Back in 1935, a young portrait artist called Phyllis Pearsall was becoming frustrated. The cause of her frustration was simple: she needed to travel around London but the newest map she could find was 17 years old and out-of-date. So she had an idea – she decided to produce a new map which would cover the rapidly expanding area of London, one which wouldn’t just include streets but also bus routes and places of interest such as museums. There would, of course, be an alphabetical index; and there was one innovation: the map would include strategically-placed house numbers on main roads.

This was a monumental task. Although Pearsall started from a 1919 Ordnance Survey map, she claimed that she walked 3,000 miles to check the names of all 23,000 streets in the city, waking up at 5am and then working for 18 hours each day. every day, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day. When the map was complete, Pearsall had 10,000 copies printed and began contacting bookshops to see who would sell it. But she faced disappointments: Hatchards in Piccadilly wouldn’t take it, nor Foyles, while Selfridges weren’t even prepared to let her show it to them. However W H Smith tentatively ordered 1,250 copies, which she delivered using a barrow borrowed from the pub next to her house. These sold quickly and soon Pearsall was taking orders to every main railway station in London, as well as to Woolworths. Her A to Z map was by no means the first fully-indexed city map, but its simple and practical design soon made it a household name. It has even inspired a musical: “The A–Z of Mrs P”!

You can guess while I’m telling you this: it’s because, of course, A and Z (or, as the Americans say, “Zee”) are the first and last letters of our English alphabet. You’ll know, if you play Scrabble, that the A tile is common and only worth one point but that there’s only one letter Z in the set which is worth ten points and valuable for that elusive triple letter or word score! Every language has its own alphabet: Welsh doesn’t include k, q, v, x or z (apparently j is trying to get its foot in the door) while Portuguese leaves out k, w and y. Many others, such as Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi or Thai, use an entirely different script.

The Greek alphabet is both familiar and unfamiliar to us. Internet users will have come across “beta” versions of websites, many Christians have taken part in an “alpha” course, maths students will be aware of the mysteries of “pi” and “sigma” – and we’ve all become sadly aware of Covid’s “delta” and “omicron” variants! Well, the = alphabet starts with Alpha and ends with Omega; these of course cropped up in our reading from Revelation which calls Jesus the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. But what does that mean?

Well, we all know that Jesus was a first-century Jew, a historical figure who lived on earth – just as we do – at a defined time and place. Indeed our faith is partly based on the belief that he was a real person rather than some mythological character, someone who experienced human life with its joys and sorrows, smiles and pains, laughter and loneliness, tiredness and hunger – and who taught about God, told engaging stories and performed amazing miracles. We know where Jesus was born, where he journeyed, where he ate his meals, and where he died; we also know (more or less) the year of his birth and his death, guided by references to other people of the period such as Herod the King, Augustus the Emperor and Caiaphas the High Priest.

Jesus will never lose this identity, even many people will be puzzled or even scandalised by our devotion to him and to his death on a cross: he is the central focus of our faith. But, of course, Christians believe that Jesus – unlike, say, Muhammad, Confucius or Gautama Buddha – was far more than a man; in fact we claim that he was God, someone in whom humanity and divinity were inextricably intertwined. So we say that, although Jesus was a mortal who was born and died, he is also eternal. We say that, although he appeared on earth as a human, he was also involved in the creation of the universe: St John tells us that in the famous passage we often read at Christmas. And we say that, although Jesus walked the roads of Palestine two thousand years ago, today he can be everywhere through his Spirit. As I said earlier, the Gospel narrative is not the beginning and end of Jesus’ story.

But what we have here in Revelation is, in a sense, the end of that story, at least as far as Christians are concerned. For, as we’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks, what we have here is Jesus’ return to earth (a fundamental part of our faith which we rarely think about), the renewing of all creation, the heavenly city (whatever that might be exactly), and God’s people living in it for ever. It is the end of time as we know it, and the start of eternity – something which our minds simply can’t handle. We do not know when Jesus will return, indeed we are cautioned against trying to work it out (which hasn’t stopped many people making confident predictions which have proved wrong!). In any case, as one writer puts it, “the End is not an event but a person. We have good reason then not to try to calculate the date of the End, for he has been, is, and will be. He has come, is here and will come soon”. In other words, Jesus is past, present and future, all at the same time. Or, to use words we often say at Communion: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”. And, seeing the state of our world, we cry out with John: “Come, Lord Jesus”.

