THE FUNERAL OF THE LAITY
The funeral liturgies for the Ukrainian Catholic Church are utilized at some of the most vulnerable times in the lives of her faithful. Literally confronted face-to-face with death, the Church’s funeral services neither deny death (as our contemporary culture tends to do) nor do they reveal the reality that is death. Instead, the funeral services are merely the final liturgical events in an entire lifetime of liturgy and worship of God. In fact, this life-long liturgy (particularly in the Eucharist) reveals the true nature of death and provides the context by which we can properly understand the funeral services of the Church.
From the moment of the Christian’s Baptism, each liturgy concerns life and death, namely, the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Every Baptism is a Baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus; every Sunday Eucharist is a liturgy deepening the Christian community’s involvement in the death and resurrection of Jesus; every period of fasting is a period in which the Christian’s funeral begins. One must keep in mind that Jesus Christ, being True Life, reveals to us the true nature of death. But what does it mean to die? Instead of abolishing physical or biological death, Jesus proclaims the coming of the Kingdom of God, a joyous proclamation of the resurrection of the dead. Christ’s Pascha, his victory over death, is a victory over something horrible and unnatural: separation from God. To be separated from God, to sin, to refuse communion with the very Source of Life is death, a death far more central than physical death, a death that indeed gives meaning to physical death. By thus revealing to us what Life is (communion with the Living God), Jesus Christ reveals to us what death is (separation from the Living God).
It is for this reason that we sing “Memory Eternal” throughout the funeral services. This moving hymn refers not to our human memory, so fragmented and selective, but to God’s Memory: to be “remembered” by God is to be involved in loving communion with the Source of Life. If one never enters into communion with God, if one has never “known” God and has not allowed God to “know” him/her, then he/she is spiritually dead. Throughout the liturgy of one’s life we constantly remember God and allow God to “remember” (that is, to know) us. For instance, each Eucharistic liturgy recalls the salvific work accomplished by Christ, particularly his death and resurrection (this is known as the anamnesis or “recollection”/ “remembrance” of the Anaphora, or Eucharistic prayer). As a result, there are those in this world who may be physically alive but in fact dead because their desires for food, luxuries, unhealthy relationships, and so on supersede any desire for communion with God.
But Jesus Christ’s death on Calvary is an explosion of Life: Jesus Christ becomes dead to this world, a world marred by sin and separation from God. And because of our Baptism, a Baptism in which we cease merely believing in Jesus Christ and begin to “put on Christ” (Gal 3:27), is a Baptism into the death of Christ and thus into that explosion of Life. Thus Baptism is both a funeral and a birth: it is our funeral in the sense that we “die” to this world that is fading because of Christ and it is a birth in the New Life that comes in the world to come, the Kingdom of God. To be baptized into Christ is to “put on Christ,” to follow him wherever he has gone and wherever he now goes, to forsake the life of this world for the Life in the world to come in the Kingdom. Thus physical death (which has not yet been abolished) needs to be referred to spiritual death (which has been utterly destroyed in Christ).
Understanding this context helps one to understand the place of Christian burial in our lives today. We bury our beloved simply because we love them: we respect them and all that they were (including the body) and we thank God for their lives and for the worship that they have offered to God in communion with us while still living. This personal love for the deceased, beginning at his/her birth and nourished and fostered throughout his/her life, remains after death, and it this personal love in the Trinity that inspires us Christians to pray for the deceased. We pray for them at the funeral and at various anniversaries of their deaths not just to help them (this is secondary); rather, we pray for them to manifest our firm belief that physical death is a positive reality, in the sense that those who die in Christ are saved and the bonds of communion between them and God and between them and the rest of the Church are not severed by death.
The essence of the funeral services, then, is contained in the vigil before the funeral, the Order of Parastasis. This service contains some of the most ancient elements, including: 1) the singing of the Trisagion as we move the body into and out of the Church; 2) Psalm 118 (Kathismata XVII) which reveals the central faith of the Church as being grounded in God as the Source of Life and inspiring all to enter into blessed communion with Him; 3) and the singing of Alleluia as the expression of the Church’s Baptismal joy (and thus should not be sung as a funeral dirge).
With regard to the remainder of the service, one immediately notices that the Hymns of John of Damascus address the faithful gathered at the funeral, lamenting the reality that is death. Though a part of our tradition expressing the anguish of the mourners, these hymns are a later, medieval addition to the service that reflect a very Platonic outlook on the world, one that shows some disdain for the world and God’s material creation. As a result, one should not find the essential meaning of the rite within these hymns, however important they may be. One should instead recall the Baptismal event in the life of the deceased, an event recalled in the moving “Last Kiss,” which is in fact the very same kiss by which the Church welcomed the deceased into her fold at his/her Baptism. Thus we welcome the Christian into the New Life of Christ at two services, Baptism and the funeral, the latter kiss recalling the first.
Proclaiming the joy of the resurrection made possible by the death of Jesus Christ and entered into by all Christians through the Baptismal waters, the funeral services of the Ukrainian Catholic Church comprise yet another means of worshipping God and entering into communion with Him. By recalling our Baptism, that event by which we enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus, the funeral comes at the end of lifetime of liturgy for the deceased. May the Risen Lord who gives Life to us all be praised and glorified for ever and ever, and unto ages of ages!
The above explanation is based on Paul Meyendorff, “The Development of the Christian Funeral” (lecture presented at the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Summer Liturgical Institute, Crestwood, New York, 28 June 2006
Article Contributed By Nicholas Jurkiw
Cantor Danielle Kerling