The Amazing City

In this episode, I reflect on the vision of the “New Jerusalem” as depicted in Revelation and Genesis. Imagine arriving in a magnificent city, free from litter, crime, and even hospitals—a place where God dwells among us. This heavenly city embodies God’s original intention for humanity: a direct, intimate relationship with Him. As we approach Pentecost, I encourage you to pray for the Holy Spirit’s presence and power. Join us in prayer ministry after the 10:30 Pentecost Mass to experience this spiritual awakening. Let’s embrace our identity as God’s people, ready to live fully in His presence.

00:00:00 So imagine that you’ve just arrived at a new city, and it’s an enormous city. As you arrive and you board a train and the conductor tells you you’re going to be on the train for quite a long time. In fact, even though the train is pretty fast, it travels 100km an hour. It’s going to take all day to get into the centre of the city. It’s so enormous. And so as you begin the beauty, the stunning glory of everything around you just really amazes you. You see these beautiful parks, you see these incredible art galleries, these museums, these theatres, shopping malls, you see university campuses and yet more parks be you begin to notice that other things don’t seem to be there. There doesn’t seem to be any litter. There’s no garbage. There’s no crime. Time. You notice that there’s no army, there’s no police. You don’t notice any hospitals. You begin to realize that this is a strange kind of city. Strange kind of place. So beautiful, so good, so holy.

00:01:26 You see people from every language, every nation, every skin color, every gender, every orientation, they’re all there as part of this community. And it’s the train continues to speed you through. You begin to realize other things are missing as well. You don’t see any temples there. No mosques, no churches. What kind of a place is this? Well, what you’ve come to is the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city. This place where it’s so good, so holy, so true, that there is no need for particular places to gather, to worship. Because here we’re told God lives among his people. God is simply here, in the very midst of this community, of this people. There is no need to have particular places to go to encounter God because he’s here. He is with us. He dwells in the very midst of this diverse and wonderful community. That’s the vision. The way that God ends, the story that we read in revelation 21 and 22 is the way that God begins the story back in Genesis one and two, the way that God originally intended all of us to experience life not in particular places, but simply that easy relationship with God.

00:03:06 The God who dwells among us, the God who is available to us. And how do we experience this? How do we begin to live this reality? It’s the prayer of Jesus in the gospel today. The prayer of longing for peace, this longing for the gift of the Holy Spirit. This gift of a God who wants to be among us. A God who wants to be present within our lives. If you’ve ever struggled to pray. If you’ve really struggled to make sense of of life and the mysteries of God, one of the things that we can always rely on is that the power of the Holy Spirit is always available for us. This gift of God’s love and God’s grace. Sometimes the New Testament. It’s called the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it’s called the Spirit of Jesus. This power that is available to us to awaken within us this desire, this recognition of the goodness that God is already calling us into, this freedom that he wants us to experience, this power that is available for us. And we can long for that.

00:04:24 If we when we try and pray Oh, we seem to come to is a place of dryness. A place where there doesn’t seem to be a lot of vitality. A lot of energy. The Holy Spirit can really begin to awaken within us this deeper desire for the presence of God, a deeper understanding of the way that God wants to dwell among his people. In these final weeks of the season of Easter, as we prepare in two weeks for the great Feast of Pentecost, let’s indeed long for the God of grace and goodness to be with us. Let’s long that God will indeed dwell among his people, that we can be that nation and that community that begins to experience this power, that we can begin to experience the gift of new creation. Now, some Paul in his writings tells us that the gift of the new creation is not something that will only happen at the end of time. It’s available to us right here, right now. So let’s be open ourselves to his grace and to his goodness.

00:05:31 As we pray for the full flourishing of the gift of the Holy Spirit among us. That we can experience this incredible gift of his power and his life and his goodness among us. So let’s indeed really long to let God do that work among us. Let’s pray that we might indeed experience that wonder. In two weeks time. We will again have prayer ministry after the 1030 Mass on Pentecost Sunday, and we need that opportunity. If you’ve never experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, and you want to feel that power, and you want to experience that love and that gentleness and that tenderness of God, that we can pray with you to unleash that power of the spirit, to be at work within your life, that you can experience this the gift of being known and loved by God. That intimacy of life with God does indeed pray and really go into that spirit of really longing for the gift of the Holy Spirit to be unleashed upon us so that we can be the community and the people that God has called us and created us to be.