#christ as king of the universe
The description of the New Jerusalem, the bride of Christ, [is] highly symbolic. The twelve gates (drawn from Ezekiel’s prophecy) face the four quarters of the compass, to show that it embraces the whole universe and is four-square solid. They symbolise the twelve tribes of Israel and so also the twelve apostles. The richness and contentment [thereof] is hinted by the sparkle of precious stones, not only diamonds but many others too. The dimensions of the city are vast: a cube of 1,500 miles in each direction. [For scale, that measures approximately from present-day Jerusalem to Afghanistan and Ethiopia! Yet even across all this space, there is] no need for the light and warmth of the sun, for the Lord God and the Lamb provide a single source of its nourishment and illumination. [And there is] no need for a sacred area, for the presence of the Lord God and the Lamb make the whole city a sacred area.This [description, as a whole,] is the ultimate goal of Creation, when all is absorbed into God, the ultimate fulfilment of ‘Thy Kingdom come’. The Letter to the Ephesians expresses it as the whole universe ‘headed up’ into Christ– [restoring His rightful position of universal authority as a head to the body, or a groom to a bride– and thus] making sense of Creation and bringing Creation to its completion.
Dom Henry Wansbrough; Commentary on Revelation 21
At Sinai the voice of God spoke from the midst of the fire, an event that foreshadowed the great advent of the King and Lawgiver Himself, when the Eternal Word would become flesh and dwell with us. Any theology that regards God as entirely transcendent (i.e., God is beyond any analogy with the finite) will have a problem with divine immanence (i.e., God is inherent within the finite), since the highness, holiness, and perfection of God will make Him seem distant, outside of us, far away, and unknown… Incarnational theology, on the other hand, manifests the nearness of God to disclose the divine empathy. Indeed, the LORD became “Immanuel,” “God with us,” to share our mortal condition, to know our pain, and to experience what it means to be wounded by sin, to be abandoned, alienated, forsaken. The “Eternal made flesh” bridges the gap between the realm of the infinitely transcendent One, and the finite world of people lost within their sinful frailty. We therefore celebrate the giving of the Torah both at Sinai and especially the giving of the “Living Torah” at Bethlehem with the birth of Messiah. We rejoice that God is indeed the King and Ruler over all, but we further affirm that God’s authority and rule extends to all worlds– including the realm of our finitude and need.
John J. Parsons
