Revelation 1:1-3
January 6, 2019
I.
I’m going to be preaching for a while on the book of Revelation. You may wonder what I could possibly be thinking. But Revelation a book whose relevance is underestimated. It actually gives us a glimpse into the heart of what Jesus Christ comes to do. Revelation is the antidote to a domesticated, compromised, watered-down faith. It offers us a faith that is the opposite of a personal, private, self-affirming hobby. Instead it takes us on a wild ride of cataclysm and new birth.
The book of Revelation reminds me of a disaster movie. I’m kind of a fan of disaster movies. They often address in a secularized way the same fears, needs, and hopes about our lives and our world, that Revelation is responding to.
Because people sometimes have this profound, intuitive, uneasy sense that there is something out of whack with the-world-as-we-know-it, and that we are due for a serious reckoning. The world feels unsustainable, like it is headed for a crash. Sometimes we might also get a hope, even wishful-thinking, that there is another, better world out there somewhere waiting to be born. Maybe we sense that its arrival is inevitable, inexorable, terrible, and violent, yet ultimately, in the end, after all is said and done, things will work out. It will be good. Indeed, the only way to get to that better world, is through a catastrophe that wipes the slate clean.
Perhaps the deepest root of this sensibility is in the book of Exodus, where God delivers upon the superpower of Egypt a systematic series of mostly ecological disasters, resulting in the liberation of the Israelite slaves. It is a story that has become the template for Jewish, Christian, and even Islamic religion. In some ways the entire Bible is a kind of commentary on the exodus, God’s seminal, transcendent miracle of deliverance and emancipation.
The point of the Exodus story, like the book of Revelation, is not the graphic orgy of destruction. It is the new life that emerges once the elaborate prison in which we had been trapped is reduced to rubble. It is the miracle of freedom; freedom to arise into God’s truth; freedom to emerge as God’s people.
One of the best depictions of this apocalyptic sensibility is in a non-disaster movie, The Longest Day, a film about D-Day in World War II. In that movie there is a scene of an old Frenchman who lives in a house overlooking the English Channel. One morning he awakes to the sound and shaking of artillery, and he looks out and sees the allied armada approaching, firing on the German fortifications near his house. But he dances for joy, even as his own home is being blown to bits, because he knows this is the day of liberation. If you can relate to his joy at the demolition of the-world-as-he-knows-it so that he can be free, then you will understand the book of Revelation.
Jesus Christ comes into the world to destroy the prison we call the world. He comes to defeat forces that had conquered and enslaved us, crippled, blinded, excluded, and killed us. This is what his ministry will be about. And in the end he endures the consequences and gives his own life, shedding his own blood in the process. And this becomes the final victory. This is his revelation where he wins freedom for us from our bondage.
II.
After the Lord’s death and resurrection, he delivers the words of this book through a messenger or angel to John in a vision for the benefit of the church. For even though the victory has been won, we remain subject to time. Christ’s triumph has yet to be fully realized among us in our experience. We live in a paradoxical between-time, during which our salvation has in one sense already occurred, and in another sense it is something for which we are still waiting, something we are expecting and anticipating.
The word that the New Testament uses to express this is “near.” “The time is near,” says John. “Near” refers to something that has already arrived and is available to us, but at the same time we haven’t fully connected with it and may not even be conscious of it.
When John talks about things that must “soon” take place he does not mean just in chronological time. If he is referring to some specific time in the distant future it would be completely irrelevant, like when scientists told us just last week that our galaxy is destined to collide with another one. It’s sort of interesting but since it’s billions of years off it doesn’t affect our daily life at all. That’s not “soon.” If he meant soon it’s hard to imagine that he meant thousands of years in the future.
On the other hand, we can understand John’s prophecies as being at least partially fulfilled now in our time. In fact, every generation has done this. Every generation has read this book and found good reasons to believe John is writing about them specifically. Whether we’re in the 6th century, the 13th century, or the 21st century, it is uncanny the way this book always seems to line up with current events. This book is always relevant.
I get the impression that the end of history John describes is not so much a specific date on a calendar as it is something that is always “near,” always “soon,” always in some sense present, and always about to break in on the world-as-we-know-it. I wonder if John isn’t describing things in figurative language that apply to all times.
Understanding Revelation means getting our heads out of linear time as we experience it. Instead, we need to see “the End” not as something in the literal future, but as the ever-present Truth that Jesus reveals to us. That Truth is always in tension with the-world-as-we-know it. That world is always breaking down in this collision, because it isn’t actually real. The book of Revelation tells in vivid, dreamlike imagery the story of this collapse.
III.
John is writing to communities of disciples of Jesus Christ. They have embraced the Christian message, which is that Jesus, a man executed by the Romans for blasphemy and sedition, nevertheless didn’t stay dead, but is now spiritually alive with, within, and among them by his Spirit. Thus he absorbs and neutralizes Rome’s violence, revealing its bankruptcy and imminent doom. And he inspires and gathers communities oriented towards a new future, and based on different values, practices, stories, and relationships.
These communities are inherently counter-cultural. They are explicitly critical of the State, family, economy, nation, and religion of the time, providing alternatives to all of these. They are therefore under intense pressure from the State to either conform to what is normal, or be subject to often brutal persecution as traitors, terrorists, atheists, and even cannibals.
It it to these communities, holding on to the Truth revealed in Jesus, embodied in the way they live together in love, compassion, forgiveness, and peace, that John writes. His message will be that they need to hold on to Jesus Christ at all costs because his message is the only dependable, reliable Truth. And they should not cave in or compromise with the powers-that-be in the-world-as-they-know-it, because Jesus reveals their imminent end.
In other words, they realize that the world is actually a kind of prison. Jesus is coming to destroy it, something that is already beginning to happen. Therefore, they should not try to cope by befriending the warden and the jailers. If they do they will perish with them. Just wait. Hold fast to what is true. Live in God’s love. And be ready to leave for the Promised Land when the whole place finally comes down.
For the world we live in is not real and it is not lasting. It is something that humans have constructed out of the lies of the Evil One, who very profitably appeals to our own ego-centricity. This world is based on fear, shame, and anger, expressed in greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and the other sins. Misguided humans have built relationships, languages, institutions, and world-views based on all these lies, and have thoroughly embedded and wedded themselves to them, naturally assuming and imagining that they are real, necessary, inevitable, and that there is no alternative. Selfish violence is just human nature, we say. Any other opinion is just naive, we say. It’s always been this way and always will be, we say.
To all this Jesus Christ says, “No. It doesn’t have to be this way. We do not have to be crushed and driven by injustice, disease, corruption, and fear. I will show you… indeed I am another Way, a better Way, the only Way, Truth, and Life. Follow me. Love one another. And you will see.”
IV.
The book of Revelation, then, is profoundly good news… but it is only perceived as such by people who do not have much to lose in the destruction of the world-as-we-know-it. The only answer is: lose that stake. Because the destruction will happen. Count on it.
But if we invest in Jesus Christ and his coming new world, the Kingdom of God, which he inaugurates, if we place our wholehearted trust in him, God’s only Son whom God gives to us out of love, we will not perish but we will have eternal life. We will live forever in the truth of God’s love.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment