In my last piece, I opened up the topic of funeral customs with a question about cremation: does cremation honor or dishonor the human body as created in God’s image, and does it reveal or obscure the doctrine of the bodily resurrection? Before moving on to other aspects of funeral customs, I wanted to include a quote from John Kleinig on the matter of burial, which I think sums up my proposition:
The church must not embrace any kind of discarnate spirituality… Even though the Bible does not forbid cremation, the church would do well, in our present context, to encourage the burial of the body on hallowed ground as a powerful, countercultural witness to the resurrection of the body, like our ancestors and Christians in the early church. In fact, Christians in Rome held all human bodies in such high regard that they gathered the corpses of derelict people from the alleys and streets where they had died and buried them properly, so that they were not dumped in the municipal garbage heaps with the corpses of dead animals for want of anyone to care for their remains. They buried them in a dignified way because they had been created in God’s image. The same belief should inspire us to care for the bodies of those who have died. That, traditionally, was one of the Christian deeds of mercy. At the very least, congregations that own cemeteries should be encouraged to keep them and make good use of them, for those who have died are still part of the congregation.
Kleinig’s note about the Bible’s lack of prohibition of cremation is an important one. My goal for this series is to raise these questions about the body for faithful Christians to consider and weigh in light of their own study of Scripture, not to bind anyone’s conscience by making rules where God has provided none. It is my hope that these essays might direct our readers’ attention to practices and habits we may be taking for granted and to assess them in light of biblical, orthodox teaching concerning the body.
The Focus of Christian Funerals
After reading my last piece, a friend mentioned in conversation that she wasn’t sure what more there was to say about funeral customs—doesn’t burial just about cover it? I realize I’m going deep into the weeds here, but as any gardener knows, weeding makes a big difference in the overall health of your garden. The fact is, as Christian burial has fallen out of practice, lots of little weeds trying to pass as flowers have sprung up in our funeral traditions. Even while many forgo burial, the desire for ceremony remains. Ceremony signals deep meaning—it sets something apart from ordinary life and recognizes it as remarkable. And whether or not we bury our dead, we still want death to be treated as meaningful and worthy of ceremony.
And yet so often our modern funeral ceremonies seek to distance us from death. At least in many Western countries, funerals have become replete with trite imagery and euphemisms that ultimately undermine the significance of the event. When we intentionally remove the presence of the body from funerals, the funeral often becomes less about mourning and more about reminiscing. We even call these types of gatherings by another name: not “funerals,” but “memorial services.” Recently, the term “celebration of life” has become a popular substitute for “memorial service” that further distances such an event from the subject of mortality. What is the purpose of renaming the event? Why do we shy away from the term “funeral”? Is it because we’re trying to avoid the topic of death? If the purpose is to try to make these gatherings less sad, then we’re kidding ourselves; skirting around the topic of death is not going to make those who are grieving feel better. If we’re only considering the beloved’s life apart from their death—rather than in the context of their death—we’re failing to tell the whole story. If we’re not talking about death, then we’re muting the significance of our mortality.
This reconfiguration of the traditional funeral places the focus on the spirit alone. It’s easier to talk about the part of us that “lives on” than it is to reckon with death. Even at orthodox Christian funerals you’ll hear talk of the beloved being “freed” from her body—especially if she was elderly and had been physically deteriorating for a long time. But this kind of language sounds more Gnostic than orthodox Christian. It’s as though the body that lies in the coffin is nothing more than an old snakeskin or a broken cocoon—something to be discarded, while the “real” person is now free to move on without it.
These sorts of habits ultimately push the story of the body’s redemption to the sidelines. If we avoid talking about the body’s mortality, then how can we talk about the body’s resurrection? For the body too was made for eternity—it too will “live on.” How do you tell the story of the gospel without telling about the fall? If we want our funerals to take the body seriously, and indeed, as Ephraim Radner has said, “to take morality seriously,” then we must make sure that our funerals are proclaiming the gospel in its fullness—accounting for death as the wages of our sin and declaring it conquered in Christ’s bodily death and bodily resurrection. Any response to death that says less than this will tend towards triteness and dishonesty.
Telling the Whole Story
I recently attended a Christian funeral in which the state of the casket became a contentious issue among the family members. The man had died at a ripe old age, and his body no longer looked, shall we say, “nice.” He was gaunt, stretched thin, and ready for Heaven. Some argued that this was a reason for keeping the casket closed—that he wouldn’t have wanted his friends to see him this way. Others argued that the state of his body was not something to be covered up—that it was a solemn reminder of his mortality and his need for resurrection. There were only two options, and each told a different story about the man’s body. In the absence of explicit instructions about the casket, the question of whether it was to be open or closed was a theological one: what is the body’s significance after death?
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes it abundantly clear that the gospel is only good news if Christ’s body was raised from the dead: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). The gospel, then, depends on the bodily resurrection. If our telling of the gospel does not account for the body’s need for redemption, then we are not telling the whole gospel.
This is why funeral customs matter. Funerals are one of few occasions in the modern age that raise the problem of death and invite us to acknowledge our need for resurrection. Because of this, they are opportunities to catechize the saints in a right understanding of the body and to remind them of the fullness of the gospel to which they’ve been called.