“Babylon the great is fallen . . . for in one hour is thy judgment come.”

(Revelation 18:2, 10)

What will be the form which ultimate evil will take?  John in the Revelation pictures the superlative existence of evil under two dramatic symbols: a corrupt and degenerate city, and a shameless and unprincipled woman.  Indeed, says George Caird of Mansfield College, “John, in chapter 18 of the book of Revelation, never seems to make up his mind whether he is describing a woman or a city.”  “Babylon the great is fallen,” he says in one breath, and in the next: “For all the nations have drunk the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” And in the next, he says: “Alas, for that great city . . . for in one hour is her judgment come.”

But John, ever a lover of striking contrasts, also in his Revelation, sets before us the ultimate form of righteousness and goodness in the same symbols of a city “coming down out of heaven, a holy city, the new Jerusalem,” and as a lovely woman, “as a bride adorned for her husband.”

“John conceives of womanhood as capable of the lowest dregs of degradation but also of the most refined loveliness that can be imagined.  He thinks of the city as the congestion and rotten dump heap of all that is morally putrid in life, but he thinks of the city also as symbolic of the presence and glory of God.” (Laymen’s Commentary on Revelation — Julian Price Love)

So John pictures the ultimate despair and destruction that awaits man in this world in the sack of a city and the crushing of her structures of economic and social life: “Fallen, Fallen is Babylon.”  But also, John sees the ultimate in his idea of salvation for man not in terms of escape for the individual from the doomed city to an uninhabited island paradise, but rather as a welcome into a heavenly city of transformed human relationships where men live together as brothers under the benign reign of a Heavenly Father.

Now, of course, the highly picturesque symbolism of apocalyptic literature is a bit strange to us.  We belong to a more literal minded generation.  “Tell it like it Is,” we say.  We pride ourselves in directness of speech and demand that those who would communicate with us strip from their discourse all flamboyance.

But we are not unacquainted with the realities with which John is grappling.  We know only too well how sudden destruction can come, even in one hour, upon any city in our world: either, by act of God, as witness the fifty thousand Peruvians who perished in that recent earthquake which shattered their cities in a matter of minutes; or by act of man, as witness our poised Polaris nuclear missiles and their counterparts in the Soviet arsenals.

We know how unheavenly city life can become, and how threatened with destruction by riots and burnings and looting and disregard for law and order, and by poverty and unemployment and inadequate health care, et cetera et cetera.

The distinguished Harvard Sociologist, Edward C. Banfield, has published a book on the current American urban crisis and given it the title, The Unheavenly City.”  Banfield’s Unheavenly City traces the pattern of the development of our American cities.  They began with the inner core of business and establishments and industrial plants.  Grouped about these, at first, were the homes of the people located close to their places of work.  Then began the trek outward as the noise and dirt and pollution of the inner city increased, and as wealth and means of transportation made movement possible.

Those not capable of moving remained and the festering of the inner city began.  Simultaneously the stratification of the classes in American urban life hardened into upper, middle, and lower class.  Meanwhile the proliferation of the city’s problems raced on – poverty, crime, disease, over-crowding, pollution of the environment, crises in education, et cetera, et cetera.

Banfield’s thesis in Unheavenly City is the gloomy but well documented assertion that the problems of the modern American city can never be solved so long as we have a sizeable lower class of people who are entirely “present oriented,” incapable of making sacrifices, laboring, and planning for the future.  These are the folk who are motivated only by the desire to satisfy the appetites and desires of the present moment.  They are the improvident poor who can spend in extravagant fashion, beyond anyone’s capacity to supply, even a most generous Uncle Sam, and their problems will never be solved by giving them any amount of money.

Banfield believes that a big part of our problem in grappling with the “unheavenly city” of America today is our Puritan heritage.  It has bequeathed us two mottos:  One, “Don’t just sit there — do something,” and two, “Do good.”  An indispensable part of the American dream has been the conviction that we can solve any problem if only we will work hard enough on it.  Banfield believes we now have on our hands urban problems of such immensity and complexity that they are beyond our capacity to solve and that for the next twenty years things will get worse in our cities.

Where does this leave the Christian man, the urbanite with a Christian conscience?  Has all our money been wasted which was given to the poor?  Because some social engineering failed, will all other schemes be doomed?  Are we to face the future hopelessly, knowing that our wisest plans and most prodigious efforts will always be defeated by the mass of lethargic present-oriented poor and the criminal element that moves in their train?

Let us turn back to John’s vision of Babylon, “the un-heavenly city,” and to his vision of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, and look there for an answer to three crucial questions:

First, what does John say is responsible for the Fall of Babylon?  John says it is pride.  Pride of power:  “for she said in her heart, I sit as queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.”  And pride of possessions: of gold and silver and every luxury that enabled her to live deliciously.  Then came the third inevitable result of pride and power and possessions, a callous inhumanity which made her common life inhuman and animalistic.  Babylon trafficked in precious metals and stones, and spices and cloth, and in human slaves and the souls of men.

