M: When Jesus says "Behold I make all things new," I’m guessing he’s speaking of an ongoing reality.
C: Yes, I think that’s right.
M: If that is true, and given that we observe the feasts and liturgical seasons, and that Scripture speaks of the trees in the New Jerusalem bearing fruit, is Heaven itself, though beyond time, also experiencing "cycles" of ongoing renewal?
C: In short, yes. But—we have to draw our response with very fine lines. Talk of “renewal” suggests the cycles of nature—birth/death/rebirth. God, of course, is never subject to conditions, never forced to change. God does not change, which is why we can be sure that God’s power never weakens or strengthens and God’s passion never waxes or wanes. This is why the tradition says God is immutable and impassible.
M: Agreed.
C: All that notwithstanding, God is truly lively. Spirited! It may seem pedantic to teach the doctrine of the Trinity, but that doctrine, rightly taught, tells us that God’s life is never boring. We can even say that God surprises God—also by surprising us. What makes God reliable, essentially, is the character of God’s dance with God; God is unmovable, our unshakeable foundation, because of the way God moves.
M: Beautiful. But how does that answer my question? Why are there fruit trees in the New Jerusalem?
C: The conditions of heaven are not ultimately natural or even supernatural; they are divine. In the Ages of Ages, the love of God is manifested as the atmosphere in which we can at last in full freedom live, move, and have our being. The “weather” of the new heavens and the new earth is graced through-and-through. That may seem like wild speculation, but that’s simply what the Scripture promises, is it not? The Apocalypse says there will be no need of the sun and no need of the moon in the New Creation because the glory of God, the Lamb, is the city’s light. That claim, obviously, is not true only of light; it’s necessarily also true about all of the movements of the creation, including everything that happens in its day-night cycles.
M: Is John here saying that while there is “no need” for the heavenly bodies, in fact they are subsumed in Christ and continue as real spiritual realities in their consummated form and state?
C: That’s how I take it. No good is lost or left behind, not even the signs of the good. Jenson says in the end we will be so intimately united with the Father in Jesus through the Spirit as their co-improvisors and co-instigators that we will enjoy the universe as God enjoys it and in that way make it ever more and more enjoyable for God! He even says (at the end of his systematics) that if black holes occur, we will “play with them close at hand.”
M: Echoing Isaiah.
C: Yes! Isaiah 11.
M: So at some level we will experience nuances and differences—shades of meaning—in the Created Order that are “reminiscent” of the ways in which life moves now? Shades can be dark without being gloomy or menacing.
C: I wouldn’t say that what we’ll experience then will remind us of this life. It will be this life—rectified and fully realized. No. Rectified and more than fully realized. This is important: God has no memories. God “remembers,” no doubt; but the past is past to God; reality never closes on him. Even now, under the conditions of fallenness, all is present to God as God is present to all. So, as the Scriptures assures us, when God is all in all and everything to everything creatures will know as they are known.
M: What makes the New Creation new, then? How does God become all in all?
C: What we call the Second Coming the apostles called Christ’s “appearing.” And that appearance is not something that happens in time, as one event among the many, but to time, making it so that each and every thing that exists receives an unlimited share in God’s nature. Hence, the trees and their fruit, like the light, like the waters, become entirely and utterly Spirit-ed. Chesterton, in his The Man Who Was Thursday, gets this exactly right, I believe. The secret of of the whole world, he says, is that we’ve never really encountered the truest truth of any creature. We’ve only known their “backs,” because everything is “stooping and hiding its face.” The “appearing” of Jesus gives us our faces.
M: That’s Lewis.
C: Yes. Exactly.
M: So will there be snow and rain? Or will the entire earth be without those atmospheric dynamics? I get that in Paradise there was no rain…
C: There’ll be all the good those things signify, and therefore those things, too, in their fulness. No good is lost, including the good signs of the good.
M: So they are all symbolic of what is to come.
C: Yes, but not merely symbolic. They are sacramental, even now. And infinitely more than sacramental then.
M: Say more.
