Revelation 21:10, 22 – 22:5
“Healing of the Nations”
May 22, 2022 – Sixth Sunday of Easter
The first time Revelation 22:2 registered on my young mind was in junior high. At the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, his protagonist, reformed book-burning fireman Guy Montag, remembers these words, “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
At the conclusion of Bradbury’s story, Montag leaves a city just before it is destroyed by nuclear bombs, following a river downstream. After the catastrophe, he and his companions turn and go back upstream to offer help to any survivors. Those gorgeous words from Revelation, which he has memorized, are what he selects to share with his friends on the way. That sudden appearance of Christian hope, at the end of a terribly bleak story of dystopian ignorance and violence, lodged itself in my mind. I don’t know where I got the picture, but I imagine that verse blazed across a crimson sky with a mushroom cloud rising in the background.
The larger context here is John’s vision of the holy, spiritual city of Jerusalem, as we heard from chapter 21, verse 10, “coming down out of heaven from God.” I’ll stop right here and remind you of something I’ve preached for years. This is the true Christian hope that John sees, not that we will go up to heaven and stay there for eternity, but that heaven, that God, will come down to us.
Our Christian story is not about some great escape from our poor doomed planet. Instead, the story starts with God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden on earth, and continues with God meeting Moses in a burning bush and then traveling with all Israel in a tent they carried through an earthly wilderness. The center of it all is God coming down to earth as one of us, a fully divine but fully human Savior. Jesus came preaching that He was bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth with Him, giving it to us right now, right here.
Of course, our planet, as beautiful and wonderful as it can often be, is hardly the Garden of Eden. There is much about it and about us that can make you feel that God is nowhere in sight. That is why the story is not over, not for us, not for planet earth. There are last scenes still to play out, the kingdom to be fully realized, the presence of God to be made absolutely and completely visible.
That Holy City, the new Jerusalem, is John’s visionary symbol of how it is all fulfilled, how God finally appears on earth to be among us without leaving. That’s why verse 22 of chapter 21 tells us there is no temple in the city, no particular, single building like our own sanctuary, where people go to meet God. Instead, God will be throughout His city.
I’ve preached this text several times before, focusing then on that “river of the water of life” in chapter 22 verse 1. It is an image which flows through Scripture, hinted at in Genesis, called the “river of God” in Psalms, wonderfully envisioned in Ezekiel, and mentioned by Jesus Himself. Yet today, in these times, I feel drawn to the “tree of life” whose leaves promise healing for the nations.
The whole text is full of images on which we could dwell. At the end of chapter 21, John reflects on the light of the presence of God in the City. It makes other illumination, even the sun and moon, unnecessary. The “lamp” of that city, says verse 23, “is the Lamb.” That same thought reappears in verse 5 of chapter 22 as we read that those who dwell there “need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.”
Yet today, right now, the nations. God help the nations. God help our nation of course, but God also help Ukraine and Syria and Taiwan and Afghanistan and Colombia and Myanmar and the countless troubled and warring tribes of this earth. As the old Pete Seeger song goes, “Oh, when will they ever learn?” According to our text, the answer is when that Holy City arrives, when God comes down to earth to stay.
The nations are mentioned several times here. In verse 24, we’re told that “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” That bright illumination of the Lord’s presence will attract and draw the nations of the world. Verse 26 repeats it, “People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”
It’s the same inclusive vision we heard in the Revelation 7 text for Mother’s Day, an uncountable multitude from every nation, every people on earth, coming together around God, around the Lamb of God who is Jesus Christ. It’s the blessing of peace for the world at which Jesus hints in our Gospel lesson for today, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives.” The peace Jesus gives will not disappear when a treaty is broken or a border is violated. It’s a peace more lasting and deeper than anything humans can create by negotiation or compromise.
Speaking Friday on the third anniversary of his inauguration, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that only “diplomacy” can end the war in Ukraine. But he also insisted that Russia should be made to pay for every home, school, hospital, and business it destroys, that allies of Ukraine should seize Russian property and use it “to create a fund for Ukrainian victims of the war.”[1]
Zelenskyy also called a Russian strike on a cultural center Friday “absolute evil.” By “diplomacy” he doesn’t mean compromising with such evil. And when Scripture here tells us that the Holy City will be open to “the nations,” God will not compromise with evil. Verse 27 ends chapter 21, “But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” When heaven comes to earth, God will include people from the whole world, but He will also exclude all the evil which the world generates. It will be taken away, like cancer from an otherwise healthy body. God will not negotiate with evil. He will root it out. God intends to heal the nations, heal our world.
So today, instead of that brilliant light, instead of that incredible river, instead even of that amazing City with its gemstone walls and pearly gates, I’m focusing on the tree which will grow there. It’s an amazing tree which somehow grows on both sides of the river, says verse 2 of chapter 22.
In that vision of a tree somehow growing over a river, John expanded another prophet’s vision found in Ezekiel 47:12. Ezekiel too was shown a great river. It flowed from a rebuilt and purified temple. Its water healed the broken, ruined land of Israel after Babylon’s destruction. Its waters even made the Dead Sea into fresh water. And on its banks there were trees which grew all sorts of fruits which are for food and “their leaves for healing.” John drew out that idea to the “healing of the nations.”
The Tree of Life itself is there at the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 2:9, in the middle of the Garden of Eden and then again in 3:23 as God removes Adam and Eve’s access to its healing fruit and leaves. Yet in Revelation it is returned, restored along the River which was also present in Eden. Verse 2 says that tree will bear “twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month.” It’s a never-ending supply of life-giving sustenance, another splendid symbol of how God plans to care for us on this earth forever.
