The Other Beast.

Revelation 13:11-18

August 25, 2019

I.

Last time we heard about the new approach the Accuser, Satan, has to take, after being finally thwarted by the Earth itself in his scheme to flush away the Messiah in chapter 12.  He resorts to an elaborate campaign of turning the humans against God.  To this end he first summons a great Beast from the sea.  The Beast represents the glory and power of human Empires, especially, in John’s time, Rome.  But this is a strategy the Accuser takes in every generation.  And it is fantastically successful.

To explain and clarify how this happens, John sees a second Beast claw its way up out of the earth.  Together these three were like an anti-trinity, mimicking in opposition to the true Trinity.  At the top was the Accuser, Satan, the Red Dragon, the Evil One.  Then secondly there was the great Beast from the sea, representing the glorious Empire.  And thirdly there was this new, smaller Beast from the ground.  

This second Beast was also called the False Prophet.  Elsewhere in the New Testament he was the “antichrist.”  He was the effective implementation arm of the Beast.  He was the one who sold, enforced, and applied the will of the first Beast and the Dragon in actual cities and individual lives.  He was the local face of the Empire.  He was the way the Beast and his godless agenda were made real in people’s daily existence.

We have a saying that, “All politics is local.”  It means that politics stays abstract and theoretical until it gets applied in people’s actual lives.  In the Roman Empire this was done through the councils of business and government leaders which met in each municipality.  It was the job of these local councils to keep people in line with the Empire’s agenda… and to organize ways to exclude or even persecute those who dissented.  Like the Christians.

John sees these groups as manifestations of this second Beast.  This Beast looked harmless.  He describes it as a lamb with 2 cute, nubby little horns.  It looked like a bunch of civic-minded, responsible community leaders doing their best to keep the system functioning well for everyone.  

But John notes that though they may have looked benign, they spoke like the evil Dragon himself, which is to say, they used the tempting and corrosive language of egocentric selfishness, self-interest, self-gratification, achievement, progress, development, and growth, along with the undercurrent of paranoia that was always identifying and condemning enemies, scapegoats, losers, and others who may threaten the system.

These groups had the function of making the Empire look good.  They put on amazing spectacles, rituals, plays, concerts, all lifting up the benefits of Rome.  And they issued propaganda that on the one hand framed Rome’s actions and accomplishments as splendid miracles that improved life for everyone: the roads, the water projects, the monuments, the military exploits and security, the laws.  They encouraged people to be proud of being subjects of the greatest Empire ever. 

On the other hand, they stood ready to spin any apparently negative news about Rome.  They would play down or explain away or just plain deny the atrocities, the poverty, the wars, the slavery, the inequality.  Anything that made the Emperor appear at all less than great was given this treatment.  And anyone voicing opposition?  They would have to be silenced or eliminated.

II.

John says that this Beast, as a perversion of the seal of blessing God’s people receive in chapter 7, placed an identifying mark on people’s heads and hands.  This is to say that he left a deep imprint in people minds and actions, their thinking and behavior, so that they reflexively obeyed and followed the values and practices of the Beast.  This mark was so deep that it didn’t even occur to most people to think or act any differently.  The Empire was considered inevitable; there was no alternative.

This was the point: to so ingrain loyalty into people that they would imagine that the things the Empire demanded were simply human nature.

The values that the Beasts pressed into people were what the Church calls sins.  The Empire, as an agent of the Evil One, the Accuser, lifted up behaviors that were the precise opposite of discipleship of the Lamb, channeling people into self-destructive opposition to the Creator.  That’s why one of the names for this Beast is “Antichrist.”  Sins got reframed as “virtues.”  The planned end of this project was the annihilation of the creation itself.

For the Empire greed was good.  It whispered in people’s ears that it’s okay to get something for yourself.  Be ambitious!  Get what you can!  And watch out for that other guy who wants to take it from you.  Measure your life by your credit score, your assets, your bottom line.  If Jesus says no to Satan’s temptation to make bread, Satan says make and get and keep and store and control as much “bread” as you can.  That’s what it means to be a success!  

