Jezebel.

Revelation 2:18-29

February 17, 2019 

I.

Thyatira was smaller than the other cities to which the Lord is speaking.  It was centered on its artisans and merchants… and even these enterprises were thoroughly enmeshed into the Roman pagan system.  

In order to participate fully in many of the professional guilds and trade associations, you had to engage at least indirectly the various religious cults.  You’d go to a meeting of like the Rotary Club or the Association of Bronze Smiths, and you’d have to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Empire and pray to Apollo, whose temple was providing the food.  Maybe sing a hymn to the goddess Artemis just for good measure, and at the end take up a collection for legionnaires wounded fighting against the Germanic barbarians.  

Attending such meetings difficult for Christians, which made doing business nearly impossible.  That was where all the deals were made!  That’s where you connected with customers and providers.

And in Thyatira, as in most of these cities, the church had some members who thought engaging with the Empire was not such a bad thing.  Last week it was Balaam and the Nicolaitans.  Here it was a woman called “Jezebel.”  Jezebel in the Hebrew Scriptures was the pagan wife of the very bad Israelite King Ahab.  She bullies him into all kinds of injustice and idolatry, which gets explicitly called out by the prophet Elijah.  It doesn’t end well for Jezebel.

This is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that these conflicts were not merely religious differences.  Avoiding idolatry wasn’t just because you had to maintain a separate religious identity.  Christians did not go to their deaths and suffer all kinds of indignities over mere theological opinions and style.

We don’t quite understand this because in our culture we have largely reduced religion to a private, personal hobby, disconnected from all other parts of our life.  Like having a model train set in your basement, or following a sports team.  There is no reason why we would refuse to interact with someone who had a different hobby, like Irish dancing.  And a hobby usually has no impact at all on your business, or what you eat, or how you vote.  There is mutual antipathy between some hobbies, like bird-watchers and bird-hunters.  But we don’t care that much anymore about what religion someone holds, as long as it stays their own private hobby and doesn’t impact much else.  And it doesn’t usually occur to us that our faith makes much of a difference in what we throw in our carts at the Shop Rite or what we order at Applebee’s.

But in the first century, people were conscious of how the established religions were integrated into the Empire, which was a system of predatory injustice and oppression, colonialism and war.  These religions rationalized and excused the violence, theft, slavery, inequality, and status quo of imperial rule.  

To participate in these religions was to share in the complicity, responsibility, and blame for all kinds of injustices and atrocities.  That is what Christians could not abide.  

II.

That’s why Christians who favored a more lax and open approach to the prevailing economy and culture are so sharply criticized here.  That’s why they get called loaded, nasty names like “Balaam” and “Jezebel.”  They are advocating a direct or indirect participation in the evil and violence being done in the name, and under the protection, of these religions, especially the cult of the Emperor.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Elijah and Queen Jezebel get locked in mortal combat because worshiping the Lord and worshiping Baal are two completely opposed ways of life.  To worship Baal was to support the absolute power of the king and the ruling class of land owners.  While to worship Israel’s God is to favor a commonwealth of tribes, clans, and villages, with land ownership spread out more equally among them.  To worship Baal meant the king was the law; to worship God means only God’s word is law.  The two systems are utterly exclusive and incompatible.  Elijah correctly observes that an absolute choice has to be made.

In those days idolatry was worshiping Baal, Apollo, or the Emperor.  In our time we have secularized idolatries that look non-religious.  Our idolatries are the myriad things to which we dedicate our time, energy, and wealth.  But all idolatry is an expression of our egocentric sinfulness.  It is a kind of self-worship that feeds our greed, gluttony, lust, and so forth.  It is about what we get.  Idols are just projections of our own desires, hopes, and dreams.  They are about what I want.  

And because what I want invariably clashes with what someone else wants, idolatry always leads to injustice.  It turns into a power struggle over who gets what, where there are necessarily winners and losers.  Idolatrous systems invariably end up featuring both massive inequality of wealth and power, and perpetual war.  

And because injustice knocks life out of balance, spawns inequities, and does damage to people and planet, it always leads to a reckoning.  It always draws down a correction, that is, a general catastrophe.  It can be ecological, or economic, or political, or all three.  But injustice is unsustainable.  

This sad trajectory happens repeatedly in Scripture and history.  The book of Revelation itself is mostly a blow-by-blow description of the disaster that results from the injustice that calcifies out of idolatry.

So when some Christians in the early church advocated compromise and cooperation with idolatry, they were betraying the basic and essential confession of our faith, which is that Jesus alone is Lord.  They were replacing that confession with the affirmation that my ego is my lord.  I will be governed not by what God wants for all of creation, but by what I want for myself.  That is the idolatry that slides inexorably into death and destruction.

III.

The woman called “Jezebel” and her followers in Thyatira apparently suggested that Christian faith was deeper than all these superficial political considerations.  As long as you believed in Jesus in your heart, stuff like what you eat doesn’t matter.  They were already beginning to reduce faith to the domesticated private hobby it pretty much is today.  To them behavior didn’t matter as much as having the right spiritual knowledge.

But the Lord says, “You think you’re getting deeper into God?  No.  You’re really going deeper into Satan.  You are caving in to the 3 big temptations Satan offered to me in the wilderness.  When you dedicate your life to the pursuit of money, fame, and power you are following Satan, which is to say your own ego, whether you realize it or not.”

The alternative is that the church hold fast to the teachings and example they have from the Lord Jesus, and continue to do his works of generosity, compassion, forgiveness, truthfulness, and love.  On the margins of society, he is forming new communities based on different values, practices, and relationships.  It is a matter of witnessing to different principles than greed and profit, and developing instead an economy of sharing in which people bring what they have and receive what they need.

These are the “works” of the “Son of God.”  In Matthew 11, Jesus points out what he is doing to validate his ministry: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  It is a marvelous summary of Jesus’ work and the work he gives to his continuing church to do in his Name.  It is about enlightening, empowering, embracing, educating, enlivening, and enriching people.  

We need to approach our relationships, including the marketplace, not with an attitude of “How can I get what I want?” but of “How can we humbly share together in God’s amazing abundance?  How can we treat each other with dignity and grace?  How can we grow out of our own toxic and corrosive self-interest, and participate together in the joy of the Lord?  How can we make this about what we contribute to the common good, more than what I get for myself?”

The one who conquers their own ego will be given a taste of God’s ultimate triumph and truth, like the morning star that anticipates the dawn; like an advance token of the Light of the World.  It is that Light, that bright morning star, which we are given to share with others by our generosity, compassion, sharing, and love.

IV.

We usually don’t realize the degree to which we are ourselves compromised to egocentricity and its global Empire.  We don’t understand the full extent of our own idolatry.  Were we do to an analysis of what we consume and where it comes from and how it is made, we would find ourselves buying into soul-shaking evils all the time.  We are doing unmeasurable damage to people and planet every minute.  Our whole world as we know it is structured around injustice and war, and has been for all of history.  It is practically unavoidable.

We can rationalize it.  Make excuses for it.  Justify it.  Deny or ignore it.  We can even make a virtue out of it!  All of which involves minimizing people’s suffering, and therefore degrading and disregarding the cross on which Jesus Christ chooses to identify with the victims of our choices.

Or we can turn and follow Jesus.  We can keep the life he gives us alive within us and and among us, as expressed and reflected in our actions.  We can learn to rely on the Presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and keep that gentle, subtle Light of the Morning Star alive in our hearts, feeding our words, shaping our work.  We can, by his power, let go of what we want, and to hold on to what God wants, as he shows it to us in Jesus Christ.  

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