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| Image: Trinity Toledo Episcopal Church |
First thing to be said about the passage from Revelation, as ever with any reading of that strange book, is that nothing in it should be taken as prediction or at face value. It belongs to the category of apocalyptic literature and like all such work, it’s mostly a deep social commentary upon the world of its time, full of symbolism and strange imagery. It’s a book that’s often seen as rather threatening in mainstream churches, but I spent a month a couple of year ago reading my way through the book before the start of Advent and blogging about it, chapter by chapter, and I ended up with a strong respect for Revelation.
So what’s this about? It’s not so much about the end-times as about the nature of the kingdom of God. It’s about bringing together heaven and earth into one, and building it on earth. Because although most translations talk about a new heaven and earth, there’s apparently a good case in the Greek for the word ‘new’ to be understood not so much as ‘brand new’ but as ‘renewed’, as recreated. Some special places in the world are sometimes described as thin places, a phrase I first heard to describe the island of Iona. In these places the gap between heaven and earth is said to be less than elsewhere. Well in this new Jerusalem, there is no gap at all between heaven and earth. God has come to live with his people here and now. And I do believe that the author of Revelation means this as a model for the present time, not just for the future, just as Jesus said ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’.
If God is present among us in this new Jerusalem, then all the bad things of the world will be at an end. Because the other thing about Revelation is that it was written at a time of great persecution, and written to people who knew all about death and mourning and pain. This is why the words are of such comfort, and why they’re often read today at funerals and have been set to beautiful music. My favourite setting is by Karl Jenkins, in his mass for peace in times of war, The Armed Man. As an idea it’s also the basis of CS Lewis’ vision of the eternal future in his final book in the Narnia series, where after the end of the world of Narnia he talks of the ‘real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here’. The new earth is the same as the current earth, only more real and better than the current earth.
But if it’s true that this is an image of the kingdom of God now rather than just in the future, if it fits with the words of the Lord’s Prayer that “your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”, then how is this to happen? Well, I think for that we need to look to our other text for today. And as a link I want to share with you a hymn from the Iona Community, written by John Bell, which reads:
Behold, behold, I make all things new,So let’s turn to the new commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples. It’s the same word for new in the Greek as the new heaven & new earth, so there’s a clear link there, along with the same sense of renewal. It’s a strange thing to call new in some ways, the idea of loving one another. If we just see that in terms of love within the group of believers, just as love for fellow Christians, then that’s not new at all. The idea of loving one’s neighbour is in the book of Deuteronomy, and it was described by Jesus as summing up the whole of the law, along with loving God. But when asked who he meant by neighbour, he offered the amazing parable of the Good Samaritan, full of images of outsiders and crossing of boundaries. And throughout his ministry he warns that simply loving those who love us is insufficient, and that we must love our enemies and forgive those who hurt us, even seventy-seven times. So already in the gospels we see Jesus presenting love for others as being something expansive and costly.
Beginning with you and starting today.
Behold, behold, I make all things new,
My promise is true, for I am Christ the way.
Yet in this passage we see a still more costly love being presented as a model. Context is always important in understanding scripture, and although the lectionary presents this as the gospel reading four Sundays after Easter, it occurs in the narrative at the Last Supper. Shortly before this passage, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, giving them his model of leadership and love through sacrifice – what is sometimes called servant leadership; and he explicitly says that the disciples should wash each other’s feet. Then we have Jesus’ prediction that one of the disciples will betray him, and he makes it clear through his actions that he’s talking about Judas Iscariot, who leaves the room. There’s a quality like a film script to all this, and the passage we heard begins with the words “when we had gone out”, meaning Judas on his way to betray Jesus. And immediately after the passage we heard, the camera turns to Peter, who is usual impetuous way says he’ll lay down his life for Jesus, and Jesus says that in fact he’ll deny even knowing Jesus before the next morning.
