This is Eternal Life

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on May 17, 2026, by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 17: 1-11

If you take a walk from the centre of Rome above the Tiber River and stroll up Aventine Hill you’ll find the Priory of the Knights of Malta, a religious order of crusaders founded in Jerusalem in the eleventh century. It’s the oldest surviving chivalric order in the world. It’s protected by a rather forbidding and far-from-beautiful ten-foot green door. If you kneel down at the door and look through the keyhole, you get an unforgettable surprise. What you see through the keyhole is a view, perfectly framed by the cypress trees of the priory garden, of the rotunda of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, two miles away.

I want you to think of this experience as a metaphor for eternal life. Given that eternal life is central to the message of Jesus; death is inevitable for all of us and pressing for many of us; and trust in eternal life is perhaps the key point of difference between Christianity and the secular world, it’s surprising the church doesn’t talk very much about eternal life. Why? Perhaps because we’re absorbed in our present struggles, our fights with one another near and far, our challenges in income, relationships and health; or because we’re distracted by the drama of art or sport or politics; or when it comes to mortality, we’re preoccupied with suffering and unfairness and dismay; or, when we do reflect on life beyond death, we get into a tussle about who gets there and whether we have to believe certain things and if other faiths qualify.

While it’s understandable we get preoccupied with the pressures of our lives, the crises of the world or the obsessions of our imaginations, one of the most obvious reasons we come to church is to spend an hour disentangled from the anxieties on this side of the big green door, and focused on what we can spy through the keyhole. The reason we zero in on Jesus so much is because Christianity is the conviction that Jesus is the keyhole that provides us with everything we need to know about what’s on the other side of that green door. I believe we misunderstand Jesus if we treat him and his words and deeds as principally about offering us the mechanisms to get through the green door and the rules to get to the other side. Instead, my conviction is that Jesus is the keyhole through which we can see beyond the door; and our calling in this life is to inhabit a world that resembles what we see though that keyhole.

So for us to imagine eternal life means to discover what Jesus shows us when we stoop to look through that keyhole. Just as through the Aventine keyhole we can see cypress trees, a manicured garden path, a group of hedges, the sky, and the dome of St Peter’s Basilica, just so I want to point out the five things about eternal life we see through the keyhole we call Jesus. The first thing we see is, it’s about God. It isn’t a mechanical thing about physics and chemistry: it’s about a relationship. Today’s gospel reading is a conversation between Jesus and the Father. Going beyond the green door means entering the relationship of the holy Trinity. When we read the words, ‘This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent,’ the word ‘know’ is present tense, which means it’s about a dynamic unfurling relationship, not a static tableau. If we’ve known profound companionship of discovery and mutuality in this life, that’s just a glimpse of the all-encompassing wonder of being met and understood and cherished beyond the green door.

The next thing is this special phrase, ‘before the world existed’ – or as it’s sometimes translated, ‘before the foundation of the world.’ What we see through the keyhole was always there – it’s the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit, which was there long before we came along. The mystery of the keyhole is not that there’s a secret view to the other side, but that somehow there’s existence this side of the green door. We’re so fixated on the drama of our lives that we think existence on our side of the door is the normal thing and what lies through the keyhole is exotic and speculative and beyond our imagination. But in reality, our side of the door is flimsy and transitory, while what lies beyond is boundless and forever. Jesus didn’t appear simply to sort out the flaws on our side of the door: he came to show us to look through the keyhole into eternity and invite us to join him there.

The third thing we realise when we look through the keyhole is there are real continuities between this side of the green door and what we behold beyond. If it were entirely different, we’d need to be entirely different to dwell there. I find the word ‘transcendence’ helpful. If things are exactly the same on both sides of the green door, we call that correspondence. If they’re totally altered, we call that transformation. Transcendence has the similarity of correspondence plus the difference of transformation. To say eternal life transcends this life is like saying Jesus’ resurrected body bears the scars of Good Friday. In heaven we’re still truly human but through Jesus we’ve gone beyond our grievous shortcomings and our mortal limitations. It would be wrong to say there’s sadness and suffering in eternity, but the truths that those things have taught us in this life remain with us, only now as wisdom rather than sorrow.