C: Nature at its most life-giving is already truly sharing in God’s life, and sharing it with us. Those moments are not only symbolic of the good God does; they are also signs that do what they’re signifying (hence, sacramental). We see this everywhere in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, do we not? When what’s needed is a sign of death, the waters cooperate by taking him in, swallowing him up like the fish that had been prepared to save Jonah. When what’s needed is a sign of life, the waters again cooperate, bearing him up like Aaron and Hur held up Moses’ arms in the battle with the Amalekites. These stories tell us that water, at its inmost heart, at its causal joint, is capable of the infinite. And that’s true for all creatures.
M: Mind-boggling.
C: To say the least. Can I read you something from Jenson?
M: Of course.
C: Again, it’s from the end of his systematics: “The material of New Jerusalem's walls and streets, of the divine-human community's place, will be jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, amethyst, pearls, and ‘gold, transparent as glass.’ We are to take this information with the desperate seriousness that transcends the registering of prose. After all, will there be no jewelers or goldsmiths in the Kingdom? And will the achievement of their lives provide no matter for eternal interpretation by Jesus' love? That feast of "rich food ... of well-aged wines strained clear," will it have no taste? Will there be no cooks or vintners in the Kingdom? Or even connoisseurs?”
M: The answer must be Yes.
C: Yes. All the Yeses.
M: Is he essentially saying the city, and the world around it, is continually being "built" by the perfected saints through their creative skills and crafts and gifts?
C: Yes. But because it is happening in God and with God, it involves no lack, no scarcity, no conflict, no corruption. There is difficulty without suffering; development and curation without damage; challenge without fear or failure.
M: In the eternal state, if it’s truly infinite, would that mean that there’s no limit to creative expression? And would there be the possibility of endlessly honing and sharpening of our abilities? Bezaleel and Aholiab were graced for all kinds of craft—metallurgy, masonry, etc. In the age to come, will they carry on that work, and only that work, or will they also be capable of being, say, concert violinists?
C: If what we’ve been saying is true, then I think we must all be able to do it all—but in ways that remain utterly, entirely personal. They will carry on their work, and share their skills with us just as the Spirit gave and gives it to them. And it will be ours, uniquely, as it is theres.
M: Will we be honing and sharpening of our abilities forever?
C: God’s goodness never “maxes out.”
M: Dumb question: Does God ever change the scenery for us? Let’s say you really like rain and thunder. Or sunshine. Does the climate of the new earth retain any of that, or no? Not by virtue of cycles, per se. But simply because God desires our pleasure and enjoyment.
C: Even now that’s true in some sense. In the end, after cosmic history is finished, when all things have been fulfilled in God, scenery won’t be merely scenery: it will cooperate with God. It will have agency. Isn’t that what the Gospel stories suggest? The waters agree to bear Jesus, the pigs cooperate in witnessing against the demons, the fig tree itself suggests the truth Jesus declares prophetically. Why does all that happen? Because Jesus personalized everything and everyone he encountered. And here’s another wonder: in the end, in the ages of ages, we will have received that personalization so completely that it will be ours to give. And the more we give it, the more there will be to receive and the more blessed both the giving and the receiving will be.
M: That is really something worth hoping for.
C: It is, isn’t it?
Chris, does “M” stand for “Me” as in you’re asking the questions? And “C” stands for “Christ”, though posing as “Chris”, while literally answering your questions . . . in all the parabolic and poetic flare and fashion that was and is Jesus—who yet can’t “give it to us straight” even in this post, the shadowland; because until ‘then’ getting it “face to face” or fully “unveiled”, would overwhelm us to say the least, i.e., feel far more like a knockout punch though really it was but a more perfect picture of God’s loving embrace?
My God, I love this! The prayer, Our Father, bubbles up in me as I read this. Thank you for sharing. "He elevated nature to Himself, making nature itself another mystery” (Amb5.5).
It reminds me again of St. Julian of Norwich's revelation of a three-tiered heaven "all in the blessed manhood of Christ—none is more, none is less, none is higher, none is lower, but they are even-like in bliss" (Showings Ch. 22)