A New Earth

A plum tree, one of the earliest fruit trees to blossom in our neighborhood.
Revelation 21:1-7 is certainly my favorite passage in the last book of the Bible and one of my favorites in the whole New Testament.  When I was active as a pastor, it was often a passage that I used for funerals as a comforting promise of the afterlife, but I think it is an exciting proclamation of what is also happening already.
As we hear these passages from Revelation on the Sundays of Easter, the light of the Resurrection adds new meaning to them.  Jesus has risen into this new heaven and new earth and makes it accessible to us right here and now.  By becoming human, and even more so by rising into God, Jesus is himself the wedding of humanity and divinity.
Here in the Revelation passage the union of God's people with God is compared to "a bride adorned to meet her husband."  In this new heaven and new earth the home of God is now with us.  Repeating from last Sunday's passage, from much earlier in Revelation, the visionary tells us that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and lead us to the springs of life-giving water.  "There will be no more death or mourning, no more crying out or pain....And the One who was seated on the throne said, 'See, I make all things new.'"
Teilhard de Chardin sees our whole universe evolving into this newness, into the Risen Christ.  He says, "By virtue of creation and even more of the incarnation, there is nothing profane for those who know how to see."