St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
University of Kansas
2 May 2010
For daily readings, click here.
As I travel, as I profess to others that I am a devout KU fan, I either get jeers or sympathy. Most people familiar with basketball know how KU's season ended. They know about the dude named Farkohmanesh. For most of the country, he is cinderella. For us, he is godzilla. People have said to me ever since that fateful game, if they are not MU or K-State fans, that they're sorry the season this year was a failure. I try to protest that going 5-0 against our rivals and winning both the regular season and postseason Big XII championships is a strange definition of failure. Yet like it or not, what people remember, and what most of us remember, is that 3 pointer from Farkohmanesh hitting the bottom of the net. We remember how things ended. The season is judged by how it ends.
Which makes our second reading today from Revelation all the more important. This reading is from near the very end of the Bible. The Bible, with all its incredible plots and characters, is reaching the finish line. This is the moment we have been building up to, the moment that makes it all worth it. For KU fans, this reading represents the spot in the game of all games, when Sherron is bringing up the ball, handing it off to Mario, and watching him launch that gorgeous shot in the air. Thank God Memphis didn't foul! Listening to these words from revelation is like the unforgettable moment of waiting to see if Mario's shot is going to clank, or to swish. So pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention!
In the final vision John sees a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven. He then hears a loud voice, a clear voice, proclaim that 'God's dwelling is with men.' My friends, I can not overestimate how important these words of prophecy are for our understanding of our Christian faith. Let me repeat the words. 'God's dwelling is with men.' In this great vision given to John, in these last words recorded for the sake of our redemption and salvation, in this great preview of what is to come, John gives us a vision not of souls being taken up into heaven, but heaven giving birth to a new earth. What we see is not the discarding of the physical and a return to the metaphysical. No, what we see is the opposite. The metaphysical continues to give birth to the physical. Then what we hear is not exactly what we expect. We hear not that man's dwelling is ultimately with God, but that God's dwelling is with men. Of course both are true. Man's dwelling is with God. Yet this is not what shocks us. What is unbelievable is the revelation that in the end God also chooses to make His dwelling with us.
We know from Genesis that God created the world out of love, even though He did not need to create. Yet as good as the world was, it was not in the beginning God's dwelling place. The garden was the dwelling place of Adam and Eve, not of God. He made it for them, not because He needed to place to live for Himself. My how things have changed from the beginning of the story to the end, from Genesis to Revelation. Now, somehow, after all the fateful stories of the Bible, the world has changed, not for the worse, but miraculously, for the better. The world, even the world that has been scarred deeply by the wounds of sin and death, has been healed and made so new and so good by the resurrection of Jesus, that now God's dwelling is with men. Not temporarily, but forever. This is how the story ends. It's even better than Mario's shot swishing through the net, although that too seemed too good to be true!
This great vision given to John, and to us at the end of the Bible, should greatly discourage us from ever dumbing down the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For those who choose to leave the Christian faith today, most do so not in order to become bad people, or to begin committing every kind of evil without any accountability. No, today people sense it is becoming more fashionable to be a humanitarian than to be a Christian. This divorce annoys the livign daylights out of me. Unfortunately, it is becoming easier and easier for a person to make a false dichotomy between the two, between loving God and loving the world. It is becoming easier and easier to say to people, and to have them believe you, that you don't have to be a Christian in order to be a good person or to love your neighbor. Those who leave the Christian faith today are oftentimes seduced by a cheap understanding of the meaning of Christ's Resurrection from the dead. This cheap understanding presents Christians as gnostics not evangelists, who purport to have secret knowledge, and who would forsake making the world a better place if it increases their chance to get to heaven. This modern Manicheism presents Christians as those who are afraid that the world will capture their soul, and so are those who ultimately hate the world and all those who belong to the world. Christians are in danger of becoming more and more marginalized and stereotyped, as those who might pretend to love their neighbor, but in the end, are just trying to earn their way to heaven by their proselytizing, and ultimately, do not care if their neighbor makes it or not, as long as they do. I hear from teenagers all the time who are questioning their faith because heaven might be boring, and what is more, it would be incomplete and undesirable, if they make it but one of their friends does not.
This way of thinking tests my sanity! What an impoverished view of heaven this really is! How can we possibly suspect that the new Jerusalem prophesied at the end of the Bible could be anything less than the opportunity to love God and our neighbor in an even more perfect and exciting way than we do today? This final revelation from John puts the rapture, with its attendent fears of being left behind, and its pressure to force Christians to hate the world, in the proper perspective. If God's dwelling place is with men, the fear is not ultimately being left behind, but in failing to be fully human, for God's dwelling place is with men, and the glory of God is man fully alive! The goal is not in the end to find the most perfect way to hate the world, but to be the very best instruments of this new creation, of this new Jerusalem being born from heaven. The impetus of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not in the end a fleeing from the world, not the divorce of the soul from the body, not the rupture of the spiritual and material, but the proclamation that because of the paschal mystery, God's dwelling is not simply about playing harps on the clouds, but is right here with men! Being Christian is nothing less than the ultimate way to be a humanitarian and to love the world, to not pretend in any way that we are God, or that the universe is God, but to accept and to welcome that God desires to dwell with us, with a creation redeemed by His love that has been completely poured out for us in the paschal mystery? The meaning of the Incarnation, Jesus taking a body from us, and being raised from the dead in that same body, is to show not that the world as we know it will be thrown into the great discard pile, as a failed experiment, with the souls of a few chosen being whisked away at the last moment, but that the world as we know it has the destiny of being redeemed, and recreated as the new and eternal Jerusalem. The impetus of the Resurrection is not to rescue for heaven a few holy souls who were mistakenly sent from heaven to earth; no, it is to establish permanently that God's dwelling place is right here with men! The Easter proclamation of the Church is that love is the foundation of life, and that same love which produced something out of nothing, is still re-creating the world, with that love that flows from the side of Christ, that divine love that can and does hold creation together against the powers of sin and death. Our Easter proclamation is that sin and death are not greater than the love of Christ by which there is something rather than nothing and through which all things are made new! Christ makes the commandment that gives birth to His new and eternal life very simple, and it is a commandment for us to be instruments of His love through which the world was made and by which it is remade the eternal dwelling place of God. He tells us to love one another, just as He has loved us.
My friends, there can be no divorce between being a humanitarian and being a Christian. Everything that a Christian professes and lives corresponds to the natural good of man here and now, even as the natural good of man lays the foundation for the faith that corresponds to his supernatural good forever. There is no divorce between being a humanitarian and being a Christian, because the goal of Christianity is not to escape to become a spirit or a ghost or an angel, but to share in the life of the Risen Christ, who even being fully human, shows that a human person, soul and body, who always loves may always live! May we rejoice with the Risen Christ in this Easter season, and proclaim to the world its destiny to become the new and eternal Jerusalem, and grow in confidence in knowing ourselves to be the instruments of this redemption, by loving one another, as Christ loves us!
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