instead, he asked where they had laid him. He let them take him there. He stood in the loss with them before he did anything about it.

That is the kind of church I want to be part of. That is the kind of community I’d love for us to build together.

CLOSE

So here is where I leave you today.

We have seen it in Scripture. We have seen it in the lives of women who grieved loudly and honestly, refusing to pretend for anyone's comfort. We have seen it in the rooms where people are still numb, still raw, still asking if they will ever feel like themselves again. And we have seen it in the character of a God who does not stand at a distance from our pain but enters it.

Grief is not a detour from your faith. It is not evidence that something has gone wrong with you. It is the price of love in a broken world. And you are allowed to pay it at your own pace, in your own way, without apology.

If you are in the middle of grief right now, fresh grief, old grief, grief you have been carrying so long you have forgotten what it feels like to set it down, I want you to know that you are not alone in it. And point you toward someone who can walk alongside you in it in ways that go beyond what a podcast episode can offer. My colleague and friend Dr. Quanny Ard does incredible grief support work, and I will link her information in the show notes.  I also have an upcoming podcast episode with her to look forward to.

For the rest of us, for those who love someone in grief, who pastor or lead or show up for people in their hardest moments, the invitation is simple, and it is hard. Stay. Don't fix. Don't fast forward. Don't hand someone a silver lining before they've had a chance to sit in the dark. Just stay. Be the kind of presence that says, without words, if necessary, I am not going anywhere, and you do not have to be okay yet.

That is the church I believe we are called to be. And I think we are capable of it.

Before I let you go, here is your reflection question for this week: Which of the women we talked about today do you most recognize in yourself right now, and what does her story tell you about what you need?

Stay with that. Journal it. Bring it to God. And if you feel led, come share it with our community; you know where to find us.

Next week, we will continue in the Re-Imagine space and talk more about women, specifically those Scripture tells us were prophets, theologians, and leaders. Women whose voices shaped the story of God's people. And we are going to talk about what the church has lost, and is still losing, by silencing them. It is a conversation that is long overdue, and I think you will want to be there for it.

Thank you for being here today and for being willing to go to the hard places for yourself and for the people in your life who are carrying more than anyone knows. That is what courageous hope looks like. And I will see you next week. Jesus, Justice, No apologies.