The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C, 2016 – Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, and mourning and crying and pain shall be no more.
What a promise! These are the words with which the Bible draws to a close: our whole scripture, from Genesis all the way to Revelation, Old Testament and New, leading up to this glimpse of a world that is at peace; our scripture speaking finally the hope we so long to hear. Mourning and crying and pain, no more. A new city, God’s city, the city in which God dwells, city formed and shaped by God’s presence, every day. The holy city, the new Jerusalem, city in which all tears are wiped away.
This is not the city we know. The city we know is often full of tears. The cities we know have been full of tears for a very long time.
Do you recall who built the first city? It was Cain. Fresh from the murder of his brother, cast out from the presence of the Lord, Cain wanders east of Eden, in the land of Nod. There he marries and has a son and, Genesis tells us, builds a city. There is no indication in Genesis that the city is all bad; In this city, it appears, the crafts are born and music-making: iron tools and bronze—the hint of weaponry—and lyre and pipe. It is not all bad. If there are weapons, there is also music. It is a human city. But it begins in Cain’s brother’s blood and it leads, before the paragraph is done, to Lamech and another murder and vengeance 77-fold.
Lamech said to his wives:
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
You wives of Lamech, listen to what I say
I have killed a man for wounding me,
A young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
Truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.
The city that humans make is both rich and fraught, the ancient texts say, speaking from the land that has known the cities of Egypt and Nineveh and Babylon. The city that we make is rich, full of the human capacity for life: energy and inventiveness and celebration, music and tools, crafts, and also weapons. It is exciting. I love living in this city because it is a place of people, full of art and sport and crafters and energy, so full of life.
But it is also fraught. Ever since Cain it is fraught, full not just of people but of the ways people hurt each other, marked by old blood and wandering hearts, people turned away from the presence of God and from their own brothers, hurt and hurting, turned in on themselves. It is not the city itself, you understand, that is the problem. It is the fact that the city is built, Genesis says, away from the presence of God.
The city without God is headed inevitably towards blood.
This week David and I watched a film set in Mumbai. The Lunchbox, it is called. It’s worth watching: quietly funny and also very moving. It all hinges on Mumbai’s famous lunchbox delivery system, which never makes a mistake. Mumbai is “city” writ large, the good and the bad of it. There are so many people: crushed together on the trains and hanging out the doors; working cheek by jowl in government offices at endless rows of desks, children playing cricket in narrow muddy streets; a woman cooking food in a tiny kitchen on a two-burner stove, with magic in her hands and a little help from her “auntie” who lives upstairs. There is life here and love—the patient love of the auntie for her husband who has been in a coma for 15 years; the friendship between auntie and Ila, the woman with magic in her hands. But there is also hurt and betrayal and deep loneliness. “My husband comes home late every night,” Ila writes in the lunchbox, “and he looks at his phone all the time.” “There are too many people in this city,” the man who gets the lunchbox says, “and they all want too much.” The man who gets the lunchbox finds no joy in the city. He winces in the crush of people on the train and chases away the children who play outside his gate, and when he smokes by himself on his balcony of an evening, watching the family eating supper together in the next building, the girl who plays in the street gets up and closes the window, and shuts him out. He is alone in the teeming city—his wife died years ago—and his co-workers say he has not smiled in 35 years.
There is a love story here, growing slowly out of loneliness and hurt. But there is first the hurt: the harm that we do, and the pain of loneliness and illness and death. “There are too many people here, and they all want too much.”
This is not yet the holy city. There is death here, and wandering, mourning and crying and pain. The woman’s husband does not come home; the man stands alone by night on his balcony; he shuts out the playing children, and the little girl shuts him out of her light.
This is the city Cain has built, city of people who all want too much, who look at their phones and take what they want and do not see each other.
And yet we discover, as the film goes on, that a redemption is at work. In this city, right in the midst of the crying and the pain, a redemption is at work.
It takes an unlikely form—a mistake in the system that does not make a mistake; an errant lunchbox; an irritating orphan, auntie’s hot chili peppers—but it is at work.
There is a friendship offered at first without any hope of return; there are lunchbox letters from two people who slowly begin to see, really to see, each other. There is an offering of the self. And the man who for a long time has sat in darkness begins, just barely, to smile.
It is the self-offering that makes the difference: the woman who pours her heart into the food that she makes; the man who hears her cry. As the man stands on his balcony one night towards the end of the film, the camera catches something in the shadows on the wall behind him. It is a cross. The man stands alone on his balcony by night, and beside him there is just this: a cross.
“Behold,” John the seer says in the Book of Revelation, “the dwelling-place of God is with people, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them.
In a film that is so nuanced, in which every little thing—even a lunchbox—has meaning, I do not think the cross is accidental.
For the people who sit in darkness, in the darkness a light has shined.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things came into being through him…In him was life, and the life was the light of people. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
God comes to us in the place of our mourning and crying and pain; it is there that he is with us. God comes to us in Jesus the Christ.
He comes to us in Christ even in the city that we have built.
He comes to us in Christ in his glory, and that glory has the shape of the cross.
This is what Jesus means in John’s gospel.
“Now the Son of Man is glorified,” Jesus says to his disciples as Judas goes out into the night. The Son of Man is glorified as Judas goes to betray Jesus, and God is glorified in him. Jesus is looking now, at this moment in John’s gospel, straight at the cross. And it is here that he sees God’s glory, the glory of God revealed in the crucified Son of Man.
This is God’s glory: that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
In the midst of the suffering city, in the shadows of the night, right there with the man on the balcony wall, there is the love of Christ. For the cross is Christ with us, the friendship that persists, the love that does not falter even when we have turned our faces away.
For behold the dwelling-place of God is with people, even in the cities we have built, especially in the cities we have built, even in our loneliness.
God is with us in Christ who has suffered with us, Christ who has suffered our loneliness, the effects of our alienation from each other and from God, Christ who has suffered our God-abandonment, so that we might walk with God once more.
This is the love of God
“A new commandment I give you,” Jesus says to his disciples as he goes to the cross. Love one another as I have loved you.
This too is the grace God gives us: not just that he has so loved us in this Christ, in this cross, but that we might love one another.
It is the love that makes the difference. Small love, unlikely love, love that persists. The friend who will not go away even when he is annoying, even when he is rejected. The love of the hands that care for a dying husband for 15 years, and do not stop; the love of the hands that cook on a two-burner stove in a tiny kitchen food that is manna in a lonely man’s life. It is love that makes the difference: small people’s love, small hands that care.
This is the gift God has given us. That we too may share in the love of Christ, that our small acts of giving may in him be hope in a lonely man’s life. In the darkness on the balcony, the cross stands beside the man. Christ is with him. Christ is with us, in the lonely city. God’s glory, seen even now, in the hands that care.
This is the gift we have been given.
To be a light like the light that is Christ, even in the cities that humans have built. To ease a lonely heart. The city is still the city, sitting in darkness as well as light. People still look at their phones, and want too much. There is death and mourning and crying and pain. For the final consummation we still wait.
But there is even now a light.
God dwells with us even now, in the hands stretched out; Christ walks beside us. The cross is our pledge.
The camera rests on the cross. Toward the end of the movie, the man stands on the balcony again. Across the street the family sits at supper, and the home is full of light. The girl looks up and sees the man. She smiles. He smiles, just a little, and she waves. The window stays open, and the family laughs together, and the man is drawn into the light.
AMEN.
