Revelation 22:1-6 The Leaves of the Tree are for Healing

It’s Labour Day weekend, the end of summer and the end of our summer series looking at various tree images in the Bible. We’re ending it by looking at the end of the story which also brings us back to the beginning of the story. The Bible mentions trees in the very first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible and now here in the final chapter of the Bible we encounter trees again. Here we find the tree of life, the tree Adam and Eve failed to eat from in Genesis 3, choosing to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil instead. Through the Bible we find references and images of the tree of life while the tree of knowledge of good and evil is never spoken of again. Now here, when Jesus returns and brings heaven down to earth again, the tree of life is available to eat from again. It’s not just the fruit of the tree of life that’s good for eating, but the leaves are good for the healing of the nations.

In this city garden, we see how history has moved from a simple garden filled with streams flowing through it, a place where everything lived in harmony and humanity’s task was to nurture and discover the potential in creation and help creation become everything that God created it to be. Things got messed up when Adam and Eve chose to go against God’s plan in order to make themselves equal to God by eating from the one tree in the garden God had said not to eat from. The punishment for their disobedience is death and a curse placed on the ground so that life becomes filled with painful toil, with thorns and thistles and sweat and achy muscles and bones at the end of the day. We’re separated from God’s presence; no longer does he walk with us at the end of the day in the cool of the garden. But now the Apostle John shows us that with the return of Jesus, the tree of life returns and, as Robert Mounce writes, “there will be no more physical or spiritual want any longer.”

This image touches my soul because my brother Glen was born with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, mental retardation, among other things, when his birth mother fought against him when she began labour. Life was hard for him, he lived with pain all his life. This image in Revelation points to physical, mental and spiritual healing and renewal and I look forward to walking alongside the river under the shade of the tree of life with Glen and hearing him speak for the first time and getting to know him more deeply as my brother, learning how he experienced life here while he was with us, and then life with Jesus after Jesus took him home years ago.

There are so many people who need to hang onto this image of Jesus’ return and the promise of healing, the promise of life. There’s so much suffering in our world, so much brokenness that is put on too many people and children. I’ve walked with people who have been broken by abuse, neglect, hatred and rejection; walked with those who have inherited disease and hurt through no fault of their own and there’s no healing this side of heaven and so they hang on fiercely to this promised vision that John gives us as to what the future holds, of the healing and restoration that’s coming. Too often I can only helplessly walk alongside people, weep with them, rail at the injustice in our world, do the best we can to ease the hurt and then point to Jesus and his return. Our lives are brief in the grand scope of eternity, but that doesn’t lessen our suffering here and so we walk as best we can with compassion and grace, helping each other see Jesus and the compassion of the Father. But it also gives us a vision to work towards as we prepare for Jesus’ return.

John’s writing this revelation and vision to churches going through severe persecution. John himself is in exile on the rocky island of Patmos, writing to the churches to give them hope and help them see God’s presence; giving them the strength of knowing that Jesus is returning and bringing healing and new life through himself. We already have a taste of the new life because of Jesus’ death on the cross where he paid the penalty for our sin. We’ve received the Holy Spirit that Jesus sends after his resurrection from the grave and return to heaven. The book of Revelation is the story of the battle that Satan is fighting against Jesus, a battle that Satan lost at the cross. The tree of life points us to Jesus’ victory.

When I read this passage, I close my eyes so that I can see in my mind’s eye the picture John’s giving us here. The wide street running through the center of the city and the river of the water of life, an echo of Psalm 1, flowing beside it with the trees of life lining them both, providing shade from the sun, think of the trees on 51^st Ave, as they draw their life nourishment from the water of life flowing from the throne of God. John echoes images found in the book of the prophet Ezekiel and the Psalms. John echoes Jesus’ own words to the Samaritan woman he met at a well, where Jesus calls himself living water. He offers her new life, offering this woman who’s an outcast in her own village living water and acceptance and respect in spite of her past. Grace and salvation come from Jesus, not from what we have done, especially when our past has been filled with brokenness and hurt.

Matthew Sleeth wrote Reforesting Faith, a book that reflects on how trees in the Bible help us see and understand God more deeply He loves how John describes heaven and Jesus’ return, “Like others, I wonder what heaven will be like. On the earth most people place their best chair or couch facing the television. In heaven God’s throne faces a tree. “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” I want to get to heaven to see God. I want to meet the saints. And I want to eat the fruit of heaven.” He encourages us to have as our goal “an orchard in heaven.”

Scott Hoezee, the professor of preaching at Calvin Seminary, says this passage “Generates Hope. But true, biblical hope is no opiate, no excuse for passivity, no reason not to rage appropriately against the machinations of injustice, poverty, corruption, and violence today. Rather hope is what animates us precisely to begin leaning into and living toward exactly the vision for abundant flourishing that John sketches in his vision. Hope is what gives us the steel and the grit to soldier on for the truth, to preach the Gospel, to denounce that which Christ died to end and anything that will not have a place in the New Creation.

Hope is what got Mother Theresa to bathe the putrid flesh of lepers in Calcutta. Hope is what made Martin Luther King, Jr., and the others walk across that bridge in Selma. Hope is what let Nelson Mandela get out of bed every morning across long years of unjust imprisonment. Hope is what moves every volunteer in a soup kitchen to ladle out bowls of chicken and rice and to griddle up some toasted cheese sandwiches for the homeless. It is not the hopeless who found Hospices, establish Ebola clinics in remote parts of Africa, or stand in the breach when rival drug gangs threaten to shoot up whole neighborhoods. It is the hopeFUL who do all that precisely because they even now serve a risen Savior who also right now has all the power to accomplish what will fully come when the vision of Revelation 21-22 becomes each creature’s everyday reality.”

The tree of life reminds us that what we experience today is not the end of the story, especially when times are hard. Every time you see a tree, let it remind you that God is a God of abundance, a God of life, even when your life feels stunted and withered. When our roots are in the water of life that is Jesus, there is always hope. Let this inspire you to work to be a person who changes things, who works to be a blessing wherever you are. May those same trees also point you to Jesus again and his amazing love, a love stronger than death, stronger than evil, a love that will bring us into the presence and light of the Father one day where we will find complete healing for all our wounds in the tree of life.