What We Shall Be

Homily for All Saints’ Day — 1 John 3:1–3

By the Rev Dr George Lewis Boar-Hays, Vicar of Macomb

In a certain house, which may no longer exist, there is a photograph of a child.

The child is perhaps six years old. He stands beside a woman whose name has been forgotten. Behind them is a garden, and beyond the garden, a wall.

The photograph preserves an instant that has vanished from the world.

The child does not know that he will grow old. He does not know the people he will love, the people he will lose, the betrayals he will commit, or the forgiveness he will receive.

He does not know that one day he will hold this very photograph and wonder who the child was.

Yet the child and the old man are the same person.

Or so we believe.

There is something mysterious about this continuity. The child has disappeared, and yet he has not disappeared. The old man has become someone the child could not have imagined, and yet he has never ceased to be that child.

Perhaps every human life is such a mystery: a succession of persons who bear one name, remember one another imperfectly, and are somehow one.

The author of the First Letter of John writes to a community that has suffered division.

Those who once called one another brothers and sisters have become strangers. They have disputed the identity of Jesus, the nature of truth, and the meaning of belonging to God.

One might suppose that the writer would begin by explaining who was right.

Instead, he offers a sentence that seems almost too simple:

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.”

And then, as though anticipating our disbelief, he adds:

“And that is what we are.”

Not what we shall become.

Not what we might deserve to become.

What we are.

There is a curious paradox here.

We spend much of our lives attempting to discover who we are. We search our memories. We consult the judgments of others. We assemble the fragments of our histories into something resembling a coherent account.

We imagine that our identity is the sum of everything we have done.

But John suggests that our deepest identity precedes our understanding of it.

We are already known by a name we have scarcely begun to comprehend.

Children of God.

The world, John continues, does not recognize us because it did not recognize Christ.

Recognition is a strange thing.

A person may stand before us, and we may see every feature of that person’s face without knowing whom we are seeing.

The authorities of Jerusalem saw Jesus.

They knew his name. They heard his words. They witnessed his death.

Yet they did not recognize him.

They saw a condemned man.

God saw the beloved Son.

Perhaps the same failure of recognition occurs whenever we encounter another human being.

We see an old woman whose memory has failed. A man whose life appears to have accomplished very little. A stranger whose suffering we cannot understand.

We see what is visible.

We do not see what God sees.

And then John writes one of the most astonishing sentences in the New Testament:

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

We are what we are.

And we do not yet know what we are.

This is not a contradiction.

It is the condition of our existence.

The child in the photograph was already the person who would become the old man, though nothing in the photograph could have disclosed that future.

Perhaps we stand before God as that child stands before the camera.

We know something of ourselves.

We do not know the whole.

We cannot even imagine the whole.

John continues:

“When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

There have been philosophers who supposed that eternity must be an endless succession of moments.

Others imagined it as a single moment containing all moments.

But John does not offer us a theory of eternity.

He offers us an encounter.

We shall see Christ as he is.

And somehow, in that seeing, we shall become like him.

We are accustomed to thinking that knowledge changes what we believe.

John proposes something stranger.

There is a knowledge that changes what we are.

To see Christ truly is not merely to acquire information about Christ. It is to enter so completely into the truth of divine love that our own existence is transformed.

The mirror, at last, will show us a face we have never seen.

And we shall recognize it.

Perhaps this is why the Church remembers the saints.

We remember people whose lives, like ours, were incomplete.

They made mistakes. They suffered disappointments. They grew old. They died.

Some died believing they had failed.

Some were forgotten almost immediately.

Others left behind names that history has preserved, though history, too, is an imperfect memory.

We call them saints not because they had reached the end of becoming, but because they belonged to the God who had not finished with them.

Their stories are not concluded by their deaths.

Nor are ours.

There is one final paradox.

John tells us that those who possess this hope purify themselves.

The future, which has not yet arrived, alters the present.

We live differently because of something we have not yet seen.

Perhaps every act of forgiveness, every gesture of mercy, every refusal to abandon another person is a small anticipation of that final recognition.

We begin, however imperfectly, to see one another as God sees us.

Today we remember the dead.

We remember their faces, their voices, their familiar gestures.

We remember the photographs.

We may suppose that memory preserves them.

But memory preserves only fragments.

The person we loved was always more than we knew.

And if John is right, that person is more than even they themselves knew.

For what they shall be has not yet been revealed.

Nor has what we shall be.

Perhaps, when we see Christ as he is, we shall discover that the long history of our becoming was never merely the story of our attempts to find God.

It was also the story of God knowing us, even when we did not know ourselves.

The child in the photograph.

The old man who remembers him.

The person who has died.

The person who has not yet come into being.

All are held within a love that knows them more completely than they have ever known themselves.

And when at last we see,

we shall discover not that we have become someone else,

but that we have become, at last,

the persons whom love has always known.