Episode Details

Could this be heaven for everyone?When you were at school you may have read George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. The story is about a hostile takeover of a farm led by two pigs called Snowball and Napoleon. The animals have come to believe that their human owner is an oppressor and that they can create a much freer and equal society by throwing off his yoke and running the farm themselves.But, of course, once they have secured control of the farm, the lofty ideas drafted by the elite porcine liberators are quickly watered down until their meanings have been changed or reversed altogether. Certain things that the pigs said were not permitted became permitted. Other things that were said to be permitted were banned. And certain slogans were produced that seemed to contradict those they went before: “Four legs good, two legs bad” became, over time, “Four legs good, two legs better”. And “All animals are equal” famously became “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.Animal Farm is about our seemingly innate desire to build a heaven on earth. If only we could change this or that change, implement this or that philosophy, we tell ourselves, we can do it. And, yet, every time we try, we fail, and we fail with catastrophic consequences.The reason for this is because we attempt to bring heaven to earth without the help of God as a manifestation of human pride. We attempt to use politics to do what only God can do, which is, as our passage from the Book of Revelation today tells us, to make all things new.Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, said, ‘Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic.’The Heavenly CityIn Revelation 21, we see the end of the story of the whole Bible: the complete recreation of the cosmic order. Did you know that the ultimate Christian hope is not just that our souls will go to heaven when we die but that the entire universe will be recreated and that we too will be recreated? Even our bodies, which decay and die in this life, will be raised up again to live in this new world.Revelation shows us this: the old heaven and the old earth pass away and a new heaven and a new earth are created. And then we see a very strange image: the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. This is the literal coming together of heaven and earth. The image of a bride and her husband implies a nuptial union between this world that we live in now and the heavenly realm. We cannot possibly understand this in any detail but we do know that God promises to dwell with his people. And we are told in a great promise that in this place there will be no more tears, for God will wipe them away from every eye. There will be no more mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things will have passed away.It is no coincidence that this reading is chosen for the Easter season: when Jesus stood up and walked away from the tomb, he began a project of cosmic renewal. Again, not just so that we would live forever in a spiritual realm, but so that the whole of the universe might be redeemed from the curse of sin which it came under back at the beginning of the story.And this, friends, is the answer to that human longing for heaven on earth, which is so often manifested in a prideful attempt to do it on our own. From the very beginning God has been coming down to earth: walking in the Garden of Eden and beckoning to Adam and Eve, descending to Abraham, Moses and the Prophets to call a people for his own possession, and ultimately, taking the form of man in the coming of Jesus to this world in the incarnation.The point is that we cannot lift ourselves up to God. We need God to come down to us. And this is not just for no reason. It is so that we might be lifted up to him. Another aspect of the end of the story that is often not spoken about enou