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GOD Will Wipe Away the Tears from Every Face

GOD Will Wipe Away the Tears from Every Face

Last updated on: October 10, 2026 at 4:58 pm by Jeff Hood

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GOD Will Wipe Away the Tears from Every Face 2026-10-10T16:58:09-06:00 Jeff Hood

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GOD will wipe away the tears from every face

“GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.”

Isaiah 25:8

GOD will wipe away the tears from every face: The Silence after an Execution

I have been thinking about these words since coming home from Huntsville.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows an execution. It is not the silence of peace. It is not the silence of something settled. It is the silence of a world that keeps moving while something inside you has stopped. The traffic still moves. The lights still come on. People still ask what you would like for dinner. Your phone keeps ringing. Somewhere, someone is laughing at a joke you cannot hear. The world has not noticed that you have come home carrying something you do not know how to put down.

I know how to be present with a man who is dying. I know how to sit in a visitation room and listen. I know something about the strange concentration that comes when a life is approaching its end. Everything becomes immediate. The words spoken. The silences. A hand held against glass. There is no need to pretend that tomorrow will be ordinary when everyone in the room knows that tomorrow may not come.

Coming home is different.

At home, the urgency disappears but the weight remains. There is no execution clock to watch. No guard waiting outside the door. No reason to keep your attention fixed on the next thing that must happen. You are left with yourself and sometimes that is the hardest place to be.

I have wondered whether this is part of what Isaiah means when he speaks of God wiping away the tears from every face. Not only the tears that fall in the terrible moment itself but the tears that come later, when everyone else has gone home and the one who witnessed the suffering is left trying to understand how to live with what he has seen.

There are tears that arrive on schedule. We know what has happened. We know why we are grieving. We can tell the story. We can point to the moment when everything changed.

Then there are the tears that have no obvious beginning. The heaviness that settles over an ordinary afternoon. The exhaustion that sleep does not touch. The difficulty of answering a simple question because some part of you is still somewhere else. The feeling that you ought to be grateful to be home, ought to be relieved that the waiting is over, ought to be ready to return to the life that was waiting for you.

But you are not ready.

You are home in the physical sense. Your body has returned. Your keys are on the table. Your clothes are in the closet. Your bed is where you left it. Yet some part of you remains behind, in a place that no longer appears on the calendar. You carry the memory of a man’s face into rooms where nobody knows his name. You sit at your own table while remembering a man who was not allowed to sit at his. You try to take part in the ordinary business of living while some part of you remains occupied with the extraordinary business of death.

No Ceremony for Coming Home

I have spent years with people on death row. I have witnessed executions. I have stood close enough to the machinery of the state to know that an execution is not an abstraction. It is a human being’s life coming to an end while other human beings stand nearby and watch.

I have learned how to be useful in those moments. There is a person to sit with. There are words to speak. There are prayers to offer. There is a sacred responsibility to bear witness, to refuse the lie that a condemned person has become less than human because the state has decided to kill him.

But there is no comparable ceremony for coming home.

Nobody hands you a prayer book for the first night back. Nobody explains what to do when you find yourself standing in your kitchen unable to remember why you walked into it. Nobody tells you how to explain the distance between the person you were before you left and the person who has returned. There is no official recognition of the grief that follows the witness. The world knows how to name a death. It has far less language for the people who keep living after standing near one.

Then there is the guilt.

How do you come home to your own bed when another man cannot go home to his? How do you eat when you remember the restrictions placed on the man you were visiting? How do you complain about an ordinary inconvenience when the person whose face you cannot stop seeing had so little control over the conditions of his own life?

You know that your grief is not the same as his suffering. You know that the burden you carry is not the burden he carried. You know that making your own sadness the center of the story would be a terrible mistake. But knowing these things does not make the sadness disappear. Sometimes it makes it harder to admit that you are struggling at all.

There is a loneliness in this work that I have never learned how to explain. It is not that nobody cares. The experience itself is hard to bring home in words. People want to know what happened. They want to know what was said. They want to know how you are doing. You try to answer. You give them the pieces you can carry into conversation. The deepest parts resist translation.

Sometimes you do not know what to say because you do not yet know what you feel.

That is where I find Isaiah’s words waiting for me.

GOD will wipe away the tears from every face: Every Face

“GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.”

