May only truth be spoken, and truth received. Amen.
Angels
blowing trumpets! Monsters rising from the deep! Lakes of fire and rivers of
blood! So much colour! So much noise! The imagery found within the pages of the
Book of Revelation is extraordinary but also so very confusing. Revelation is
probably the strangest book in the New Testament, the hardest to understand,
and creates an incredible polarization – you either love it or hate it. Why? Because
it has beautiful writing that is quite appealing to the imagination, but it also
talks about the end of the world. So, after all of the celebrations of Easter
Sunday, why on earth would the lectionary give us 6 weeks of Revelation? Well,
because despite it all, Revelation is a book full of hope!
Over
the next few weeks, we are going to explore the Book of Revelation but as is
typical with our Sunday lectionary, we will only be reading sporadic chunks. So,
I recommend that you go home and read the book in its entirety.
I
want to start by pointing out couple of misreadings of the title of the book. Unbeknownst
to the everyday reader, the title of the book has gotten twisted up over time
and has become “The Book of Revelations of John.” There are two errors here. First,
it is the Book of Revelation, singular, not the Book of Revelations, plural.
This is an important difference because the entire book, no matter how full it
is, refers to a single Revelation – that earth and heaven met in the person of
Jesus of Nazareth. Second, the book is often erroneously called the Revelation
of John when, in fact, it is the Revelation to John. The first verse of
Revelation says, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show
his servants what must soon take place, and he made it known by sending his
angel to his servant John.” It is clear here that God revealed something about
Jesus Christ and the future of the world to John and then the second verse tells
us that John was tasked in testifying to what he heard from God.
Revelation
can be read in a few ways. Overall, it appears to be written as an extended letter.
The book opens and closes like a letter and, in verse 4, it says that John is
addressing this letter to the 7 churches in Asia. Then, throughout the first 3
chapters, there are specific addresses to each of the individual churches. Revelation
is also presented as a prophecy. As with other prophets of the time, John pulls
on earlier scripture and brings them forward to flow to and from Jesus Christ. The
content of Revelation, with regards to prophecy, is a series of colourful warnings
about what will happen once God’s purposes are fulfilled. Finally, Revelation
is first and foremost apocalyptic literature.
Apocalyptic
literature is defined as a genre of heavily symbolic literature that displays
distinctive literary characteristics and claims to unveil the truth about the
world as viewed from an apocalyptic perspective, with the main themes being the
end of the world, the defeat of evil, and the vindication of the righteous.
When we think apocalypse, we might picture movies like The Day After Tomorrow,
28 Days Later, or Independence Day. Movies where the entire world might come to
an end if the heroes don’t save the day. Or a movie like Hunger Games where the world is depicted post-war and looks completely different
than what we know the world to be today. But the apocalyptic literature found
in the Book of Revelation is quite different than those movies.
In Greek, the language in which Revelation would
have been written, the word apokalypsis means revelation or unveiling. It is the origin of the English word apocalypse
and while the term is commonly used to describe a catastrophic event or the end
of the world, its literal meaning refers to a revelation of hidden knowledge or
a vision of the future. So, when we’re talking about apocalyptic literature in
the time that Revelation was produced, the goal of the writer would have been
to reveal or to pull back the veil and tell the truth about events going on or
visions from a seer. According to Mark Powell,
“The Book of Revelation seeks to pull back a veil and show Christians
the truth about God and the truth about the world in which they live.
Accordingly, the message of the book is both negative and positive, an oracle of
doom infused with a promise of hope.”
It’s for this reason that when we read the Book of
Revelation, we must shift our focus from the events surrounding the end of the
world to the hope that is found in the meeting of heaven and earth in Jesus
Christ, our Messiah.
Returning to the introduction to Revelation, to John’s
letter to the 7 churches in Asia, you can see that John is pointing us to Jesus
Christ, to the one who is “the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the
kings of the earth.” John is reminding these communities, communities who are suffering
under the Roman Empire that continues to wreak violence and destruction, communities
who are losing hope that their world will witness the promises made by God through
Jesus, John reminds them that Jesus died on the cross in order to make them all
“priests serving God” and that Jesus will return to defeat the evil and
injustice of the empire.
John tells the churches that Jesus’ birth, life,
death, and resurrection are the promise that God has always been and always
will be with us. But more than that, John reminds his people that no matter
what, God’s authority, not Rome’s, is ultimate. God is the “Alpha and the Omega.”
God is the one “who is and who was and who is to come.” God is “the Almighty.”
God is in charge of the world and God will have the last word.
And therein lies the hope of Revelation. That the
work of Easter is not yet done. Easter is not a one-and-done kind of event, but
part of a continual unfolding of God’s redemptive work bringing all of creation
into the kingdom of justice and peace. Here, on the second Sunday of Easter, we
don’t simply say that Christ is risen. We say there is more coming down the
pike. We say:
“God loves us.
God has already freed us from our sin, and we know there is still brokenness
aplenty in this beautiful Easter world.
God will come back, with the clouds, to finish the work Easter unleashed.”
Amen.
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