Can We Build the Holy City

And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 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. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day — and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. 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.

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 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. 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; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 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.

There are many who read Revelation, the most confusing book of the Bible, as a precise and literal description of the end of the world, generally thought to be now or at least very soon. However, I think Revelation was never meant to be read literally. We need to read it spiritually. It talks about things that neither the human eye nor earthly history may ever see. But Revelation is truer than history for it talks about the reality of God and our destiny with God.

The images in today’s scripture are so delightfully textured that we could happily use a whole sermon on just a single sentence. But I want to reflect briefly on what this text suggests about how we should live in this life knowing that our eternal destiny is the new Jerusalem, the Holy City come down from heaven.

So notice first that the most important thing about the new Jerusalem is that there is no temple in it. God is the temple and there is no need for any other.

It may be hard for us to appreciate the importance of this but remember that when Revelation was written the earthly temple in Jerusalem had stood for nearly a 1,000 years symbolizing the presence of God. But such a symbol will not be needed in the new Jerusalem. The presence of God will no longer be confined to a sanctuary. God’s presence will pervade the whole life of the city.[1] In other words, everything has been made holy and there no longer needs to be a distinction between the sacred and the secular. All of life becomes sacred in the Holy City.

Notice next that eliminating the distinction between sacred and secular will not be achieved simply by abolishing the secular. Contrary to how many interpret Revelation, God will not be content to save a handful of martyrs and allow the rest of humankind, along with all their achievements of culture and civilization, to perish in the abyss. No, God brings into the holy city the nations and the kings of the earth.[2] That’s an amazing thought for when you read through Revelation these are the same nations and kings who earlier in the book cursed God and warred against God’s elect. But in the end, God’s holiness comes upon even God’s enemies and the gates of the city of God, unlike the gates of all ancient cities which were built to keep enemies out, will never be shut. All may continually enter into the full presence of God.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of this. So many want to turn Revelation into a book of damnation against everyone else. But ultimately Revelation is a book of blessing. For God’s holy love is going to burn away — and that is a terrible yet ultimately hopeful thing to contemplate — all that is evil and unholy in the world, including that which is evil and unholy in you and me. And God will bring us to the new Jerusalem, the new city of God, where the fullness of God dwells with us and we with God. In other words, the city of God is the place where we and everyone else are finally healed of all that is unholy, unhealthy, and unhelpful.

This is the importance of the tree of life which the text describes at the center of the new city.[3] The tree of life produces twelve fruits, one per month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Do you remember when we last encountered the tree of life in the Bible? Back in the beginning in the Genesis story when Adam and Eve brought sin into the world. Then God barred humans from the Garden of Eden and placed an angel with a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life so no one could get to it. (See Genesis 3.22-24) But in the END, God overcomes the sin of Adam and Eve and all who are their children and the tree of life brings healing — no flaming sword bars the way. There is no temple in the city of God for God’s holiness will ultimately come upon all.

Having said this much about the city of God, we come to a question: can we build it? Can humans build the city of God? A little more than a hundred years ago, a lot of Christians would have answered yes to that question. A hundred years ago at the end of the nineteenth century, many Christians in Europe and America were extremely optimistic about what could be done on earth in God’s name. Some folks even started a Christian magazine (still published today, by the way). They called it The Christian Century for that is what they thought the twentieth century would be.[4] With progress in science, technology, and morality the twentieth century would lay the foundations of the city of God.[5]

Some of the most progressive thinkers back then even took the implications of Darwinian evolution as a sign that the world was getting better. In 1872, for example, a philosopher and theologian named John Fiske (1842-1902) wrote a book called The Destiny of Man. This is some of what he said:

“It is Darwinism which has placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colors of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priest and prophet, the inspiration of the great musician, is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge; and as we gird ourselves up for the work of life, we may look forward to the time when in the truest sense the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever, king of kings, and lord of lords.”[6] That’s an image from Revelation 19 (verse 16) and Fiske saw evolution leading us towards the city of God where Christ reigns.[7]

We don’t think this way any more. In these early years of the 21st century, realizing that the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, many Christians would not admit to much optimism about the future. If asked could we build the city of God, most of us would answer no because nothing suggests our efforts can contribute much to the construction of God’s city. Beginning with the devastations of World War I — fought largely between Christianized nations — and continuing with blood and barbarism to this very day, we have not arrived in a new century and a new millennium optimistic about our building skills. No, we cannot build the city of God.[8]

So if we cannot build the Holy City or even help much in building it, why talk about it? Does this vision from Revelation have any relevance for us? Yes, because it points at how we should live. We cannot build the city of God but we can live in its light and this is the lesson some young mothers taught a preacher in Australia a few years ago.

