Everything Will Return

Last Friday was November 1^st. For many people, that’s the day you take down the Halloween decorations and turn on the Christmas music. Some others know November 1^st as All Saints Day: a day on the Church calendar when we remember and celebrate the saints who have lived and died before us. (And when I say “saints,” I don’t just mean those with an St. before their names, but anyone who’s lived with Jesus as their Lord.)

All Saints is a chance to learn from the wisdom and examples of those believers of the past, but it’s also a chance to celebrate God’s promises for the future. One of the scripture readings for All Saints Day this year was from Revelation 21, one of my favorite passages in the Bible, when, after the dead are raised back to life in chapter 20, John glimpses a “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1). And he hears a voice that says

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 and be their God; 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. (21:3-4)

That’s the promise we hold on to whenever we lose a “saint” we love: one day, the dead will live again, and God will come to live with us, forever. No more death. No more tears. No more hurt.

And that future, according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, includes new, eternal bodies (15:35-56). Just like the resurrected Jesus walked out of his tomb, ate broiled fish, and held out his hands to disbelieving disciples, we can expect resurrected bodies for that eternity with God and each other. After all, when with the saints in glory we at last see Jesus’s face, how could we sing with “joy through the ages” of his love for us, without lips, tongues, vocal chords, or lungs?

I recently came across a passage from the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov that, I think, beautifully captures that All Saints hope. It’s from a letter to his mother, as she grieved the loss of Nabokov’s father:

Three years have gone–and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us… slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair. Everything will return.

Everything will return—birthmarks, the way he raised his shoulders, everything.

When Christ comes again and God’s saints climb out of their graves, they’ll know each other. They’ll recognize that face, those hands, that gait. They'll know those bodies. 

For every saint, for everyone who lives with Jesus as their Lord, everything will return.

That’s the promise I’m celebrating and resting in this week.