While the images, especially in the prophets, are “metaphorical” they are not only that: they have a historical and even natural core, which is why biblical metaphor is not a matter of unreality but of reality under a figurative form. The difference is monumental for thinking and living from within the biblical thought world, yet it runs directly against the grain of modern popular reading practices. Consider the three quakes in Matthew: twice the earth quakes – at the cross and at the resurrection (27:51; 28:2); but the other quake is a quaking of the sea in 8:24.

How should we think of this triplet? Each time there is a quaking, someone emerges from a tomb. The quake of the sea in ch. 8 foreshadows the resurrection. There is Jesus, in a boat, on the sea, sleeping. Later, he will sleep the sleep of death having been tossed into the Gentile waters, tried, and executed. Jesus “rises” from his sleep in ch. 8:25-26 just as he will “rise” from the dead in 28:6-7. Jesus demonstrates his authority over wind and sea by rebuking it, just as he will proclaim his authority in heaven and on earth after rising from the tomb. When the boat in Matt. 8 reaches land, they are in Gentile territory, and Jesus casts out a legion of demons from two demoniacs who live in a cemetery in the country of the Gadarenes. These demoniacs are evidently coming out of the tombs (so the Greek), suggesting a picture of zombies or mummies rising from graves to confront Jesus. After Jesus dies on the cross, the earthquake cracks open other tombs and saints “come out of the tombs” (same Greek construction), and after Jesus rises from his tomb he will send out his disciples to make disciples of the nations of the (to speak thematically) “demon-infested” Gentiles. According to Matthew, the Gospel is about the shaking earth and the shaking waters of death, the shaking of the realm of death itself, shaken until she gives up her dead and the righteous are vindicated, which, we remember, as Paul tells us, is what the earth groans for. First, then, in Matthew the ground gives up demoniacs, then the saints, then finally Jesus, in which the world is finally to be turned back (and forward) from chaos to glorious order.

The role of the waters in all this is extraordinarily rich. On the cross we witness God’s darkness descending, and Christ’s darkness at the cross is the deep, dank darkness which blanketed fearful Abraham in the covenant ratification ceremony in Genesis, that swallowed Egypt as a plague, that filled – ironically by its emptiness – the cavity of Jonah’s fish in which God’s prophet was entombed in the deathly waters.

What we fear about drowning, about abandonment as a speck on the swelling waves of the vast, endless ocean, connects us not only to our own mortality but to the shape of divine judgment. The darkness of the cross was not only the hiddenness of the sun but also the darkness of the deep. The deeper one descends in the watery abyss, the fainter the light of the sun becomes, until there is no light at all, no sense anymore of what is up and down, of direction and movement. Order is absent, chaos rules. It is hellish; it is the taste of hell on the tongue. In the abyss, where there is no sense of one’s relation to the world, or to God himself, there is – it would seem – no hope. The “waters” slowly swallow up the soul and not just the body.

To redeem the soul from such a pit as that, to reach as far down as the worst of such horrors and put the world right, Christ himself descended to the deepest depths, descended into hell, and swallowed the waters as the waters swallowed him so that we might emerge from them, with the blessing of the Spirit hovering over us, as new creation. This is the sense in which Rev. 21:1 speaks of the new creation as a state in which “the waters are no more.” It is these waters, not what the waters are by creation but what they became as a result of the Fall: the potential instrument of disorder, of bloody judgment, a place of threat and of danger with devouring monsters hidden underneath. “The waters are no more” because the waters have been calmed not only by the voice but by the death of Jesus. He who was swallowed by them in death has walked on them by resurrection, and so reversed disorder into glorious order and life.

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“Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, ‘Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal” (Rev. 21:9-11).

First impressions are important.

We know this because God gives them with the aim that they should shape our lingering impressions.

In Rev. 21:9-11 we are granted the equivalent of a first impression of the glorified Bride of the Lamb. Starting in v. 12 and extending, arguably, to the end of the Book, and thus of the Canon, this first impression is filled out with a sustained, awe-filled gaze. But first is the divinely purposed impact of the unprecedented beauty we behold, the dumbstruck wonder at the woman who has just been pointed out by the divine Hand. With his words, “and he showed me,” we can imagine her having just filled the doorway with her light at the far end of the long aisle.

But seeing her properly requires the proper vantage point. It will not do to try to gain a faithful sense of her beauty by craning our necks and peeking through arms and elbows. And so the Angel who had once done his irregular, improper, yet necessary and holy work of pouring out judgement, now takes up his more fitting and gracious task, and invites us to come and to see. And at this word the Spirit rushes in and takes us right to the aisle, as it were, steadies our hands, our feet, our gaze as he gives us a tall perch with a perfect view from which to try to take her beauty in.

And what is that first impression? It is the unmistakable glory of God, not only a glory within Her but a glory that flows from her. She emits the Light, shines with it. A creature now fully and thoroughly fitted for her heavenly environment, she has become an effulgent one. She does not merely wear jewelry; she is jewelry.

And this, no doubt, is due to her being the telos of the incarnation: she comes “down from heaven” and so the dwelling place of God is now, finally and fully, with man (vv. 2, 3). The reader cannot help but link this with what is said in John 1 regarding the Word who became flesh and “tabernacled” among us, in whom we behold the glory of God.

This first impression, then, must be the initial image of the fullest “why” of the God-man. With the glorification of the Bride the glory-filled Groom is, in a sense, complete. It was not good for this Man to be alone, and he will not be. And therefore the whole point of the Garden-City-Tabernacle-Temple story swells up into this moment of our first impression of the Bride. No wonder, then, that we stand there with mouths and eyes wide open: here is our first glance at the final “why” of human being, longing, hope, and history.

But, again, we cannot overlook the prerequisite to this moment: the role of the divine Usher. We cannot see the Bride for the truth of who she is if the Spirit does not usher us to the proper vantage point. But, then, this is what the Spirit does: he teaches us the truth about the Church-City-Bride, for we would never believe it unless he persuaded us.

And of course this text is given that we might believe the truth about her now, about the work – this work – in progress she really is now, not just when the truth of it is finally disclosed to us then. Indeed, in the mysteries of his ways, God gives this inspired image of the glorious Bride as a means to its own end: by grace we become her the more we believe this about her.

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