A Reflection for Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Find today’s readings here.
“Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
and its people to be a delight;
They shall live in the houses they build,
and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.” (Is: 65: 17-18, 21-22)
In John Ford’s classic 1939 film “The Grapes of Wrath,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, the Joads have fled the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and moved to California to seek a better life. There they find only more poverty and hardship in the form of low wages, high prices, merciless agriculture bosses and brutal law enforcement thugs. After Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) kills a man in self-defense during a labor strike, he prepares to leave the family and go on the lam. Ma Joad asks Tom where he is going to go. “I don’t know,” says Tom. He goes on in one of the most iconic speeches in film history:
“I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy. I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when the people are eating the stuff they raise, and living in the houses they build, I’ll be there too.”
That last line of Tom’s, “When the people are eating the stuff they raise and living in the houses they build, I’ll be there too,” directly echoes today’s reading from Isaiah. God is describing what will happen in the “new heavens” and “new earth”, in which his people “shall live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.”
God is promising these good things in this entire reading:
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there,
or the sound of crying;
No longer shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
God’s promise raises the classic question of whether human existence could ever be so ideal, with constant joy and happiness, with no suffering, no weeping. Or surely the “new heavens” and “new earth” are located in the airy realms of the afterlife. Such marvelous human flourishing (no weeping, no crying!) is not meant for the “here and now” but the “there and later.” Correct?
Or is God inviting us to create such a world right here and right now, in the way we live and follow his commands and treat one another? Is God inviting us to create a new heavens and new earth in the universe of our hearts, in the firmament of our souls? “If you live in my will you will carve a space in your heart where, no matter how difficult life gets, you will no longer live in despair or rage or lies, but in the love and peace only I can give.”
Whether God’s vision of a “new heavens and new earth” is meant for the afterlife, or as a promise of life right now, is less important to me than Tom’s tribute to this promise. Namely, that wherever we go and whatever happens to us, God will be there.
