I am in the age of funerals. Friends die, acquaintances die, cousins die, siblings die, spouses die, we die. I have no peers whose parents are both still living. I turn to the obituary page in our local paper just after I check the front-page headlines, a habit I found both morbid and comical in my parents. I’ve acquired a stiffening in the shoulders at the Prayers of the Faithful each Sunday, as I await the jolt when familiar names go on the list of the dead.
I go to more funerals than I go to weddings. And if weddings still seem to be about “forevermore,” funerals now seem to be about “never,” as in, “this did not, could not, will not happen.”
Instead of a body — stark evidence of death — there is a PowerPoint slide presentation: picture after picture of a vigorous man or woman, here skiing a double black diamond run at Aspen, here rafting the white water of the Salmon River. Smiling and strong, the image assures us that he is not dead, she is not decaying, for who could deny the vitality, the life projected larger than life before us?
And what of the body? We hear whispered comments, “I think she’s already been cremated.”
Someone tells us they plan to take his ashes and scatter them along the Continental Divide.
When will this scattering take place?
Later.
No one seems to know the details. But it will be private. Just the family. Or just the husband. Or just the bridge club, whatever intimate circle remains.
All things having to do with a corpse are kept private, secret, hidden. Even the word “funeral” is banned. It will be “A Celebration of Life.” There will be photographs, that way by which — in our time — we know we have, in fact, lived, placed on every surface. There will be totems — golf clubs and tickets from a night on Broadway and prayer flags brought back from a trek to Nepal. At some point in the proceedings, a favorite song will be broadcast over speakers, usually an anthem from the deceased’s sexually vital youth. Something like “Born to Run,” even though the departed was never a “tramp” but was, in fact, an orthodontist, and, before that, captain of the tennis team.
Because we have been formed as television watchers, we will do as we are trained: We will sit and watch. A soloist may sing the Our Father, but we will not join in. The designated talkers will, like good emcees, keep the tone entertaining, light, with lots of amusing anecdotes. And there will be plenty of talk. Silence, dead air, the bane of every broadcaster, is banished.
“Don’t be sad,” one of the speakers is sure to admonish us. “She’s still with us. She’ll always be with us.” This, though her half of the bed is, and will remain, empty.
We may release balloons at the close of the celebration or we may each be given a butterfly pin, with an explanatory note attached about caterpillars and cocoons and butterflies. Reincarnation Lite for people raised, however lightly, on the Incarnation.
So that, once again, when Holy Week comes round, the Passion story collides with our own cultural narrative of suffering and death and leaves us dazed, wandering along the street and wondering, “What just happened?”
The gospel reading for Palm Sunday begins with Luke’s stark phrase, “When the hour came.” The hour is the time of Jesus’ suffering and death. It is at hand. Jesus knows this and never tries to hide or disguise what is unfolding.
He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for, I tell you, I shall not eat it again until there is fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and said, “Take this and share it among yourselves; for I tell you that from this time on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you.”
In that brief narrative, Jesus has told his disciples, I will suffer. I will shed blood in my suffering, and I will do it for you. He tells them he will die. He tells them there will be fulfillment in the kingdom of God.
Most of the “memorials” I observe strive for the unique and settle for what they believe to be the original. Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, who, is, in truth, unique, lives an ordinary human life. He is born, not of a queen, but of a poor, local girl. He lives with his parents and works with his hands. There is no evidence to suggest that, as a child, he did anything with water or with wine than to wash and drink. Indeed, the gospels circulating among the early church in which a child Jesus is shown, say, to make clay birds breathe and fly for the amusement and amazement of his friends were rejected by the early church and never admitted to the canon of scripture.
This is not because he doesn’t know his godhood or has not yet assumed it. This is because the Incarnation is given, in part, to reveal the holiness of the human life God created and gave. In the Eucharistic prayer the priest prays, “All life, all holiness comes from you.” Life and holiness are linked in the prayer because they are linked in the fully human, fully divine person of Jesus.
So the story unfolds, and Jesus bears every weight known to the sick, the wounded, and the dying. He is afraid. He is betrayed. He is abandoned. He is tried. He is ridiculed. He is beaten. He is burdened. He is in pain. He endures, but so does the pain. He dies. As we proclaim in the renewal of our baptismal promises during Easter, “(He) was crucified, died and was buried.”
That statement, or one very like it, has been repeated millions of times through the centuries as the reality itself repeats. People suffer. They die. They are buried. Just like Jesus, who was just like us in all things but sin.
I wondered about that for years. “Why,” I thought, “if he is like us in all things, wouldn’t our sinfulness — so much a part of our lives — be part of his life as well?”
I was well into adulthood before I realized that the human nature Jesus shares with us is the fully human nature intended for and bestowed upon us by God. When God the Father breathes into the man, Adam, it is the very breath, or life, of God we are given. It is a life in communion with God, the One whose breath and spirit we share. Human life, fully human life, is life in intimate relationship with God. Sin, and its killing separation, has neither part nor place in what God has made. What Jesus shares with us, and shows to us, is human life. What he invites us to cast aside is the gangrenous appendage — attached to our life but filled with death — that is sin.
And when we find, as we do, that we have neither the will nor the strength to make the painful, but healing, cut, Jesus provides.
When Jesus, spent, cries “out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,’” we are hearing the voice of the new Adam. He does not deny the pain he knows, nor does he dismiss it. He never says he is no longer afraid. He just tells the truth, “I am yours, in life, in death. I am in your hands.” Jesus speaks the way a beloved child cries out to a parent in the midst of pain and fear. She is afraid; she is in pain; her mother is her only refuge. It is to that face, those hands, so known and dear, she will turn. This does not guarantee a surcease of suffering; it only guarantees that both, mother and child, are where they ought to be, in communion, in relationship, embraced and welcomed, at home.
Jesus does not show us the unique way. He shows us the human way, the ordinary way. Paul writes to the Thessalonian church that Christ “died for us so that we, awake or asleep, might live in company with him.” He does not tell us what terrors or comforts those hours, awake or asleep, may hold. He knows only that we are to pass them “in company with him.”
I stood one June day in a small mountain meetinghouse. Sacred Harp singers from all over Colorado had come to spend the day together. We sang an Isaac Watts tune, called “Attention.” I had never heard the hymn before, though I recognized the melody. I knew it a "Auld Lang Syne." We sang the song so slowly that every trace of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians was erased. And the text caught me up and held me fast.
Hark! From the tombs, a doleful sound!
Mine ears, attend the cry;
Ye living men, come view the ground,
Where you must shortly lie.
Where you must shortly lie,
Where you must shortly lie.
Ye living men, come view the ground,
Where you must shortly lie.
Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your tow’rs;
The tall, the wise, the rev’rend head,
Must lie as low as ours.
Must lie as low as ours,
Must lie as low as ours.
The tall, the wise, the rev’rend head,
Must lie as low as ours.
Isaac Watts wrote the hymn in 1777. Nothing has changed. “Princes, this clay must be your bed, in spite of all your towers.” Each of us must lie in the low bed of the grave, each “as low as ours.” It is the human way, the ordinary way. But we cannot lie in any grave lower than the one Jesus freely took, and, by taking, hallowed.
Grant us the pow’r of quickening grace,
To fit our souls to fly;
Then when we drop this dying flesh,
We’ll rise above the sky.
We’ll rise above the sky,
We’ll rise above the sky.
When we drop this dying flesh,
We’ll rise above the sky.
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