A New Heaven and a New Earth

Easter 5, Year C

May 2, 2010

What’s your idea of heaven? My guess is, if you were to tell me, what you would describe would be a scene filled with images from nature; with beautiful scenery, pleasant breezes, and the like. Perhaps your image would largely be derived from Psalm 23, which we recited last week: “He makes me to lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters.”

There are a couple of recent books about heaven that have received some press. Lisa Miller, who reports on religion for Newsweek takes readers on a whirlwind tour through past views and interviews people in the present. She points out that the notion of a place where we will go after death and meet our loved ones is a fairly recent notion. Whatever our notion of heaven, it reflects our deepest hopes and ideals about the perfect life. I doubt whether many of us imagine heaven to be a city.

But a city is precisely what John sees in his vision of the new Jerusalem. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven.” Our second lessons in the season of Easter come from the book of Revelation. The imagery we’ve been hearing these last weeks has been haunting me. On a very concrete level, the imagery in today’s reading should surprise us for its otherness. Two things stand out, first of all, a city, second, there is no sea. For us, the city as an idea and as an ideal has lost most of its appeal. Just think of how Madison has developed over the last century and a half. It was designed very carefully, with all roads radiating out from the center, the capitol. In more recent decades, subdivisions have proliferated on the city’s edge, offering people not community, but the illusion of space, independence and freedom. We want to live in our fenced backyards, socializing not with neighbors, but with self-selected groups. We especially want to avoid the hassle of dealing with things like Mifflin Street Block parties.

Many of us like to visit large cities as tourists. We enjoy the culture, food, and cosmopolitan offerings of urban life. For the most part, though we think of cities as dirty, noisy, and violent. Most of us choose to live in secure and secluded suburbs. And even the cultural centers we might visit from time to time are light years away from the teeming slums of most cities.

The other piece of John’s imagery is even more alien to our culture. The sea is no more? Again, for most of us, there are few things we treasure more than a visit to the beach—the opportunity to laze in the sun and enjoy the majestic scenery of waves, rocks, and sand. And the seafood! Who can imagine heaven without shrimp on the menu?

To understand this imagery in all of its power, we need to delve a little more deeply into the visions of St. John the Divine. In the first place, this isn’t the only city alluded to in the Book of Revelation. Earlier we see another image, lurid and bloody. The whore of Babylon is depicted, clothed in purple. But the reference is not to the ancient city of Babylon, instead the purple color of the robe and the mention of seven hills make clear that vision refers to the dominant city in the Mediterranean world when John is writing—Rome.

Rome is the great enemy, the servant of Satan, who struggles against the forces of good. It purports to bring peace, stability, and order to the world—the pax romana—Roman peace. In the visions of John, it brings chaos and blood. Most immediately, it brought ruin and destruction to Jerusalem itself, by conquering it and destroying the temple, only twenty or so years before John is writing.

And indeed, that event also looms large in John’s consciousness as he writes. Jerusalem was reduced to rubble; the temple destroyed and its glories carried off to Rome, an event that was recorded on the Arch of Titus, and can still be seen by visitors to Rome.

So against this image of chaos and evil, against this backdrop of the destruction of the temple, John sees a new city coming down from heaven, a city that is perfectly orderly—later verses describe its precise symmetry. It shares one trait with the old Jerusalem, it too has no temple. But this time, it is not because it has been destroyed by the Romans but rather because God’s presence extends throughout the city. God is not limited to a single place: “See the home of God is with mortals; He will dwell with them as their god and they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.”

It’s worth making another comment about John’s vision of the New Jerusalem. When we think of heaven, when we think of dwelling with God, we imagine leaving this earth to go to another place. That’s most obvious among those conservative Christians who hope for the Rapture to transport them to heaven. But John envisions God coming to us, dwelling with us here.

This is what links these readings from Revelation to the resurrection of Christ that we celebrate during Easter season. The resurrection is a sign of new life—Paul calls Jesus’ resurrection the first fruits,” the proof that Christ has triumphed over death and the grave and is ushering in a new reality, a new world. We might not see it yet; we might experience it only fleetingly in brief, tantalizing glimpses, but our faith proclaims the reality of the resurrection, the reality of transformed lives and a transformed vision.

We see something of that tension between already and not yet—between the reality of resurrection and the reality of lives in a world as yet not fully transformed by Christ, in today’s gospel reading. It takes us back to the last supper, to the final darkest moments of Jesus’ life. We are reminded again of the betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. Jesus says to the little group disciples who have not abandoned me, in words that sound ironic given the reality of the scene: “Now the Son of man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”

For John, the crucifixion is clear and certain evidence of the power and glory of God. In that moment of suffering, weakness, and despair, we see Christ’s triumph over the power of the world, death, and evil. In that moment, Jesus shares a commandment with his disciples—to love one another, as he has loved them.

Here we have two different, yet complementary images of the new community and new way of life brought into existence by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—on the one hand, in the book of Revelation an image of a city, perfectly ordered, in which God is present everywhere and where there is no mourning. On the other hand, an image of a small group of Jesus’ followers, loving one another as he loved them.

In these two texts, we have two images of the community called into being by Christ. In the gospel, it is a small band of friends and disciples, knit together by Christ’s love for them, and their love for one another. In Revelation, it is city, beautiful, well-ordered, but, cosmopolitan, for cities, in the ancient world as now, are made up of “all sorts and conditions of persons.”

The reading from Acts deepens that vision of new community. We have here traces of the deepest conflict that beset the earliest Christian community. It was a conflict over identity, who this people were to be, how they would relate to their Jewish past and to their non-Jewish neighbors. Here in Acts we see the emergence of a new sense of the people of God that would invite all, Jew and Gentile to join in. It is a vision of an inclusive community, open to all. In a way, it is a vision like John’s vision of the New Jerusalem.

A city is teeming with people, coming from all over the globe, with very different cultures, lifestyles, languages, ethnicities, and expectations; brought together by chance, hope, or necessity. One of the things that makes us uncomfortable about modern cities is just that, the encounters we have on the streets, even in a relatively small city like Madison. We are confronted and challenged by people very much unlike ourselves—the homeless, the hungry—people looking for a handout, or perhaps someone who’s had rather too much to drink and becomes belligerent towards us.

The new city, coming down from heaven, is a vision of what will be and what might be: a people of God, brought together from every nation on earth, from every walk of life, people of very different lifestyles and values, languages and ethnicities, united in their love and worship of God. It is a vision that unites us as well to the present, to the city in which we live. Unlike those politicians and people who want their community to include only people who look like them and speak their language, the New Jerusalem reminds us we can not close our doors to the reality around us. Our church cannot be a place only for people like ourselves. Let us embrace that image of the heavenly city, and, in the power of Christ’s resurrection, transform ourselves, our church, and the world, to invite all of humanity to join us at the Eucharistic feast, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.