The Perfect Ending

The scriptures referred to are Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35.

I was watching a YouTube video on bad endings that writers should avoid because it betrays the emotional investment that the reader or watcher had in the story. The YouTuber John Fox listed 8 bad endings. Among them were the rushed ending, such as we saw in the last season of The Game of Thrones. There's the story without an ending, such as we see whenever a TV series is cancelled and ends on a cliffhanger. There's the Deus Ex Machina ending brought about by an outside or previously undisclosed force, such as in Live and Let Die when James Bond's magnet watch turns into a buzzsaw that cuts through his ropes, a feature not mentioned beforehand by Q. There's the unearned happy ending, such as you see in most Hallmark movies when previous conflicts to the couple getting together are easily reconciled. And let's not forget the infamous “It was all a dream” trope, forever remembered as the notorious way the TV show Dallas undid its entire 9^th season. Fox's last category to avoid was the predictable ending. By this he means the ending you could see coming practically from the beginning of the story. Fox did not mean that every story should end with a twist that changes the tone or genre of the story. Instead, he cited Greek playwright Sophocles who said that the ending should be both surprising and yet appropriate. You should be able to look back over the story and say, “I did not see that coming but it totally makes sense that this is how the story should end.” A great example is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.

Our passage from Revelation is the ending of the saga of the Bible. God creates a new heaven and a new earth with a new Jerusalem in which God will dwell with his people. Death, mourning, crying and pain all cease to exist. It's a happy ending but is it a good ending? To determine that, let's look back at the story.

The Bible begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. He forms the earth and populates it with plants and animals and then creates human beings in his image to take care of the earth. He pronounces it all very good. (Genesis 1)

God is love, we are told in 1 John 4:8. And for genuine love to exist people must have free will so they can choose to love. But that means we can also choose not to love. And humans chose not to obey their loving God and instead use the gifts he's given them to bring sin and violence into the paradise God has created. (Genesis 6:5,11) The rest of the Bible is the story of how the God who is love works to bring human beings back to him. He chooses to work through various people who respond to him by trusting and having faith in him. He works through people like Noah, Abraham, his son Isaac, and of his 2 sons, Jacob, who is renamed Israel. And then out of Israel's twelve sons, he chooses Judah, and out of his descendants, he chooses David.

Along the way God leads his people through folks like Moses and the judges and kings descended from David. Through Moses, God's people are liberated from slavery, enter into a covenant with God and receive laws to govern themselves. (Exodus 20:1-17) They later become a kingdom, bordered by much larger empires. But they repeatedly disobey God and forget his law. Finally they are conquered, their temple is destroyed and they are taken into exile in Babylon. In exile, they realize that they have not been obeying God and turn back to his law. When they are liberated again God's law is reintroduced into Judea under Ezra, and though the Jews rebuild their temple to God, they are now people of the Book, the written Word of God.

God's Word consists of the Torah, or law of Moses, the writings, which include the Psalms and wisdom books, and the prophets, who speak for God and constantly call God's people to repent and turn back to him. The prophets speak of a new spiritual covenant to come. (Jeremiah 31:33-34; Ezekiel 11:19-20) They also predict the coming of the Messiah, the Anointed One who will save his people. (Isaiah 9:6-7; Daniel 7:13-14) In the New Testament, which literally means the New Covenant, it is revealed that Jesus, a descendant of David, is the Messiah or in Greek, Christ.

Jesus heals, preaches and teaches about the kingdom of God. (Matthew 9:35) But this is not a worldly kingdom. (John 18:36) It is not a political kingdom with borders. It is not an ethnic kingdom made of one kind of people. (Revelation 5:9; 7:9) It includes all who respond to Jesus' voice and come to him, regardless of their race, nation or language. (John 10:14-16) As he says in today's gospel, the hallmark of his kingdom is love, the love we see in Jesus' own life and ultimately in his dying for our sake.

The religious and political authorities do not understand Jesus' kingdom and have him executed on a cross, the most cruel method they had. He dies and is buried. But on the morning of the third day, he is raised to life. His disciples, his students, begin to realize that Jesus is more than just a man—he is God in the flesh, the Word of God incarnate, who shows his love by dying to save us from slavery to sin and by rising again to share his eternal life with those who respond to him with trust. (John 1:1-15; 10:30) He gives his disciples his Spirit and sends them out into the world to proclaim the gospel or good news of God's love, forgiveness and grace revealed in Jesus. (John 20:21-22; Matthew 28:18-20) And God's Spirit works through people to spread the good news and bring people into his kingdom. Like Jesus, his followers face hardship and opposition. They face temptation and those who pervert the gospel for personal gain. Yet the spread of the good news of the God of love revealed in Jesus Christ cannot be stopped.

Our passage from the Book of Revelation reveals how, despite all these trials and tribulations, God will resurrect the heavens and the earth as he did his son Jesus. He will make all things new and restore creation to being a paradise once more. He will populate it with his resurrected people who will no longer suffer death, pain or sorrow. He will personally wipe away all tears with his own nail-scarred hands. He will live with his people in the new Jerusalem, where heaven and earth meet.

That is the right ending to the story of the God of love and his people. It is certainly not rushed. Jesus' death and resurrection which set up the ending took place almost 2000 years ago.

It is not unearned. It was accomplished at great cost to Jesus, God's beloved son.

It is not predictable in the sense that how God would do this was not obvious at first and yet it is foreshadowed in the prophets, especially Isaiah 53, and so is appropriate and satisfying.

It is not accomplished by an outside or previously undisclosed force, because God has been at work with and in humans from the start.

It is not simply a dream, albeit a pleasant one, because the story of humanity has not come to an end. So it is also not a story that lacks an ending. As a character in the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel says, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, then it's not yet the end.”

The real question is whether we want this to be the ending of our personal story. Do we want to be part of God's people, who put their trust in the God who is love and who is revealed in Jesus? Do we want to let his Holy Spirit restore in us the image of God that we see in Jesus? Do we want to have Jesus, God incarnate, heal us and wipe away all our tears? Do we want him to make all that we have gone through meaningful because we were no longer struggling for our own selfish ends but carrying out his mission to bring love and forgiveness and grace to everyone we possibly can?

We will all die some day. We will all be as dead as the flies who lie on window sills or who were swatted with but a moment's thought. Will our lives be as insignificant as those of flies? Will we end up as merely another element of the soil people and animals walk on? Will all that we have experienced and learned be forgotten and lost?

Or will we trust in the God who promises life and joy eternal with him, wrapped in the love between the Father, Son and Spirit, the love which has existed before creation and which will restore creation and which lives in the very heart of creation? The choice is ours.