After the great battle over the ring of power, the hobbit Samwise Gamgee is recovering in a friend’s home. He is injured but will survive. The last he knew, the wizard Gandalf had fallen into an abyss and died. But now at the end of the story (as J.R.R. Tolkien tells it), he hears a voice calling him back to consciousness:
“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?”
Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”
“A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf. And then the wizard laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as Sam listened the thought came to him that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from bed.
“How do I feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” — he waved his arms in the air — “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”
What does it mean to make the sad untrue? Can this really happen?
The theologian N.T. Wright is fond of describing the work of Christ as that of “setting the world right again.” In one of the earliest Christian sermons, Peter declared the coming of “a time of restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21).
One day, the Father will welcome all his children home, set them up in places of their own, and put them in charge of something suitable to them and honorable to their Maker. Then the Son and Spirit will join Him, and from that point on there will be “no more mourning, or crying, or pain” (Revelation 21:4).
The Gospel does not declare that the hurts of this world don’t really matter. If that were so, then Jesus could have avoided going to the cross. It was precisely because they matter that he suffered and died the way he did. He was subject to our weaknesses and susceptible to our vulnerabilities.
But where we fail and hide, Jesus keeps his face toward God even as he suffers unjustly. He fights a fight we cannot win and comes out the other side alive forever.
Our present joy is in waking up, opening our eyes, and seeing Him who is with us always, even to the end of the world.
Russel Jarvis has lived in Hancock County since 1989 and has served as the lead chaplain at Hancock Regional Hospital since August 2003. This weekly column is written by local clergy members. Send comments to [email protected].
