The Quiet Truth at the Heart of King Harald’s Funeral

In the end, King or commoner. “Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return”. The Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.

From Aleteia

By Cerith Gardiner

Amid the crowns, ceremony, and royal titles, King Harald V's funeral offered a simple reminder: in death, even a monarch is simply one of us.

There are few occasions when the trappings of royalty are more visible than the funeral of a monarch. And on Wednesday, as Norway said goodbye to King Harald V, they were everywhere.

His coffin, draped in the red Norwegian royal standard, was carried through Oslo on a gun carriage as a 21-gun salute rang out. Kings, queens, and political leaders had traveled from across the world to pay their respects, while tens of thousands of ordinary Norwegians lined the streets. After the service at Oslo Cathedral, four fighter jets flew overhead, with one peeling away from the formation to mark the King's passing.

It was an extraordinary farewell to a man who had worn the Norwegian crown for 35 years. Yet inside the cathedral, for all the titles, ceremony, and centuries of royal tradition surrounding him, Harald was facing the one journey on which none of those things could accompany him.

When a king becomes simply a man

Presiding Bishop Olav Fykse Tveit chose one of the best-known passages in Scripture for his funeral sermon, St. Paul's great reflection on love in 1 Corinthians 13. “Most things come to an end in this life. Almost everything. But not love,” he told the congregation. (You can find the text here, but scroll down for the English version if needed.)

It was a striking thought in a cathedral filled with some of the world's most powerful people. Crowns pass to somebody else. Titles are inherited, offices filled, possessions left behind and even the longest reign eventually reaches its final day. Death has never shown much interest in rank.

The timing of Harald's funeral brought another royal farewell to mind. Just one day earlier, September 8, marked the fourth anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Harald's second cousin and, like him, a monarch whose reign had stretched across generations.

Westminster Abbey gives a lovely reflection on her funeral in 2022 that was filled with even greater pageantry, watched by millions around the world. The Imperial State Crown rested on her coffin; the Sovereign's Orb and Sceptre lay alongside it. Here was a woman who had been addressed as Your Majesty for seven decades and whose image had appeared on coins, stamps and banknotes across the globe. Yet as the Christian liturgy unfolded, something subtle happened to the language. Elizabeth became simply “our sister.”

At her committal service at St. George's Chapel, the Dean of Windsor prayed that “with our sister Elizabeth” those gathered would one day know eternal life. Elsewhere in the services she was described as God's daughter and “Elizabeth, our sister here departed.” No Majesty. No Sovereign. Just Elizabeth.

The great equalizer

Four years later, as another European monarch was carried into a cathedral, the same truth hovered beneath all the ceremony. Christianity has never pretended that death observes the hierarchies we construct during life. Before God, the king and the person standing among the crowds outside his palace arrive on precisely the same terms.

While there is humility in that, there is also an extraordinary reassurance. Most of us will not have fighter jets overhead when we die. There will be no gun carriage, no national minute of silence and, unless our families have been keeping something fairly significant from us, very few foreign heads of state are likely to rearrange their diaries. But the Christian promise made at a royal funeral is no greater than the one made at the smallest parish funeral.

King Harald's funeral sermon spoke of God's love not as something earned through a life perfectly lived, but as grace. “Love never ends,” Bishop Tveit repeated, because death may separate people, but it does not have the final word.

Perhaps that's why the simplicity of a monarch's name at the end of life can be so affecting. For decades we knew Queen Elizabeth II and King Harald V. History will continue to use those titles, and rightly so.

But eventually there was Elizabeth, and there was Harald: two human beings who had loved, failed, giggled, grieved, grown old, and finally died, just as generations before them had done and generations after them will do.

Their crowns belonged to this life. But the hope expressed at their funerals belongs to us all: that death is not the end, and that before God, no title is needed.