Revelation 21:1-7, 22-27
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’
He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’
He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.
I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
So we have reached the holy city, the restoration of all things, the new heaven and the new earth. After the drama and disaster of previous weeks, it feels like we can breathe a sigh of relief. The passage we heard this morning is so exquisitely beautiful, full of hope and promise. “God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” We’re also told there will be no more sea, which as someone who has spent hours staring out to the horizon listening to the sound of the waves, I am less happy about. But here we have to remember that Revelation deals in symbolism, and in first century Jewish understanding, the sea symbolised chaos. It was the unformed deep before creation, and the waters of the Red Sea which had to be held back to allow safe passage, and the ocean which was populated by man-eating whales. It is that chaos that has gone in this new creation.
Something else that has gone is the temple. I can only imagine how strange this must have sounded to the first Jewish readers of this letter, because the temple had been at the centre of their worship, and the destruction of the second temple several decades earlier must still have been felt as a great heartbreak. But there is no need for a temple because God is everywhere in this city. That is reaffirmed in a slightly odd little passage, where an angel comes and measures the city and finds that it is twelve thousand stadia long. Assuming that the number is symbolic, twelve for the tribes or the disciples and a thousand to represent a really big number, the measurement itself is not that significant, except that we are told the city is as wide and high as it is long. In other words, it's a cube. That feels completely bonkers, until you realise that the inner part of the Holy of Holies was also a cube. This heavenly city is the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of God which is now also the dwelling place of people.
I find it interesting that heaven is pictured as a city. The biblical story begins with a garden, and we might have expected that the new creation would be a return to that garden, especially given that cities do not often fare well throughout scripture. Babel and Babylon and Rome are symbols of arrogance and decadence and oppression. Even Jerusalem, the original holy city, comes in for its fair share of criticism. Because the thing is that cities are human creations, and when we build them on our own they are deeply flawed, but when we build them as co-creators with God, they can be made perfect. And there really is a sense of co-creation here. “The river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, [flows] from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city [and] on each side of the river [stands] the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month [and] the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” God's garden is at the heart of the city, and the city is not built on top of it but around it, in a beautiful harmony. Heaven is God's kingdom, but there is space for our creativity and our craftsmanship, our projects and our passions, and I think that is incredibly exciting.
What else do we know about this city? We are told that “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars – they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur”. But then a few verses later this has softened a little to say only that “nothing impure will ever enter [the city], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life”. And then in the following chapter, we read that “outside [the city] are the dogs, those who practise magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practises falsehood”. So which is it? Are they thrown into a lake of burning sulphur or do they sit outside the city walls? Is it that the lake is only temporary or is it only symbolic? Why do those who are not allowed to enter the city loiter outside its walls, and what do they do there?
I think perhaps we find some answers in that middle verse, which says that those who do what is shameful or deceitful will not enter. The emphasis there falls squarely on the behaviour and not the people. Perhaps then the lake of burning sulphur is meant to represent a cleansing kind of fire in which those impurities can be burned away. Perhaps they wait outside the city walls until they are ready to leave those behaviours behind and enter. Because remember the gates of this city will never shut. I used to think that was because heaven was so safe it did not need any protection, but the bad people are right outside, so surely a closed gate would be a good thing. Except God doesn't want to keep the bad people out, and so he leaves the doors open until they are ready to come in. Only those whose names are written in the Book of Life may enter, but who says it is a closed book?
I have described myself before as a hopeful universalist, because I truly believe that God's heart is for redemption and restoration so complete that no one will be left out of it. Perhaps not even Satan himself. For he too was thrown into the lake of burning sulphur, so perhaps he too sits outside the city walls, and perhaps he too may yet enter the holy city, having been transformed by the persistence of God's grace. It may be a radical idea, but it is one I find utterly compelling. I know there are some who view universalism as heresy, or see it as undermining the need for faith and repentance, but it has a long history in Christian thought, and what I see in these closing chapters of Revelation is that in God's unending grace, there is unending opportunity for faith and repentance. God will wait for eternity if it means every sheep makes it back into the fold.
We're coming to the end of Revelation now. There's an odd moment which it would seem disingenuous to ignore, in which either an angel or Jesus (it's not quite clear) says “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.” It doesn't square at all with what I've just said, or with Jesus' message of “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” and quite frankly I don't understand it. My best guess is that this is meant to express a sense of inevitability, that people can carry on doing what they're doing but so will God. Given that this letter was written into the context of persecution, perhaps it is another reassurance that the oppression of the church will not prevent the fulfilment of God's promise. I certainly don't think it weighs heavily enough to counteract the calls to and opportunities for repentance elsewhere.
John concludes with a warning not to add or take away from his words, so certain is he of the importance of their message, and the end of Revelation also brings us to the end of scripture, although not to the end of God's word, for God is still speaking. Revelation is an apocalypse because it uncovers deep truths about the world as it is and shall be, but it is not unique or definitive in that regard. In the early days of the covid pandemic, many of us spoke of it as an apocalypse, because it revealed deep truths about our society. It shone a light on inequalities in housing and healthcare, among other things. But it also showed us that we had an enormous capacity for building community, in ways we had never thought of before. There is much we can learn from Revelation, but there is also much to be learnt from paying attention to the apocalypses of our own time. I also think that the promises of Revelation can be as transformative as the warnings, and that we can hear a call to repent but also a call to restore. If cities can be perfect when they are co-creations with God, why not start co-creating now?
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