Love Across All

All Saints and the Redemption of the Cosmos

John 11:32-44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Photo by Robert Hrovat on Unsplash

In the science fiction film, Interstellar, the plot begins with a crisis—earth is experiencing climatic upheaval, crops are failing, and dust storms are raging across the landscape. With food scarce and people starving, farming has become an all hands on deck reality. This includes Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned corn farmer. As a scientist he knows the grim truth—the prospects for human survival are slim, teetering on the edge.

Then, through a strange twist of events he follows a set of geographical coordinates to a secret NASA research facility. They are working on an escape plan for humanity—two possible paths for a habitable future. Cooper becomes part of the plan, agreeing to pilot a mission to discover which planets can host human life. NASA calls the mission, the Lazarus project.

It had been a long time since I’d last seen the movie, and yet when I rewatched it recently I felt the same uneasiness I’d had when the film was first released. Here was a profound and beautiful movie with an unquestioned flaw at the center of its plot. The only hope was an escape from earth. All of humanity’s efforts, all its best minds, were not turned toward the healing of what is here, but to an escape to elsewhere, a fresh start on some other planet in some other galaxy. The hope represented by the Lazarus in this film was not resurrection, but escape.

The plot of escape is not an uncommon one in science fiction. It is telling that our stories tend to place more hope in leaving our planet than in healing it. And the narrative of escape is no new fantasy, either. Throughout our history, even our religious imaginations have put our hopes in an elsewhere. We have imagined heaven as a place where we can get away from our earthly entanglements rather than a new reality that enters and renews our earthly life. “I’ll fly away some day by and by,” is not that different from planning a new home for humanity in another galaxy.

It would be easy to imagine Jesus as a figure like Cooper in the movie—a hero who has come to save us from our self-destructive life on this planet by loading us on a space ship and flying us away. But if we turn from the Lazarus project of Interstellar to the story of Lazarus in John’s Gospel; if we listen to the message of the Book of Revelation rather than fantasies of science fiction, then we will find a very different message, a very different hope—resurrection rather than escape, heaven descending to earth rather than us leaving for a heaven elsewhere . It is a story of solidarity.

In the trivia of my childhood scriptural education, we learned that the shortest verse in the bible was John 11:35 in the old King James: Jesus wept. It was an easy addition to our list of memorized Bible verses and yet it wasn’t until I was older that I realized just how profound that verse really is. In those two words we find the reality of the Incarnation—Jesus wept because Jesus is God-with-us, living in solidarity in the midst of our suffering, our loss, our heartache. God is not some aloof divinity who knows it will all turn out okay in the end. Instead, God in Jesus came right into our midst and felt all of the grief we feel.

That resurrection happens and there is life beyond Death, is a realty that comes about through the healing power of God’s solidarity with us. In John Jesus weeps and in Revelation, God wipes away every tear. Both are signs of God’s work to heal the world and make it whole. The raising of Lazarus is a sign of the healing that will come in fullness for all of us. It is a healing that breaks through in Jesus, making way for the restoration of the earth in his resurrection, the first fruits of the feast of the new creation..

God’s work of cosmic resurrection is found in Revelation, where heaven and earth are restored to wholeness rather than destroyed. Here we don’t find a story of escape, but rather of new life coming into the midst of the old. Instead of our going to be with God, God comes down to be with us, making a home with us, pouring out the abundance of His life so that “all things are made new.”

Today, we celebrate All Saints. Over history it has become a time when we remember those we have lost, those we hope to see again in the Resurrection life of God’s renewal of all things. But that word saint refers to something more than simply the Christian dead. It is rooted in the word holy, connected to the words health and wholeness. All of us are saints who live in the hope of God’s healing, all of us are saints who wait even in the midst of our loss and grief and suffering for the coming of God among us, making the world whole. All of us are saints who join with God in the work resurrection, learning to practice it and welcome it in the broken, dying places of our world. We are saints because we have joined our lives to the God who came among us and is coming again. So let’s not plan our escape to an elsewhere. Let’s get to work on healing what is here with the knowledge that the work of resurrection has started. God is moving in and has already started unpacking.