The New Jerusalem

Epistle and Gospel

Revelation 21.1-6

I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.“

John 11.32-44

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days.”

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

A Great Multitude

In his vision of ‘the holy city’, ‘the new Jerusalem’, ‘the home of God’ John the Divine is also allowed to see those who dwell there with God. In Revelation ch7 he describes them as ‘a great multitude that no one could count, standing before the throne of the Lamb, robed in white’ and when he enquires about them he is told ‘these are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb’.

From earliest days the church has recognized as its foundation stones those heroes of the faith whose lives have excited others to holiness. On 20^th August 2008, Pope Benedict XVI described the saints as ‘the colours of the spectrum in relation to light because with their own tones and accentuations each one reflects the light of God’s holiness’. The child looking around the cathedral with his parent put it even more simply: ‘the saints in the windows are so beautiful with the light shining through them’. His Holiness the Pope went on to say ‘how important and useful is the cultivation of knowledge and devotion of the saints, alongside daily meditation on the word of God and filial love of our lady’. It is a great blessing that the liturgical calendar gives us at least one saint each day and still adds to their number as the Pope will do in a year’s time when he comes to England and at a Birmingham football stadium add John Henry Newman. So today we thank God for all the saints and rejoice in the way that they enrich our Christian lives. How? Well in at least two ways:

Firstly, they remind constantly remind us that the whole purpose of this earthly life is the attainment of the beatific vision of heaven – or blessed hope, destiny and goal. We are on a pilgrimage to return home to our father in heaven. As St Francis de Sales said: ‘the world is only peopled in order to people heaven’.

Secondly, they illustrate how we (no matter how ordinary and mundane our lives may be) like them have the potential for holiness. If God, by his grace, could so transform each of them there is no reason why he cannot do the same with each of us. We are encouraged to strive, through our friendship with Jesus (like Lazarus), to die to self and rise to glory. St Clement of Alexandria said: ‘we are made for the contemplation of heaven. It is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, a state of supreme and definitive happiness’.

Isaac Watts says it for me (Common Praise No.216):

‘Give us the wings of faith to rise within the veil, and see the saints above, how great their joys, how bright their glories be. Once they were mourning here below, their couch was wet with tears; they wrestled hard, as we do now, with sins and doubts and fears. Our glorious leader claims our praise for his own pattern given; while the long cloud of witnesses show the same path to heaven.’

Philip Doddridge, a contemporary of Watts, wrote to him:

‘I was preaching in a barn to a company of plain country people. After the sermon we sang your hymn ‘Give me the wings of faith to rise’ and I had the satisfaction to see tears in the eyes of several. After the service some of them told me they were not able to sing, so deeply were their minds affected. They were mostly poor people who work for their living.’

The clear conclusion is that of the author of the epistle to the Hebrews (12.1-2):

‘With so many witnesses in a great cloud all around us, we should throw off everything that weighs us down and the sin that clings so closely and with perseverance keep running in the race which lies ahead of us. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection’.