Bright Light, Big City.

Revelation 18

October 13, 2019

I.

Another powerful angel comes down from heaven, one so aflame with God’s Light that the whole earth is illuminated.  By this bright Light we are given a view deep into the belly of the Beast, the dark heart and core of rapacious and consuming human Empire, the hub of the regime of greed, lust, and gluttony, what he calls the great city, Babylon.  600 years earlier, Babylon had conquered, deported, and attempted to annihilate God’s people.  He’s saying: Babylon, Rome, Sodom, Tyre, Jerusalem, Ephesus… you name it.  All cities are by nature manifestations of the same sour, depraved, godless, mercenary ideology.  And they all fall.  

The Bible is everywhere suspicious of urban existence.  It contains this keen awareness that cities, and the agricultural revolution that spawned them, are a big sign of what has mostly gone wrong in human life.  In Genesis, it was  Cain whose offering of grain was not accepted by God.  Cain murders his brother out of jealousy.  He then went away to found… cities.

For one thing, cities mean inequality.  Even today one of the places with the widest spread between very rich and very poor is Manhattan Island.  And many cities are much worse, with luxury, high-rise condos next to sprawling shantytowns teeming with destitute and hungry people.

The list of disasters that urbanization brought into the world include constant wars of conquest, crippling poverty, epidemics of disease, corrupt government, economic injustice, slavery, the subjugation of women, and moral degradation.

John calls all this a wasteland full of death and decay: “a dwelling-place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit,” which indicates a place ravaged by addiction, hatred, fear, violence, and disease.  It is “a haunt of every foul bird, a haunt of every foul and hateful beast.”  He is describing the Big City as a barren and dangerous Death Valley.  The vile and vicious animals may be metaphors for the kinds of violent and lying humans that roam urban areas, conniving both in seedy back alleys and in the carpeted offices in skyscrapers.

This is a global problem; he says it has to do with “all the nations,” which means no one is exempt.  All nations participate in the economy of the Empire and the Big City.  They have all “drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,” meaning the commodification and reduction of everything, including human beings, to mere things to be sold or exchanged for profit.

“The kings of the earth,” of course, have enthusiastically caved in to this mentality and practice.  Even more obviously is this something to which “the merchants of the earth,” always in league with the kings, have made an obscene amount of money over.  The kings and the merchants and the nations have all managed to fill their own pockets from this ideology of buying and selling.  The entire regime is complicit.

II.

Then John hears a voice from heaven issuing a final plea for people to abandon the doomed city, to get away from the regime that is on a collision course with the Truth, the Empire that is going down like the Titanic.  Even at this late, perhaps last, hour, God is still calling people out of the disaster zone.  People still have the option of refusing to share in the dubious and ephemeral benefits of the Empire; they can still get out of the complicity in the Empire’s violence and injustice.  People can still rely upon God’s grace and be saved.

“Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds,” the heavenly voice says.  It sounds a little like payback time.  But I think John is just saying that, if the Big City and the Empire were all about selling us and others, then maybe we need to sell our interest in them.  Maybe we need to divest ourselves of our entanglements in that toxic and lethal system.  Maybe for once it’s okay for people to act out of their own self-interest and sever their connections to the crashing edifice.

In effect, the angel is saying to these common people: Remember that it was the theft of your labor that made the regime so wildly wealthy in the first place, and when you stop working it will produce “torment and grief” in the nations and kings and merchants whose luxury their efforts, your blood, tears, and sweat, were paying for.  Those who assumed they were immune from grief and loss will know pestilence, mourning, famine, and finally fire when you cease propping them up and feeding them, protecting them and fighting for them.  When the people decide to stop working it’s all over for the Empire and the Big City, it’s the ruin of the Beast and the Red Dragon, it is the end for the Accuser and the Adversary.

Meanwhile, the rich merchants have no compassion for the Big City that helped them gain their wealth.  They just watch from afar and mourn… not for the Big City or people in it but for themselves and their losses.  They hold on to the ideology of ownership that “it’s all about me and my profits,” to the end.

John gives us a fairly long list of the products they traded.  And we notice that these are all luxury items.  There are no staples here, nothing that ordinary people could afford to buy or own.  It includes “gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—[that is,] human lives.”  

The Big City economy was working really well for people who could afford all this stuff.  But for everybody else, the ones who actually did the work of mining and processing and transporting and raising animals and manufacturing?  Not so much.  The list concludes with the abomination of slavery.  John dramatically stops there, to remind us that this is trading in, buying and selling, human lives, human “souls” is the literal Greek word.  The most valuable of all God’s creations, reduced to a commodity, given a price in the market, and sold like any other object.

III.

When this ghastly engine of death, degradation, depredation, and destruction goes down in awesome flames, the angel says: “Rejoice!”  Heaven, saints, and apostles, rejoice! 

The Big City is going down because of the merchants who were the “magnates of the earth.”  Magnates.  I remember this Laurel and Hardy routine where Hardy brags to Laurel that, having married a rich woman, he has now become a magnate.  "Do you know what a magnate is?" he asks.  Laurel gets a quizzical look on his face, hems and haws a minute while Hardy proudly preens.  Then he offers, “It’s a little white thing that eats rotten cheese.”  Stan Laurel has the same opinion of magnates — in Greek the word is literally “big men” — as John: he doesn’t see the difference between them and maggots.

John says the Big City had its own kind of sorcery, probably because it  was so good at convincing people that these leaders really were important men, too big to fail, who needed to be kept satisfied, and not slimy, disgusting parasites.

The final sentence delivered against the Big City by the angel is to point out that it has on its hands “the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”  The prophets and saints, who died for their faith, are identified with “all who have been slaughtered.”  This is something  Jesus the Lamb himself does.  He also died at the hands of the same machine, identifying with the executed, the lynched, the murdered, and the tortured of every age.  

Only, of course, he does not stay dead but is raised to new life.  The big men and the Big City threw their worst at him, to no avail.  He even uses his time in the realm of death to liberate the souls imprisoned in Hell, which is kind of like the model and prototype of the Big City.

IV. 

The world that John describes in Revelation is our world.  The global regime he shows us simply has not changed that much in 2000 years, except to get more sophisticated, universal, and top-heavy.  But the basic principles we have been talking about remain the same.  It’s still based on greed, violence, and inequality. 

When the angel calls on people to get out of the Big City, this, like so much in Revelation, doesn’t necessarily mean physically relocating.  It is more a matter of escaping the corrosive, hectic, harried, anxious, and frantic mindset and squalid practices that often rule urban existence.  It is more about leaving behind and letting go of the dog-eat-dog hustle and the rat-race: qualities we have been addressing in Revelation for weeks: the reduction of human life to an egocentric, selfish scramble for commodities in which everything and everyone is just an object for sale.  We don’t have to get out of that Big City as much as get it out of us.

The revelation of God’s Truth in Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain but who now lives, gives us an alternative way to live… indeed, the only Way to live, because, as he has been persistently depicting, the other path leads inexorably and inevitably to ruin and extinction.  That other path is the highway to hell, into the mouth of the ultimate consumer, the Red Dragon, whose goal is the silent scream of universal death.

The irony is that early Christianity flourished primarily in the cities of the Roman Empire, as people finally found a Way of faith and life that drew them together in forgiveness, equality, justice, peace, and especially love.  They gathered around the Lord’s Table as one body, and learned to follow Jesus’ example of cherishing each other and the whole creation, in lives of humility generosity, healing, and blessing.

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