THE END OF DEATH IN JOHN’S APOCALYPSE
Jesus the Comforter, August Andreas Jerndorff. Public Domain.
I originally wrote much of the material that follows for two sermons given earlier in May 2022, and I lined up much frothier introductions to connect the lectionary passages from the Book of Revelation to our life between Easter and Pentecost. Today, as I am editing them together, waves of grief in the wake of repeated mass shootings are enveloping many in the United States, and my perspective on the book has changed. When I manage to face the anguish of our current state of affairs, I realize I want a reckoning straight out of Revelation’s most dramatic pages. My soul yearns for a full and final end to the gun violence crisis. The trouble is that my imagination struggles to discern how that can taks shape without requiring more force. Revelation certainly includes imagery that can be contorted into support for those kinds of actions, familiar in the calls even now to arm ‘the good guys’ more than ‘the baddies,’ to further militarize police forces, to send our children off to school saddled by bulletproof backpacks, our elders to market in body armor, and our pastors to worship in ballistic vestments. Chasing the illusion that only a superior vengeance can suppress violence, we weaponize even the summons to put away our swords. Yet I’m convinced that the tail end of our Bible presents a quieter, gentler kind of apocalypse, one that brings the power to heal.
‘Apocalypse’ most often appears in our vocabulary when describing alien invasion films or devastating scenes dutifully detailed by news agencies. But the word ‘apocalypse’ does not really concern a threatened end of the world suitable for blockbuster productions, nor is it restricted to bad stuff. It simply means uncovering a truth that can no longer be ignored. Since whoever wrote Revelation calls it an “apocalypse (apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ” (1:1), what it reveals must therefore be understood as specific to the Risen One. Given how many American references use the book as a means of determining who gets to be on the winning side of a cosmic showdown, I don’t know if the corrections of this christocentrism can be over-stated. The apocalypse Revelation unveils is not how to prooftext your favorite enemy into being bound for a lake of fire but rather how to receive the truest truth that God revealed in Jesus is for us and for our salvation.
God’s being for us and our salvation consists simply of being an available presence. In 21:3, after much of the drama settles down, what is described as a fierce (megalēs) voice insists, “see, the home of God is among mortals.” All the preceding narratives of dragons, plagues, and warfare point to this promise that God is near. The Holy One proclaims a commitment that has been shown in Christ to endure through the most difficult things we humans do to one another: betrayal, neglect, quests for power, seeking self-preservation to the point of causing another’s suffering and death. Even so, the word for ‘dwelling with’ in verse three is not a begrudging assent but rather connotes the joyful tabernacling of a God who pitches a tent (skēnōsei) around us.
Echoing the words that Ruth uses when she promises that Naomi’s people, place and God will become her own (Ruth 1:16-17), in Revelation 21 God treats us as the beloved who can never be abandoned: “God will tabernacle with them, they will be God’s peoples and God’s own self will be with them as their God” (verse 3). Not that God could be near if we would just be good, or that God might sometimes show up, but that God is in fact already close at hand. God will settle for nothing less than dwelling with humanity, calling us God’s own people, permanently putting God’s own self in our midst. There’s no place God would rather be, no work God would prefer to engage, than to set up camp right where we are.
Of what does this tabernacling presence consist? We may struggle to imagine the glory that attends finally and fully being with God as anything other than a fantastical setting where we never face budgetary dilemmas and our air conditioning always works. And Revelation’s description of the new Jerusalem can seem extreme: stars fall, streets are paved in gold, and we hang around angelic beings covered with eyes. But before we get carried away with new visions of grandeur, chapter twenty-one verse four says that when God is with us and we are secure in being God’s people, and the fresh (kainēn) and holy (hagian) city of God is taking shape in our midst, the first thing that happens is…God wipes away our tears. I have to pause each time I read that line. Maybe you can, too.
“And God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
God does not only throw in the Divine lot with us in a general way. God closely tends to our crying. God wipes away each tear until “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (21:4). No more dying. No more grieving. No more kraugē, the loud shrieking in unearthly clamor that is often the only sound the wounded can make. No more ponos, the pain of toiling while silenced by agony. As I write this, I am thinking about the terror of a child playing dead under the body of a classmate, elders shot while searching for safety, the keening of family and community members, the stricken faces of countless victims of abuse. I lack the emotional capacity to fully process even one of these tragedies. Yet God is present and promises to fully attend to all.
