The end is like the beginning

Revelation 21:22-22-5

21:22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23 And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25 Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. 26 People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 27 But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

     22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; 4 they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

When you imagine heaven, what comes to mind?  Is it fluffy clouds and pearly gates?  And how do you imagine yourself (assuming you think you’ll end up there)?  Do you have a body or not?  Are you able to relate to other people or is all of the attention on God?  Or do you not think about heaven much at all, maybe because it’s too hard to imagine, or just because the whole notion seems too unlikely?  

I have no data to support this, but I’m guessing that if you surveyed the general population about what Christians believe, very high on the list of results would be something about going to heaven when you die, that Christians believe in the afterlife, in eternal life - and I suspect Christians would say something similar.   In fact, there are more than a few Christians who make the heart of the faith about getting to heaven, who describe earthly life as just a kind of sorting exercise.  And even those who don’t take such an extreme view, who see life here as having more than just instrumental value, it is still the case that Christians imagine the world as a place we will leave behind, that this isn’t our true home.  

More than any other book of the Bible, Revelation provides the resources to think about these things, but the vast majority of Christians have no idea what to do with this book, while a minority seem to all kinds of crazy ideas about what to do with it.  In either case, the assumption is that Revelation consists of cryptic prophecies about what will happen in the end times, that the  fundamental interpretative task is decipher.  Even those who try to engage with it find that they cannot make much sense of it, while a few convince themselves they’ve cracked the code.  

I want to suggest another way of approaching Revelation.  First and foremost, the purpose of the book is to encourage the faithful perseverance of churches in Asia Minor who were suffering persecution.  The great Satan, the beast, Babylon, all that stuff that gets defeated, applies originally to the Roman Empire over which these Christians expected Christ to triumph, eventually.  The famous 666, for instance, is almost certainly an oblique reference to Neron Caesar, the emperor at the time.  What these early Christians longed for, in continuity with the Jewish apocalyptic imagination, was the establishment of God’s reign on earth as it was in heaven.  Of course, in their own lifetimes, this did not come to pass, though a few centuries later the emperor, Constantine did become a Christian and make the persecuted faith the official religion of the Empire.  At the time this might’ve seemed like a fulfillment of Revelation.  But then it’s hard to maintain that all the earthly powers have been defeated and made subjected to Christ, that God’s reign is entirely established.  

All those people throughout the centuries who have claimed that this or that person or event definitively corresponds to something in Revelation have actually been correct even as they have also been quite wrong.  The way for us to read Revelation throughout is, as it was for those first Christians, as an encouragement toward faithfulness, to the hope that the powers of this world will be overcome.  There is a sense in which every kingdom which rises and falls is a fulfillment of Revelation, that the same fate awaits all who would claim a power they do not possess.  We should very much read Revelation into our current situation while resisting the conceit that we finally are those people living at the end of history.  Everyone predicting the end has been wrong thus far, and though someone will eventually be right, the odds of success are not good.  

All that said, Revelation also does imagine the end, when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.  The “value” of Revelation, to my mind, is in providing us a vision of what that kingdom will be like - not so that we can predict its arrival but so that we can live in light of that kingdom here and now.  This not only inspires our hope but gives shape to the very essence of what we take the meaning and purpose of creation to be.  

The imagery in the passage we read is not exactly subtle, but it’s still easy for us to miss the significant of the last chapter of the Bible ending with a tree - a tree of life - at the center of this city.  And, of course, the Bible begins with a garden with a tree - a tree of the knowledge of good and evil - at the center.  What Revelation envisions is a return to, a restoration of, the Garden.  In the beginning, before Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, God would walk with them in the Garden in the cool of the day.  They enjoyed perfect fellowship with God and one another, and everything they needed was provided.  This was the relationship God wanted with humanity, which is why Christ overcame the power of sin and death by hanging on another tree, the cross, to be resurrected to a new life.  And in the end God will have this relationship with humanity again, not just with Adam and Eve in a garden, but in the city of God where all the nations will receive healing and life - not death - from this tree.  The end will be like the beginning, only better.  Creation becomes a new creation.  

Perhaps you’re thinking that this is a nice little thought, but that it’s ultimately a bit far-fetched, the distance between our reality and what is envisioned here too great for dwelling on this to be useful, perhaps even that fixating on an imagined future reality only distracts us from the living of life here and now.  But the most basic question is, What kind of existence is this?  What story are we living in?  Living well requires having good answer to this question, and answering these questions has everything to do with how the story ends, with what the goal of it all turns out to be.   And especially in a world in which the default mode is nihilism, where there is no point, no goal, no coherent story because there is no author, it is imperative that we have the eyes to see a more beautiful vision.   

Rather than being the people who condemn the world and long to escape it - who imagine stark discontinuity between this life and the next - Christians are those (or should be those!) who believe that God created this world and that God will redeem this world, that it’s not a place that we leave so much as it is a place where God comes to live and reign, that its not a project that God seeks to abort but the very desire of God which absolutely must reach fruition.  We are the people who proclaim unbroken continuity between what God set out to do in the first place and what God will do, between cretin and new creation.  

And if we learn to see the world with these eyes, then it potentially transforms the way we live.  In the first place, it means that we embrace the fundamental goodness of this world.  God did not make a mistake.  Though much is broken and corrupted, all things can be made new.  We should be hopeful for early life, for it is for this that God made us, and this is where God will finally make a home.  

It also means that, if this is our final destiny, if this is where creation’s story reaches its conclusion, then it means our own stories can be transformed in light of that ending, that we can live here and now oriented to God’s good future.  As we saw a few weeks ago, our citizenship is in heaven, we are like expats from the kingdom of God, and we can live in this time and place according to the peace and justice of our true home, which is to say we can be empowered to live in the truth even in when it is denied by our neighbors.  

Most of all, like those first Christians for whom a vision of a better future encouraged perseverance and inspired faithfulness, we too can take comfort that God, far from abandoning us, intends to bring about our restoration and then some, that when history ends - when the sun and moon are no more - God will be our light and all will be as it should’ve always been, but even better.