Ten Thousand Clusters

Some people take their opinions from the talk of the heretics, and so they know nothing about how God has arranged things, or about the mystery of the resurrection of the righteous, or about the kingdom that is where the life beyond decay begins and where those who are counted worthy grow used, little by little, to taking God in. These people need to be told plainly: the righteous must first receive the inheritance God promised to the fathers, and must reign in it when they rise again to see God in this creation made new; and the judgment comes after that. [a]

It is only right that in the very creation where they worked and were afflicted, tested in every way by suffering, they should receive the reward of their suffering; that in the creation where they were killed for their love of God, they should be brought back to life; and that in the creation where they endured slavery, they should reign. For God is rich in everything, and everything belongs to him. So it is fitting that creation itself, put back into its first condition, should be under the rule of the righteous with nothing to hold it back. The apostle Paul made this plain in his letter to the Romans, where he says: “Creation waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed. For creation was made subject to emptiness, not willingly, but because of the one who subjected it — subjected it in hope, since creation itself will also be set free from its slavery to decay, into the glorious freedom of the sons of God.”

So the promise God made to Abraham still stands. This is what he said: “Lift up your eyes and look out from the place where you are now — north and south, east and west. All the land you see I will give to you and to your seed, forever.” And again he says: “Get up and walk the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” And yet Abraham received no inheritance in it, not even a foot’s length of ground. He was always a foreigner and a traveler there.

When his wife Sarah died and the Hittites were willing to give him a place to bury her, he refused it as a gift and bought the burial ground instead, paying four hundred talents of silver for it to Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite. That is how patiently he waited for God’s promise. He was unwilling even to look as though he were taking from men what God had promised to give him, when he said to him again: “I will give this land to your seed, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates.”

If, then, God promised him the land as an inheritance, and he never received it in all the time he lived there, he must receive it together with his seed — that is, with those who fear God and trust him — at the resurrection of the righteous. For his seed is the church, which receives adoption to God through the Lord. As John the Baptist said: “God is able to raise up children for Abraham out of these stones.”

Paul says the same thing in his letter to the Galatians: “But you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of the promise.” And again in the same letter he shows plainly that those who have believed in Christ receive Christ, who is the promise made to Abraham: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as though of many, but as of one: ‘And to your seed,’ which is Christ.” And again, backing up what he had already said: “Just as Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. So understand that those who are of faith are Abraham’s children. And the Scripture, seeing ahead that God would count the nations righteous through faith, announced the good news to Abraham beforehand: ‘In you all the nations will be blessed.’ So then those who are of faith are blessed along with faithful Abraham.”

So those who are of faith are blessed along with faithful Abraham, and they are Abraham’s children. Now God promised the earth to Abraham and to his seed, and neither Abraham nor his seed — that is, those who are counted righteous by faith — receives any inheritance in it now. They will receive it at the resurrection of the righteous. For God is true and keeps his word, and that is why he said: “Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth.”

This is why, when he was about to suffer — so that he might bring Abraham and those with him the good news that the inheritance was thrown open — Christ took the cup, gave thanks, drank from it, gave it to his disciples, and said to them: “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the new covenant, which will be poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. But I tell you, from now on I will not drink of the fruit of this vine until the day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.” So he himself will make the inheritance of the earth new, and will set in order again the mystery of the glory of his sons — as David says, “He who renews the face of the earth.” [l]

He promised to drink the fruit of the vine with his disciples, and by that he pointed to two things at once: the inheritance of the earth, where the new fruit of the vine is drunk, and the resurrection of his disciples in the flesh. For the new flesh that rises again is the very flesh that received the new cup. There is no way to understand him as drinking the fruit of the vine while settled somewhere above the heavens with his disciples; nor are the ones who drink it without flesh, since drinking what runs from a vine belongs to flesh and not to spirit.

This is also why the Lord said: “When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your neighbors or your relatives, in case they invite you back and so repay you. Invite the lame, the blind, and the poor, and you will be blessed, since they cannot pay you back; but you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” And again he says: “Anyone who has left fields or houses or parents or brothers or children for my sake will receive a hundred times as much in this world, and in the world to come will inherit eternal life.”

