John 11: 32-44 &
Revelation 21:1-6a
All Saints’ Day - 1st
November 2015 - Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
And
so we find ourselves in between, caught, as it were, between two tearful
texts.
In
John 11, we find Jesus summoned to the home of Mary and Martha. Their brother Lazarus was sick and died and
was already in the tomb four days by the time Jesus arrived. Jesus entered a house full of tears. Mary was weeping. Their friends who came to pay their respects
were also weeping. Jesus discovered a place
flooded with grief and sadness. We’re
told, as the NRSV renders it, that Jesus “was greatly disturbed in spirit and
deeply moved.” It’s actually stronger in
the Greek. “Greatly disturbed in spirit”
is really more like anger. The Greek verb here describes someone who is
furious—even verbally expressing disgust or violent displeasure at
something. Groaning, grunting at
something. “Deeply moved” is deep
emotion, emotion that causes one to shake, to shudder. Shaking and angry, Jesus asked, “Where have you
laid him?” “Here come and see,” they
said. “Jesus wept.” ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς . John 11:35, the shortest verse in the King James Version,
should be read this way: “Jesus burst into tears.”
In the apocalypse, that is, the
revelation given to John the Divine (not the writer of the Gospel, a different
John), we find in chapter 21 a glimpse of the vision he saw and an echo of the
voice he heard speaking to him. Seeing
deep into the mind of God, seeing deep into the future, seeing deep into the
end or purpose of history itself, John tells us what he saw, “Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth…and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down
out of heaven from God…and I heard a voice from the throne of the Lamb, “See,
the home of God is among mortals. He
will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself
will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying
and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Rev. 21:1-4).
The vision is stunning, staggering
in its implications: heaven to earth; earth renewed, not destroyed; God,
formerly perceived as distant and aloof will come “down” and in and dwell among us, as God did in Jesus, and will live near us, as close
to us as our breath. And God’s near-presence
will change our lives and remove all that separates us from God and from one
another and ourselves. God will wipe
every tear from their eyes; mourning and crying and pain will be no more. It’s a beautiful sentiment, full of hope. But we must not be sentimental with this
text, nor with the reading from John 11.
Yes, tears will be wiped dry—completely—which, then, means an end to
tears, which, then, means the complete removal of everything that causes us to
tear, everything that causes us to mourn and cry, even death itself must be
removed.[1] Life-giving water will wash away our
tears. For God’s presence makes all
things new.
And so we find ourselves caught in
this in-between time, held, as it were, by these two tearful texts. Jesus bursts out in tears over the death of
his friend Lazarus and the promise of a time when tears will cease. But what about us? How do
we, then, live in the meantime? How
do we live until that day when every tear will be removed from our eyes? Let’s go back to John’s gospel.
Why was Jesus so angry? What bore the brunt of his anger? Death.
Biblically, theologically speaking death
isn’t simply a natural process, a question of biology. We know that it is a natural process, of course, but
biblically, theologically speaking it’s also something else. And resurrection in the New Testament doesn’t
necessarily mean the end of biological death, that is, something that happens only after we
physically die. Death is a force working against what God intends for
us. Death is a force that is at odds with God’s intention for creation and
creatures alike, and what God intends for us is life.
As I’ve tried to stress over the years, Koine Greek has two different words for
our one English word life: bios
and zoe. Bios
is natural life; think of the word biology. Zoe,
on the other hand, is fulfilled life, pregnant with possibility. It’s zoe, life-giving life, full-life,
meaningful life that Jesus offers us, not biology, not simply existing, but
being and becoming fully alive! When Jesus said, “I came that they may have
life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), he’s talking about zoe, not bios. John’s gospel calls
this zoe-life “eternal life,” but
this doesn’t mean life ever after, or life after this life. Instead, “eternal life” in John’s gospel
(as in John 17:3) is a here-and-now experience; it’s really “life touched by
eternity,” life touched by the divine presence, the life of the everlasting one, namely
God; that’s everlasting life.
