Christmas In The New Jerusalem

The Book of Revelation and I do not get along very well, theologically. Too much of it is devoted to depicting all the horrible things that are in store for people who do not pass muster with the Heavenly Authorities. In its gloating over others' soon to come punishments, hope gets swallowed up in terror, judgment crowds out love, and new creation almost vanishes from sight. That narratives like these might be read aloud in worship services, especially those with our grandchildren in attendance, should be appalling to contemplate.

Scattered through this mostly dreadful book, however, are images not of a world coming to its supposedly deserved end at the hands of a fed up God, but of a world as it should be, as it was meant to be, and as it will be, at the hands of an infinitely loving One. My favorite is the image of a coming holy city, within whose gates God will "have his dwelling with (human)kind." Death, grief, weeping, and pain will be no more, for the old order will have passed away. ( 21:2-4) There is a New Jerusalem to come, we are told, on earth and not just in heaven, whose center is God and peace, justice, and love its everlastingly sounding harmonies.

This is a truly breathtaking image, but one that seems out of place with almost everything that surrounds it in the book. The holy city it depicts is hard to appreciate in the context of a plan of salvation built around a final tallying up of accounts and a separating of the righteous from the unrighteousness for all eternity, accompanied by a wholesale obliterating of the earth in the here and now. Worse still, all of this is to happen long before God's already promised work of reconciling and transforming all of humankind remains unfinished. How can divinely wrought destruction on a cosmic scale, and perhaps even of the cosmos itself, possibly be thought of as anything but a failure on God's part, and on Christ's, to fulfill the central promise of The Book of Revelation, that all things are being made new? That the final destruction is just about to begin (evidently, we are supposed to keep on believing this, the passage of time to the contrary notwithstanding) makes God appear to be unfaithful to his own purposes and commitments.

A more sensible way of looking at humanity's future --- sensibly biblical, that is --- is to begin with the obvious fact that there is still a lot of work to be done on the part of our Creator to bring to pass what he had in mind "in the beginning" for all of us. Most probably, it occurred to him well before the morning and evening of the sixth day that the human race he was about to create might, in spite of his best intentions, become mired in mistrust that the created order would have enough in it to go around. And that its members might become consumed by fear and suspicion of others' schemes to grab more than their fair share of things. And that they might wind up making a life out of devious plotting on their own, driven by a finely tuned sense of entitlement, to cop all the provisions for themselves first. That the Creator, having stared these discouraging alternative scenarios squarely in the face, went ahead and finished his sixth day of work anyway, should tell us that he had already figured out how he was going to deal with them, and that his plan would be successful.

The plan? To keep working on us, lovingly, to bring about a change of heart that eventually will let fear and suspiciousness be overcome by gratitude, competition and aggression by sharing, and narcissism by self-sacrifice. This is the kind of plan that is going to require a lot of time to complete, much, much more time --- maybe the whole five billion years or so that earth has left before the sun fizzles out --- than a lot of rightous people apparently are willing to give it. For them, the rest of us have already had time enough to mend our ways, and God should simply quit taking his own sweet time about exacting his price for our not doing so. Basically, he should cut his losses quickly, salvage the few good souls that still remain in the world, set everyone else to genocidal conflict, and move on to alternative universes in which things might go better.

Evidently, though, the Creator has something else in mind. For one thing, a vulnerable baby, whom he trusted to become the kind of human being in whom the true holy city, New Jerusalem, would forever dwell, and through whom it can dwell in everyone. Life and light to all he brings, even now.