And what are these hundredfold rewards in this world, these meals given to the poor, these dinners that are repaid? They belong to the times of the kingdom — that is, to the seventh day, the day that has been made holy, on which God rested from all the works he had made. That is the true sabbath of the righteous, when they will have no earthly work to do, but will have a table set for them by God and supplied with every kind of dish.

The blessing Isaac gave his younger son Jacob means the same thing. He says: “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a full field that the Lord has blessed.” But “the field is the world.” And so he added: “May God give you the dew of heaven and the richness of the earth, plenty of grain and wine. May nations serve you, and kings bow down to you. Be lord over your brother, and may your father’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be anyone who curses you, and blessed be anyone who blesses you.”

If anyone will not take these words as referring to the kingdom that has been appointed, he falls into one contradiction after another, as the Jews do, who are left in complete confusion. For in this life the nations did not serve this Jacob at all; on the contrary, after he had received the blessing he left home and served his uncle Laban the Syrian for twenty years. And far from being made lord over his brother, he was the one who bowed down before his brother Esau when he came back from Mesopotamia to his father, and gave him many gifts. And how did he inherit plenty of grain and wine here, when he had to move to Egypt because of the famine that had taken hold of the country he was living in, and became a subject of Pharaoh, who was ruling Egypt at the time?

So the blessing that was foretold belongs beyond question to the times of the kingdom, when the righteous will rule after rising from the dead — when creation too, made new and set free, will bear an abundance of every kind of food, from the dew of heaven and from the richness of the earth. This is what the elders who saw John, the Lord’s disciple, used to report: they had heard from him how the Lord taught about these times, and said:

“Days will come when vines will grow, each one with ten thousand branches; and on each branch ten thousand twigs, and on each twig ten thousand shoots, and on each shoot ten thousand clusters, and on each cluster ten thousand grapes; and every single grape, when pressed, will give about a hundred and fifty gallons of wine. And when one of the holy ones takes hold of a cluster, another cluster will call out, ‘I am a better one — take me; bless the Lord through me.’” He said the same about wheat: a single grain would produce ten thousand ears, and every ear ten thousand grains, and every grain about seven pounds of clear, pure, fine flour. All the other fruit trees and seeds and grasses would yield in the same proportion. And all the animals, living only on what the earth produces, would become peaceable and at harmony with one another, and completely subject to man.

Papias, who heard John and was a companion of Polycarp, bears witness to these things in writing, in his fourth book; there were five books in all that he put together. And he adds: “These things are believable to people who believe.” He also says that when Judas the traitor would not believe them and asked, “Then how can the Lord bring about growth like that?” the Lord answered, “Those who live to reach those times will see.”

So when Isaiah prophesies about these times, he says: “The wolf will feed with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf and the bull and the lion will graze together, and a little boy will lead them. The ox and the bear will feed together, and their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. And the nursing child will put his hand into the asp’s den, and into the nest of the adder’s young; and they will do no harm, and will have no power to hurt anything on my holy mountain.” And again he says, going back over the same ground: “Then wolves and lambs will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and the serpent will eat earth as if it were bread; and they will not hurt or harm anything on my holy mountain, says the Lord.”

I am well aware that some people try to apply these words to savage men — men of different nations and different ways of life — who come to believe, and who once they have believed live in harmony with the righteous. That does hold true now of some men who come out of various nations into the harmony of the faith. Even so, at the resurrection of the righteous the words will apply to the animals named as well. For God is rich in everything. And it is right that when creation is restored all the animals should obey man and be subject to him, and go back to the food God gave them at first — what the earth produces — since at the beginning they were made subject and obedient to Adam. Showing in full that the lion will then feed on straw belongs to another occasion and not to this one. What the saying does show is the great size and the richness of the crops. For if an animal like the lion feeds on straw, what must the wheat itself be like, whose straw is fit food for lions?