Ezekiel the prophet, in his day, derided the city of his residence with the charge: “This was your sister Sodom’s crime:  she and her daughters lived in pride, plenty, and in careless ease.”  This is a trinity not of heaven, but of hell.  Pride, plenty and careless ease.  Look everywhere in the modern world and see the hell they have made.  Join pride and plenty and the result is always the third member of that trinity – indifferent ease.  The combination of these three traits develops  a crustacean callousness to the defrauded and exploited, to those outside the holy circle of plenty, to those on whom swollen pride looks down.” (Halford Luccock – Preaching Values in the Old Testament)

A group of young men had answered a help wanted ad and taken a written examination of their knowledge and mechanical skill for a particular position.  A company official announced the name of the man making the highest mark on the tests and asked him to stand.  But the job was not given to the man with the highest grade.   Later he said:  “I knew by the look on the man’s face when he called my name and asked me to stand that I wasn’t going to get the job because he could see I was a black man.”

John said Babylon, the unheavenly city, falls because of her pride, which always eventuates in man’s inhumanity to man.

A second question for which we must seek an answer in John’s chapter on the unheavenly city is: Who’s weeping and wailing over the fall of Babylon, and why are they weeping?

The merchants who have grown rich through their traffic with the great city, the princes who have grown powerful through their alliance with her, the ship captains and transportation moguls who have profited through their commerce with her – these are the ones who wring their hands and weep and stand a safe distance away as Babylon the great goes down like a sinking ship in a sea of fire.

And why do they weep?  Because the foundation of the economy and the security of their investments and their hope of future prosperity have all been tied up in the intricately balanced manipulation of Babylon’s goods and human souls and pride and power and oppression and cruelty.

We look in vain in John’s record for an account of a patriot’s tears – of someone who loved Babylon for reasons other than what they might get out of her because of their alliance with her.  There is no record of patriot tears like that Jew in Exile who hung his harp on the willows and vowed: “O Jerusalem, if I forget thee, let my right had forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;” or like Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, and saying: “If only thou hadst known the things that belong to thy peace.”

Finally we must turn to John’s pictures  of the unheavenly and the heavenly city and seek an answer to this most pressing question: “What are we learning during this time of our urban failures, frustrations, and despair over the judgments we can see which are falling on the unheavenly city of our life? In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, the blind slave girl, Nydia, moves about the city singing a plaintive song about her woes and her shadowy existence in a land of perpetual night.  But when the fateful day came that Vesuvius erupted and a pall of smoke and ashes and darkness fell upon the city the inhabitants rushed about wildly in terror. Nydia, however, accustomed to total darkness, moved unerringly through the streets of the stricken city, to find and rescue her beloved.  What new perceptions and finer sensitivities are our days in the house of our darkness bringing us?

We could be learning, for one thing, that the true greatness and strength of America lie not in her material wealth that has flooded our land, nor in the military might we are so eager to display, but in our Founding Father’s faith in God and in brotherliness of spirit.

In that desperate decade of England’s history when the Spanish Armada threatened invasion Shakespeare wrote those moving words which expressed his patriotism:

“This sceptered isle,

This Eden, this demiparadise,

This fortress built by nature herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

The precious stone set in the silver sea.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

So for us, the emergencies, the desperate threats of our urban crisis, can bring home to us Americans the preciousness of our true treasures.

And then again, we can learn anew that imperfections will always plague every earthly system, even our blessed American ways, and judgment must always be visited from Him who is above upon all our best guiding. We can remember the words of Augustine, “There is one commonwealth of all Christian men – that heavenly city which has truth for its King, love for its law, and eternity for its measure.”

And, supremely, we can learn more of the nature of our God and so distinguish what is and what is not imperishable in our earthly order.  The Memphis Commercial Appeal last week recorded in an inconspicuous place almost hidden by the screaming head lines of the war in Cambodia and the crime in our streets, and the bargain huckstering of commercials, the account of a Heber Springs, Arkansas, construction worker who saved the life of a fellow worker but lost his own life in the venture.

“Bobby D. Rolins, 30,” it read, “saw a truck backing up at a construction site, and realized that it was going to hit L.B. Burrow, Jr.  He jumped into the path of the truck, pushed Mr. Burrows away, but did not have time to reach safety himself.  Mr. Burros said he had met Mr. Rolins only two weeks ago when the construction project got underway.”

Why do we thrill to this?  Why, this is what Christ did for us.  This is what St. John and St. Paul and all the apostles say was God-like in that one who for our sakes endured the death of the cross.  So the heavenly entered the earthly.  And it is this Christ like spirit of unlimited responsibility for others, even those we barely know, but all of whom are men and women and boys and girls for whom Christ died, which transforms the most unheavenly city of this world into the heavenly city of our God.  “This is the sum of religion,” said Augustine, “to imitate whom thou dost worship.”