The first parents had to be told the door was never locked from God's side, only from theirs. The next family proved it. They opened the door and walked through, early, while the world was still young.
Every people on earth remembers them, even if they don't know it. There are old stories everywhere — in every land, in every language — about a golden city, or a shining island, or a whole country that was here once and then was gone. Sunk under the sea. Lifted into the clouds. Vanished. People call these stories myths. But a myth is often just a memory that got old. There really was such a people. They were real.
What made them different was simple. They remembered who they were, and they remembered fast. They didn't wait a whole lifetime to wake up. Early in the morning of the world they opened their eyes, saw that they were the children of God, and began to live like it — of one heart, of one mind, caring for each other so completely that no one among them was poor.
And here is the thing they discovered, the thing this chapter is for: the door home was open the whole time. Not just after Jesus came. Before. Since the very beginning.
We sometimes think Christ's gift only started working the day he died — that everyone who lived before him was standing in line at a door that hadn't opened yet. That isn't true. What he did reaches backward as well as forward. It pours out in both directions from the middle of time, like light from a fire filling the whole room, behind it and in front of it at once. The first parents could be washed clean by it. This early city could be washed clean by it. Everyone who ever lived, before him and after him, stands in the same light. The full glory of God was never far from anyone, in any age. It was always one thing away. It was always just a remembering.
So this city remembered, and the door opened, and no one could shut it. That is the key he holds — the key that opens what no one can close, and closes what no one can open. He opened the way for them, and all the power in the world could not bar it.
Here is the pairing this city teaches, the third balance of God: patience and quickness, held together. God is patient beyond anything we can imagine. He will wait the whole length of the world — every age, every generation — for the last child to remember, and he is never in a hurry to give up on anyone. But God is also quick. The moment you turn toward home, he is already there. He does not make you wait at the door while he decides. I come quickly, he says, and he means it — not late, not slow, but there in the instant of your remembering. Patience that waits forever, and quickness that arrives at once. He has all the time in the world for you, and no delay in him at all. That is why the door could open for a city at the dawn of time and still be open for you tonight.
They were not many, and they were not strong the way the world counts strength — they had little strength. But they kept his word, and they held on while everyone around them forgot. So he made them a promise, and then he kept it: he took them up. Out of the hard place, out of the school of good and evil — because they had already learned enough. They and their children had tasted enough of the bitter and the sweet to be ready. And there were still so many others who needed to come down and learn it for themselves. So he lifted this finished family up out of the garden to make room for the rest, and to show all of us what the end of the road looks like.
He made them pillars in his temple, and they went out no more. And he wrote three names on them: the name of God their Father, and the name of the city of God — the new Jerusalem, Zion, home — and his own new name. Three names that are really one truth: you belong to us, you belong here, you are ours. That is what it means to be sealed. Not locked up. Named. Remembered out loud by the One who made you.
So when you hear the old stories of the lost city, do not be sad that it is gone. It isn't gone. It went up. It went first — early proof, written into the memory of every nation on earth, that the way home was open from the start, and that all it ever took was to remember.