The image of the “New Jerusalem” in the Bible is a dream city. This city is not a “historical city” but belongs more to the world of the imagination. It is a city in which the idea of a city which we have in our imagination, is fulfilled. In India we may imagine a city which has features like the city as it has evolved in the Indian context. We also have “Holy Cities”, which represent what citizens long for as a symbol of the location where a whole community and culture finds a living place. Every civilization creates what it believes to be the “ideal city”. It is this ideal, or dream city in which we begin to imagine important events taking place, which are part of the narrative of our sacred scriptures.
There has been the question: The life of Christ was historical, and Jesus was never in India !!. Jesus lived and died in a particular culture and time which happened twenty centuries back in the past. We do not know what that culture was like, or at least cannot imagine it. When we imagine the life of Jesus, as we read the events described in the Gospels, we think of Jesus as being present in our hearts. Jesus is not just living in a distant land, which we have never visited. Jesus is here and now, in our imagination, in the desires of our hearts. So the dream world is the place that lies in our hearts, in our longings, and in our imagination.
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