How does God’s tending work? First, God never tells us that we should try to make the old order of death disappear by pretending it did not harm us. Contrary to what we might first think, wiping tears does not mean stopping them. At a time and in a country where grief is so often constricted into a performance that washes our own hands of responsibility and pushes us back into the status quo, we may miss the fact that God’s hands wait to tend all our tears. For death cannot be stopped if all we do is cover or hustle through grief. When we short-circuit lament, we are far more likely to constrict the new life our world so badly needs and which God plentifully offers. We fall prey to death’s hidden extended-release capsule of retribution, scapegoating, or passivity.
God, however, does not urge us to quiet down, pick up, or move on. The text’s vocabulary emphasizes each and every one tear, combining the Greek word for ‘all’ (pan) with the singular noun ‘teardrop’ (dakryon). This stress that God wipes each tear, one by one, means God’s concern is not to make us stop crying, hide our tears behind a stiff upper lip, or cover our sorrow with smiles and platitudes. God neither admonishes us to find good in our suffering nor hastens our recovery. For God is in the business of healing, not repressing. God sticks close enough so we can express all our pain, in all the anguish of our actual feelings. God comes close to listen, to carry with us our agony, to gently wipe away each tear, as many times and for as long as we need. Only this patience can heal our despair.
And it is not just the crying that God stops, for tears are a symptom of a problem, the righteous response to suffering. The text calls God’s wiping away exaleiphó, which means “removing each and every trace.” The choice of this verb stresses that every last bit of how pain has shaped our lives is wholly and entirely obliterated, in the same way that a canceled debt has no more hold over us. To be so totally removed, the causes and scope of each tear must be addressed. If God obliterates each tear, then God also removes all the snarled reasons and means for our tears—all our fear, loneliness, rage, and retributive impulses. Revelation 21 tells us that the Risen One who has tasted but conquered all these forms of death’s dominion makes God’s healing hands totally available to us, even in the midst of our continued struggles. Revelation 21 shows us that God makes death cease by addressing each bit of its damage in each one of our tears. God’s top priority for our new life together is not to guarantee a showy victory. The first thing on God’s mind is healing us from death’s dominion. Our pain is heard, it is acknowledged, it is lovingly tended to, and its sources are healed. That is how death at last grinds to a halt.
Revelation has one more apocalypse to unveil: the truth that attending to pain not only ends death but also knits together God’s people. Though each occasion for tears impacts each of us differently, healing sorrow and death is not a private affair. For as we know, this chapter is describing how the new city of God takes shape, how God enacts belonging among all the people who count the Risen One their savior. Chapter 22, verses 3-5 clarify that in this place, the people bear God’s name on their foreheads. Getting a giant facial tattoo marking them as Christ’s own means that they take on God’s own behavior, that they willingly embody their belonging to God with their every word and deed. This, too, is an unveiling of the Risen Christ: we are given the power to adopt God’s own behavior, including the patient and thorough erasure of all of death’s dealings. As God’s hands wipe away our tears, so, too must we wipe away the tears of those who suffer. And not just the tears as the result, but all the factors that brought on those tears, every last little nook and cranny of pain. We must eradicate them, too.
If that is the life of the Risen One God wishes to make real in our midst, how will this apocalpyse change us? How will we become present to this God? How will we learn to do this for others, as a way of extending in their lives the gift of healing hands God makes available to us? Especially in this time when church credibility is low because the name of God has been used to foment violence and shush or deny grief, what will it look like to practice this care, this kind of tabernacling, in company with the God whose sole desire is to be with us to heal, to bless, to tend?
Truly, God’s hands heal us from death. And truly, God has no hands now but ours. As St. Teresa of Ávila put it, “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which [God] looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands, with which [She] blesses all the world.”
Call, email, write, text your elected Senators and Representatives. March. Carry out careful conversations with family, friends, and neighbors. Do what you can to obliterate one tendency towards violence, however small, from your own or another’s life. Because this is the healing way of our God. +