Last week I read a sermon by a minister named Scott Cowdell from Canberra, Australia. He talked about starting a young mother’s group at his first parish. They met together every couple of weeks for coffee and conversation about whatever interested them. One time he asked them to write on the white board in the room images or descriptions of “eternal life.” Before long the entire board was filled with these young mothers’ closely-written responses.

Eternal life was for them a happy thing — it would mean being together with loved ones. It would mean relief from the difficulties of life and relationships. It would involve plenty of unhurried time. In short, it would be all the things busy, young mothers knew their lives were lacking! In other words, they saw eternal life in terms of earthly life’s disappointments somehow being put right, and as a place where the potential of our lives and our relationships would at last find its full flowering.

The pastor concluded that women know, perhaps better than men, that relationships are at the heart of being human.[9] And this ultimately is the vision of Revelation. For into the Holy City comes a redeemed and healed humanity in all its relationships. What God makes right in the Holy City is human life, not heavenly life. That’s the point of the image of the Holy City coming down out of heaven. For God is putting right everything we have here in the life of Earth.

This tells us how to live. We are to live in the light of the Holy City now. Eternal life isn’t just about the future or after we die. It’s about how we live now. We don’t live God’s holiness perfectly. But we can witness to it. Our lives witness, more or less well, to our God, to the ultimate reality that creates us and redeems us. Everything we do, everything — how we talk, how we think, how we spend our money, how we work, how we play — points, more or less well, to God. So if we want to live more in the light of the city of God, we must witness to that now in all that we do.

In other words, we need to live like all good mothers teach their children to live. We begin to live our future with God when we live the way our mothers taught us. Be polite and considerate. Don’t hurt others. Share. Help each other. Love.[10] Our mothers taught us to do these things and Revelation agrees. For our eternal destiny is a human future in the Holy City in the light of which are must live today. May God help us so to do.

[1] G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) 278-279. It was also “a reminder of two distinctions essential to Jewish religion, the one between the holy and the common, the other between the clean and the unclean. What was holy was set aside for the special service of God, and what was common remained available for the daily, secular use of man. What was clean could be either holy or common, dedicated to God or freely used by man; what was unclean could be neither. Thus from the large central area of the common and secular, objects and persons were withdrawn in one direction by being sanctified and in the other by being declared unclean. The temple was therefore the symbol of God’s claim on the secular world and of his abhorrence of the unclean.”

[2] Caird, 279-280. “To suppose that by these phrases he means only the elect would be to run counter to his consistent usage throughout the whole of his book. The nations are the heathen, who had once been allowed to trample the holy city underfoot, who were seduced by the great whore, and who were finally reduced to subjection by the armies of Christ (11.2, 18.3, 23, 19.15). The kings of the earth are those over whom Christ has asserted his authority only at the cost of untold suffering to his faithful people (1.5, 6.15, 17.2, 18, 18.3, 9). Those who once brought the splendor of their luxury trade to deck the great whore now bring their willing tribute to adorn the holy city. Nothing from the old order which has value in the sight of God is debarred from entry into the new. John’s heaven is no world-denying Nirvana, into which men may escape from the incurable ills of sublunary existence, but the seal of affirmation on the goodness of God’s creation. The treasure that men find laid up in heaven turns out to be the treasurers and wealth of the nations, the best they have known and loved on earth redeemed of all imperfections and transfigured by the radiance of God. Nothing is excluded but what is obscene and false, that is, totally alien to the character of God. Nowhere in the New Testament do we find a more eloquent statement than this of the all-embracing scope of Christ’s redemptive work.”

[3] Caird, 280-281. “God’s curse, pronounced over the whole creation because of Adam’s disobedience, is not abrogated (Gen. 3.17, cf. Zech 14.11), for the whole creation has been renewed by the re-creating hand of God; and no flaming sword bars the way to the tree of life.”

[4] Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1975) 241. “Immeasurably more influential was Charles Clayton Morrison, who in 1908 founded the Christian Century and made it a potent ecumenical, socially oriented journal.”

