Revelation 21:10,22-22:5.
Two weeks ago, coming back to Berne by train from taking services at the Anglican church in Geneva, I got talking to three elderly people from the city of Mariupol in Ukraine. Like many other Ukrainians, they fled from their homes when Russia invaded their country. They are living as refugees here in Switzerland, their lives utterly overturned. It was striking to know they were from Mariupol. The city where they were living peacefully three months ago has now been destroyed, with huge loss of life. Mariupol's theatre was bombed on 16th March; it's estimated that 600 people sheltering there were killed. From time to time one of the three started sobbing and repeating 'When will it end? When will it end?'
That conversation came to mind as I reflected about the passage from Revelation that was read just now. Mariupol speaks to us in an extreme way of two very different forms of the human city. On the one hand, a flourishing community, with beautiful buildings, busy, noisy, full of life. On the other hand, something like Hell on earth: buildings, beauty, communities, families – all destroyed; a city of death. The war in Ukraine has made us in Europe vividly aware of what has always been true, that the city can be a place of life, joy and peace, and can be a place of violence, misery and death.
The Book of Revelation is a tale of two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem – two contrasting pictures of what it is to be human. Through much of Revelation, the focus is on the great city of this world, Babylon (which is code for Rome, the superpower of the day). Babylon is full of pride, greed, corruption, and violence. It is a place of oppression, persecuting the Church, threatening it with destruction. Babylon stands not just for first-century Rome but for every expression of human life based on arrogant rejection of God and brutal exploitation of the weak by the strong. But as well as Babylon, Revelation also speaks of Jerusalem, the city that God is building, where God dwells with humankind: a place of healing, security, purity; a place that takes up and honours all that is good and beautiful from every nation in the world. Today's reading from the end of Revelation describes a vision of the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.
On the one hand: Babylon – Babel – Rome; and on the other hand: Jerusalem. Two cities; two ways of being human.
What is our default image of heaven? Maybe we incline to images of serene solitude, detachment from the noisy busyness of modern life with all its difficulties, dirt and danger. But the image of heaven that scripture gives us is a city. Not a quiet garden where we can forget about everybody else, but a huge city, redeemed, glorious, but still a city, full of people and every kind of good thing from every corner of God's good world, with songs and music of every kind blending to the praise of God.
Speaking of music, the vision of the new Jerusalem at the end of Revelation has inspired a range of music. For example, Edgar Bainton's moving anthem 'I saw a new heaven and a new earth', with its memorable, trembling rendition of the words 'God will wipe all tears'. Or, in a quite different style, the foot-stomping spiritual 'When the saints go marching in', which also draws on these last chapters of Revelation, and in its own way expresses longing to be part of the new Jerusalem, the redeemed humanity that God promises – 'Lord, I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in.' In the glorious diversity of Christian worship, arising from different cultures and in quite different styles, we already know something of the life of heaven.
This vision of the new Jerusalem, right at the end of the whole Bible, reminds us that God made us social beings. We are made for community. Where human life goes badly wrong, we see cities that are places of darkness and oppression, Babylons old and new. But where that happens, the answer is not isolation. In isolation we would in the end all wither away to nothing. The answer has to be renewed community, restored, healed community, because human cities can also be places of beauty, joy and flourishing. Never (in this world) perfect cities – not even in Switzerland – but pointing us towards the true human conviviality that God made us for, pointing to the new Jerusalem.
That is what Jesus Christ came to bring about. True human community, focused on God, who is the life and light of the new Jerusalem, but still truly human community. Whether in villages or huge cities, we can only flourish as we are set free from the oppressive Babylons of human devising and start to live towards the new Jerusalem that God promises and God brings about.
And that is what we are called to be as Church: the Church as a whole and local church congregations are called to be foretastes of the new Jerusalem, communities where the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are praised, communities of security and reconciliation, communities whose gates are open to include everyone, but where everything that is disobedient to God and that corrupts and degrades human life is excluded, communities where the splendours of all nations are honoured and their gifts are celebrated, communities of feasting and celebration, where gifts of music and art, administration, hospitality, practical service of many kinds are all exercised and valued.
Of course, even the best church community we have ever known falls far short of that ideal. Churches are not always safe, welcoming, reconciled, diverse places, honouring the image of God in everyone – that, incidentally, is why church leaders and those serving the church in many roles, such as in Junior Church, need to do training in safeguarding, to make this a safer, purer church. But every church, including us here at St Ursula's, can truly point ahead to the new Jerusalem that God will bring about, and it must be our longing and our prayer to be growing constantly in that direction.
The new Jerusalem will be a place of healing, both for individuals and for nations. In some of the most moving and beautiful language in all the Bible, echoing the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, we read that in the new Jerusalem God will wipe away every tear; that a river clear as crystal runs through the city; and on the river's banks are trees, and their leaves are for the healing of the nations. What longing there is in these words. We all need to have tears wiped away: sadness, hurts, and disappointment deep within us that may never be fully healed in this life.
