Revelation 21: A New Heaven and a New Earth

In the World English Bible, Catholic Edition:

¹ I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away, and the sea is no more. ² I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. ³ I heard a loud voice out of heaven saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with people; and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. ⁴ He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more. The first things have passed away.”

⁵ He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” He said, “Write, for these words of God are faithful and true.” ⁶ He said to me, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give freely to him who is thirsty from the spring of the water of life. ⁷ He who overcomes, I will give him these things. I will be his God, and he will be my son.

The rest of the chapter (verses 9–27) is an angel showing John the city itself: its twelve gates named for the twelve tribes of Israel, its twelve foundations named for the twelve apostles, its walls of jasper and gates of pearl. And then the surprise: “I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city has no need for the sun or moon to shine, for the very glory of God illuminated it and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22–23).

Revelation 21 comes straight after the last judgment in chapter 20, and it answers the question the whole Bible has been asking since Eden: will God and his people ever live together again? The answer is yes, and on earth. The holy city does not wait for us to climb up to it; it comes “down out of heaven from God.” The loud voice announces the fulfillment of the covenant promised all through the Old Testament: “they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”

Three details carry the meaning:

• “A new heaven and a new earth.” This is Isaiah’s promise fulfilled: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be remembered” (Isaiah 65:17). St. Peter repeats it: “according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).
• “The sea is no more.” In the Bible the sea is the image of chaos and threat, the place the beast rose from in Revelation 13. Its disappearance means there is nothing left to fear.
• “I am making all things new.” Not “all new things.” God does not scrap the first creation and start again; he heals and transforms it. St. Paul says the creation itself “will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

Revelation 21:4 is one of the most searched verses in the Bible, and for an obvious reason: it is a promise about grief. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes” is itself a quotation of Isaiah: “He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces” (Isaiah 25:8). The picture is not of tears forbidden, but of tears wiped away, one by one, by God himself.

It teaches three things. First, that death is an enemy, not a natural friend: “The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Second, that the sorrows of this life are real, and God does not pretend otherwise; they are listed one by one, mourning, crying, pain, before they are ended. Third, that they are not final: “The first things have passed away.” The Catechism quotes this verse whole when it describes the heavenly Jerusalem where “God will have his dwelling among men” (CCC 1044).

Verse 8 is the hard verse, and the second most searched: “But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

It has to be read with the verses before it. Verse 6 has just said that God gives the water of life “freely to him who is thirsty,” and verse 7 promises everything to “he who overcomes.” Verse 8 is a warning about those who refuse to the end, not a list of everyone who has ever sinned; the apostles who fled at the Cross were cowards for a night, and Peter was a liar three times over. What shuts a person out of the city is not having sinned but refusing mercy.

The Catechism teaches exactly that. Hell is “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033), and its chief punishment is “eternal separation from God” (CCC 1035). But “God predestines no one to go to hell”: it takes “a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin)… and persistence in it until the end” (CCC 1037). The same paragraph adds that in every Mass the Church asks God to “save us from final damnation.”

Revelation 21:1–5a, 6b–7 is one of the readings the Church provides for funerals, under the heading “There shall be no more death.” It is among the New Testament readings a family can choose for a funeral Mass, and during the Easter season, when the first reading at a funeral is taken from the New Testament, it is one of four that may be read (Lectionary for Mass, no. 1012, as the USCCB lists them). It is also read on Sundays: in Year C of the Sunday cycle, Revelation 21:1–5a is the second reading on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, and 21:10–14, 22–23 on the Sixth.

It fits the funeral liturgy because the funeral is not a eulogy. The Catechism asks that the homily “avoid the literary genre of funeral eulogy” and instead “illumine the mystery of Christian death in the light of the risen Christ” (CCC 1688). And every Christian funeral looks toward what Revelation 21 describes: what the believer confessed in the Creed, “I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” fulfilled (CCC 1680).

The Catechism’s section “Hope of the New Heaven and the New Earth” (CCC 1042–1050) is essentially a commentary on Revelation 21. In outline:

• The Kingdom in its fullness. “At the end of time, the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness. After the universal judgment, the righteous will reign for ever with Christ, glorified in body and soul” (CCC 1042).
• A renewal of everything. “Sacred Scripture calls this mysterious renewal, which will transform humanity and the world, ‘new heavens and a new earth’” (CCC 1043).
• God’s dwelling with us. In the heavenly Jerusalem “God will have his dwelling among men,” and the Catechism quotes Revelation 21:4 in full (CCC 1044). The redeemed form “the holy city” of God, “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb” (CCC 1045).
• The world transformed, not discarded. “The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed” (CCC 1047). “We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way in which the universe will be transformed” (CCC 1048).
• So this life matters. “Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on” (CCC 1049). What is good in our work and our love we “will find… once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured” (CCC 1050).

Heaven itself the Catechism calls “the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings” (CCC 1024), and admits it is “beyond all understanding and description”: Scripture can only speak of it in images, among them “the heavenly Jerusalem” (CCC 1027).

Hope, the Catechism says, is the virtue by which “we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises” (CCC 1817). This prayer is for anyone who needs to hold on to that promise tonight: after a loss, in a long illness, or simply tired of a world that is not yet made new.