Final City

Midweek Worship

Seventh Week of Easter, AD 2022 C

A Reading from the Revelation of St John:

“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates.

“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Revelation comes across as a schizophrenic book. Prophecies of chaos and destruction, giants and monsters, lakes of fire and rivers of blood, bump up against irenic promises of paradise, of a bright new age, a new heaven and a new earth, where every tear is wiped away and death is now no more.

Part of this has to do with genre, the mold in which Revelation is written. Revelation is an apocalypse, and apocalypses are a specific sort of writing. They emerge in troubled times of war or persecution. They are addressed to people in panic, people whose lives are falling apart, whose world is upside-down. And an apocalypse tells them: “This is not the end. There is an end, a good one, and this isn’t it. Rather, let me show you where God is still at work. Let me show you what’s really going on spiritually beneath the turbulence of surface things.”

The Book of Revelation comes to us in such a time of crisis. In the latter half of the first century, the leadership of the early Christian Church was almost entirely wiped out: Peter crucified, Paul beheaded, James bludgeoned to death with clubs. And John—John the Apostle, who is held to have written Revelation—came to be imprisoned on the island of Patmos. Jerusalem, meanwhile, the heart of Israelite faith, home to the Temple, site of the Resurrection, was wiped out by the Romans.

The center of the Jewish world had simply ceased to be. For early Christians, who were themselves thoroughly Jewish, it must’ve seemed the end of the world. What was left to them? How could they survive against the might of eternal Rome? And so John pens Revelation, in response to a vision of Christ. It is a wild vision, full of prophetic allusions and the logic of dreams. And it purports to reveal the actions of God, the workings of heaven here on earth.

Where is God when His people suffer? Where is God when the martyrs cry? He is with you, John insists. He is in you, John insists. And your proof of this is the Mass. Your proof is the divine liturgy celebrated by Christians every Sunday. John describes our worship, of Word and of Sacrament, as nothing less than heaven itself descending to earth, as eternity breaking into time.

When we gather, when we are forgiven, when Jesus opens to us the Scriptures to reveal Himself within, when we come to the Altar and the Table of our Lord—that is heaven. That is the Reign and the Kingdom of God, here in space and time. We who come as beggars, we as sainted sinners, are forever given foretastes of the feast to come. We know our end, the end of everyone and everything that God has ever made. And it’s an end of such goodness and beauty and truth that we can only speak of it mystically, poetically, as though it were a dream.

Of course, the world we seem to live in, the material world, that’s the real dream. That’s the passing vision. But the Lord we know in worship, the heaven we see here together, that’s the true reality, the higher and deeper awakening. And this vision of truth sustains us through all trials, all temptations, all fears. The Temple cannot be taken from us: our Temple is Jesus Christ. The future cannot be taken from us: we live in eternity now.

And the violence of Revelation must be read within this context. To a people who are persecuted, suffering, on the verge of their extinction, the notion of empires falling and tyrants toppled is one of liberation, of relief. Of course they want the old order to pass away, because the old order has been killing them. Yet even within this, there is a subversion of violent imagery. Christ as Conquest, for example, has but His name on His thigh were a sword ought to be.

The only sword He wields in Revelation is the one from out His mouth: the Word of God, the Gospel of salvation. By this He slays His foes; by this He conquers all: with but a word! Killing them with kindness, one might be tempted to say. But what it is He really kills is ego and pride and illusion: all the things that separate His children from His love. Jesus slays the false self to raise the Christ within. And so even our defeat is His mercy hard at work. The very hands that fell us, heal us.

We’re used to swords that slay the living. But His is the sword that raises the dead.

And this whole story culminates in the wedding feast of the Lamb: the Lamb who is also a Lion; the Lamb who stands as though slain. In eternity the Risen Christ is wedded to His bride, which is to say the Church, which is to say us all. Creator and Creation, God and humanity, made as one in love, one by the Blood of the Lamb. And so John proclaims in ecstasy a new heaven and a new earth where God shall dwell with humankind as once we dwelt in Eden, where there is no darkness, no shadow, no death, and no locked doors.

Once upon a time, in the Book of Genesis, Eden was a garden fit for two. But now, at the end of the age, the culmination of our story, paradise descends as an impossible city of Brobdingnagian proportion: a cube 1400 miles wide and long and high! And death is no more, and hell is no more, and everyone says, “Come!” Come to the city, come to the wedding, come to the reconciliation of all things with God at the end of the age, the fullness of time.

It is a vision of astonishing grace, of universal salvation: not of the destruction and condemnation of the wicked—all of that is done, all of that is past—but of amnesty unlimited, the final and ultimate mercy that follows final judgment. I think of revelation as grimly optimistic. Things will be hard, it says, harder than we can image. But the victory that follows all can never be denied. Christ is King and Lord and God, our husband and High Priest. No-one can take us from Him.

Blessed are those who wash their robes by Baptism into His death. They have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city gates. And there we cry out together, the Church and the Spirit together: “Come! Come, to all who are thirsty! Come, to all who may hear! Come, anyone who wishes, and take the water of life as a gift! Christ has given this all to us that we may give it to you, and to the entirety of the cosmos!”

The rebellion is over. The war is done. And Christ is Lord of All. There are no more enemies left to fight, only friends to be loved, for death itself has been slain. All of this Jesus revealed to us in the visions of St John. And now our only mission is to live as we know this is true.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.