My mother used to say that funerals were for the living. A memorial service held for the dead is really there to help the living grieve, to show their love and remembrance for the deseased.

I’m sure most of you have been to one. They’re usually held in a chapel, a lot like our chapels and halls, with the body of the dead one up front, about where we have the emblems, and there’s usually a podium with someone speaking behind it, somewhat like an exhorter. I think that’s why we say on Sunday we’re having a memorial service.

The idea would have been even more familiar to people at the time of Christ. Getting together and having a funeral meal for the deceased was an old Roman custom, and one of the reasons it was so hard for the authorities to determine who was a Christian during the times of persecution. After all, they were just having their memorial meal for someone named Jesus.

Funerals have been on my mind lately, the way we react to someone’s death, and the way in which we remember his life. I’ve also been thinking about the apostles and how they gathered together in an upper room after Christ was crucified. I don’t know what they said or did there, but since we know that only a few days earlier Christ said to them, “Do this in remembrance of me,” I have to think that every time they looked at another loaf of bread or a cup of wine, they would have to think about him and remember him. I don’t know if anyone ever tried to give a eulogy for Christ, but it might have gone something like this:

A possible eulogy for Jesus
There has never been anyone like him. There never will be again. Even if I had the words to tell you what kind of a man he was, it wouldn’t be enough to describe what it was like to actually hear him, to be there and see his marvelous works.

But he’s changed our lives forever. I will spend the rest of my life living in his shadow, and even so I’ll never be able to do the good in my lifetime that he did in one day.

He was a teacher, a healer, a prophet, and an uncrowned king. Whenever people had a problem they couldn’t solve, they took it to him. And he’d solve it, sometimes in ways you weren’t expecting. When a man wanted to walk, first he was absolved of sin, then healed. We didn’t understand what he was doing.

His whole life was devoted to giving. Everything he did was for someone else. He never asked for money, and he never asked what he’d get out of it. He even used to take a poor box around with him, although he never had any money of his own. Sometimes he’d help people even when they hadn’t asked him. Once he saw a widow mourning and he knew that she was mourning her only son; he went up to the boy and restored his life because he pitied the grieving mother.
Sometimes when there was too much ignorance and selfishness, he’d go alone to a mountain or the wilderness to pray to God. I don’t think we’ll ever understand what that meant to him.
It was like that every day for years. I couldn’t tell you half of what he did. I know that all of us were touched by him, and that we have special memories.

But people don’t always like to hear the truth. So after three years of preaching and healing and working with the people, he was captured, tried, and convicted, even though he’d done no crime. And they crucified him.

Yet he’s alive
Which leads us to our memorial service which is different from others because he’s not dead. We don’t gather every week to remember a dead man. We come to consider the living Son of God. The living, active presence that is with us whenever two or more are gathered in his name.
I don’t know what you think about during the breaking of bread, but I was at a Bible school once where one of teachers asked that question directly: What do you think about? The overwhelming majority said they thought about Christ on the cross, and their own need to be cleansed of their sins.

Now, as Christadelphians we don’t use icons, but I think they have affected us, nonetheless -- all those paintings and statues of Christ bleeding on the cross, by everyone from Fra Angelico to Dali. When Sunday morning comes around, isn’t that how you remember Christ? I know I do. Every week I come here and I think about his sacrifice and the price of my freedom from sin. But that’s not enough. When we talk about the sacrifice of Christ, we have to remember that that includes all of his life, not just the last six hours of it. Thousands of people died on the cross. Only one man lived his entire life without sin. Not to acknowledge that trivializes what he did. Even beyond that, we have to remember why we’re meeting on a Sunday.

“Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them” (Luke 24:1); they found an empty tomb, and the angel who said, “He is risen.” We meet on Sundays to honor Christ’s resurrection. “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life” (Rom. 5:10).

Our living, active Lord
We all understand the importance of these things. Many of us have devoted years to understanding them. We know that in his death, we died, and in his life we are alive. The resurrection cannot be removed from an understanding of Christ. More than that, we know he is working in our lives.
When the Pharisees threw out the idea that God had been resting since Creation, “Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” And if we doubt that this can be applied to Christ now, we only have to look at our brethren. All of us were called by the grace of God and the intervention of Christ. He is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life, and without him none of us could have approached God. Every believer who goes into the water of baptism is proof of the work of Christ. “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph 5:14).

My plea to you is that you remember everything about Christ. Remember his kindness and self-sacrifice, remember the patience he had with his disciples, the power, the love, the self-restraint, remember how he humbled himself at Gethsemane, and how he yielded to suffering on the cross, how he was raised from the dead and spoke to his disciples again. Remember how he drew you close the day you decided to be baptized. And when you pass the emblems from hand to hand, remember that these people, too, are a part of Christ.

Then, when you’ve remembered all that, remember that he is coming, that we’re waiting to see the Lord whom we love. Because Sunday morning is not a time to mourn, and it’s not a funeral. It’s not a Sabbath for our rest. It’s the time to prepare ourselves and gird up our loins, because now we have to fight the good fight and run the race.

If we really believe that Christ is coming soon, there is no time to rest. The time to preach, to witness, to spread the gospel is today. Christ might be here tomorrow. There isn’t much time. We were hired to work in the fields and our Lord provides everything we need. It’s time to remember, to prepare and work.

Jessie Warner, Washington, D.C.
December 1999