Requiem for All Souls

God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Revelation 7.17)

Although we live in a country that is now no longer Christian, or, more accurately perhaps, where Christianity is actually practised by only a small percentage of the population, it would still take a very brave person to hear words spoken by Jesus and then to say, "No, I am not going to do that – I am going to do the exact opposite." And yet that is what we all do, especially at times like these, myself included. I cannot help it, for it is part of my human nature.

There is a lovely part of the Easter story where Mary Magdalene meets the Risen Jesus in the garden by the empty tomb, and when she recognises that it really is him, she does what we would all have done at that moment. She instinctively goes to embrace him. Jesus says to her, "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father." We take his words at face value, and we usually interpret them as meaning something that implies that Mary cannot embrace his resurrection body because there is something about its nature that would make that action impossible. We assume that he is forbidding the single instinctive action of that moment. However, Greek, in which the Gospels were written, has more than one type of imperative form of a verb, and what Jesus is actually saying is, "Do not keep on clinging to me." In other words, he is telling Mary that if she tries to cling on to him as he was before his death, then she will never really meet him or know him as he is in his resurrection life.

Because of human nature, we all do what Mary Magdalene wanted to do. How could we do anything else as human beings who have loved so dearly, and have been loved in return? We all construct our own rituals to hold on to something of the person who has died and whom we have loved.

During the last week, my wife and I had a few days' break staying with a friend of ours on the Isle of Wight. One day, we visited Osborne House, which Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, had built as their private retreat. We stood in Prince Albert's study, which, after Albert's death, the queen had ordered should be kept exactly as it was, even down to the arrangement of things on his desk, on the day that he died. Although my own grandmother was a Victorian by the date of her birth, she didn't quite have Queen Victoria's means, although she had quite a bit of her character. When my grandfather died in 1949, my grandmother got a tailor to take his best suit apart and to re-tailor it so that she could wear it. I always thought that she looked very smart in it, and when I learned what had happened, I understood why!

Most of us have very simple, private rituals to remember and to try to hold on to those whom we have loved. From the day that my father died many years ago, I was given his signet ring by the nurse that attended him and I have worn it on my own hand ever since. Paradoxically – no, deliberately and significantly – I wear it on the hand with which I give everybody the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.

The words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, however, always challenge me: Do not keep on clinging to me. They came to me in anticipation on the day of my father's funeral. When he had died at the beginning of the week, I received a telephone call in the morning to tell me that he had had a massive heart attack. I made it from Birmingham to his bedside before he died, but I threw my best suit in a bag to take with me, having a premonition that I might need it. But I forgot to pack any black shoes. So I went to my own father's funeral wearing his black shoes. I take size ten – he took size eight and a half! Not only could I not step into my father's shoes easily; I could not keep clinging on to him in that way either.

Jesus knew that we all feel the way that Mary Magdalene felt, so he did something for his friends on the evening before he died that would help them to remember him as he was, but also to look forward to what he would be after Easter Day. He took two of the simplest, everyday things of life that were already on the supper table in front of them all and gave them a very special significance in a ritual that we have come to know as Holy Communion. He asked us all to remember him in this very special way, and so we do – even on this evening.

Saint Paul explained the ritual further to the early Christians at Corinth, saying that "as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord's death…" That part of the ritual remembered the past. But then Saint Paul added, "…until he comes." That part of the ritual looks to the future, which was how Jesus wanted his friends to remember him. There was a future to be anticipated. There was a new life, by God's promise, waiting for those who had died. The Christian service of Holy Communion echoes this when we describe the sacrament as "a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all people." This is why, when we remember our loved ones who have died in the past year, we do so in this way. We are remembering not only what they were, but what they are now in God's eternal presence, and what they forever will be.

How can we know, or even begin to explain, what the nature of their life with God now is? It is like trying to look out across a sea to a distant land that our mortal eyesight cannot pick out. Our Methodist hymn-writer, Charles Wesley, said, no – they are not as far away from us as that, and he described death as what he called "the narrow stream". In rituals such as Holy Communion, we can reach out to them in faith and feel their presence round about us.

Last week, Irene and I waited at Portsmouth for the ferry to take us over to the Isle of Wight, whose wonderful outline looms only a mile or three away. I cannot stand on that bit of our English coastline without remembering that another hymn-writer, Isaac Watts, also stood there nearly three hundred years ago and, looking upon the same scene, wrote the famous hymn, "There is a land of pure delight where saints immortal reign." He was looking at the Isle of Wight, of course, but he also intended us to sing that hymn as a metaphor for heaven: "Infinite day excludes the night, and pleasures banish pain."

When Saint John was a very old man, he was given a fleeting vision of heaven, as a promise of what God had prepared for us and for all those whom we have loved. The vision is poetic, symbolic, metaphorical and beautiful. It speaks of many things, in part inspired by what we hope will be, but it contains one of the most beautiful promises in Holy Scripture in relation to those who have died and whom we have loved. In that realm, in God's eternal presence, God will look upon those souls whom we have cherished and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

In my quieter moments of reflection, when the urgency, bustle, and cares of this earthly life have abated for a while, I have often wondered why there might be tears in the eyes of those whom God has brought safely home. In Saint John's original vision, the tears were caused by the saints remembering the pain of the persecution that they had endured in the first century of Christianity. But if the vision was a universal one, rather than merely a particular one, then perhaps the tears that God wiped away had also been shed because the saints suddenly realised that those whom they thought that they had lost were safe, and were waiting for them. They were tears of reconciliation, like the reconciliation of Mary Magdalene. Perhaps too they wept because, although they were safe in God's presence, they still sensed the pain that we feel from their absence from us on this earth, the pain of those whom they had to leave behind for a while.

The faithful promise of God still stands at this season of All Souls: God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Let us this night permit God to wipe the tears from our eyes too.