[5] Ahlstrom, 225. “On the intellectual level the new challenges were of two sorts. First there was a set of specific problems that had to be faced separately: Darwin unquestionably became the nineteenth century’s Newton, and his theory of evolution through natural selection became the century’s cardinal idea. But the struggle over the new geology was a vital rehearsal in which new conceptions of time and process were absorbed. Historical research meanwhile posed very detailed questions about the Bible, the history of doctrine, and other world religions. Accompanying these specific problems was a second and more general challenge: the rise of positivistic naturalism, the cumulative result of modern methods for acquiring knowledge. In every discipline from physics to biblical criticism, myth and error were being dispelled, and the result of this activity was a world view which raised problems of the most fundamental sort. Are deterministic principles as applicable to human activities as to the natural world? Are all moral standards and religious beliefs simply behavioral adaptations of the most intelligent vertebrates? Are the Bible, the Christian faith, and the Church to be understood as having their existence entirely within history? Granted these naturalistic challenges, are Christians to save their faith by resort to the unbiblical solutions of romantic subjectivism and idealistic pantheism?”

[6] Quoted by Ahlstrom, 232-233. Ahlstrom calls Fiske “the prolific apologist for Darwin and Spencer.” See Rev. 19.16: “On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’”

[7] Ahlstrom, 231. The response was predictable. “Charles Hodge, in fact, soon published what many regarded as the orthodox repudiation. In his What Is Darwinism? (1874) he correctly isolated the essential factor, natural selection, and pronounced it to be in flat contradiction to the doctrine of an omnipotent, omniscient Creator. Christians he insisted, must account for the facts in some other way Professor Randolph S. Foster of Drew Seminary (later a Methodist bishop) took a lower route — one that was to be much more heavily traveled during the coming century — and sought to laugh evolutionary theory out of court: ‘Some future pup, Newfoundland or terrier, in the finite ages may,’ he said, ‘write Paradise Lost. . . . Therefore a pig is an incipient mathematician.’ Behind both Hodge and Foster lay a fundamental conviction that three decades later would still underlie Billy Sunday’s confession that he did not believe ‘in a bastard theory that men came from protoplasm by the fortuitous concurrence of atoms.’”

[8] Ahlstrom, 248-249. This is his assessment of the liberal movement. “During the later nineteenth century a self-conscious and intellectually distinguished movement of theological liberals gained many eloquent proponents in the Protestant churches. Yet its influence is very difficult to estimate. Even the author of a book on The Impact of American Religious Liberalism has great difficulty in defining its ‘impact’ — not because the movement was without effects, but because its legacy was all pervasive. It is impossible to determine whether the people it influenced were called back to the faith, or whether they were merely assured that their minimal beliefs constituted the essence of Christianity. The single most vital fact, therefore, is that the liberals led the Protestant churches into the world of modern science, scholarship, philosophy, and global knowledge. They domesticated modern religious ideas. They forced a confrontation between traditional orthodoxies and the new grounds for religious skepticism exposed during the nineteenth century, and thus carried forward what the Enlightenment had begun. As a result, they precipitated the most fundamental controversy to wrack the churches since the age of the Reformation. . . .
It would be hard to deny that in doing these many things they sometimes stripped away the Church’s spiritual armor. Often incredibly naive in their evaluations of man, society and the national destiny, they did little to prepare Americans for the brutal assaults of the twentieth century. In this respect they laid the ground work for tragedy and disillusion. One can accept H. Richard Niebuhr’s harsh summary of their outlook: ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.’ (The Kingdom of God in America, p. 193.) In the face of many difficulties, however, they maintained standards of scholarly rigor, intellectual honesty, and moral responsibility that their successors often failed to appreciate. In the later twentieth century renewed demands that Christians be ‘honest to God’ would enhance their reputation. To be sure, they may have been overly optimistic about human nature, but they were not fatuous; and those who entered the Social Gospel movement were effective critics of the American social order.”

[9] Scott Cowdell, “Our Resurrection,” Lectionary Homiletics 18.3 (2007): 63-64.

[10] Such a list reminds one of Robert Fulghum’s first bestseller. Some of what he wrote was parodied and ridiculed. But wisdom is ultimately simple and that was essentially Fulghum’s point. All we need to know we learned in kindergarten. “Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. We aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup — they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word of all — LOOK.” Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts On Common Things (New York: Villard Books, 1988) 6-7.