The movie Slumdog Millionaire, despite the controversies surrounding it, won eight 2009 Academy Awards and gained popular acclaim. The story’s poverty, violence, crime, and child exploitation provide a backdrop for a young man’s pure, unwavering love for a girl he met in the slums. The pair is tragically separated for years, and after they see each other briefly, she’s taken from him again. Yet he never stops trying to find her.
Against impossible odds, the boy and girl finally reunite. He pulls back her dupatta, revealing a long, captor-inflicted scar that disfigures her face. As she looks down in shame, the young man, his eyes full of tears, holds up her face and kisses her scar. Not first her lips, but her scar. It’s as if the scar itself is at last redeemed, somehow made beautiful.
The extraordinary power of the story lies in the depth of their love, forged in a context of years of injustice, evil, suffering, and separation. That climactic, love-filled moment could not have happened without the story’s disturbing setting. He could not have kissed her scar if she had no scar.
Likewise, the climax of Revelation 21:4, when God wipes away all tears from every eye, could not happen without the billions of tears shed because of the evil and suffering we’ve endured (and inflicted). It could not happen had Jesus not borne it on the cross for us.
David asked God, “Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll—are they not in your record?” (Psalm 56:8). David believed his suffering mattered, that God counted it as precious, so precious that the Lord kept an account of every tear.
This gives special meaning to the promise that God will wipe away every tear from His children’s eyes. Our tears are all recorded in Heaven’s books. God is keeping track of the pain behind each and will deal with them one by one.
When Jesus wipes away all our tears with His gentle, omnipotent hand, I believe our eyes will fall on the scars that made our suffering His, so that His eternal joy could become ours. “He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. The LORD has spoken” (Isaiah 25:8).
Hasn’t God in Christ kissed our scars? And when we look at the scars on the hands and feet of Jesus, might we not, with tear-filled eyes, wish to kiss them?
Put a diamond only in light, and you will see some of its wonders; but set it against something dark then shine a light on it, and you will see what otherwise would have remained invisible.
I fell in love with astronomy years before I fell in love with the Lord of the cosmos. Night after night I observed the marvels of planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies. As every backyard astronomer knows, streetlights and bright moonlight obscure the wonders of the night sky. In order to see the full glory of the stars, I learned that you must stay out for hours in the cold darkness. I did this night after night because what I discovered was worth it.
As the Heavens declare God’s glory in the absence of other light, so God shows Himself against the backdrop of evil and suffering—if only we are willing to look... and to discover that seeing Him is worth even the cold darkness.
