Will I ever be dead?

(The resting ground of my mother and father, Harry (1941-2010) and Levina (1943-2023), Steinbach Manitoba)

Is it possible to be more spiritual than Jesus? I suspect this spirituality when someone dies and we utter sweetness like, “ Don't worry, that’s not really Bill there in the coffin. The Bill we know is up in heaven with Betty.” Or worse, “It doesn’t matter much what we do with his body, because that’s not really Bill.”

Clearly something changed when Bill died, or else we wouldn't call him the dearly departed. But Jesus doesn't talk like this. "Jesus told them plainly, 'Lazarus is dead... let us go to him'" John 11:14,16.

People die. Bill got dead. He didn't just butterfly off into some heavenly plane. At his funeral someone needs to say out loud, “The one you love is dead. That’s why we're weeping today. He got pneumonia and it killed him, and now we have nothing to do but sing, pray, and carry him out to the graveyard."

This is semantics but not mere semantics. A vexing heresy that never goes away for long is gnosticism, which in its various forms separates the person from their physical body. For gnostics, the real you is your spirit, not your body. The spirit is immortal and sacred but the body is a trap, a prison, a stain scraped away at death. In my view, gnosticism is almost a default way humans think, unless something drastically interjects, like the bodily resurrection of Christ. I worry that when we point at the casket and say, 'That's not really Bill', we just sound gnostic.

There are current trends in the death and funeral industry that hint at a gnostic separation of the body and the person. We now do things with the bodies of the dead that traditionally would have seemed disrespectful, even a violation of the person. However, if the body is completely disconnected from the person, who cares? For example, at most funerals now the body is nowhere to be seen. We schedule "Celebrations of Life" for family and friends months after the body has been disposed of. Wakes, where the community accompanied their loved one until burial, seem bizarre to us now. Why sit around the dead body and sing if that's not Bill?

Cremation has exploded in popularity, even though Christians and Jews historically rejected it as too gnostic. Most Christian defenses of cremation I have heard take some form of, "that body is not really Bill, so we can do whatever we want with it." But traditionally, cremation was seen as a symbol that symbolized all the wrong things. It called to mind the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the destruction of Achan and his family, not to mention the fires of hell. Christians did not reject cremation because they thought God could not resurrect a cremated body (a myth you often hear). They rejected it because it preached a pagan, gnostic sermon. Christians believed the body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, destined for resurrection in three days, and thus should be seeded in the ground in readiness.*

But truth be told, all the money we spend on embalming a person for burial to look perfectly alive rather than dead in the coffin, is not exactly pro-body either. In its own way it also tries to pretend Bill is not really dead. Cremation banishes a body in the flames, but we can also banish the body under paint.

But let us celebrate the resurrection of Jesus!

Christ is the only Christian pattern and hope. Jesus died. Jesus was buried. Jesus rose from the dead. And if Christ is raised, then we will too!

Think about the empty tomb. It's empty because Christ's crucified body was needed for the resurrection. For Easter, God needed the Christmas body Mary gave birth to. To say, "That's not really Jesus in the tomb, that's just his body" is to deny that the resurrection happened to the baby born at Christmas. The emptiness of the tomb tells us that the person in the manger, is the person who healed the lame, is the person who died on the cross, is the person who lay in the tomb, is the person who rose triumphant, is the person now reigning on high. If that's all the same person, than me, this person I am, will be the same person who dies, is buried and raised with Christ too. If that's not Bill in the tomb, "our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain" (I Cor. 15:14).

I realize this raises valid questions about what happens in the "intermediate state" between death and resurrection, but the centre of our faith is not what happens in the "intermediate state". No scripture teaches that our Christian hope resides in the truth that while he was in the tomb on Saturday, the real Jesus continued his existence somewhere else. That might be true, but it's not our comfort in life and death. Our only hope is Sunday, the glorious resurrection of Christ.

Let us then speak plainly: Lazarus is dead. But if this is Jesus Christ who weeps as he approaches the tomb, we 'know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’

To recover a Christian understanding of death and funerals, first watch the movie Departures, the beautiful story of a Japanese nōkanshi, a ritual mortician, that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2009. Then read The Undertaking: Life Studies in the Dismal Trade, by Thomas Lynch, a novelist and undertaker in small-town Michigan. Finally read Accompany Them With Singing: the Christian Funeral, by Thomas Long and Funerals: For the Care of Souls by Steinbach pastor Tim Perry. After that you should be good to go.

*There are ways to humanize and Christianize the practice of cremation, although this will diminish the economic attraction of cremation. I officiated a funeral in Toronto where the funeral home required family members to personally accompany the body to the cremation. The crematorium had a chapel with a window to the cremation oven. We gathered there for payer and when the moment arrived, a curtain was drawn, and a family member pressed a button on the wall, igniting the flame. I respect that. Burying the ashes can also be a way to prepare for the resurrection.

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