The House of Mourning

Here is the honest complaint people raise against this verse: it sounds like a man who has stopped enjoying life. It says it is better to go to a funeral than to a party, and it adds that "the living will lay it to his heart." Put that on the fridge, and your family will quietly decide you have turned gloomy.

Ecclesiastes deserves a careful reading here, because the same book also commands the opposite in plain words: "Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart." The Preacher is not against feasting. He had feasted on a scale none of us will ever match, with houses, vineyards, pools of water and singers, and he wrote down what it all came to.

What the funeral gives you is knowledge. The verse says, "that is the end of all men," and everyone in the room knows it. Everyone standing there has just been reminded of the one fact about themselves that they spend most of an ordinary week not thinking about. Because a body in a coffin is what reminded them, it sinks in. The party is doing its own job too: its job is to ease the pain for a while, and it works.

So the verse is practical advice about where to stand if you want to see clearly. "The living will lay it to his heart," and taking it to heart is the whole point. Someone who has been in that room lately makes different choices about their calendar, their money, and the person they have not spoken to since March. You can learn that lesson at a graveside better than almost anywhere else, but it fades quickly once you are home again. That is why Moses turned it into a prayer: "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." God is willing to keep teaching what the funeral begins, long after the flowers are gone.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 3 is Full (John 15:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two