Fr Matthew Reese

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
—Revelation 21:1-4

Dear Friends in Christ,

I’ve been reflecting the last two days on Deacon Susan Erickson’s sermon, and the nature of time. What is time? What is the length of a human moment? How can it be that time is both infinite, and yet for us, so finite?

We, of course, mere mortals that we are, experience time linearly, within the bounds of history. And though God does act in history—not least in the Incarnation of Our Lord—He is not constrained by it in the ways that we are.

Our God is a God not of the dead, but of the living, we were reminded on Sunday. To Him— the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob—“they are all alive.” And today’s beautiful passage from the Revelation to John gives us a sense of that.

John’s vision occurred to him in history, probably around 95 AD, on the island of Patmos. But the content of his vision transcends space and linear time. John sees in the inbreaking of heaven, the consummation of all things, the eschaton, and yet at the same time, the Incarnation a century prior: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men.”

Past, present, future, these are all melded. The creation, the consummation; the living, dead; the Church visible, the Church in-visible.

The poetic and theological richness of this passage, and its view towards the End, this is why this passage is so central to the Burial Liturgy: “and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.”

What greater hope can there be than that? I leave you with one of my favorite settings of this text.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew