The Blessing of Funerals
This past week I attended a funeral at our church. I was honored to be one of the pallbearers. I had never met the woman who had died. She had been a member of the church for 53 years, but she had gone to live with family before I moved to the area. She had asked for the elders of the church to be her pallbearers. Her devotion to her church was well known among those who knew her.
Her funeral was sad. She was loved by her children. Her grandchildren recalled many fond memories of her. Members of the congregation remembered her with great love. She is gone. None of those who loved her will ever see her again in this life. Death, our great enemy, stole a precious woman from this life. It is bitter and stupid and tragic. Every death is a horrendous loss. Every death is a victory for the enemy of life whose mission is, above all, to kill.
And yet. Our pastor preached a wonderful sermon reminding us that we will see her again. Death cannot hold his prey. Death is not the final word, not since Christ broke the power of death at his resurrection. In fact, we have this promise of Christ’s final triumph,
“For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” [1Co 15:25–26 ESV]
Christ has not only broken the power of death but will ultimately destroy death itself! There will be a day when death will die. And those in Christ will ultimately taste the power that raised Christ from the grave as he returns in triumph to subdue the last enemy. The godly dead will rise from their rest in the grave to live forever. And not in the same bodies they had when they died. No, they will live forever in a glorified body that is as much like this body as the plant is to the seed.
The Curse of Life
Yet while death is an enemy, death is bitter, death is to be done away with forever, God owns it even now. There is no bitter providence that God isn’t working for our good. Even death. God promised Adam that when he tasted the forbidden fruit that he would die. He died spiritually on that day, but in his mercy, God did not end his life and Eve’s physically on that day. God allowed their lives to continue so they would have time to repent of their sins. This space of time is a great mercy of God who has every right to end our lives at our first sin.
Yet, this world is cursed. God promised that childbirth, the creation of new life, will bring pain. God promised that work, the means of supplying life-sustaining food, would only bring sweat and pain. All of creation groans under the curse of God’s justice. Every moment of life is accompanied by pain, discomfort, struggle. Mosquitos, hunger, sweat, blood, tears, anguish, and sickness are a minute-by-minute part of life. Every bit of life is corrupted not only by our slow march to death but by the putrid rot of sin.
The Mercy of Death
The woman whose funeral I was part of was elderly and infirm. She had, in the recent past begun to suffer the effects of dementia. As her grasp of this reality slipped away, she was no doubt encased in an ever-present fog of confusion. I’ve witnessed that fog first-hand. Fifteen years ago, my mother began to lose her mind to Alzheimer’s. It’s been more than ten years since she recognized any of her closest family members. She spends the entire day in a fog, not quite aware of her surroundings anymore. Not happy, not really sad, just lost. Every minute.
So, in a way, I sort of envy the woman who died recently and her family. The long agony of her inevitable death has finally ended. My mother’s torment lingers. There is no hope for recovery. Alzheimer’s will kill her in the end. She has no hope of relief from her suffering except death. So, in that way, I understand the ones at the funeral who were relieved in a way that she had passed.
In that way, death can be a mercy. I pray daily that my mother would be granted this mercy. Can you imagine if we were condemned to live forever in this cursed world? After Adam’s sin, God drove him out of the Garden of Eden so that he could not eat from the Tree of Life. What mercy from the God who had been so affronted by mankind’s rebellion! To live forever with all the sickness and sin of this world would be a torment comparable only to Hell itself.
One of my favorite quotes is something attributed to Randy Alcorn,
“For Christians, this present life is the closest they will come to Hell. For unbelievers, it is the closest they will come to Heaven”.
And so, God turns even our greatest enemy, death, into a mercy. He cuts the cords that hold us to the curse of this world. And, greater still, he frees us at last from the sin that still dwells in this body. And greatest still, he instantly transports us into his presence. He makes our greatest curse into a blessing.
We are told not to mourn for believers as those who have no hope. But we are not told not to mourn. We miss our friends and loved ones deeply. It hurts. Yet that pain is mixed with mercy. And at funerals, we are reminded that this is not the end. We can rest in the hope of our Savior’s return, knowing that we will be reunited with them, and completely united with Christ at last. This is the blessing of funerals.