How do we know this? It’s all over John’s gospel, but just focus
here on John 11. Jesus raises Lazarus
from death. But, think about it. This action didn’t stop Lazarus from dying,
right? He eventually died. But after his resurrection (that is, the
first one) he never lived on earth the same way again—how could he? How can you live life, perceive life the same
after you’ve been brought to true life from out of death? The poet G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
reflects this radical change of perspective in his poem The Convert:
After
one moment when I bowed my head
And
the whole world turned over and came upright
And
I came out where the old road shone white,
I
walked the ways, and heard what all men said…
They
rattle reason out through many a sieve
That
stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And
all these things are less than dust to me
Because
my name is Lazarus and I live.[2]
The point is this: the everlasting life
that Jesus gives is basically the same on both sides of the grave![3] Jesus gives life on both sides of the grave! This
means that we don’t have to die in order to know something of Christ’s
resurrection life. With Jesus, “Life
is changed, not taken away.”[4] This also means that until that day—when “all shall be well, and
all manner of thing shall be well,” as the English mystic Julian of Norwich
(1342-1416) loved to say—until that day we can be confident that the life of
Jesus meets us in our places of pain and torment and suffering, that Jesus’ anger
rages against all the things, all the forces of death that cause us to weep; he
weeps for us, he weeps with us, and his life-giving presence
fills all those places of grief and absence that we know about all too well in
our lives. Our tears mix with his
tears. Our tears, when mixed with his tears, flowing together, can actually become
the place we encounter the Lord of Life!
This means we are people—saints!—that witness God’s new life in the
midst of this dying world; God’s resurrection life bring us to life, even in
this life marked by tears and pain and sorrow—this is the work of God making all
things new! (Rev. 21:5).
At the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
(1892-1973) epic journey The Lord of the
Rings, in a scene that echoes John’s vision in Revelation 21 (Tolkien was a
devout Christian, a Roman Catholic), we find the terrible Ring destroyed in the
fires of Mount Doom and the world finally free from the evil of Sauron. Now, maybe
you love Tolkien; maybe you don’t. Maybe
you’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; maybe you
haven’t. May you’ve watched all three
movies, including the extended version of each (as I have); maybe you
haven’t. Nevertheless, the way Tolkien
brings his story to a close is amazing.
All
those who engaged in the many battles required to free Middle-earth, those that
survived, having faced this ordeal of suffering, pain, loss, and death—an
ordeal that reflects Tolkien’s own experience in the First World War[5]—gather
in the woods to honor the Hobbits. Frodo and Sam, the heroes, are placed on a
throne and everyone bows to them in gratitude.
The crowd cheers. A minstrel of
Gondor asks to sing a song in praise of “Frodo and…the Ring of Doom.” With tears and laughter they listened. Here’s how Tolkien describes what happens
next, “And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their
merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold,
and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the [tongue of Elves], now
in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words,
overflowed, and their joy was like swords”—that is, pierced by joy—“and they
passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears
are the very wine of blessedness.”[6]
The
place “where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of
blessedness.”
That place is not unlike
this place, the Table of the Lord,
where all our tears of pain and delight flow together with the tears of Christ
and become for us the very wine of blessedness.
O blest Communion.
The title is borrow from the hymn text written by William Billings (1746-1800), "When Jesus wept, the falling tear in mercy flowed beyond all bound" (1770).
Image: Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Saintly Throng, a rendering of Dante Alighieri's (1265- 1321), Paradiso (Canto 31), 1885.
Image: Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Saintly Throng, a rendering of Dante Alighieri's (1265- 1321), Paradiso (Canto 31), 1885.
[1]Brian Blount, Revelation: A Commentary
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2009), 380.
[2]G. K. Chesterton, “The
Convert,” The Collected Poems of G. K.
Chesterton (1927).
[3] Gerard Sloyan, John (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988),
150-151.
[4] Sloyan, 151.
[5] See John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of
Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).
[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: Vol. III – The Return of the King, originally published in London by George
Allen & Utwin, 1955.
