Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 25, 2025
The New Testament offers no shortage of metaphors for God’s ultimate work in the world. Every Sunday, we pray for the coming of God’s kingdom. With some frequency, we invoke the image of the heavenly feast or the banquet — images with biblical layers, which become particularly fruitful when standing at the communion table.
There are others, of course. Sometimes we talk in naturalistic terms. We talk about the lakeshore, or with equal reverence we invoke the mountaintop, each of them sites where God fully unveils Godself with some apocalyptic flourish. For the most part, we like to find images for God’s work in the simplest and most naturalistic things. Bread. Wine. Water. We like to imagine God at work in the most basic and elemental pieces of God’s creation.
Except here in Revelation, where God’s coming looks like a city.
Revelation is a story about cities. It starts as a letter written to Christians in seven cities throughout the eastern end of the Roman Empire; it assumes that its readers carry with it all of the joy and all of the hassle of living in the dense urban environments enabled in part by imperial might. As it unfolds, Revelation becomes fixated on the nightmarish city of Babylon, a stand-in for Rome itself, which freely traffics in the worst kinds of human depravity, injustice, oppression, and bloodshed. Given the description of Babylon, one might readily expect that Revelation would find its solace on the lakeshore, or the mountaintop, or any of those rustic retreats with which the New Testament authors are so intimately familiar.
But for John on Patmos, God’s work also looks like a city: the New Jerusalem, the city of God.
We should be a little surprised by this, given John’s cynicism about Babylon. But Revelation is not an invitation to run for the hills. It’s written to city-dwellers who are being called not out of the world but into it, not away from their station but into the full expression of their discipleship as faithful neighbors. As Brian Blount puts it in his commentary on Revelation, God’s work is imagined here “as a complex, other-connected and no doubt other-oriented relationship that brings with it all of the social and political ramifications that life in any city engenders.”
The church I serve is in the middle of a city, and we have at best a love-hate relationship with its geography. We love the energy of being surrounded by the students at the University of Texas; we hate the parking and the traffic and how difficult it is to get from home to church and back home again. On a weekday morning, I can get within two blocks of church and then be stuck behind a thousand pedestrians in the crosswalk. Twenty minutes later, when I finally pull into my parking spot, I can’t help but resent the city around me just a little bit. I daydream occasionally about how much easier church would be if we didn’t have all these neighbors around us getting in our way and taking up our space. We could have the mountaintop to ourselves! We could have the lakeshore to ourselves!
But that’s not the calling. The calling to these Christians addressed in Revelation is not so different than it is to us now: rather than running from the world, we are called into it. Rather than abandoning our post, we are called towards it with vigilance. And rather than isolating ourselves from the troublesome, bothersome, and endlessly complicated reality of civic life, we’re called to embrace it: to live among those who are different than us, to love those who occupy the crosswalk in front of us; to seek harmony with those who cause the traffic jams around us.
The imagery of the city of God isn’t meant to confer some virtue on those already living in the urban mess. Nor is it trafficking in the current cultural/political divides between city mice and country mice. But it does mean that the call to love your neighbor isn’t a temporary way-station en route to some ultimately insular mountaintop.
If life in God’s realm is anything like a city, you’re going to have neighbors the whole time.
Questions for reflection on the Sixth Sunday of Easter:
- What are your favorite images of God’s work in the world? What metaphors do you most frequently use, and why?
- Who are your church’s neighbors? How do they frustrate you, and how do they enrich your community?
- Where is God at work in your church’s relationship with the community around you?
View the corresponding Order of Worship for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
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