 |
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati Main Page || The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index |
Live
Letters Fifth Sunday of
Easter |
The Catholic Telegraph
May 11, 2001The first three readings from Revelation offered us images of the heavenly Christ: ruler of the churches, saving Lamb, protector and rewarder of the faithful. Now the Lectionary takes us to the last chapters of Revelation and gives us two Sunday readings about the final state of redeemed creation and then, to complete the series, provides the conclusion of the book for the Seventh Sunday of Easter.
This Sunday’s reading from the beginning of chapter 21 gives us a general overview of how things will be when the conflicts have ended and God’s enemies have been destroyed. It is a lyrical passage that deserves to be set to music and sung by a choir of a thousand voices!
"Then I saw" indicates that this is a new vision, distinct from what had gone before. John the visionary sees "a new heaven and a new earth," not all creation cast aside and substituted with something different, but the old creation, renovated and purged from the age-old stains of sinfulness. The sea is an image of chaos and evil and it is completely done away with.
Now to fill this new creation there comes a city from heaven, sent by God, beautiful as a bride on her wedding day. (In 19.7 Revelation speaks of the wedding feast of the Lamb and, in the image of the bride, seems to be referring to the Church.) In this heavenly city on earth God is to dwell with His human creatures. (The idea of living together includes more than God appearing to His people or even protecting them from their enemies. It has overtones of permanence and immediate personal intimacy. God will settle down and be close to us forever.) Everything that made the previous kind of earthly life painful will be removed. Death and sorrow and pain will all be things of the past when this new world order begins.
Finally we hear the voice of God Himself: "Everything is fresh and new and it’s all My doing."
This passage gives us the full and fundamental message of Revelation: God is going to win in the end and everything is going to be OK. All this has been the accomplishment of the Lamb Who had come forward in chapter 5 to carry out God’s plans for the world and Who, in the intervening chapters, had confronted and defeated all
God’s enemies.
What this message calls for from us is not mindless optimism, but deep spiritual conviction about the power of God, a conviction based on the victorious salvation brought about by Christ. God will win in the end because the end will be the full development of what has already begun in the resurrection of Jesus.
His resurrection makes the old categories irrelevant: selfishness, sinfulness, burning out, getting old, losing our way, undergoing death - all this is over thanks to our new life in Christ. It is not a matter of throwing away or destroying the basic human contexts in which we have lived, but of imbuing them with newness, with new life and new meaning that come from the risen life of Christ. He is the source of a new hope for those who believe in Him, the source of a new identity which is, at the same time, both ours and His.
Being part of this new heaven and new earth, being a citizen of the new Jerusalem in which we will live side by side with God is not something that we achieve or earn by our human efforts. It is all God’s doing. It is God who makes all things new.
Yet our role is not simply passive waiting, hiding out in a cave, as it were, until the conflict is over and it’s time to march in the victory parade. Our part is more than that, and it’s a part that nobody can perform for us. God looks to us for ongoing receptivity, for ongoing assimilation of the life of Christ whose beginnings we received in baptism. God wants us to become ever more capable of living in the new Jerusalem, ever more in harmony with the kind of life that He will share with us there.
This is not an effortless undertaking. It requires resistance to the evil that is all around us, that infects our minds and hearts and directs us in destructive directions. It requires resistance to our own sinful inclinations, those inherited tendencies that make us want to look out for ourselves first, that make us settle for immediate short term satisfaction instead of waiting for what God has in store for us later. Maturity in the life of Christ can also demand patience with our fellow believers who so often seem to hinder us more than help us. It can even call for forbearance with the Church on our part, with that community of believers which itself is always in need of purification and renewal. All this can cause us sadness and pain and tears. It can cause us to undergo many kinds of death in our earthly life’s span. But in the end our efforts will be assumed into the life of the risen Christ in the new creation, not as a reward for what we have accomplished but as God’s definitive gift to us.
A saintly friend of mine used to say, "We are an Easter people and ‘Alleluia’ is our song." "Alleluia" because God will make all things new in the risen Christ. Even us.
###
Conversation Questions
What needs to be made new in my life and my world?
What causes the tears in my life? How can I allow God to wipe them away?
###
Main Page
|| The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index
Copyright © 2001 Archdiocese of Cincinnati.