The Day God Wipes Every Tear

John was still a prisoner on Patmos, where the waves slapped against the stones all day long. Across that water were the churches he loved, and he could not get to them.

In his vision, John had heard a crowd as loud as thunder singing about a wedding. Since then he had seen a rider on a white horse, and the devil thrown into a lake of fire, and Death itself thrown in after him. Now he looked up, and the sky was gone.

The old sky and the old ground had passed away. In their place were a new heaven and a new earth. And there was no sea.

(John had stared at that sea every day on Patmos. In the new world he searched for it and could not find it anywhere.)

Then a city came down out of heaven from God. It was called the New Jerusalem, and it was holy, and it was dressed like a bride on her wedding day, ready for her husband.

(A city in a wedding dress! John did not try to explain it. He just told us what he saw.)

A loud voice rang out from the throne. "Look! God's home is with people now! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them and be their God."

The word John heard for "home" means a tent. (Long ago in the desert, God's tent stood in the middle of Israel's camp, and only one priest, once a year, could step into the room where God was. Now God was pitching his tent among all of them.)

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes," said the voice. "There will be no more death. No more crying, no more sadness, no more pain. The old things have gone away."

Every tear. The tears beside a grave, the tears in the dark after a bad dream, the tears from a stubbed toe. God would wipe every one himself. No more death meant nobody in that city would ever have to say goodbye to someone they loved.

Then the One sitting on the throne spoke. "Look! I am making everything new!"

He meant all of it, from the mountains and rivers to the people who had died, who would get brand-new bodies. (Even the mud would be new mud.)

"Write this down," he told John, "because these words are true, and you can trust them."

So John wrote it down. But when the vision ended, he was still on his rock. The waves went on slapping against the stones, and in the churches across the sea, people still got sick, and cried, and died. The old things had not gone away yet.

But John had seen God pitch his tent among people once already. When John was young, he had followed a man along the roads of Galilee, a man who got tired and hungry and once fell asleep in a boat during a storm. John watched him die on a cross, and then saw him alive again, and the making-new began that morning.

The one who will wipe away every tear has cried tears of his own. Jesus wept at his friend Lazarus's grave, and then he called Lazarus out of it, alive.