Fifth Sunday of Easter Yr C 2025

Title

God’s Dwelling is with the Human Race

Outline

Christians talk about going to heaven when they die

That is not how non-Christians talk. The Greeks talked about Hades which was like the Hebrew Sheol, a shadow world separated from God or the gods, and only later took on the a sense of possible retribution. My son-in-law just did law just did a Native American ritual for his sister that involved burning the clothes she had been dressed in after death, cleansing of his heart with smudge, and putting the ashes into the river that goes to the sea where the spirits are. Emotional comfort, but not much hope there.

But Christians talk about going to be in heaven with the saints and with God/Jesus, even if Catholics also mention purgatory as part of the process of going.

But our readings talk about God’s ultimate coming to earth to be with us

Jesus told his disciples that they could not come where he was going, but that he would come to them, which he does already in the Blessed Sacrament. But he also talked to them about being in his Father’s house where there were many dwelling places.

In Revelation, which is also Johannine, we get the ultimate picture. The universe will be renovated, even raised to a higher order of being. Jerusalem, the people of God of both Old and New Testaments (the foundations are the apostles and the gates are the twelve patriarchs), comes “down” from a place in heaven to the renewed earth with the announcement: “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them . . . [for] the old order has passed away.” The city is described as cubical, lined with gold, i.e. as the Holy of Holies, the dwelling of God himself. It is Ezekiel’s Temple, the new Eden, the throne of God and of the Lamb on this earth.

Now that has implications

It means that God loves us so much that he will remake the heavens and the earth so that he can dwell with the people he loves.

But that also means that to be at home there we much love God as he loves us and love those whom he loves, so the new commandment is: “love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

In other words, our love for one another marks us out to the world as citizens of that new city of God and to God as those who are his children.

Let us, then, live in love, for it is our passport to home, our passport to the new Jerusalem tattooed on our hearts. God’s ultimate desire is to live with us, so let us live as the people he has committed himself to in love.