midnight movie
Our reading and discussion of Revelation was enjoyable as ever. It’s colorful and fascinating and has been controversial since the early Church first argued over whether to include it in the New Testament. It’s interesting that such a document made it into our canon of Scripture. Interesting, but also fortunate and even a blessing, because for all its darkness and shadows, we can and do find promises of God there.
John Patmos has sometimes been seen as a right wing conservative Jewish Christian who was appalled at liberal tendencies among churches that Saint Paul had founded in Asia Minor a couple of generations earlier. The members were behaving like ordinary residents of the Roman empire -- enjoying the economic prosperity of the Pax Romana like everyone else -- not especially an issue with Paul and those who later wrote in his name -- in the marketplace like everyone else, buying for home consumption meat that had been sacrificed to idols -- again not an issue with Paul for whom idols were nil, nada, zilch -- and just generally being accommodating toward Rome and caesar and the Roman occupation that a quarter century earlier had destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, where John Patmos may have been born and raised, and where he may have built up a lifelong hatred of Rome and Romans and of failure to keep the Law of Moses.
Johannes von Patmos doesn’t say why he is in exile on Patmos where he wrote so angrily against Rome and castigating Christian churches who weren’t behaving as he felt they should. One wonders if he was something of a rabble-rouser who was a nuisance to the authorities; and if earlier in his career he had been one of those who gave Paul such fits by coming in after Paul and teaching what Paul called a different gospel, i.e., the “circumcision party.” We don’t know.
John Patmos does bring to mind modern day fringe Christian sects and cults, and even major denominations and nondenominationals who rail against the Pope as the anti-Christ and against Christians who dance and drink beer and whiskey and play cards and go to the baseball game on Sunday afternoon and against women who wear pants and put on makeup and braid their hair. John Patmos might have melded unnoticed into the Bible belt of the American South or the fringe militias of the Pacific Northwest. He definitely would have been against gay marriage, and in his basement, per the Second Amendment, he would have accumulated an impressive arsenal to be ready for the uprising against the liberal establishment.
Some scholars say the Greek language and writing of John Patmos is borderline illiterate. No Greek scholar, I cannot say, but something that came to mind this morning is the fall of 1962 when James Meredith was attempting to register at the University of Mississippi and there were riots, and how impressed I was with the angry white Mississippi cab driver who was captured on television one evening and I watched him say “we’ll close Ole Miss down before we let the n____s in” and then he said something against the necessity of all this education anyway and proved it by saying “I only went through second grade and it ain't never hurt me none.” Not putting St. J. Patmos there, but he does have his prejudices.
For all that, John Patmos shows an amazing intellect. Almost obsessively, he develops a “document of sevens” in which the number seven dominates his entire book. As skillfully as the director of a Lord of the Rings movie, he sets up a structure with three cycles of hair-raising horror suddenly eased by instant calm, horror - calm, horror - calm. Every time I read Revelation I feel like I’m in a 3D movie extravaganza with horses rushing by me and over me, gigantic scorpions coming at me. That giant spider going after Frodo Baggins comes to mind. Someone visualized members of an early Christian church being told that the letter had come from John Patmos and would be read in church Saturday evening. Members gather excitedly after sunset as the sky darkens and night comes on, an oil lamp flickers up front where the messenger reads, and casts eerie shadows round the room, everyone settles down for a long adventure story that will chill them to the bone and scare them half to death before reaching the grand conclusion of glorious victory for Jesus and his faithful.
I enjoy visualizing that scene and that gathering. When I was a boy, the scariest thing you could do was go to the midnight movie. And with my love for Tolkien and Bilbo and Frodo and the Goblins and Orks and Elves and Gollum, and C. S. Lewis and Narnia and High King Peter and The Lion and the Marshwiggle, and J. K. Rowling and the midnight showings of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord and Hagrid and Dobby and the Hogwarts Express and even Kreacher, I understand completely, and I love Revelation myself. I’ll bet those early Christians could hardly wait until the letter from John Patmos arrived. I'll bet they had popcorn that night.
TW+