At some point in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity,” Burt Lancaster’s character delivers a great line to Deborah Kerr’s character. He says to her, “I’ve never been so miserable in all my life since I met you, and I wouldn’t change a minute of it.” This is the premise of most romantic comedy: that some relations seem miserable, but there are rewards that make them worthwhile. This is also the premise of a fair bit of religion: that a relationship with God might be difficult, might even make you miserable, but the rewards make it worthwhile.
If you ask me, the quip makes a pretty good prayer. It’s the type of thing I sometimes feel I want to say to Jesus in my prayers, when I reflect on how relentless is Christ’s call to follow him and to love him, and how often that call insists that I see that the world does not revolve around me.
Today, on the Sunday after the Ascension, Easter is starting to feel like a distant memory, and it feels like we bid farewell to Jesus on Thursday night. And from this vantage point, all these generations later, we might be beginning to reflect that Resurrection and Ascension are all fine for Jesus, but to ask ourselves what’s in it for you and me? A lot of people look at the church these days and they can only see a lot of misery caused by and within the temples of religion. I suppose that they suspect that trying to have a relationship with Jesus will only make you miserable, so why bother? For many Christians, the rationale for putting up with the demands of a relationship with Jesus is the promised reward of eternal life. It may be difficult to follow Jesus, even miserable in some ways, but considering the reward, they wouldn’t change a thing.
But eternity isn’t what it used to be. Eternity used to be what we called “world without end.” But then we realized that we didn’t really mean that. Eternity used to be for ever and ever and ever and ever. But we are not so sure that’s good idea, either. Who wants to go on for ever and ever and ever and ever, world without end? Eternity was much more popular, I suspect, when neither the past, the present, nor the future was all that wonderful for many or most people. If you were miserable anyway, the promise of eternity was an attractive alternative, I guess, as long as it was lived in paradise; as long as eternal life is to be lived in heaven, not hell.
But of course, changing attitudes about heaven and hell have also tended to undermine the appeal of eternity. Nowadays most people would be hard-pressed, I think, to say just what they think they mean by either “heaven” or “hell,” let alone what the church might mean by these concepts. Eternity might be just fine, as long as it’s in paradise. But who really believes in a heavenly paradise these days? And as long as there’s Paris, could paradise really be that much better? And if Paris isn’t your cup of tea, well then, there’s Vegas.
But the prospect of eternity as a spiritual prize has also begun to seem less appealing, as many people find the idea of reward and punishment as the two possible outcomes of religious participation somewhat unconvincing.
In the New Testament, eternity is usually mentioned in the context of “eternal life.” And this promise of eternal life is always presented as a reward, much to be desired. Nine times, in St. John’s gospel, do we hear Jesus promise the reward of eternal life. It is a significant theme. But if eternity isn’t what it used to be, neither, I suspect, is the promise of eternal life. I suspect that there are simply fewer and fewer people out there who prioritize the possibility of eternal life as a happy thing to hope for. Even at death’s door, the possibility that a new life might await us, unbound by the limits of time, might be too nebulous a promise to bring much hope and comfort to many people. Plus, many people these days put more faith in medicine than in God, so that the end of life is almost always preoccupied with avoiding the inevitable rather than preparing for it. No, the promise of eternal life isn’t what it used to be.
In the passage we heard from John’s gospel just now, Jesus is praying to God the Father, and in his prayer, Jesus says a curious thing:
“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son… since you have given him authority… to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. As I say, this is a curious statement, and I’m sure that it can be read in a number of ways. The way I read it, Jesus means that eternal life is somehow related to “knowing” God, and this is “knowing” in more or less the biblical sense, which is to say, not so much as an item of knowledge as in the object of a relationship. And if eternal life is somehow related to coming into a closer and more obvious relationship with the one, true God, it is not clear, in this formula, whether eternal life is the benefit that comes from the mechanism of being in a relationship with God; or whether a deep and intimate relationship with God is the benefit of the mechanism of having been given eternal life. Which comes first? I hope it will not surprise you to hear that I don’t think it matters which is the result of which.
What I think is this: that humanity is not in a crisis because people see less and less value in the promise of eternity. Whether eternal life is used as a carrot or stick in the development of a spiritual life, I’m not sure it makes the difference between being a card-carrying, church-going Christian, and a person who knows themselves to be spiritual but not religious, or a person who has neither spirituality nor religion to call upon in their life.
But humanity is in a crisis in many ways because people do not know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he sent. Without knowing God - that is to say, without having a meaningful relationship with God - people do not know who or what to worship. As the late, great American writer, David Foster Wallace, reminded us in a famous speech he once gave. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Wallace went on to say this: “…the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”* Wallace knew whereof he spake. For, in this world of ours, consumerism, the greed of the marketplace, guns, warfare, addiction to fossil fuels, political orthodoxies, the intransigence of racism, and the stumbling of truth in the public square, among many other objects of worship, are surely eating us alive, little by little.
When Jesus prayed about the gift of eternal life that is his to give us, he was, I think also praying that we would come to know who to worship in a life in which everybody worships, and the only choice we get is what to worship. “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
But, as I say, eternity isn’t what it used to be. The time-space continuum isn’t what it used to be, either. If Einstein could imagine a four-dimensional world, so can God, so the odds seem likely to me that Einstein was onto something. And eternity is not a long and endless string of linear time, but a reality in which everything is always happening everywhere, we just can’t see it from where we live. Maybe eternal life is the gift of being able to perceive the created order as it truly is, God perceives it, which might be in four dimensions, or more. Maybe the gift of eternal life isn’t a measure of time, maybe eternal life is a measure of God’s love.
Jesus did not come into the world to make us miserable but willing to bear that misery because of the promise of a reward that would carry us from here to eternity. Jesus came into the world to bring us back into a close and intimate relationship with God, to establish a new covenant of love, in which we know ourselves to be loved by God, and in which we can reclaim the desire to love God too.
Jesus wants us to know the truth of God as God really is. And when we know that truth in the biblical sense - that is, when we have embraced the truth that God loves us - then we will see the world as it really is, in four dimensions or more, unbound by time or space, and we will know that we have been given the gift of eternal life, which will turn out to be even better than it was cracked up to be!
Jesus’ prayer to God the Father that the gift of eternal life will some day be ours, is a recognition that from where we live our lives now, bound by time and space, life can too often be a misery. But I also suspect the Jesus wants to pray the same exact prayer about me that I would have prayed about him: “I’ve never been so miserable in all my life since I met you,” I can hear Jesus say to me, “and I wouldn’t change a thing."
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
21 May 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
*David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,* a commencement speech at Kenyon College, may 21, 2005