But the Bible does not allow us to focus only on our individual needs; always we are pointed to how intertwined we are with our neighbours and in the end with the whole world. The leaves of the trees in the new Jerusalem are for the healing of the nations. Our own healing is connected to the healing of the nations, the healing of Ukraine, the Middle East, Ethiopia and Eritrea, in fact of the whole creation. We now know very well that we cannot flourish as humans unless we also take care for the flourishing of the earth, the air, the rivers and oceans, and all that is in them. This too is our hope: that the crucified and risen Jesus is making all things new; has created a new space where we can live as we were made to: bearers of God's image, made to live together in harmony, rejoicing in the goodness of God and the goodness of all God's creatures.
This is a compelling, beautiful vision of human flourishing, but it goes beyond any political manifesto because the heart of what we are promised in the new Jerusalem is that we will see God face to face: 'The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.' That is the end beyond all ends, the end without end: to see Christ face to face.
It's a massive understatement to say that we do not yet live in this reality. As St Paul says, for now we see in a glass, darkly. Our vision of Christ is limited, confused. We all need healing, in body, mind and soul; the nations need reconciliation; all creation groans for renewal. But as the people of Jesus Christ we do not let go of the hope that this healing of all things is where God's creation is heading.
And this hope doesn't stay at a safe distance in a mystical future that leaves the present unchanged. This hope reaches into our present, grabs us, and inspires and challenges us to pray and work for change now, change at three levels: in our own individual lives; in our life as a church community; and in the wider world, the cities and other communities to which we actually belong. All of this matters to God; all of it, from our daily individual lives to the life of our local community is what Jesus Christ means when he sees 'I am making all things new.' In conclusion, let's think briefly about these three levels of change: in our individual lives, in our life as a church, and in the wider world.
In the first letter of John, we read that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; and if we have this hope we will purify ourselves, even as he is pure. Our hope that in the end we will see Christ face to face and become like him demands of us that we each start to live now as the Christ-like, truly human, beings that God made us to be and that we will in the end become. We are each called to live now in the light of what we will be. That means we all have things we have to turn from, deeply engrained habits and patterns of living and relating that drag us down and hurt others. But we all also have ahead of us the great positive vision of what we can become as we follow Christ and open ourselves to daily renewal by God's Spirit. We may be tempted to despair at our slow progress on this way but we can be encouraged that Christ himself is always much more committed to our transformation than we are. He has begun this work in us and he will complete it. And others in the Church are here to help us continue, often stumbling, along the way.
And so we turn to our life as a church and the call to us as this community to grow into all that we can and should be as a local, Anglican, international but English-language expression of the Body of Christ. We know that among us there are different visions of what the Christian Church more widely and also this specific church should be like. Some of us feel we must emphasize and live out a more radical welcome and inclusion of all people and be more practically engaged with the world around us; some feel we need a firmer Biblical basis of our faith and Christian living and should be calling people more clearly to come to faith in Christ; for some there is a danger that traditional ways of worship are being lost; for others the great imperative is to prioritize work with children and young people. There is some truth in all these concerns, and many others. We are all partial and limited in our vision of the Church; we all glimpse something of what it means to be the Church, and we need each other to sustain and grow into the rich fullness of all that God wants the Church to become as a pointer to the new Jerusalem and a foretaste of it.
Finally, the fact that we look ahead to the city that is to come, the city of God, does not mean that Christians can forget about the cities of this world. Revelation may speak of God's condemnation of Babylon, the symbol of arrogant rebellion against God; however, the task of the Church is not to execute God's judgement but to announce and live out the love of God that we see in Jesus. Because God so loved the world, we must learn to see the whole world, every city, every human community, as the object of God's good and loving purposes. When the people of Israel went into exile in Babylon, far from their beloved Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed to them that they were to pray to God for Babylon and seek its welfare. We too may feel we are living in cities or other communities that largely ignore God and Jesus Christ, but we are to pray for them, to seek their flourishing, to cherish what is good in them, to contribute to their health and flourishing, and to support those within them who are most weak and vulnerable. Our vision of the heavenly Jerusalem must flow over into our living in Bern and the other communities we know.
Christians are called to live with both patience and impatience. Only God can bring about the perfect transformation of our lives, of the Church and of the whole world with its human communities and wider creation. So we must pray and wait patiently for what in the end only God can do. But there is also a proper Christian impatience as we long to see the fulfilment of God's promise to make all things new. How long, O Lord? How long must we wait? When will the darkness end?
Jesus Christ died and rose again. He is bringing into being a new reality, the new Jerusalem, a healed, purified and reconciled creation. Because he calls us to live now in the light of that promised transformation, we long to see it increasingly realized in our own lives, in the Church, and in the world around us; and we commit ourselves to cooperating as best we can with his transforming work.
David Marshall