It is the living who mourn at a funeral - not the dead. We mourn because the lives of the dead had made our own more lively and since we are (or had been) so knit together the loss of another's strand will eventually cause our own unravelling. Fellowship is the mingling of threads that make up a fabric and only in a fabric do we have some kind of meaningfulness.
Tho we are alive we live in the midst of death and those of us who have been born of the Spirit into life have been born among the dead. How can we escape Sorrow unless we numb ourselves and kill the life we have been called to.
Mourning is a rerlex to loss and if we have regained what was lost - our own lives, our fellowship with God, we have no reason to mourn except for others - the dead around us. So, this reflex becomes a call and when we set ourselves to the work of "seeking the lost" we find comfort.
Comfort comes in the fruit of our labor. Comfort comes in the fellowship with the "Man of sorrows". Comfort comes in the joy of birth and birth will not come without travail.
The blessedness of Christian mourning comes because our mourning will bring to us and to God and to this world meaningful productivity while the mourning (if mourning is really possible without life) of the world brings them to despair. What is more blessed than to bring someone from despair into hope, or from death into life?
