Nov 26: Our Destiny: Not Only a New Heaven But a New Earth

Alonso Cano: St. John's Vision of the New and Heavenly City, Jerusalem

Friday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Reading I: Rev 20:1-4, 11—21:1-2

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (NRSV, Rev 21:1-2).”

Father, we are grateful to everyone who has helped us to understand the one word that you always speak to all of us. The Neo-Platonists of the first centuries of the Christian era have taught clearly and well that we have our origin in you and are called to return to you. For them, however, it is merely a journey of the spirit. The body is to be left behind. Aristotle, recovered by Christendom only in the 13th century, also placed the emphasis on the rational soul, the immaterial aspect of human reality.

Lord, in coming to a deeper understanding of our relationship with you and of your word spoken to us, help us return to our Hebrew roots that we might better grasp the reality of who we are. Before the Greeks who divided us into two parts, soul and body, or even two principles, as St. Thomas stressed in his reading of Aristotle, the Hebrews understood human beings always in their entirety, standing whole before you their God, challenged to say “yes” to you with all of their being. Our destiny, for the Hebrews, involved all that we are, not just some higher spiritual principle with the body sometimes dragged along as an afterthought.

On the road to Damascus St. Paul experienced your son Jesus Christ risen from the dead in the totality of his being, in the language of the Greeks in both his soul and his body. This is what Paul taught to the Church in Corinth when it had erroneously concluded that our destiny involved only the soul, the spiritual dimension of our being. Resurrection, Paul taught, is in the body but a body transformed from a reality of the old world into something completely new.

Father, help us to recover what the Hebrews learned from you long ago, that everything that you have created is good. The physical body is not weakness. It is not shadow existence. It is not to be left behind. Above all, let us resist the ancient Persian Zoroaster and his later disciples who have taught that the body is even darkness and evil, to be fought against.

Help us, Lord our God, in the vision of John, to recognize that our destiny with you involves everything that we are and indeed everything that we have made or done, that nothing that is us in any way will be lost. Help us to look forward with great hope to the creation, not only of a new heaven, but also of a new earth, that we might dwell with you and all your beloved in the new and heavenly city, Jerusalem.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.