Sermons
13th May 2007 - Easter 6
The gates of the heavenly city will never be shut, says the revelation to St John. A story about those heavenly gates...I was told this story by a bishop so I think I can repeat it in the pulpit. Heaven is getting full, people are squashing in left, right, and centre and Jesus realises he has to do something about it. So he goes to St Peter at the gate and says, ‘Peter, heaven is getting very full we are going to have to be more strict about who we let in for a while, so I would like you only to let in those people who have had a really bad last day on earth before they died’.
So Peter starts turning people away who haven’t had a real bad time on their last day and then this man arrives. Peter says, ‘Did you have a really bad last day on earth’. ‘Oh yes, awful’ says the man. ‘I was doing my exercises on my cross-trainer next to the open window in my apartment on the 18th floor, when I slipped and fell straight through the window and down the side of the building…Amazingly as I was passing the 17th floor I managed to grab hold of the window ledge with my finger-tips and I hung on there. But then this man came over to the window and started jumping on my fingers so I fell again, all the way to the ground. Amazingly, I landed on some bushes which broke my fall and I had survived. But then, lying in the bushes I saw a fridge being thrown out of the window of the flat on the 17th floor, which landed right on top of me and killed me outright, and that is why I am here today, so you see I had a terrible last day on earth.’ And Peter said, ‘Gosh, yes that is a bad last day, you better come in’.
Then the next man arrived at the gates and Peter says, ‘Did you have a really bad last day on earth’. The man says ‘Oh yes, I had a terrible last day on earth, you see I had thought for some time that my wife had been having an affair so I came home during the day to try to find her with this other man. When I got into our flat on the 17th floor, I found my wife there looking very guilty and I looked everywhere but couldn’t findanyone, until I looked over to the window-ledge where I could see the man hanging on by his finger tips so I ran over and jumped on his fingers and he fell to the ground. Unfortunately, he landed on some bushes and survived! So I dragged the fridge over from the kitchen and threw that out of the window and it fell on top of the man and killed him. Unfortunately, the strain of moving the fridge gave me a heart attack, and I collapsed and died and that is why I am here’. So Peter said ‘Oh yes, that was a really bad day, you better come in’.
Then a third man arrived, and Peter said, ‘Did you have a really bad last day on earth’. The man says ‘Oh yes, I had a terrible last day, you see I was hiding in this fridge…’
In John’s Heavenly City there will be no gatekeeper, the gates will be open continually. In the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, there will be no need of sun or moon, for the Glory of God will illumine all things and the lesser glory of the nations will come to its brightness. In the Holy City that is the transfiguration of all we can now experience, there will be no night, and a crystal-like river will flow through the streets nourishing the tree of life whose leaves will heal all the pains of war and destruction that we experience in this world. The gates of the Holy City will never be shut, and there will be no need for a temple in the city because the glory of God will be fully present to all. What a place!
Of all the books in the Bible, The Revelation to St John the Divine, or the Apocalypse, is the most cinematographic, the most visually stunning. As well as a vision of the eternal city of God, consider for a moment some of the scenes and characters John conjures up: there are monsters from the sea and monsters from the land, there are terrible prophecies of the end, there is the blasting of the last trumpet, the opening of the scrolls, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the number of the beast, 666, the woman and the dragon. As the Americans say, ‘You couldn’t make it up’.
It is no wonder that this dazzling collection of Old-Testament-inspired prophecy has caught the minds of artists and musicians, dramatists and more recently film-makers. But throughout Christian history there has often been a suspicion that Revelation is actually rather a baffling book and probably most difficult to understand for ordinary Christians living lives that are rarely if ever interrupted by fantastic visions of the eternal battles waged between the powers of good and evil, between the lamb of God and the various manifestations of beastly activity that John describes for us. For ordinary Christians, if there are such things, is this book to be taken as a warning, is it a Millenarian fantasy designed to scare us into accepting its vision of the heavenly city and steer us away from the pit? Or might it be political allegory writ large, are we to take these visions of transformation as a pattern of permanent revolution against the political and economic systems that oppress the holy people of God? I would like to focus on two aspects of John’s vision of the Heavenly City. First the way in which it is rooted in, but differs from, the earlier vision of a celestial city afforded to the prophet Ezekiel, and secondly, to ask what this vision might mean for the way in which we live as ordinary Christians, but ordinary Christians with a vision.
Ezekiel’s vision is of a real city which will house the restored people of God when they are returned from exile, Ezekiel sees the restoration of a real Jerusalem in a real Israel, and the reversal of a very real exile. John’s city is also a return from exile of course, but the return is from the metaphorical exile that all people experience after the expulsion of those metaphorical first humans, Adam and Eve, from that metaphorical paradise Eden, described at the other end of the Bible. In that first garden the tree of life was rejected by humans in favour of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, innocence was traded for pride. For John, the exile that is human life, takes place between the paradise of Eden and the paradise of the eternal city and his eternal city where the tree of life can now dispense healing through its leaves, is not descending from on high like some terrifying space-craft but is actually the community of Christ’s followers, the redeemed community, the church, both temporal and eternal, militant, expectant, and triumphant.
In Ezekiel’s vision the city of God is dominated by a new Temple where rituals will be renewed and the cultic sacrifices continued. In John’s heavenly city there is no temple, no particularly place to meet with God or offer him prayer, because God will be fully known to the inhabitants of the city.
And Ezekiel’s city is an exclusive place, a new Jerusalem for the sons and daughters of Israel to rejoice in, but a city with walls and entry requirements and gatekeepers. In John’s city the gates are forever open to what has become cleansed in the blood of the lamb and we remember from Peter’s vision last week that the boundaries of the holy are set by God not us. You might be surprised when you get there to see how low the bar is for entry into this city, you might find people such as the prodigal son even get a pass. John’s celestial Salem is a place where all nations and peoples will come for healing and if Peter is on duty at the gate, his duties will be ones of welcome not of testing.
So how might this vision inform the lives of ordinary Christians, what can we take from these dazzling images of divine welcome? First, we are given a vision of the generosity of the love of God. The gates are open because God is constantly inviting us towards him, constantly inviting us to share in His vision. He is primarily a God of love, not a God of judgement. And secondly, that when we acknowledge that love, then we should know that we have a great duty to show to others in the way we welcome them into this part of the heavenly city, that God’s gatekeepers have a primary character of love and not of judgement.
This vision of the heavenly city shows us that boundaries tend to be human constructions not divine ones. I often think the most difficult thing about churches, both church buildings and the communities within them is their walls, walls both physical and metaphorical, the physical church has walls that keep people in and keep people out, and the church that is the body of people gathered in Christ’s name also often have metaphorical walls that keep some people and keep other people out. John’s celestial vision shows us that how ever many walls we build down here, of whatever sort, they will never reach as high as Heaven.