Cancer Blog #36
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #36 – Cremation vs Burial
May 10, 2022
[Gen 3:19 NASB95] 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
[1Samuel 31:11-13 NASB95] 11 Now when the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, 12 all the valiant men rose and walked all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shan, and they came to Jabesh and burned them there. 13 They took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days.
I thought I would do a brief discussion of a current topic, viz., cremation vs burial. In the past year or so (according to sources online, so who knows), for the first time the number of cremations in the US has surpassed the number of burials. Of course the reason seems to me to be obvious: simply that the cost for a cremation is vastly less than a burial. Most people in the US now have no funeral service as was conducted in the past (which was a type of church worship service with scripture reading, a sermon, hymns, and prayers). Nowadays I think people have a celebration of life service, and often times provide an extensive obituary online in the newspaper or on the funeral home’s website. Obviously there would be no viewing time. Many people are not members of a church and so hold the celebration of life in various venues.
For a Christian, however, other considerations are important besides just the cost. Interment is the normal and historical mode of caring for someone’s body after death (thus, burial has been the Christian practice for thousands of years). But, is it required by God? Is cremation a sin? The vast majority of places in the Bible that record what is done with the person’s remains after death describe a burial of the body, or what’s left of the body (as with John the Baptist who was decapitated for his execution and so only a headless corpse could be buried). Only in the passage I quote above do we have recorded a cremation and then burial of the bones (yes, there was also Achan, who sinned by stealing during a battle and whose family was stoned then burned. Not sure why). So, do all the many incidents of burial indicate a mandate for burial?
I think not for several reasons. First, the curse in Genesis 3 is that we will return to dust. Nowhere is there any indication that process will be fast (as with burning) or slow (as with burial); it doesn’t seem to matter. Either way, we return to dust. Second, in no place does scripture seem even to imply a mandate to bury the dead. 1 Samuel 31 is the only place I have found with burning (cremation) and then the burying of the remaining bones. But, again, there’s no indication (as we might assume with Achan) that the burning was a result of sin, a curse (especially as they were burning not only Saul but also Jonathan), or a violation of some burial mandate. Perhaps they burned the bodies as they were decomposing, but I somewhat doubt that as that situation may have occurred elsewhere in the cities or fields of the nation of Israel and there’s no mandate in the Mosaic Law to burn or to bury in that situation. Or, perhaps as my wife suggested, maybe it was because they feared that the enemy would dig up the bodies and further desecrate them. Third, though I’m no Near Eastern history expert, my guess is that Israel buried because that’s what most nations did to deal with the body after death. There may have been also the problem that the nations who practiced burning did so for pagan religious reasons. But, that’s just my guess; I have no evidence in the scriptures or elsewhere that that was Israel’s motivation.
But, Christians today are in no danger of making unbelievers think we are trying to satisfy Moloch, or enter Valhalla, or follow the Hindu practice of a funeral pyre (yes, in India that is the most common method of disposing of the body). In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has now approved cremation for its members as an alternative to burial provided it is not done for pagan reasons, and that the ashes are not scattered. In the Roman Catholic Church’s eyes, the ashes are the remains of a person and should still be buried out of respect for that individual’s physical remains.
There’s one place in the NT where burning is mentioned, viz., a remark made by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:3:
[1Co 13:3 NASB95] 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed [the poor,] and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
I’m not sure what to make of his remark. I thought at first that maybe it was an analogy having to do with the burnt offerings in the OT. But, a friend of mine has convinced me that it more likely refers to the practice of the Roman empire during Paul’s time using immolation as a means of execution (gruesome to say the least). In either case, I can’t see that his remark has any bearing on the question of cremation vs burial. I think this issue is completely unrelated to Paul’s remark.
I should mention something that may provide some further guidance. Joseph had his father, Jacob, embalmed by the Egyptian physicians according to Egyptian customs:
[Gen 50:2 NASB95] 2 Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father. So the physicians embalmed Israel.
But, as with cremation and burial, I don’t think there was any particular mandate associated with the act (i.e., we’re not required to embalm our dead just because Joseph did). It seems more likely that Joseph was simply following a common Egyptian practice, Egypt being where Jacob’s family then lived, but without attaching any Egyptian religious ideas to it. And, that is how I see cremation vs burial. It is now a common culture practice of the country where I live and I believe I’m free to practice it as my neighbors might do.
So, for me, the bottom line is the bottom line. If it’s significantly cheaper to cremate than to bury, and if I’m free to follow this practice in this country with no particular scriptural mandate to bury, then I’ll choose to be cremated (though we have decided to have the ashes placed in an urn and buried in a cemetery.) I have read the arguments for burial, but was not persuaded. There are simply too many situations where people may be lost at sea or disappear, or whatever, to think that burial is a mandate for Christians to prepare for death and resurrection. To me there is little difference between burial and cremation. We still are planning on having a funeral (memorial) and possibly a graveside service with the presence of ashes rather than a body.
Personal note: My wife and I were to fly out today (Friday, May 20) to San Jose to see our two sons and their families, but Monday night (May 16) I woke and was freezing cold and sweating, obviously being sick. Tuesday morning my temperature was 102.2F. I called my oncologist who recommended a COVID test. My PCP (primary care physician gave my wife 4x). I did one on Tuesday and one 24 hours later (Wednesday), and they both were strongly positive. We did one on my wife yesterday (Thursday), and it was clearly negative. The symptoms have changed daily: now the fever is almost resolved, the headache gone, the diarrhea mostly gone, fatigue bad but not as bad as on Tuesday when I slept the entire day. I had an excruciating sore throat on Wednesday, somewhat improved and well controlled with Tylenol yesterday, and almost resolved today with no Tylenol. My only real concern throughout this illness is that it not go into my lungs for reasons you well know if you’ve read previous entries. But, no sign of that happening so far. God has been merciful.
We still can’t fly out; positive COVID test means I can’t be on public transportation for 10 days, minimum. We’re disappointed as we haven’t been able to see our sons in California for more than 2 years (though they’ve come back home on the East Coast 3x this past year when I became sick). And, it appears we’ll be losing our Airbnb rental (adding insult to injury).
I’ll write in the next Entry to document how I do over the next week.
Next: Our Lives as Sojourners