There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold. -Frodo, The Return of the King
Frodo and Sam have come a long way on their journey. For months the two hobbits fought all that Mordor would bring against them in their quest to save the Shire — and the whole of Middle Earth — from ultimate destruction. “We set out to save the Shire, Sam,” Frodo told his faithful friend. Tears streamed down the loyal gardener’s face as Frodo’s words fell on his ears. Somehow, he knew that Frodo could never go back to his old life. He had seen too much. His heart had been burdened too heavily by the weight it was given to bear. Frodo finished his statement with a finality of such poignancy that Sam’s heart was wrenched from his chest, “And it has been saved. But not for me.” The fellowship that had for so long protected and sustained each of them had at last come to an end. Frodo was to board the last ship leaving for the Grey Havens, for Tolkien’s metaphor for heaven. His time on earth was over.
I hate the expression that “time heals all wounds.” It’s not true. Time heals nothing. In fact, the distance time creates is often an illusion, and can even crater a wound instead of healing it. “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?” Frodo asks himself. “How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?” There is a deep truth that Frodo, years after the fellowship had completed its mission and he had returned to the Shire, began to understand. Time had not healed his heart. It had not erased the pain of his body and mind. The weight of the ring had crippled him beyond the restoration that time could offer. He needed something greater to resurrect his life. He needed the “far green country under a swift sunrise,” as Gandalf had earlier described it, where ” the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass…the white shores… and beyond.”
In Tokien’s world, the ring represents evil in its purest form, and the ring bearer is slowly taken beyond the border of life into the realm of death. Throughout the story, Frodo’s life is slowly but inevitably disintegrated and diminished, soon beyond any hope of repair available on earth. Such it is with all of us since the Fall. The sin that we inherited through disobedience weighs on all of us. Even the earth itself has been set against us: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). All of us have been wounded and will be by the Evil One, as God said we would (v. 15). None of us escape it. And nothing the world can offer will be able to heal these wounds or resurrect our hearts that have been weighed down too heavily by the effects of separation on our souls, torn as they are from life toward diminishment, disintegration, and, ultimately, death.
If we are to be restored at all to the life we were made to live, it must come from beyond us and beyond our world, yet come into our world to reach us where we are. We are far too weak to even reach out beyond ourselves for it. It must come to us, and it must come all the way to us.
This is the promise of Jesus for us. It is why His coming is such good news, and why people for centuries have fallen into His provision with abandon. Because there is no other. Nothing else can restore us, including time itself. What Jesus offers us is a complete restoration, so whole and complete that the Scriptures refer to it as a resurrection, meaning that the life we live now is death in comparison to the life we get to live.
I am astounded at this offer. How can we refuse it, if we really knew what it was about? And the cost… it was everything for Him. He bore the weight of it, taking it from us and transferring it to His own shoulders. Apparently, He could not stand the thought of our dying, being lost to Him forever. And so He came, wild with desire and hope and joy He came. My friends, this is the offer. How can we refuse Him? How could we turn our backs on life toward the death we now experience in our souls? How could we but faint into Him and accept this invitation? Nothing more matters to Him than our restoration back into the life He always intended us to live, a life full and at His side.
I am taken by His love, and I can do nothing but gasp with my fainting breath a solid yes to the offer. Where else could I go?
