A funeral centred on the hope we have in Christ makes all the difference in the world. I do not know how unbelievers cope because, without Jesus, death is utterly hopeless.

I shared the eulogy from my mum’s funeral yesterday. As these things are still in the mind, I thought I would write up some thoughts on a Christian funeral. These are in no particular order, they are not especially well formulated, they are general thoughts and reflections.

1. Death is desperately sad and being a Christian mourning the death of another Christian doesn’t change that reality.
2. Death is both natural and unnatural. It is unnatural in the sense that it is not how God originally created the world to be and it is not as the world will one day be. But it is natural in that it is the ordinary way of things in the fallen world and it comes to us all.
3. Christians do not grieve without hope and yet it is a mistake to confuse hope with happiness. Hope changes how the Christian grieves; it doesn’t change that we are grieved. Hope changes how we view what has happened; it doesn’t change the reality of what has happened.
4. A funeral centred on the hope we have in Christ makes all the difference in the world. I do not know how unbelievers cope because without Jesus death is utterly hopeless.
5. The songs and prayers at a Christian funeral take on a deeper, poignant sense. It isn’t that the things we sing and pray in church each week are not truly believed on Sunday (they are), but they are brought into the sharpest relief at a funeral.
6. Perhaps the weirdest thing about a funeral is that it is the only life event where the person at the centre of the affair isn’t there to join in.
7. The person not being there means we are really dealing with body disposal and, in a sense, what happens to it is inconsequential. In another sense, how we treat the body matters because we are body and soul, we are not Gnostic and do not believe we are simply embodied souls.

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