Over the years there have been Christians who have been obsessed with the thought that Jesus could return at any moment. In fact this was a problem in some parts of the early Church, as some believers were simply sitting around and saying, “There’s no point in working or making provision for the future as Jesus is coming back” – Paul had to tick them off for laziness! In more modern times there have been those who’ve said, “There’s no point in trying to make this world a better place; it’s all going to get burned up and renewed anyway”. That might be a valid point if we could be 100% sure that Jesus was returning tomorrow – but we cannot know (or even guess) the time.

The thought of Jesus’ return has also frightened some Christians. You might be surprised to hear that; but these good folk are worried that Jesus will catch them doing bad things or simply twiddling their thumbs. They know that God will ask them to account for their use of time and they’re aware that they haven’t spent every moment doing productive things – that leads to constant feelings of guilt and the inability to simply “switch off” and relax. Apparently in the USA you can get mugs and stickers which say, “Jesus is coming back. Look busy!” The people who buy them probably regard them as a bit of a joke: but they actually reflect a distorted mage of God, a stern boss who expects to see his employees working hard whenever he looks in their direction and reprimands them if they seem to be slacking.

Nevertheless Christ’s return is clearly the prime theme of this chapter. At the end of John’s great – and, I must say, confusing or even terrifying – vision, after the letters of advice and rebuke written to seven churches, in the final paragraphs of the Bible, we read the words, “I am coming soon” – not once or even twice, but repeated three times. This was surely intended to encourage the beleagured Christians of John’s day, who expected Christ to appear and renew the world in short order.

However we, knowing that over 19 centuries of history have passed since then, 19 centuries of unfulfilled expectation, find it hard to work up any enthusiasm for the idea of Jesus’ return; it seems a pious, improbable and irrelevant hope. We feel that our destiny is simply to keep plodding on in faith – we’d be delighted if Jesus were to surprise us by suddenly appearing in glory, but we really don’t think that it’s going to happen. We may desperately want to see our world renewed (I most certainly do, as we seem to be fighting losing battles against climate change, hunger, inequality, conflict and more); but we have little faith or hope that this is something which God is about to do. So how can we recover any belief in Jesus’ return? – it seems so irrelevant.

There are no magic answers, even though this has been of course the hope which sustained so many Christians through hard times. Some people have said, “Actually, we’re wrong to expect Jesus to dramatically appear: what we need to realise that that he has already been slowly returning – one person at a time – as men and women come to faith, that his Kingdom is expanding constantly, that there is more and more of Jesus in the world every day; and that, eventually, every knee will bow and every tongue gladly confess Christ as Lord. As one writer puts it, “This slow-motion second coming is ongoing, irresistible, and almost nearly imperceptibly a relentless wave of love crashing even now against the shores of humanity”. To all that I’d say, “Nice idea: but, if we’re honest, can we really see that happening? And does it tally with what the Bible says about Christ’s coming? I think not!”

Somehow, though, we must believe that he will return. Even as the world appears to be becoming more secular and values dear to Christians are increasingly being ignored, this is a belief which can sustain our faith on a daily basis. Perhaps we need to reread the parts of the Bible, not just Revelation but some of Paul’s letters and Jesus’ own words, which deal with the subject; we may not find them easy to understand or digest but we can let them seep into our souls. And, of course, we continue to serve God as best we can, for the Church’s mission in this world has not been terminated or cancelled.

Our service began with Christ’s ascension; it’s ending with his return. So I’ll close with some encouraging words which straddle both:

This, this is the God we adore;
our faithful, unchangeable friend
whose love is as great as his power
and neither knows measure nor end.

‘Tis Jesus the first and the last
whose Spirit shall guide us safe home;
we’ll praise him for all that is past,
and trust him for all that’s to come.

,

.