Next we realise we had no idea what lay beyond the green door before we stooped down to look through the keyhole. Eternal life is not something we work to earn, or something we have a right to attain. Did we have a right to this life we’re in right now? Do we have any entitlement to demand this life should be peaceful or secure, happy or fulfilling, comfortable or exciting? So where do we get the idea we have any more claim on eternal life? This life is pure gift. We did nothing whatsoever to deserve it or earn it. Eternal life is the same. Before we were born, we had no idea there was such a thing as this life. Now we’re here, we only have a glimpse of the next life. But what this life and the next share is, we can’t manufacture, create, construct, or merit either of them.

And the fifth thing about eternal life is we can glimpse it – but it’s fundamentally beyond. When we think about Jesus, half the time he seems a faraway figure, and we only know about parts of his life and a fraction of his sayings, and we wonder if the manuscripts are reliable, and it’s a long time ago in an obscure outreach of the Roman Empire, and billions of years after the world began and so on. The other half of the time it feels there’s so much in the gospels and it’s inexhaustible and constantly challenging and beautiful and awesome in depth and wonder and love. Likewise, we know next to nothing about eternal life. We can’t imagine eternity, whether it has time and change or not, where it has any limits of space or population and how we all get to relate to each other and the creation and the Trinity at the same time. But we do see Jesus. And he is the keyhole through which we see everything else. And maybe if we had more, we’d find it overwhelming and impossible to take in. Maybe Jesus is as much of eternity as we can deal with. And we trust that what we can’t see is of a character with what we see in Jesus. The glimpse we see in Jesus is everything we need.

Now just see how what Jesus shows us in the keyhole changes everything about how we live. If you think again about the Aventine keyhole, what we see through it isn’t just the rotunda of St Peter’s Basilica. We also see hedges and trees and a path and the sky. That means if we want to imagine eternal life, we pay close attention to the creation around us, because we expect it to give us clues about the life to come. Having looked through the keyhole, we gaze with even greater wonder at the glorious creation around us. And we treat every friend and stranger like someone we’ve glimpsed through the keyhole: on the other side of the green door, we’ll see them again, and their full glory will be revealed, and we’ll realise we were in the presence of angels all along. So we start to treat people as if they were angels, and look to them to show us glimpses of forever. More than anything we don’t regard life as a scarce resource. Yes, this life will come to an end, and sooner or later we’ll come up against the green door. But we’ve seen through the keyhole, and we know the eternal beyond is like Jesus, and we know nothing could bind Jesus in death, and his resurrection opens the door to everlasting life. So we don’t need to use terms like ‘bucket list,’ because there’s no rush to do everything before we die. We don’t have to say ‘Life isn’t a rehearsal,’ because it is, actually. We don’t have to eke out just that little bit more existence through extreme medication or desperate treatment, because death is not the end of a limited story but the gateway to an eternal one.

In the season of Ascension, it’s time not, for a change, to focus on the immediate and urgent and distracting and comforting, but to set our eyes and hearts on forever. We each approach a threshold when we must confront the inevitability of our own death. I believe the Aventine keyhole gives us a way to do that. I hope that when that moment comes for me, I won’t focus on the enormity of the green door, but on the remarkable keyhole. And I’ll concentrate my eyes on Jesus. And through the keyhole he provides, I’ll be able to espy everything I need to know about the garden beyond. And I’ll trust that, through the keyhole Jesus has provided for me and for all of us, I’ll enter that garden and come into the wonder of eternal life. And it will be as infinitely more wonderful than this life as the view beyond is than the tiny keyhole. And I’ll be confident that there’ll be nothing to fear because there’s nothing beyond the keyhole that’s out of character with Jesus. And I’ll be happy, because I’ll realise that all this has been God’s purpose – from before the foundation of the world.