Funeral - God's Love over Death
Notes
Transcript
Imagine with you receive a memo from your superior one day, during a company retreat and on is written, nothing except these words: “Lunch to be served at 1pm in the cafeteria”.
Being a good subordinate, you know that, this means that your boss had just summoned you to make sure that lunch needs to be ready by 1pm that day and looking at your watch, you realise that it is already 1245pm. Your usually competent and considerate boss must have fouled it up and forgotten to tell you about the need to get lunch ready.
You start to panic and feel a little frustrated, but there is no time for that right now. Lunch needs to be prepared and there’s plenty of time to be frustrated later.
So you rush down to the cafeteria to make sure that the lunch will be served at 1pm.
But, then when you get there, you see all your CEO, COO, CCO, CIO, and all the other members of the top management in your company in complete mess, some of them on all fours, cleaning up the oven, some of them bent over the stove and stirring the food in the pots, all of them being covered in perspiration and their clothes stained with sauce of some sort.
Then your boss look up at you and say “oh, you’re early, we’ve not quite ready to serve you yet”
You are shocked, and you try to process your thoughts… Wait, you mean my superiors are going to cook and serve me lunch? How can it be?
I am the subordinate… I’m the one who is supposed to serve them… I’m the one who is lower on the pecking order… How is it that the ones who are my bosses, the ones who are giving orders are now the ones taking order from the regular head cook, who is happily barking orders at them.
You simply cannot comprehend what is happening…
Shock… Role Reversal… Confusion…
These 3 elements in the scenario I painted above, is not too different from the scriptural text we read earlier.
You see, the washing of feet is something that is done regularly in the Middle East because they wore sandals, and sand gets onto their feet and because of the abrasive action of the sand, feet washing is necessary for comfort and health. And when someone goes to a household, feet washing is one of the first thing that is done as a show of hospitality and acceptance. Yet, feet washing is never done by the host. For the regular folks, the hosts merely provide the water, while the guests washed their own feet. And for the richer houses, washing was done by a slave and looked upon as the lowest of all services.[1]
It is therefore, no surprise that the disciples were confused at what was happening…
They could not comprehend why their teacher, a person who was revered by them and someone who was respected as a Rabbi, now stooping down to the level of a slave.
It was why Peter wanted to stop Jesus from continuing His actions thinking that Jesus needed his intervention from doing something he thought was socially inappropriate and embarrassing…
But Jesus had a message, and this was revealed when he said, “what I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this”.
From our historical vintage point, we know that Jesus was preparing them for His death, and though He was thought by them as the one who would liberate them from their present sufferings, it wouldn’t be the way they thought so… His was of liberation was not one that involved exertion of one’s authority and punitive actions that the world so commonly does, but rather that of self-sacrifice and self-denial, and ended up with the very sacrifice of His life on the cross…
But at that point of time, the disciples couldn’t understand what was going on… until after it was all over, when it was described in Luke 24:45 as having their minds opened to being able to understand the scriptures…
So, what does this passage have to do with the purpose of our gathering today?
<well, for once, this spirit of counter-cultural behaviour also exists in our brother/sister who is constantly looking for people to bless by…>
The answer is that there are many things that happen to us in this life that we do not fully understand and frankly, may not be able to find an answer to.
A time such as now, when it is not easy for us to grasp why XXX should be taken from us at this particular point of time?
Why can’t XXX be with us, one day more, one month more, one year more?
To this, we will never know on this side of heaven, and it is perhaps not very useful to pursue this thought…
They are mysteries that perhaps will never be solved on this side of heaven, and will remain a mystery for whatever conclusion we come up with, will never be conclusive…
On the other hand, there are some certainties we know and perhaps, it is far more useful to dwell on them…
The first truth is that death is but a temporal separation for just like how Jesus though dying on the cross had ultimately overcome the grave, described as making death losing its sting, and though being really dead, was resurrected on the third day never to succumb to death once again… And in the same way, all of us who call upon the name of the Lord will one day be raised up which is promised in words of Paul in 1 Thess 4 that says:
“ 13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.
14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
15 According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.
16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.”[2]
Therefore, the death that we experience on this side of heaven is not the final answer, and not the final state of our being.
Which brings me to the second truth…
Why did Jesus wash the disciples’ feet? Why did Jesus have to go through the cross for us?
The short answer is because of love.
This is recorded for us in v1 of our passage “…Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love”
Why He decided to stoop down to the status of a slave in the upper room was because He loved us enough to set aside His dignity and authority to save us….
Why He decided to die on the cross for our sins… to die an excruciating death, a death that was reserved for the lowest being, non-Roman criminals was because He loved us enough to do so…
So that when our responsibilities on earth are fulfilled, the Lord will usher us to the next phase of our lives where there will be no more tears and no more pain, no more suffering and no more illness, no more death, no more things that will hinder us from a perfect union with our Lord Jesus Christ, and will no more subject to the infirmities our fragile bodies have, but we will truly be able to live according to the way our Lord has meant for us to live… sin-free, guilt-free, illness-free…
And XXX is there right now, because of the love of our saviour, is no longer being bound to the things of this world, but being liberated from all these sufferings and pain, and in this, we can find comfort in this fact even during this time as we feel the void left by XXX, because he/she is such a big part of our lives.
However, knowing that XXX is now in the arms of Jesus, having been liberated from this broken world, and knowing that this separation is temporal does not take away the pain and sadness from our present situation. And do not let anyone tell you otherwise, for it is perfectly fine to express our sadness and pain, for even when Jesus was confronting death Himself, in His agony He cried out to God as well…
But where do we go from here?
Once again, we look to Jesus who declared unto the Lord “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)
So, while we are gathered here to commend the soul of XXX unto the Lord, let us also commend our own souls to the Lord, who will offer us the peace and comfort even as we try to confront these questions that can never be answered. Let us lean upon the Lord, our Rock, for strength to carry on during this difficult time, who promise us that He will be with us until the age to come who will give us the resources to carry on, who will one day, explain everything to us, just as He had explained everything to the disciples for He said “What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this” (John 13:7). Amen.
[1] F. L. Anderson and Daniel Webster Kurtz, “Washing of Feet,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 3072.
[2] The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 1 Th 4:13–18.