Main news for 30 November 2022

For many people today the Apocalypse is associated with the end, with a worldwide or even universal catastrophe. Yet the Book of Revelation ends in a completely different way. At the end there is not catastrophe, but renewal. A new world. A new heaven and a new earth. And the heavenly Jerusalem descending from the new heaven to the new earth. All these images are traditional for Yahwistic visionary experience, both prophetic and apocalyptic. Strictly speaking, the coming of the Messiah and the appearing of the Kingdom were linked with the renewal of creation even in pre-exilic times.

But "behold, I make all things new," sounding from God's mouth, also has a deeper meaning. Indeed, God does not simply create the world once and then leave it without His presence and without His support. The world is created by God constantly. The "in the beginning" where God "creates the heaven and the earth" is in God's eternity. And with respect to the created world, it can be revealed only in the fullness of the universe, in the totality of all its spaces and all its times. This means that the world is created, or rather renewed, by God at every moment and at every point of its existence.

A slowing of this process is possible only as a consequence of a rupture in creation, and rupture is possible only as a consequence of the fall - of a human being or an angel. If God's renewal of the world ceased altogether, the world would immediately collapse, disappear as such, and turn into chaos, into something formless and without qualities. And now, when the world has been renewed by God's breath and has become the Kingdom in fullness, it is entirely natural that its very existence has become constant renewal.

Indeed, breath is nothing other than the constant renewal of the one who breathes, who at one and the same time is always the same and always other. And the world as God's Kingdom was intended to exist precisely in this way. Now, after transfiguration, it finally begins to correspond fully to God's design for it. The words that "the sea is no more" are symbolic and testify that in the world there are no longer forces opposed to God, for in the Bible the sea symbolized precisely these forces. And the heavenly Jerusalem symbolizes the Kingdom as such.

For Jerusalem, for example in the visions of Isaiah of Babylon, where the features of the heavenly city are already visible, is not simply buildings, but first of all people, inhabitants. And the Kingdom consists of its inhabitants, of the people dwelling in it. Their relationships with one another, with God, and with Christ form the structure of the Kingdom. And the spiritual backbone of the Kingdom is Christ's own relationship with His Father. On these rests the heavenly Jerusalem opened to John - the triumphant Kingdom on the renewed earth under the renewed heaven.