But John adds that phrase, “and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” My wife Beth taught this Revelation text in elementary Sunday School a few weeks ago. She asked me why John used that image. “Why are leaves from the Tree of Life for the healing of the nations?” I didn’t have a good answer for her then, other than that it is imagery showing God’s care and restoration of our world.
The beginning of an answer for Beth and for understanding those healing leaves comes to us in the way Christians have imagined and pictured that eternal Tree of Life in relation to what is at the center of our Christian faith. Most fundamentally, they have said down through the ages that Jesus is the Tree of Life. The great Bible translator Jerome riffs on that and says the Bible has two banks like God’s River, the Old and New Testaments, and both banks show us Jesus. Our Savior is the Tree of Life which appears on both sides of Holy Scripture.[2]
Christians have also said that the object which we use more than any other to symbolize Jesus and what He has done for us, can be seen as God’s “Tree of Life.” An ancient Christian writer named Caesarius wrote, “There is no tree that bears fruit in every season except the cross…”[3] That ancient Roman instrument of death became, for you and me and all who believe in Jesus, the Tree of Life.
In our own community, long ago now, Christian artist Dan Chen created a beautiful sculpture. Beth and I first saw it one year at the Asian Festival at the fairgrounds. Dan superimposed a vine upon a cross to show us life springing from it, to show us the Tree of Life growing from Jesus’ sacrifice of His Body upon that wood.
Which brings me back around to those healing leaves and to Ray Bradbury’s story and to what this all might mean for you and me right now, not just in the glorious future which awaits us in the new Jerusalem by the banks of that mighty River. I mentioned Bradbury’s character Montag. He was a “fireman” whose job was to light fires, to burn books…, not just banned books, but all books. Bradbury was depicting a terrible time when knowledge would be feared and authoritarian despots would try to eradicate it. It makes me grimly smile at the fact that Bradbury could not imagine our own time when so many people would voluntarily give up books and reading.
At any rate, in Fahrenheit 451, books were being lost, put to the flames. Bradbury wrote before anyone really imagined the vast digital storage libraries we have now. So in his imagination, the only way to preserve the books as they were burned was for people to store them in their own minds, to memorize them. Montag meets a community of people who tell him that each of them is a book or an author. “I am Plato’s Republic,” says one. There are also those who are books of the Bible, a person who is Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. Montag himself has memorized Ecclesiastes and some of Revelation.
It is that community of “Book People” which left the city before it was bombed. It is those people who at the end of the novel turn back toward it to help. They don’t just plan to do hospice care for the injured and dying. They actually intend to rebuild, to restart civilization, and to bring an end to war. They intend to use the only tools they have, the books, the words, the knowledge they carry in their hearts and minds.
Yes, I know it sounds farfetched. Bradbury’s stories are as much fantasy as they are science fiction, but read it for yourself. Or, ironically, see the Francois Truffaut film of it made in 1966. I suggest you skip the HBO remake from 2018. When I saw the first movie, still in junior high, I was disappointed that it did not quite end like Bradbury’s book. There was no return to the city to help. There was no quotation from the Book of Revelation. But there was an incredibly powerful scene where you see the Book People walking back and forth along the banks of a river as the first snow of winter falls. In many different languages, they are reciting to themselves the books they have each memorized, a little ragged band carrying the history and hope of humanity within themselves.
What does that Bradbury book and its move adaptation have to do with the Bible and the Tree of Life and you and me? Just this, which an ancient church father understood long ago. Oecumenius in his commentary on Revelation wrote, “The leaves of life are those who hang from Christ and cling to him.”[4] He went on to say that all those who “now heal souls,” “every righteous person” are leaves on the Tree of Life and live for the healing of the nations.
The Gospel text for today comes right before Jesus declares Himself the vine and we the branches in John 15. There at the beginning of this morning’s reading, chapter 14 verse 23, He says, “Those who love me will keep my word.” Go two verses further in Revelation to verse 7 of chapter 22 and we read, “See, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.” The leaves which heal are those who keep the words, keep His Word.
Yes, there is a grand, glorious, almost unimaginable day when God’s City will come down, when God’s River will burst forth, when God’s Tree grows abundantly and our world is completely healed. In the meantime, though, our Lord’s tree still sprouts, still puts forth shining green and healing leaves. Those leaves are you and I. We carry His words, His Word, in our hearts and minds and share it however we can with the hurting world around us. We are the Book People, with a Book of Life to open and give to whoever will hear and read it with us.
It’s impossible to track down the origin of it, but in our own denomination’s history Covenant people have often referred to themselves as “people of the Book.” We mean to say that we are people whose lives are centered in and around this Book, the Holy Bible, in which we find the Tree of Life who is Jesus and His Words which can bring healing to the nations of the world. That is what we’ve sought to be here at Valley Covenant Church. It’s why Bible study has always been at the heart of who we are.
Yet it’s not just words. Those Book People in Fahrenheit 451 intended to do practical, good things with the words they carried. So do we. When we teach how Jesus loves children and take actual steps to protect them, we are keeping Jesus’ word. When we make peace with a neighbor next door or support a peace initiative in the Middle East we keep Jesus’ word to love our enemies. And when we feed the hungry or lead someone to salvation or help someone find counseling or plant a tree in a barren spot, we are still keeping the word of Jesus to love and care for each other and for our world. We are being healing leaves on the Tree of Life.
The nations need the Lord’s healing. You and I are the leaves on His Tree, perhaps the leaves in His Book, which will bring such healing. Let us stay connected to the Tree and flourish as we find there our own healing as well.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See USA Today, May 21, 2022.
[2] Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament XII (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2005), p. 389.
[3] Ibid., p. 390.
[4] Ibid., p. 391.