Towards the end of 2021, I meditated and selected a scriptural passage for this year of 2022. This is something I do each year. At our home, we have a Bible passage to spiritually frame every year. For 2022, our home passage is Revelation 22:1-5.
Western Christianity may have inadvertently portrayed the goal of the gospel as going to a place called heaven when we die. But that is a sad caricature at best. As renowned biblical scholar N. T. Wright puts it, the gospel is not so much about life after death but about life after life after death.
When Heaven comes down to earth at the end of history, we will behold and savour a totally transfigured reality of a new and better Eden; a new city of the new Jerusalem where God and humanity co-abide in a new creation.
Jesus inaugurated this new reality. We who are His witnesses and disciples collectively form the new beloved and redeemed community that is the new Temple wherein God dwells by His Spirit even now. Our work here and now has eternal implications perhaps not fully cognizable as yet.
Awarezen manifests in myriad forms and expressions as a part of this incredible foretaste of God’s Kingdom to come. Let us co-labour to co-build this new integral future of Emmanuel (God-with-us) where Christ—hitherto imagined and loved in myriad refractions—is the Centre, fully revealed as He truly is.
Revelation 22:1-5
[1] Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb [2] through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. [3] No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. [4] They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. [5] And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
