Easter 2C, Book Review: the Apocalypse

For forty years I've read and preached John's gospel of Doubting Thomas, with whom I personally identify! Not this year, I'm thinking, instead of a sermon, to give you a book review. 

Counting Easter Day there are seven Sundays of Easter, and this year’s Easter Season Bible readings come from Acts, Gospel John, and Revelation.

Along with Genesis and Mark, Revelation is my favorite book of the Bible. Genesis is loaded with wonderful stories of God and his people, especially God keeping covenant with his friend Abraham as he teases him along. 

Mark is the earliest, first, oldest and simplest of the four canonical gospels. Scholars say Mark’s Greek language is crude, and maybe so, but Mark is the cleverest by far in getting people excited about Jesus. Mark has writing quirks that, being aware of them, are distracting because I stop and notice them, but I find them charming as part of Mark’s personality, character, and “difference” from other writers. 

Mark is imaginative, he stirs up exasperation at the people around Jesus. 

Mark tells Jesus as a real human being, not some precious goody goody who’s too sweet to get annoyed by people.

My third favorite book, Revelation is a trip, scaring people out of their wits, especially the nut-fringe in every generation who take it personally and literally, and out of its Time; who misuse a good story, who are certain it has come to fruition and the sky’s going to fall in their own age. 

To understand Revelation as a dire prediction for present or future Earth is careless ignorance. The church has had two thousand years of folks looking around at the horrors of their own generation, pointing to Revelation and saying, “sure enough, just as the Bible foretold”. Some of them go up on a high mountain to watch and wait for Jesus and his angels to break through the clouds on the day and hour they’ve calculated.

Much of Revelation has precedent in the apocalyptic passages of Ezekiel and Daniel. It’s a man telling his wild nightmare of apocalyptic horror, for his own agenda, writing a scary letter to seven churches whom he seems to know well.

Revelation had a hard time being admitted into the canon of the New Testament, was delayed and delayed, and many learned Christians over the ages have dismissed it as having no place in the Bible. Revelation John presents Jesus as the torn and bloody Lamb who is angry, fierce, vengeful and murderous. The Jesus of Revelation is outrageously incompatible with Jesus of the gospels and Paul. 

But Revelation is huge fun to read, and, coming around in the Lectionary every three years in Easter Season, it always made adventurous Bible study sessions. 

Revelation is written in Greek. Its Greek name is “APOCALYPSIS”, which means “revelation”, “unveiling”. It’s a particular literary genre called “apocalyptic”, which was not uncommon for its Time, when rulers were brutal, and neighbors could be mean and hateful, and people felt wronged and built up grudges and resentments, and conceived terrifying stories of the world coming to an end, and horrible things happening to people they hated who’d offended them. 

Reading Revelation, I always imagined myself in a movie theater watching a 3D horror film, with all this nightmare happening around me. Giant red and green and white and black horses racing past me;

sun and moon and stars falling; huge scorpions with stinging tails; dragons being thrown into a lake of fire, and I get to sit there and watch it like a 3D movie, trying to explain that 666 is numerology for "Nero Caesar”.

Revelation seems to have been written in the late first century. Christians are being persecuted, either officially by the Roman government or maybe just by hostile neighbors locally. 

The author calls himself John: John is a common name, it’s not John the disciple, it’s not John the gospel writer. Revelation John is angry because he’s been abused, evidently by the Roman government. He hates Rome, he hates Caesar. He has been sent to Patmos, a penal island in the Aegean Sea off the coast of what is now Turkey. He writes a vicious anti-government story with numbers and words coded so if the authorities find it and read it they can’t tell he’s writing about them.

To distinguish him from other Johns in the Bible, I call him Revelation John.

Revelation John seems to have come from Asia Minor, what is now Turkey, an area where Paul established churches. Revelation John was a Christian there, and he knows the churches in the area, he knows what’s good and what’s bad about each one, he criticizes and compliments each one, and Revelation is actually a letter he writes to the seven of them, offering encouragement and warning.

In his letter Revelation John imagines that he’s called up into heaven, where he’s told what’s going to happen. There is horrific detail, his story deals with three categories of people that things are going to happen to, and the story is a promise and a threat for each category. There’s good news and bad news: Revelation John offers encouragement and hope for the good guys and terrifying pain for the rest:

People who are persecuting Christians are going to end up in the lake of fire.

People who are Christians but who turn coward at being persecuted, and turn away from Christ - - they also will end up in the lake of fire.

But Christians who stand up courageously to the persecution, and do not abandon Christ even if they are killed: they will be saved into the new kingdom of God on earth that’ll be ruled over by Jesus the Lamb who was slain.

There are chapters and interludes about horrific things.

As I say, the letters is a promise and a threat. It’s a warning to Christians to hang in there through persecution, it’s encouragement that if they remain faithful to Christ they’ll be rewarded. If they abandon Christ, what’s in store for them is far worse than temporary persecution. 

Again, for those who are faithful to Jesus, there’s hope, which is basically what the letter is all about: hope and encouragement. 

Revelation John ends with a description of heaven as the New Jerusalem, with streets of gold, and beautiful abundance. Including they won’t need the sun and moon for light, because God and Jesus the Lamb will be the light.

During the Easter Season, we’ll be reading five or six (depends on whether we substitute the Ascension one Sunday), five or six passages from Revelation. But they are magnificently beautiful images that do not share the scenes of bloody apocalyptic horror. 

If you’ve never read it, Revelation is a perfect project for the Easter Season. As stories go, it’s not a great story, but it’s Holy Scripture, and it’s captivating if you like horror movies and wild imagination. 

For anyone who reads my +Time blog, I’ve posted Eugene Peterson’s “The Message”, contemporary translation of the Book of Revelation to make it easy for you to get to, and also a link to it on Holy Nativity’s Facebook page.

So, apokalyoopsis, Revelation: it’s nerve-wracking, never boring, hellfire and violence on every page; and if you need a sermon instead of a book review, it’s loaded with oughts and shoulds and warnings and threats, and promise and hope.

Revelation! Try it. You'll be glad you did!

Amen!

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Book review in place of homiletic endeavor on April 24, 2022, Second Sunday of Easter, Year C. The Rev Tom Weller. Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida.