A Bowl of Bread and a Grave: I Try to Understand the Resurrection

I had a bit of a meltdown yesterday, post funeral.

Before I carry on about why, I wish to say, most passionately, how gracious and good is the funeral liturgy. For those who muscle through this mortal sphere, living the good life and making lots of friends and having A Good Time, the least kind thing those people can do, for the ones they love, is say, “I don’t want a service,” or “don’t bother about a funeral, just have a party and scatter my ashes to the wind.”

Why not a funeral service? Why not put down in writing a few things that you wish people would do in the hours after your death? If you expect that everyone will go on as they were, that is too high an expectation. Death is a grievous, a wretched thing. Death is the rending open of the cosmos. It is the greatest and profoundest evil that humanity has embraced. Every single death–known or unknown, lamented or rejoiced over–participates in the breaking apart of humanity from God. The funeral service, particularly if liturgically and biblically based, announces God’s work to put it back together. The life of the one who has died is laid out beside the life of the one who will never die again.

So we did that, in the morning, and went to the funeral luncheon. And of course there was bread at the luncheon. Really nice bread. Big abundant bowls of bread.

I slid plate after plate through the line and relayed them back to my children sitting at a long table filled with hope and expectation, because funeral luncheons are usually a life giving moment for the bereft. Roast chicken, salad, pasta, bread.

I arranged chicken and salad on my own plate and sat down, the great bowl of bread behind me on the buffet, speaking to my soul in spite of me not being able to see it. I watched the children lather butter all over their soft, fluffy, white slices, and kept watching as they worked their way through, devouring each whole piece.

Jesus endured the shame, the humiliation, the devastation of the cross to give life to the world, to make a way so that I don’t have to die forever, to give me life that continues after this death filled trial. And he gives me life now. He offers his very body as the bread. The manna from heaven. The sinless paschal bread. The rich, golden glutinous loaves of Pentecost.

And here I sit, like so many, counting the cost of bread itself. Is a funeral, where someone who has died is being celebrated, a good time to chuck it and say “Whatever, I’m eating bread because we’re all going to die anyway.” Or is that a moment to look at the living and die a little bit in the soul so that the body can remain around a little longer, so that the wrenching apart that we endure until Christ comes again can be forestalled a few more days and the cholesterol can be brought a little lower.

I came home and, as I said, melted down. I felt like Martha, facing down Jesus, knowing his power and love, “Lord, if you had been here, our sister would not have died.” Where were you, in other words. Why didn’t you work one of the miracles we’ve seen and known? And, moreover, why have you allowed the ruination of one of the primary ways that we speak of you–the bread?

And then I remembered that Jesus, who knew he was, in only a few days time, going to purchase everlasting life Martha, and for Lazarus, and for me, wept. He felt the full weight of the loss of his friend, of the sorrow of Mary and Martha. And he didn’t just make it go away. He participated, he endured it, first, and then he raised Lazarus.

Which is exactly the pattern of the cross. Jesus knew perfectly well that death wouldn’t be able to hold him. That the suffering of the Father’s turning away wasn’t going to last more than a few hours, as we count time. That the joy on the other side was going to swallow up the loss on this side. But what did he do first? He went into a garden, not to hide from the Father, but to pray, to mourn, to weep, to sweat great drops of blood, to grapple with the desire to run away and let it all go up in smoke and flames. The bread that gives life to the world endured the breaking apart of death itself.

So I can’t eat bread. So I’m going to die. So I feel like I am always standing at another grave, looking for some way to be consoled. A person like me who reads about the women, stooping down to look in the empty tomb, gazing at the carefully folded grave clothes, can’t fully understand the glory that has been revealed. The pattern–loss, grief, resurrection, rejoicing–is stuck for me in the bread bowl. I can’t see over and around the bread, past the cup. And that’s where I will stay, until my name is called out to leave the grave. I’m not in a garden. I’m in church, suffering in my pew, grief stricken and full of hope, feeding on the true incorruptible Bread whose life swallowed up death itself.