The Joy of Funerals

Last week I sat in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City at the memorial service of Tim Keller. As I looked around the room, I could see people whose lives, I know, were re-shaped by this pastor’s presence. I noticed something intangible that seemed to pulse through the sanctuary, even before the service started. By the end, it occurred to me that what we were experiencing was joy.

By joy I don’t mean happiness, of course. After the service, a friend said that he believed the most important part of the service was when Tim’s son was momentarily silent in grief. He expressed in that moment what everyone who’s lost someone they love has known.

I mean joy the way that C. S. Lewis defined it—as including a bittersweet longing, a recognition that the signposts are pointing us somewhere that we can’t find on our own. Bound up in that kind of joy is a certain kind of hope and happiness, but with it a sense of absence that’s meant to direct us elsewhere.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my wife Maria hates it when I say that I prefer funerals to weddings. “People will think that you mean you would rather people die than get married,” she says. And, of course, I don’t mean that. I also don’t really mean what anyone who’s ever served as a pastor knows—that funerals are far less likely than weddings to bring out the worst aspects of those who were expecting a “fairy tale”–perfect event—although that is certainly true. What I mean is that there is incomparable joy in the funeral of a life well-lived to the glory of God.

Sam Allberry made this point well in his eulogy. Of all the tributes and eulogies to Tim, he said, almost none of them had to do with anything Tim did. Almost all of them had to do with his character—how he loved his family, how he showed kindness to people, how he encouraged his friends, how he didn’t give up on people who disagreed with him.

I’ve consistently experienced this moment of joy at other funerals. We see the story of a life, and the way the grace of God shone through it. We pray, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life” (Ps. 23). We know that’s true because we’ve seen it in the resurrected life of Jesus—but in those good funerals we see a little glimpse of it, not in heaven hidden from us, nor in the future waiting for us, but in the completed story of a person who was indeed followed all the days of his or her life by that goodness and mercy. Often, we can think of how that person helped us see the goodness and mercy behind us also, prodding us homeward.

At funerals like that, there can be a confusing mix of grief and gratitude, the need to hug one’s loved ones closer and to ache for life in the resurrection dawn. That mix can be called many things, but one of them is joy.