The River That Runs
Reading Revelation in the Present Tense
There is a river in the city Saint John the Divine sees.
It flows from the throne of God, bright as crystal, through the middle of the street where people are walking. The water of life, the book calls it. Anyone thirsty may drink.
Most of us have learned to read the book of Revelation in a way that limits what it can offer us. We have been taught to treat it as a code, or a sequence of riddles, or a movie of the end times running on a screen we will eventually be allowed to see. The book has too often been treated as a map instead of a vision. It has been quoted by people who did not love it and dismissed by people who never tried to understand it.
That way of reading has cost us something. The book is full of imagery unlike anything else in scripture. A river of life flowing through a city. Trees with twelve kinds of fruit. Leaves for the healing of the nations. A city that has no need of the sun. These images do not need to be decoded. They need to be received. And they have a strange way of behaving differently when we read them in the present tense, rather than as a description of a future we have not yet entered.
This Sunday’s reading from Revelation gives us a glimpse, but only a glimpse. Because the lectionary stops one chapter short of where the imagery is going.
A Small Apology to the Lectionary
The reading appointed for Sunday ends at chapter 22, verse 5. Forgive me, but the lectionary exits the scene just before Revelation reaches one of its best lines. The book of Revelation has a habit of saving its best line for the end, and the bulletin has a habit of leaving it out.
Twelve verses past where we stop, the book closes with this:
“The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let everyone who hears say, Come. And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”
The book of Revelation does not end with description. It ends with an open door. After all the visions, all the imagery, all the strange and terrible and beautiful pictures, the last word of the book is an invitation. Come.
That is the line I want to read this Sunday’s text in light of. Because if you let the invitation hang at the end of the imagery, the imagery starts to behave differently. It stops sounding like a prediction. It starts sounding like an offer.
Now and Not Yet
This is the strange way Christians have always lived.
We say “Christ is risen” in present tense. The vestments at the front of the church declare it. The empty cross declares it. Something has happened. Something irrevocable. The resurrection has occurred, the kingdom has been inaugurated, and we are living on the other side of it.
And at the same time, the world is not visibly remade. Suffering continues. Death still operates. The full healing of the nations has not arrived. We are still walking toward something that has not entirely come.
Both are true. Christians have a phrase for this. Now and not yet. Christ has come, and Christ is coming. The kingdom is here, and the kingdom is on its way. Heaven has begun, and heaven has not yet been fully unveiled. Holding both at once is one of the harder disciplines of Christian life.
The temptation is to collapse one into the other. Faith becomes only a long wait, with all the good news pushed into a future we cannot access. Or faith becomes only a present possession, with no horizon left to walk toward. The first is more common, I think. We have learned to wait. We have not always learned to notice what is already here.
The Eastern Christian tradition has often held this tension more comfortably. In Orthodox worship, the heavenly liturgy is not treated merely as memory or rehearsal, but as participation now in the worship of heaven itself.
That same conviction is held more widely than we sometimes remember. You can sit quietly in a small parish on a Sunday in May and still know that something about the present hour matters. Heaven and earth are full of your glory, the church sings every Sunday. Present tense. Already true. That the river is not only coming. That it is also, somehow, already running.
What the Imagery Is Offering
Read this way, the images of Revelation 22 stop being predictions and start becoming things we learn to recognize.
The river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God. The river is already running through the life of the Church. Every baptism is a small running of that river into the world we are in. The water poured over our heads is not merely a metaphor for the river Revelation describes. It is participation in that same life.
And there will be no more night, for the Lord God will be their light. The light is already visible in the candles still burning beside the altar this Sunday. A flame in a darkened church declaring that the darkness has not won. Now and not yet. Already true, and still coming.
The river is here. The light is here. We are learning, slowly, how to recognize them.
Why It Matters, Late in the Season
We are nearing the end of Eastertide. Pentecost is approaching. The white vestments will come off. The alleluias will settle into the regular rhythm of the church year. The season that has been teaching us to live in the now and not yet will close, and we will go on into Pentecost and then into Ordinary Time, where the work of these fifty days will begin to show itself.
The question, late in any season, is what we have learned. Whether the practice has done its work in us. Whether the river has only been an image we were told about, or whether something about the way it has been running through these fifty days has reached us.
The cost of letting the season pass without learning anything is real. If we let Eastertide slip by without noticing, we live a kind of deferred faith. We wait. We endure. We hope. But we do not always see what is in front of us. The font becomes a ceremony. The altar becomes a Sunday obligation. The whole life of the Church flattens into ritual when it could be living water.
If we let the season teach us, we begin to live differently. We notice. We give thanks for what is already given. We expect to see Christ in the next room, in the next conversation, in the next stranger who is also thirsty. We do not stop hoping for the not yet, but we do not let the not yet eclipse the now. We drink while the water is running.
That is what Revelation is asking us to notice. Not merely a future uncovering. Not merely a coded prediction. The river is here. The light is here. The invitation is open.
“Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”
The water has been running the whole time.
Some of us are only now beginning to notice.