O death, where is your sting? #53

Reflections on the loss of my Uncle

This past weekend, my family gathered to celebrate the life of my Uncle Jimmy.

At the beginning of February, he went to the ER thinking he had a simple bug. By the end of the visit, he was facing a devastating cancer diagnosis. Just two and a half months later—on Easter morning—he passed away.

I was sitting in church when I got the text. We were singing about resurrection, hope, and victory over death when the message came through: Uncle Jimmy was gone. The timing hit me like a bag of bricks. I found myself caught in the tension between the beauty of resurrection and the brutality of loss. It felt unfair. Sudden. Cruel. Death didn’t feel “defeated”—it felt all too real.

Later that week, someone, well-meaning, reminded me of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15: “O death, where is your sting?” The implication seemed to be that if I was feeling the sting, if I was mourning deeply, maybe my faith wasn’t quite where it should be. Maybe I’d missed something.

But is that really what Paul meant?

In 1 Corinthians 15:50–57, Paul is writing to believers in Corinth about the resurrection of the dead and the hope we have because of Christ’s victory. His words aren’t meant to silence grief, but to reframe it. When Paul asks, “O death, where is your sting?” he isn’t denying the pain of loss—he’s proclaiming the bigger truth that death doesn’t get the final word.

Paul says the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ. Because of the cross and the resurrection, the eternal power of death is broken. Its sting—its ability to separate us from God—is gone. Death may still touch us, but it cannot destroy us.

So no, grief doesn’t mean our faith is lacking. It means we’re human. The sting we feel now is temporary, not eternal. We grieve deeply because we love deeply. And even in that grief, we hold onto hope—not in denial of death’s pain, but in defiance of its permanence.

Easter morning reminded me of both the heartbreak of death and the hope of resurrection. We live in the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. And even in the sorrow, we cling to the promise: “Death, you’ve lost your power. You can’t hold us forever.”