For the Empire, lust, gluttony, envy, pride, and resentment were all good and natural feelings to be cultivated.  It was good to want more and more!  It was good to desire what others have, it was motivating, it was inspiring, it was an expression of your own power to be able to take and have what you want.  If Jesus rejects Satan’s offer of fame, popularity, admiration, and adulation, the Empire said that this is what you’re supposed to have. 

And for the Empire, most especially, fear was good.  Fear of not having or being enough.  Fear of not having as much as the next person.  Fear of losing what you do have.  Fear of the external enemy to the east, those evil foreigners that want to invade and take our way of life.  Fear of the internal enemy next door who wants to undermine your prosperity and take your stuff.  Fear of death, which is the mother of all fear, and which Rome manipulated with dextrous and brutal skill. 

If Jesus says no to Satan’s temptation to worldly, coercive power, the Empire said: “We have that power and we will loan it to you if you pay with your absolute loyalty, gratitude, and devotion.”

   

III.

The Accuser and his agents the Beasts went so far as to make this perverse mark, this perversion of our minds and actions, a necessary condition for participation in the economy, the market.  You needed this imprint, you needed to be thinking and behaving according to these acquisitive values, in order to be successful in economic activity, in buying and selling.  If you thought otherwise, if you had not given yourself in loyalty to these values (which are really sins), then you would at least be unsuccessful in the market, and perhaps even excluded.

In John’s time Christians often were excluded from participating in commerce because it was a requirement to actually, literally bow down and worship the Emperor and the Emperor’s gods in order to gain access to the market.  Today we are a bit more more subtle.   

Every Empire has always said all these same things, and they have always worked.  And they continue to work.  These values are what advertisers and politicians have always appealed to.  “You can have it all!” is the public message.  The implied and secret message is: “Just worship me, which is to say, your own ego; feed your fears and desires, and just keep consuming!  And eventually you will deplete, degrade, and destroy this lovely garden and therefore yourselves.  And I,” said Satan, the Accuser, the Father of Lies, the Red Dragon, “I will win!”  

With people’s thinking and acting under control, with people actively and enthusiastically — however unwittingly — participating in their own enslavement and suicide, the Beast thus dominated their economic life.  

Finally, John talks about exactly what this demonic mark was that the Beast carved into people.  It was the infamous and crazily misunderstood number: 666.  The people at the time know who John means… but we don’t.  The best guess is that the number refers to the breathtakingly bad Roman Emperor Nero.  

At the same time, using the biblical symbolism of numbers, 666 also means — because 6 is one less than the perfect number 7 — that the Beast was always falling short of goodness.  Which is to say it was always and repeatedly collapsing into evil.  Ironically, the ideology that told people to imagine they never had enough, is itself not enough.  It perpetually misses the mark, which is the literal definition of sin, and falls short into oblivion.  Which is where everyone bearing that mark, everyone buying into the ideology of insufficiency and want, everyone therefore reacting in violence, ended up.  Lost.  Forever.  

It is something that we need to be aware of, as we read about the arctic heating up, and out-of-control fires deliberately set in the Amazon, and other circumstances of our self-inflicted global climate crisis.  The plans of the Beasts and the Dragon are being fulfilled as we sit here.  Human greed is systematically demolishing the planet, apparently endangering not just human life, but all life.

IV.

But the sixes are also the only shred of good news in this passage.  Because the sixes mean failure.  That’s the code.  Christians could take hope from the knowledge that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the Empire of the sixes is doomed.  It isn’t real enough; it will collapse into the nothingness which is its destiny when the Truth comes.  John has already foreseen this victory, which is what makes this chapter and some of what is to come palatable.  And he is telling the church that the current turbulence and chaos is evidence of this.  The Empire is not stable.  It is not sustainable.  It is really a fragile edifice, held together by egocentric lies and fantasies.  It will fall.  

Our calling in the meantime is to stand as witnesses to the Truth, as anti-antichrists, who know the eventual and eternal victory of the Lamb.  And to live therefore according to his life of compassion, humility, forgiveness, generosity, hope, gentleness, simplicity, honesty, justice, and especially love.  To dwell together in the Beloved Community, gathering around his Table of abundance and liberation, dancing with joy as we celebrate his coming.

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