(Preached on Sunday, April 11, 2010)
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. - Revelation 21:1
The way the Bible starts makes sense to us: “In the beginning.” That’s a good, logical place to start. We have our notions of where or how any particular thing is supposed to start. The introduction and preface lay the groundwork at the beginning of the book, not at the end. The overture precedes and anticipates the rest of the performance. The syllabus is handed out on the first day of the class, not the last.
Yet here, in the second to last chapter of the Bible, we are surprised to discover what sounds like an introduction, an overture. Right where we expect to find an ending, we find instead a new beginning. What a strange time to start something new: at the end. What author writes an introduction at the end of the book? What coach implements a new game plan as the game clock ticks down to zero? Yet here we are introduced to an entire array of newness. There’s a new heaven – was there something wrong with the old one? – and a new earth, as well, complete with a new Jerusalem.
A personal reflection biblical scholar N. T. Wright shares about the first time he encountered the Book of Revelation might help us understand what is going on here. He writes: “The first time I ever read a book of the Bible from end to end it was, oddly enough, the book of Revelation. I was fourteen at the time … I started it without knowing if it was even readable; I finished it without the question even occurring to me. The funny thing is that I am quite sure I didn’t understand what on earth it was all about, but I can still remember the explosive power and the beauty of it, the sense that the New Testament I held in my hands had a thunderstorm hidden inside it that nobody had warned me about… Easter is the most thunderous moment in the whole year. Easter is such a huge event that even in the churches we can’t cope with it, and we’ve scaled it down to fit our little minds. The world turns it into fluffy rabbits and chocolate eggs… Easter isn’t just about you and me and our present spiritual experience, or our hope beyond the grave. Easter is the beginning of God’s new world.”
That is what John of Patmos is trying to convey with this glorious vision as he begins to close out his book. Actually John’s entire book as been trying to convey the truth of the resurrection faith as he had come to understand it, that in the Risen Christ God had begun a new creation and so all things are now new. On that first Easter Day, something happened which was absolutely unexpected and utterly unprecedented. Some form of ultimate power had been at work in that tomb. Something trans-cosmic focused on that silent tomb. Actually, it was more than trans-cosmic! It was something pre-cosmic and post-cosmic – something which preceded the beginning of creation and which will succeed its final end. A dead person had become a living person, with the atomic structure of that body so transformed that not one atom of the old dust remained in its previous form. That is why we speak of this as resurrection, not resuscitation. It was something new. Different yet indivisibly related to the old. His followers at first don’t recognize him, but then they do. There is continuity between the old and the new.
John’s vision conveys that continuity as well. This passage is a great affirmation of the goodness of God’s original creation. What is promised and portrayed here is not new in the sense of being different. If I go to a restaurant where I always order the same thing and one day say, “I think I’ll try something new,” then I mean that I will order something different. What God promises here, however, is not new-different, but new-renewed. It’s not something different from or other than heaven and earth and Jerusalem, but rather a new heaven, new earth, new Jerusalem. God’s desire to dwell among his people is certainly nothing new for Emmanuel. And the promise of a painless, tearless, and deathless reality is really a return to the way God originally created and intended it to be.
You could call this “Creation (Version 2.0).” The God who made heaven and earth makes a new heaven and a new earth. The God who made everything good in the beginning makes everything good again. And the God who made everything makes everything new.
This has clear implications for the way we view and treat the world around us. The physical universe is to be transformed in ways that we cannot now fully grasp, but there is no sense here that it will be totally destroyed and God will start over from scratch. So when some people advocate that we can pretty much do what we desire with the creation, even rape it and plunder it for our own benefit, without worrying that we are destroying it, because God is going to create a new world, that is not a faithful reading of the meaning of the resurrection or of John’s vision. In the resurrection God “sets things right” by delivering the creation from the forces of evil that hold it captive and doom it to death. In so doing God was indicating that there is still a lot good in the creation.
For example, our whole cosmos throbs with rhythm and harmony, with sound and sense of music. God is the great music lover, having created not one bird to sing, but millions, creatures who spend their days doing nothing more than singing. Then, there are the waves beating upon the shore ceaselessly, and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees on summer evenings, and the thunder of the waterfall. Psalms speaks of trees clapping their hands for God, and the whole world alive with acclamation. When we sing on Sunday, that’s us joining our voices to the praise that permeates a praising planet. In the beating of the human heart, the breathing in and out that is the origin of our human love of beat, rhythm and syncopation. We long for harmony, not just in our music, but in our lives, a sense that everything is “in sync,” that we are “singing on the same page,” and that we are singing with one voice.
That desire for harmony and unity is evident throughout the Bible and here at the end in John’s vision, but it is also witnessed to in science. Most scientists have come to accept as the most logical theory and understanding of the beginning of the universe what we call the “Big Bang.” The theory states that our universe began some 13.7 billion years ago from a “singularity,” a point of infinite density of matter and space-time curvature. From this density sprang space, time, and the physical laws of our cosmos. The universe began when this massively dense singularity exploded outward into a sea of quarks, then forming protons and neutrons, and then the nuclei of helium, lithium, and deuterium, which later gave rise to neutral atoms then forming clouds of gas that congealed into stars and galaxies, finally giving rise to beings like ourselves.
We might say, then, that in a sense we remember the Big Bang. After all, it is imprinted on our bodies. The elementary particles that make us up were created in the Big Bang. Their synthesis into atoms came later, but we can trace our material substance back to the first second of the universe. We may not consciously recollect this event, but something in us longs to re-collect: to re-gather our dispersed universe back into that singularity. The mystical sense that we are one with the cosmos may be a trace “memory” of our origin. We really were one then – not just spiritually, but materially. Ever since the universe exploded, we have been striving to reconnect. When we fall in love, or care for an ill person, or gaze in wonder at the stars, these are all strategies of re-union.
John’s vision of this re-union in God’s new creation was a direct rebuke on the way the Roman Empire misused and abused the created world. Imperial Rome was notorious for its environmental injustice (such as massive deforestation) and its ecological imperialism (stripping food and mineral wealth from its conquered territories). Imperial Rome depicted itself in its literature as an empire without end. It dominated global trade through its control of all shipping. This is why the sea will be no more, for this domination will come to an end. This exploitation of wealth made possible by the control of the seas had created a wasteland in some areas, which were deforested and plundered. In contrast, within the New Jerusalem, life and its essentials are given without cost. No sea means no shipping economy, no exploitation, or traffic in cargo. But there will be water; the invitation to drink of the waters is a promise of healing.
This is good news! But it is good news which is both a little bit exhilarating and frightening. We don’t much care for new things being forced on us, but we do like to have new things offered to us. When something new is forced upon us, we have a kind of gag reflex that rejects the new and unfamiliar thing as an unwelcome change. But when something new is offered to us, we are naturally drawn to it. God offers something new in and through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Indeed, in the end, God offers everything new. God is not forcing this new heaven and new earth upon us, but God invites us to become part of it and to allow God to work a new creation within us.