18 May 2025

18 May 2025 - Fourth Sunday of Easter

Transcript

Reading:  

Revelation 21:16

Write:  

The city was square, its length the same as [also] its width. He measured the city with the rod and found it fifteen hundred miles in length and width and height.

Reflect:   

So it is a cube.

Measuring its volume, it means the earth is almost exactly seventy-seven times the volume of the New Jerusalem. Still, that is pretty darn big!

Now, we can play games with these numbers, but the reality is, most likely, very different. Rather than it being fifteen hundred miles in each direction, it was described using a term of measurement from the Greeks, twelve thousand stades (a stades was about 607 feet; and we get the word stadium from that); the number is symbolic: twelve (the apostles as leaders of the new Israel) multiplied by one thousand (the immensity of the Christians, who are the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem). 

So these numbers are probably symbolic. I don’t think we should expect to see the New Jerusalem having a fifteen-hundred-mile-long wall. But… if God wants to do it that way… who am I to say no!

Let’s say, for giggles, that a Star Trek Borg ship was real. If I calculated all of this correctly, and I’m not sure my math is right, the Borg’s volume would be over seven million gallons. But the New Jerusalem’s volume would be five hundred and ninety million gallons. That means you could put over eighty-four million Borg ships inside of the New Jerusalem! But enough of the silliness.

We have a repeat in today’s reading of a line from last week: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes…”

I think the quote “from the throne” deserves to be repeated in full: 

“Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away.”

No more suffering! That is what we are waiting for.

Also, remember that this New Jerusalem came down out of heaven from God, “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Next week we will continue reading from chapter twenty-one and we will hear that this New Jerusalem “gleamed with the splendor of God.”

There are twelve gates – three in each direction – with the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites. Each gate was supposedly made of a single pearl. There are twelve courses of stones which hold the names of the apostles of the Lamb. That means that each course of those stones had to be one hundred and twenty-five miles high! And all of them different types of precious gems (jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx. carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, hyacinth, and amethyst – I have no idea what some of those are!). But… again, who am I to tell God he can’t do it that way!

But it does sound rather incredible.

Apply:   

Now that all the incredible descriptions of size are done, I want to turn to a little more spiritually practical approach to the New Jerusalem that is the Bride of Christ. I want to back up to chapters seventeen and eighteen of Revelation. This is where the “great harlot,” “the whore of Babylon” is described.

Many non-Catholic preachers will define the whore Babylon as being explicitly the city of Rome. They use this as a way to attack the Catholic Church. However, Rome is not the place where Jesus was crucified. The “great city” is described in chapter eleven, where our Lord was crucified – that can only mean Jerusalem. After a number of other events, we get to the great harlot of chapter seventeen.

There are reasons to describe Babylon as Rome. But I think the better description is that it is talking about Jerusalem. Now, the NewJerusalem is described as the Bride of Christ. The Old Jerusalem is described as a harlot.

Let me take a little side trip. Lady Wisdom is described in the book of Proverbs in chapters eight and nine. Lady Folly is described in chapter nine. I am not going to go into those two chapters of Proverbs at this time. You can read them yourself. But I wanted to reference them because we are talking about the Old Jerusalem that played a harlot (Folly) and the New Jerusalem (Wisdom) that is the Bride – the Glorious Bride – of Jesus. It should not, therefore, come as any surprise that there is a tradition of speaking – spiritually – of the problem of good and bad being described in terms of a good or bad woman.

I will not make an apology for what some would call sexism. Because, at the same time, I know there are wise men and foolish men – just as much as that falls in with women. We have to deal with what we are given from Scripture. I think it is the height of hubris to think that we can rewrite Scripture into a more palatable modern sense of the roles of men and women.

That being said, I want to turn my attention back to what is described as Babylon and what is described as the New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem is built by God. Babylon was built by human beings; the New Jerusalem comes down to earth so that that the worshiping church can join in the heavenly liturgy.

There are more parallels between the two. In chapter seventeen verse one, John is invited by an angel to come and see the harlot; in twenty-one verse nine he is invited to come and see the heavenly city. In seventeen verse three John sees the wicked city in the wilderness; in twenty-one verse ten he sees the holy city from a high mountain. In seventeen verse four the harlot city is dressed like a prostitute wearing gold jewels and pearls; in twenty-one verses eleven eighteen and twenty-one the bride is adorned like a virgin bride wearing gold jewels and having gates made of pearl. In eighteen verse two Babylon appears as a dwelling place of demons; in twenty-one verse three, the New Jerusalem appears as the dwelling place of God. In eighteen verse seven Babylon is accused of glorifying herself; in twenty-one verse twenty-three the new Jerusalem is wrapped in the glory of God. In eighteen verse twenty-three the harlot city deceives the nations with her sorcery; in twenty-one verse twenty-four the holy city leads the nations by her light.

This is something that is typical of the entire book of Revelation. I said last weekend that the entire book of Revelation is about worship of God. Well, that also includes stories of people who refuse to worship God.

For instance, chapter sixteen speaks about the bowls of God’s wrath and that people “cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores, and did not repent of their deeds.” There are those who will never bend their knee in worship of God. They choose to fight and even curse God. Such are those who are in league with the Dragon and the beasts that will be thrown into the pool of fire at the end of time.

Yes, there is a destruction for those people and those servants of Satan. For us to assume otherwise is a huge mistake. But the message of the book of Revelation is that God wins, and those who choose to be with him will worship him in the heavenly liturgy, in the heavenly and New Jerusalem.

Next weekend I will be talking about the Blessed Mother, and how she is described in the book of Revelation. But for this weekend, I remind you that there is a danger in the whore Babylon; there is also a great blessing in the bride of Christ – the New Jerusalem. And the church is part of that New Jerusalem already established by Jesus on the earth.

One last little point. Chapter eighteen verse four says “come out of her, my people, lest you partake in her sins, lest you share in her plagues…” It is interesting that it is believed no Christians died in the siege of Jerusalem in the year seventy A.D. by Rome. They were saved by the prophetic messages of the day – this being one of them. Yet there were many martyrs also in the day.

The book of Revelation speaks very highly of the martyrs. And we honor them throughout our church year. We need to look forward to the coming of the New Jerusalem because it is the fulfillment of all the promises of Jesus. That is what the Easter season is all about.

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