Sermon preached at Evensong on the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2026

During the Sundays between Easter and Ascension Day, we are given opportunities to reflect on the implications of Christ’s resurrection. Today, on the Sunday before the Ascension, we have heard a reading from the end of the book of Revelation, a text which shimmers with resurrection life, with images which seem to us simultaneously familiar yet strange, charged with a resolute hope in Christ who was declared at the beginning of this book to be both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of all things. Today’s reading takes us to the heart of the end—an end which is also beginning. 

The New Testament scholar, Bishop Tom Wright, a former Canon here, is sometimes quoted as saying, ‘It’s all very well this talk about heaven, but it’s not the end of the world!’ Sometimes, when we Christians reflect on Easter, we can get a bit stuck on heaven, as if the only effect of Christ’s resurrection is to allow the transfer after death of a previously isolated humanity from one reality ‘into’ a new reality. Different traditions will emphasise diverse elements of what this might mean: rest, bliss, participation in God. And we are of course certainly right to point to this liberating effect of Christ’s resurrection, a liberation which frees us from death and from death’s stranglehold, a liberation which promises eternal peace and life in God. The point is, Christ’s resurrection of course does open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers, it does allow us to speak of a perfect rest in Christ’s love for redeemed humanity. But today’s readings prompt us to ask, ‘is there still yet more?’ Have we—in our categories and language—unintentionally narrowed the scope of Christ’s victory? The end of the book of revelation perhaps helps us not to get stuck.

The story of salvation told in the bible begins in a garden, Eden, and ends in a Garden City. The new Jerusalem is more than Jerusalem, and this new Eden is much more than the first Eden. Christ’s victory at Easter inaugurates more than simply individual stories of human salvation. Of course the cross and empty tomb speak to us personally as Christian believers. Of course the new life we share in Christ, now unrestricted by death and decay, is the gift of the resurrection which has permanently and finally reshaped human destiny. But there is a step change in the whole of created history as Christ rises from the dead and the whole of creation is renewed. Elements of this are visible in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection—think of the earthquake in Matthew’s Gospel, the darkness that comes over the whole land as Jesus utters his cry of dereliction, think of Mary Magdalene’s beautiful seeming-mistake which tells us so much truth, when she greets the Risen Jesus as if he is the gardener. What happens at Easter is cosmic stuff, and it resonates not only through a fallen humanity, but also through a fallen world which yet has within it the seeds of its own future.

During the fortnight before Easter, we heard so much in the scripture readings about the Temple. Jesus’s teachings within it, his action in throwing out the money changers, and his increasingly adversarial conversations with the religious professionals who were at its heart, all contribute towards the decision to pursue him to the cross. ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up’, Jesus says, speaking of the Temple which was his body. St John tells us that after his resurrection, Jesus’s disciples would remember this saying. In other words, they would finally start to get it, and this teaching would become a central way of thinking of and believing in what had just happened. ‘The stone that the builders rejected’ had become the cornerstone. There is a new building project going on now, as a result of the resurrection, which is a different kind of building. God’s intense holiness not restricted to a single place, but known and celebrated in the lives of those who follow the Risen Jesus, and who perceive the ramifications of the Veil of the Temple being torn in two.

So, in the book of Revelation’s vision of the New Jerusalem, we are told, there is no temple. There is also no need of sun or moon, because there is no night. Its gates—normally made to secure a city, quite frankly, to keep people out—are open continually. The crystal-bright river which flows through the middle of the city from the throne of God, feeds the tree of life which has plenteous fruit, and leaves for the healing of the nations. Here, the hurt of Eden and of Adam’s disobedience is finally repaired, as the nations are gathered in. This is the first and last global city, in fact, one enormous Holy of Holies; no Temple needed because an incarnate God dwells with people, Christ’s resurrection the first fruit of a new humanity living in a new creation held together by the loving sinews of intimacy in worship. The divine presence, whose holiness had before been believed to be so volatile and unapproachable, that it could not be seen or approached, is now unveiled, and the divine name—previously believed to be so holy that it could not be spoken—now written on the foreheads of those who worship. This vision reveals an intimacy between God and humanity which has not been known before. And it is a vision of consummation, where the Lamb once slain, gives life.

So, back to Easter, and why this matters so much. The life which Christ offers us through his death and resurrection is a thoroughly transformed reality, more real than anything we think we have really encountered. Wherever we think our faith has ‘got us’, there is always more. Revelation gives us an Easter vision of the end of all things, which is their consummation in a new creation, recognisable, restored, but with a character we stumble to articulate because we can barely believe it to be true. The raw material of creation is the raw material of new creation; none of this will be lost, although it will be subject to the purification of God’s loving judgement, and to the life of the One who has given his life for the life of the world. We Christians are ambassadors for this abundant vision of God’s future. This has implications for how we treat each other, for how we live amidst the ecosystems of the world, and for how we seek to shape communities and politics. We are co-workers during the time of this creation to unveil the new creation. We are to blow the whistle on all that would obscure the beauty of Christ’s love, a life given, laid down and a life restored in order that we may live in Communion with that love.

It can be hard to risk that kind of commitment, that kind of faith, where so much noise conspires to drown out the indestructible pulse of a life which does not have to compete, a life which is stronger than death. As the much-loved Easter hymn concludes, imagining a further conversation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the Garden of the Resurrection, that new Eden, ‘Mary, spring is here to stay; only death is dead.’