The prophet does not say that God will explain every sorrow. He does not say that God will make every memory bearable or give us a satisfying account of why human beings suffer. He offers an image of extraordinary tenderness. God comes close enough to touch a face.

I have thought about how much vulnerability that image contains. To have your tears wiped away, you must be close enough to be touched. You must be seen. You must allow someone to approach the place where your composure has failed.

Perhaps we have made faith too dependent on appearing strong. We speak about courage, endurance and the willingness to stand with those who suffer. We need those things. But what happens when the witness comes home and cannot keep standing? What happens when the person who has spent years accompanying the suffering of others discovers that he, too, is suffering?

Does God have room for that person?

I believe the answer is in the promise itself. Every face.

Not only the face of the man on death row. Not only the face of the family whose loved one has been taken from them. Not only the face of the person whose suffering is visible and whose grief can be named. Every face includes the person who comes home and closes the door. It includes the person who cannot explain why the evening feels so heavy. It includes the person who has given everything he knows how to give and is beginning to wonder what remains.

This is no invitation to make ourselves the heroes of other people’s suffering. It is an invitation to remember that we are human beings, too.

When I think about Jamaal, I return to his humanity. I remember the conversations, the restrictions, the glass. I remember that a man facing death needed someone to sit with him, someone who would not reduce him to the judgment passed upon his life. I remember our Eucharist, the honey bun, the Powerade, the words of Christ spoken in a place where so much had been taken away.

Christ was present there. I believe that.

But the Christ who was present with Jamaal does not disappear when I come home. The same Christ who meets us in the visitation room must also meet us in the quiet house, in the sleepless night, in the depression that can settle over a person after the demands of a terrible experience have passed. The God who receives our prayers for the dying must also receive the prayers we can hardly form for ourselves.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest lessons of this love. Presence is not something we offer only to others. We must learn to receive it, too.

I cannot tell you that I have found a way to come home without carrying the people I have accompanied. I cannot promise that the sadness will resolve itself into wisdom or that every hard memory will become something useful. Some things remain painful. Some things resist explanation. There are days when the distance between what I have witnessed and the ordinary life I am expected to resume feels impossible to cross.

Faith does not require me to pretend otherwise.

Isaiah’s promise is not that we will never cry. It is not that faithful people will be spared the weight of what they have seen. It is that the tears will not be abandoned. God will not turn away from the face that bears them.

I hold onto that because coming home can feel like being left alone with everything that happened. The urgency has passed. The people who needed you are no longer standing in front of you. There is no immediate task to keep your hands occupied. There is only the quiet and whatever the quiet allows you to hear.

Perhaps this is where the promise begins to reach us. Not by making us forget. Not by telling us to be grateful that we survived. Not by insisting that our pain must become a sermon before it is allowed to exist.

Perhaps God begins by remaining near.

I think about Jamaal. I think about the people who have trusted me with their lives in the shadow of death. I think about the families whose grief continues long after the public attention has moved elsewhere. I think about the witnesses who return to their homes and try to become ordinary people again. I think about the tears that fall in public and the ones that never find their way out.

The promise is for all of them.

It is for me, too.

I am still learning how to come home. I am still learning that returning to a familiar place does not mean returning unchanged. I am still learning that there are days when the most faithful thing I can do is admit that I am tired, that I am sad, that I do not know what to do with what I have seen.

Perhaps I am still learning to believe that God does not love me less on those days.

“GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.”

I do not know when every tear will be wiped away. I do not know how long it takes for a wounded spirit to find its footing again. I know only that the promise does not end when we leave the prison. It follows us home.

Tonight, there may be no one waiting at the door to ask what we need. The house may be quiet. The sadness may still be there when we turn out the lights. The faces of those we love may remain with us in the darkness.

We do not have to make that darkness holy. We do not have to pretend it is easy.

We only have to remember that we are not abandoned to it.

The God who meets us beside the dying is also the God who meets us when we come home. The God who sees the tears of the condemned sees the tears of those who have tried to accompany them. The God who promises to wipe away every tear does not ask us to stop being human before we come close.

Sometimes we go into the world to sit beside someone who is suffering.

Sometimes we come home and discover that we need someone to sit beside us.

God knows the difference. God sees both faces.

God has promised to wipe away the tears from every one of them.

GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.

Catholic

Politics and Religion

About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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