In the Hand of God: Michael and the Peace the World Can’t See

At Michael's Funeral Mass, the first reading was Wisdom 3:1-9

I keep hearing this one line the way you hear a psalm in a room that’s gone quiet: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.” Not in God’s memory, as though love were only recollection. Not in God’s idea, as though a human life were a sentence you can erase. In his hand—warm, weight-bearing, close. The sort of hand that lifts a child out of the street without asking permission from the onlookers.

Because the onlookers always have their verdict. Scripture doesn’t flatter us about that. It says it plainly, almost brutally: “In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died… their departure was thought to be an affliction… their going from us to be their destruction.” We call it “closure” and “moving on,” like we’re closing a ledger. We say he’s gone because our mouths can’t bear to say we’ve been robbed. We try to make death look reasonable, like a procedure, like a tired clock finally stopping. But the Word won’t let us pretend it’s tidy. It looks straight at the rawness—at the place where your throat tightens and you can’t swallow—and it says: yes, it seems like destruction. It seems like loss swallowing a name.

And then—without sentiment, without that cheap consolation that smells like flowers left too long in water—it says: “But they are at peace.” Not because the world turned kind. Not because suffering proved “meaningful” in the way people say at funerals when they’re afraid of silence. They’re at peace because the last word over a human life isn’t the hospital room or the casket or the calendar turning, but the Lord’s reign—a reign that doesn’t blink at our graves.

Standing near Michael’s farewell—Michael (2006–2026), a whole life that looks to us like it should’ve been longer—I felt how fiercely Wisdom refuses the world’s arithmetic. The world counts years like coins and calls the sum justice. Scripture counts differently. It dares to place a young life inside the scale of eternity and say: do you really think God measures by our little rulers? We’re the ones who see only the cut thread. God sees the whole weaving.

Still, the passage doesn’t lie about the furnace. It says, “though in the sight of men they were punished”—and we know how it looks to the “sight of men.” We see the strain, the body’s betrayal, the abruptness, the unfairness. We see the faces in the pews—people trying to keep their grief from spilling, as though grief were something shameful. We see the strange violence of a young death, the way it makes every adult feel accused.

But the Word turns our gaze—not away from the pain, but through it—and insists: “their hope is full of immortality.” That’s a hard sentence, not a soft one. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer. It means suffering isn’t the final address of their hope. Hope isn’t a mood. Hope is an anchoring. It’s a rope tied beyond our reach.

And then this: “Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good.” We must be careful here. “Discipline” in Scripture isn’t God being petty or cruel. It’s the strange, severe schooling of love in a world where everything holy gets pressed and bruised. It’s not a moral scolding—Michael isn’t being turned into a lesson for the living. It’s a revelation that a human life can be tested without being despised. “God tested them and found them worthy of himself.” Worthy—not because they were flawless, but because grace can make a soul able to receive God the way lungs receive air. Worthy because God can do real work in a small, hidden heart, in a life that doesn’t look “complete” to the world’s resume.

The image that keeps burning is the one Wisdom chooses: “like gold in the furnace he tried them.” Gold doesn’t become gold by being spared fire. Fire reveals what’s true. It burns away the lie, the dross, the cheap alloy. And the terrible mercy is that some lives are brought to that revelation sooner than we expect—sooner than we’d ever choose. We don’t have to call that fair to call it real. We only have to admit what our grief already knows: life isn’t ours to possess. It’s given, and it’s taken back—not by a blind machine, but by the One who gave it first.

And this one, almost unbearable in its clarity: “like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.” That’s not the language of accident. That’s the language of altar. Not that Michael’s death was “necessary” in some cold calculus—God doesn’t need corpses to be God. But Scripture is telling the truth about the shape of holiness in a fallen world: the righteous often look, from the outside, like the ones who lose. Like the ones consumed. Like the ones offered up. And yet the offer is received. Not lost into nothing, but gathered into God’s own life.

When you approach the end of life—whether it’s your own horizon or the horizon of someone you love—this passage becomes a kind of stern kindness. It won’t let you bargain with death as though you can charm it. It won’t let you pretend you’re in control. It says: you will be misunderstood. You will “seem” to have been defeated. People will speak of you in the past tense and call that wisdom. Your going will be called destruction.

But if you belong to God—if you’ve trusted him even with trembling hands—“no torment will ever touch” you in the way torment touches here. The body can be touched. The heart can be pierced. But there’s a region in the human person where only God can enter, and there he keeps what he loves. Death can’t put its fingers there.

And then it lifts our eyes beyond the cemetery’s geometry: “In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble.” I think of that as the Christian scandal: the dead are not inert. The righteous are not merely “remembered.” They’re alive in a hidden way, active in a way we can’t chart. Sparks through stubble—swift, bright, irrepressible. A life that looked small to the world becomes, in God, sudden flame.

Even the lines about ruling—“They will govern nations… the Lord will reign over them for ever”—don’t read like politics when you’ve stood at a funeral. They read like the restoration of dignity. The world humiliates the vulnerable. It humiliates the sick, the dying, the young dead most of all, because it doesn’t know what to do with their innocence and their silence. But God’s reign reverses the humiliation. Under his reign, the righteous aren’t reduced to a tragedy. They’re enthroned in love—not with crowns we’d recognize, but with a share in God’s own steadiness and joy.

And at last, the sentence that feels like a hand on the back when the knees want to buckle: “Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love.” At the end of life, truth isn’t an argument you win. Truth is Someone you fall into. Love isn’t the warmth of a memory. Love is a dwelling place.

So when I hold Michael’s dates in my head—2006 to 2026—I refuse, with Scripture, to let that dash be interpreted only by our panic. I don’t deny the ache. I don’t deny the wrongness we feel. I only deny the lie that the grave is the last word. Wisdom says otherwise: grace and mercy are upon his elect, and he watches over his holy ones. Watches—present tense. Not watched. Watches.

And maybe that’s what this passage is for when we approach the end: it trains our eyes to see that death, for the righteous, is not a cliff into darkness but a threshold held open by a Hand. We stand on our side of it, trembling, calling it destruction. God stands on the other side, calling it home.

RIP—Michael Gregory Hayes (June 1, 2006 - January 10, 2026)