I say all this because it all goes to show what Jesus means when he says “that you love one another as I have loved you”. This is the love Jesus has shown to his disciples. It’s one of sacrifice, one of putting them first before himself, one of encouragement and care. It’s an self-denying love, not expecting something back and not holding anything back. Now that kind of love is hard. When others hate you, love them. When others call you names, love them. When others deny that you can be a Christian because you don’t conform to their narrow pattern of Christianity, love them. Jesus doesn’t say anything about liking these people, but he does say a lot about loving them. And the context matters because he’s saying it midway between betrayal by one disciple and being cut off by another disciple.
Indeed the context matters so much that we named the entire day after this saying. Because in Latin, ‘new commandment’ is ‘mandatum novum’, and from that word mandatum, we get our name Maundy Thursday for the day before Jesus died, the day that he washed feet, the day that he gave this commandment. The new commandment is the most important thing that happened on that day. In essence, it’s Jesus’ last instructions to his disciples.
Jesus also links this commandment to this rather complex saying about the son of Man (i.e. Jesus himself) being glorified, and God being glorified in him. Now that word glorified, and glory more generally, is not really one that we see used in modern English outside of a church context. It’s around in lots of church language, plenty of times in the Bible and in hymns and prayers, but hardly ever outside of the church. The word in Greek, doxa, also means thought or appearance, but came to be used as a Greek version of a Hebrew word kavod, which refers to the presence of God but also to a sense of honour or respect. So perhaps we might say that God has been given honour by Jesus’ actions, that by the way Jesus behaves and lives, God’s presence has been felt and greater honour has been given to God. Some of this will come in the manner of Jesus’ death, but the sense of glorification must been seen first of all through the life of Jesus, and through the way he has been interacting with others in the self-giving love we have already seen.
This self-giving love from Jesus, in both his life and his death, fit alongside a Jewish idea of commandment always being linked to covenant relationships. The Ten Commandments were given at Sinai after a covenant was reached between Moses and God. And these covenants required a guarantee, often to do with sacrifice and blood – and the twin forms of self-giving love from Jesus form precisely this kind of guarantee. So we see love and sacrifice linked in the backdrop and support for this new commandment.
Now that’s a whole lot of theology. It’s quite dense stuff. But if we want to be part of bringing about a new heaven and a new earth, we have to start by loving one another, in the self-giving way that Jesus demonstrated, the kind of love I described earlier in the lives of Jean Valjean and Rachel Held Evans. And I believe strongly that this kind of love is intended as the precursor of the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and the new earth. There’s no way that it can be confined to love between Christians, or within a particular church or denomination. It must stretch to love for the whole world. Yet love within churches and within the Christian family is surely the start. Jesus says that the world will see that we’re his disciples through our love for each other.
It’s therefore not just a tragedy but a direct disobedience of the one we call Lord and Messiah that the church has proved really really awful at loving each other over the centuries of Christianity. Heresy trials, schisms, excommunication of Christian by Christian, the inquisition, the crusades. The list goes on and on, century after century. It goes on today, to our shame. There are those who profess to follow Christ who refuse to call another their brother or sister because that person is gay, or because they believe something different about the nature of God, or because they have different politics. It’s a disgrace. If Jesus should have taught us anything, it’s to love those around us. The theologian Tom Wright puts it like this:
As we read verse 35 we are bound to cringe with shame at the way in which professing Christians have treated each other down the years. We have turned the gospel into a weapon of our own various cultures. We have hit each other over the head with it, burnt each other at the stake with it. We have defined the ‘one another’ so tightly that it means only ‘love the people who reinforce your own sense of who you are’.” (John for Everyone Part 2, p.56)But let’s return to the positive. Jesus presents us with a mighty challenge, to love one another according to his self-giving example. But he promises such a rich outcome from this love, that who would not want to follow it? Jesus calls us to love as he has loved, and this new commandment will lead us to the model of the new heaven and the new earth, and love will come over all the earth, and God will come to make his home among mortals, and death and mourning will be no more. Amen.
