5th Sunday of Easter - A New Heaven and A New Earth

The Book of Revelation speaks to those who look to God for a comfort that only God can give. It is a prophetic book urging us to listen carefully to the Word of God and stay faithful to the covenant God has made with us in Christ. Today's passage presents us with a powerful promise of "a new heaven and a new earth," and if there was ever a time for God to "make all things new" now is the moment.

This passage from Revelation touches our deepest yearnings for our tired and broken world. So much war and conflict, so much death, poverty and suffering around us. Even the earth, air and sea are exhausted as we deplete and pollute. We, along with our earth, long for this apocalyptic vision to become a reality.  Amid all of this it might become easy for us to lose hope or ask how long must we wait for it all to be finished? Where is this promised "new heaven and new earth?" How long must we wait for the completion and renewal of all creation to finally happen?

But the real questions need to go much deeper. The present is determined by our vision of the future. This is the basic paradox that is at the heart of the Christian Gospel: death leading to life, darkness giving way to light, suffering as the road to glory. Unless and until we accept this fundamental condition, we will never understand the love we are called to share. We will never be fully at peace. We will continue to worry and fret, to question God's will and His love, to resent the predominance of evil and to slip easily into moods of doubt and despair.

Perhaps this gives us a clue as to what Jesus was talking about in his discourse to the disciples.  "Loving one another" is based on the knowledge that despite the apparent victories of evil in our world, in the end good will prevail.  If we take seriously the "new commandment" that Jesus leaves us we will have to keep examining the quality of our love to see if it really reflects the kind of unselfish love that He spoke about and lived by. When Jesus says "Love another as I have loved you", it sounds deceptively simple and easy. But when we measure our success in following that "simple" rule, we find that we fall far short of that ideal most at the time.

Yet this is the heart of the Gospel message and the cornerstone of our Christian faith.  Love is a gift of God.  But it isn't a feel good kind of love. There is also a new facet to the love to which we are called. We are to reflect the love Jesus had for his disciples, the love he showed them as he washed their feet. Now the leader is the servant. Peace will be achievable because we will bring this sacrificial love to our dealings with one another. Now we too must become servants.

The resurrection of Jesus makes the old world new. Really believing in his resurrection and hoping in the promise we hear today can make all the difference as we struggle against the daily forces of death that seem very much alive and well – and even winning the battle. We live now by the lights of the coming new city.  So, we must confront death in its many manifestations now.  And if we can’t “wipe the tears from the eyes” of everyone as God promises to do, at least in the meanwhile that hope will urge us to wipe the tears from at least one person’s eyes. If we are to be citizens of this heavenly Jerusalem, we had better get used to acting like citizens now.