Funeral Flowers

We last week hosted a funeral for a former chapel member. The mourners were not many, which is often the case when an older person dies. Several of her neighbours had attended, however, such was the community spirit and neighbourliness in that part of Skipton. Upon the coffin, and on a stand, were two gorgeous bouquets of flowers. I pondered why we arrange such beautiful displays for so short a service. They do not come cheap and we can admire them only for a while before they wilt, fade and droop.

As well as adding a welcome dash of colour to a black-clad, grieving gathering, flowers may remind us of the deceased person’s life: bright, cheerful, vivacious and carefully arranged. Yet those flowers, for having been cut, are essentially dead already, just like the dearly departed:

the dust will return to the earth as it was,

And the spirit will return to God who gave it (Ecc. 12:7).

All who behold funereal flowers ought to mind their own mortality. Your life might currently be perfectly agreeable, but you shall be cut down, or, worse, allowed to fade away.

The voice said, “Cry out!”

And he said, “What shall I cry?”

“All flesh is grass,

And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

Because the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

Surely the people are grass.

Isaiah 40:5-7, New King James Version

Those flowers remained at chapel for the following Lord’s Day, and they were admired, but they shall be thrown away at some point soon. So seek eternal life; seek Jesus Christ, who gives life that shall never end:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. John 11:25