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| Courtesy/consciouslifenews.com/ |
During this season of Lent, one of the things we Christians are asked to reflect on is the state of our life and to think carefully about what our destiny is. The fact is that no one will leave this world alive. From the fall of Adam and Eve to the present day, the destiny of the human body is to return to the dust it was made of. If you are human, you will die. No one has escaped that fate, not even Jesus. Jesus did not go into some state of suspended animation. Jesus went through the pain of death that all of us will feel. On that most Holy Cross the body of Jesus went through the process of death. His organs began shutting down to keep the vital processes, heart and brain, going as long as possible. When it could take no more, Jesus knew it was time. To show that He was going to conquer death he cried out in a loud voice according to the Bible, which is a most difficult thing to do while nailed to a cross and He surrendered His soul to the Father. At the moment of death, the soul of Jesus left the body and there was no force to keep the flesh animated any longer. Physically, at that moment, decay began. Blood, without a heart to propel it began to sink into the lower extremities. A soldier who thought that the man from Galilee was faking thrust a spear through His heart and piercing the Pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart there came forth blood and water. The body was removed and Mary His mother held the cooling, brutalized Body in her arms. Her tears were copious and she did not want to let Him go. But the disciples and friends that were on hand gently pried the lifeless corpse from her arms and laid Him atop a shroud. They wound Him up in it and without too much fanfare on that Sabbath eve, laid him in a borrowed tomb, even in death Jesus had no place of His own to lay His head.
The picture at the top is allegedly a picture of the soul leaving a man at the time of death. The article states that the blue color is the "life force" and you can see in picture on the left there is a lot of blue, and on the right, you can see just a bit of blue at head level, about to depart. I do not believe that they have captured the soul leaving the body. I just thought that the picture would provide an interesting focal point for this post.
Like it or not one day, maybe today, maybe in an hour, maybe in the next minute we will die. We will experience in some form what Jesus did, that is our bodies ultimate fate.
For some of us, the lucky ones among us, the process of dying will begin with a doctor telling us that we have a terminal disease and you have X amount of time to live. I say that you are lucky because you will have time to do what needs to be done. You will have been given a grace, a time to make repairs to relationships and in general take your leave of this world in a more or less peaceful and dignified manner. But before this all of us will go through several phases including denial of death, bargaining with God, until we arrive at acceptance.
At the time appointed by God, you will enter into the final stages of this life. You will say good bye in various ways and at the pre-ordained moment you will take your last breath and leave the garden God gave to us to tend and you will return home to our Father.
For a Christian, death should not leave us quaking in fear. We know that death has been conquered and we will rise on the last day.
I think that in our world today, especially in the United States and Canada, we deny death until the last spadeful of dirt covers our loved ones remains. We spend thousands of dollars to pickle them so they do not degrade so fast. We purchase elaborate boxes to put them in and we seal those to keep the elements out and we place these ornate boxes inside of a sealed concrete box to await the return of Christ. The death merchants sell us all manner of goods, charging five or six times the wholesale price for a casket. They charge hundreds of dollars for thirty dollars of chemicals and cosmetics and some even consider themselves quasi preachers, providing mushy "funeral committal services" at will for those not affiliated with a church. So, what does all of this expense buy for us? The undertakers will tell you that it will give the family closure. Well, maybe it does, but if the death was expected the act of taking the last breath may be all the closure a family wants. The morticians say that what they do will give the family a beautiful a memory picture of their loved one that have had all of the roughness and blemishes of death sanded away using the tools of the dismal trade and they say that will give them peace. Maybe it will, but what the undertaker is hoping for, besides a good profit on the deal, is looking towards the next case. He or she wants people to see how good he is at his work and he hopes and prays that the next one to go dies after saying "Let Snodgrass embalm me, put makeup in me, suture my mouth closed, put eye caps on so my eyes don't fly open and please put me in a very expensive box like X was in. Yes, the funeral directors next bit of business may very well come because of the way your mother or father, or friend looked under the theatrical lights on the day of the wake. Look at what an expensive casket (to be honest this casket was probably on the lower end of the price list, but still six times in what Snodgrass paid for it) looks like after twenty years in the ground:
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| Courtest: http://www.documentingreality.com/ |
Would you care to open the lid and take a peek inside to see how the occupant fared during this twenty year period? No, me either. An embalmed corpse locked up in an airless sealed up casket and sealed vault soon putrefies and after even a week or two in the ground becomes a lot less that a beautiful memory picture as the anaerobic bacteria changes the body into a blob of goo. So much for the value the dismal trade give you for your hard earned dollar.
The fact is that once a Christian dies, his or her body SHOULD be treated with respect, for it was a temple of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean we have to spend thousands of dollars in a vain attempt to keep the body from corrupting. "Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return." An inexpensive casket, I am opting for one of those purple cloth covered ones, and burial in consecrated ground is enough. Overspending on the funeral only benefits the undertaker.
I watched a very interesting movie on You Tube the other day entitled "A Certain Kind of Death." (Click Here to View) This movie follows the processing of two men through the system in the Los Angeles coroners department. What I took away from this movie was how simply stupid we mortals can be. We work our whole lives, we build up a store of goods and yet one day, all of it will belong to someone else as we are buried six feet under the ground. The movie is kind of graphic, but not in a morbid way. The coroners office buries the ashes of indigents and unclaimed bodies once a year in a potters field. The scene of the workers emptying the cremated remains of sixteen hundred people into a mass grave still is haunting me today. Each of the small aluminum boxes that contained what was left of a person that lived, had dreams and aspirations, had at one time a family that loved them, had jobs, bills, vacations and perhaps hunger, poverty, disease, and finally death came to an end at that moment. Sixteen hundred people were buried that day in the ground, their only marked a bronze square with the date "1997" on it's face.
So, let's wrap this up. What does death and dying mean for a Christian? For us it means that we are going home to God to face final judgement for our lives. So I think that for a Christian living life is much more important that memorializing it after death. I have to confess, while I won't actually be at my own funeral, for my soul will be elsewhere, I would like to think that there would be some who would attend my funeral and some that would mourn my passing. My family consists of two younger sisters and one younger brother, my parents, uncles and aunts have gone to their rest. My siblings have nothing to do with me, I have no idea why and I intend to make certain that all of my final arrangements are made in advance of my departure so they do not have to be bothered. I don't want them even to be notified. Let them to continue to treat me in death how they treated me in life. But be that as it may, I intend to be a morticians nightmare. I believe that my body will rise again as did Jesus when he defeated death. I believe that there is no reason to preserve that which is destined to decay. I will request immediate burial or cremation (I have not decided yet) and any funeral goods that I will need to purchase will be of the cheapest, most utilitarian, minimalist type. My estate, if there is anything left and my wife has died before me, I will will to my Church.
So for a Christian, I believe we must make an effort to do the things a Christian should do NOW and not wait until the doctors give us a terminal sentence. Love, Laugh, Pray, and be Merciful. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison, visit the sick and yes, bury the dead.
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| Te Purple Coffin I want to be used at my funeral |
