The river of life and the tree of life

The angel shows John 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.

Ezekiel had seen water flowing from under the threshold of a temple, deepening as it went until it could not be crossed, with trees on both banks and everything living where it flowed. Zechariah had living water going out from Jerusalem in summer and winter alike. What is described here is that image with the temple removed and the throne in its place.

On each side of the river stands the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.

The tree of life has not been mentioned since the third chapter of Genesis, where the way to it was closed and cherubim with a flaming sword were placed to guard it. Everything between those two points is the rest of the Bible.

The fruit every month is worth pausing on. Fruit trees in that climate produce once a year, and a harvest every month is a description of a world where the seasons of scarcity have gone.

And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

That clause has done more work in Christian thought than almost any other in the book. The nations, which have spent twenty chapters raging, deceiving, trading, making war and being judged, appear at the end as the object of healing rather than of destruction. How that sits with what has gone before is one of the genuinely hard questions in reading it, and the honest answer is that the book puts both things down and does not reconcile them.

No longer will there be any curse.

That is the reversal of the sentence pronounced on the ground in Eden, and it is stated in four words.

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

Seeing his face is the thing Moses was told no one could do and live. And a name on the forehead is the last of the book's marks: after the seal on the servants and the mark of the beast, the third and final one.

Genesis begins with a garden, a river and a tree, and a man and woman put out of it. The book ends with a city that has a river running down its main street and the same tree growing on both banks, and the gates standing open.

Between those two points the tree of life is mentioned exactly once, in Proverbs, where wisdom is called a tree of life to those who take hold of her.

Healing of the nations uses a word that gives English therapeutic, and the leaves are the part of a tree used in ordinary ancient medicine, which makes the image domestic rather than grand.