The Book of Revelation has by many of its readers been found to be far from revealing. George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as ‘a curious record of the visions of a drug addict.’ More respectfully, yet still unhelpful, St Jerome remarked that it ‘has as many mysteries as it does words.’ Of course many other readers have found that the book reveals the meaning of life. Fundamentalists of one sort or another down the ages have read it as a blueprint for the coming crisis; they have poured over its visions and applied them to events in recent history to show that the world was about to end. At the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster they rushed to Revelation chapter 8:11 on finding that Chernobyl in Russian means ‘wormwood’. In that verse the third angel sounds his trumpet and a star called ‘Wormwood’ or bitterness falls to earth and makes a third of the rivers and springs bitter.
So what are we to make of the Book of Revelation? If you were to come to morning prayer during the week you would find us reading the whole of the book in spine tingling instalments which alternate between jewel encrusted visions of heaven accompanied by vast choirs of the heavenly hosts on the one hand, and bloody visions of death and destruction wrought by the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the other. Morally and theologically it can often seem repugnant, symbolically it is never less than fascinating, but what we are to glean from this rich apocalyptic symbolism is hard to fathom. In case you should want to try it for yourself I will this evening provide just a brief introduction. Nevertheless, if you find you really can’t read much of it, don’t worry; in the early eastern church there were many fathers who thought it ought not to be there. They questioned whether it was really by John the apostle and thought it allowed too many dangerous and wrong headed interpretations. If you do persist you should know that it was probably written for a group of seven churches in south western Turkey during the reign of the Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). It was written to reassure its recipients that in spite of their experiences of persecution both now and in the years to come they should continue to believe in God’s power and purpose in shaping the course of history and bringing about judgment and salvation. And to convey that message the author uses imagery drawn from the apocalyptic or visionary texts of the Old Testament prophets especially from the book of Daniel.
Reading the book we should bear certain principles in mind. First we should recognize a tension between present and future in prophecy. A prophet doesn’t just foretell the future; he looks beneath the surface of the present for the forces that may shape the future. His predictions may not come to pass, but his identification of the issues that should inform a Christian life here and now remain true whatever the circumstances. The world confronted by John on Patmos is a world where the power of the state and its leaders is a source of profound unease in the church and a spur to heroic witness unto martyrdom. We might think of the parallel attempt of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to alert the German churches of the 1930ies to the danger of Hitler’s Reich.
The second principle in reading Revelation involves donning a blindfold. For all the vividness of its imagery we should not try too hard to visualise what the author s saying. A man with a two edged sword coming out of his mouth is not a very appealing sight even though clergy in the diocese of Chichester have to put up with it on the diocesan coat of arms in all official letters. Such symbolism is meant to create a dynamic psychological interpretation rather than a visual one. What does a two edged sword do? How might someone’s words have that effect? How might words cut both ways?
And the third principle that should guide our reading of this text is to set the violence of its imagery of war in heaven and on earth in the context of the opening and closing chapters. In the midst of the throne in heaven is the lamb who was slain – the image of the one who loves us and sacrifices himself for those he loves. His only power lies in the words he has to express that love; and those words may both pierce the soul with the agonising conviction of wrongdoing and reassure the penitent soul with forgiveness and healing. The sword represents the impact of truth on illusion, ‘the steel that questions the distempered part’ with ‘the sharp compassion of the healer’s art.’ And the sword is the instrument of the God who wills to wipe away all tears from our eyes so that there will be no more death or mourning or pain and so that the old order will pass away and all things will be made new. That is the framework of the text even though within that framework the author also allows the shadow side of Christian frustration, fear and rage to have its say. And perhaps we should not reject the shadow side of this book too quickly when we ourselves have had little or no experience of an evil which might stir up in us a fierce desire simply to root out that evil and destroy it. What might the meaning and the impact be of wrathful love?
So when reading Revelation we should bear in mind these three things; prophecy is not just about the future but about fearless discernment of the present; apocalyptic imagery is not primarily visual but psychological – what activity do these images imply? And third we should allow ourselves to be moved by the anger in this text while holding it in the framework of a healing love.
This book is the last book of the Bible. It is often said that the Bible begins in the garden of Paradise and end in the heavenly city. At the gate of the heavenly city is the one who proclaims himself as alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. This might seem like a panoramic view of all things which demands of us simply the passivity of acceptance. And yet the figure at the gate also says, ‘Behold I make all things new.’ If Revelation ends the Bible it is remarkably open ended. If God is alpha and omega he is the beginning and end of all possibilities of verbal expression and the Bible is a book we can never be done with. The one whose face is like the sun shining in all its brilliance, is the ending that always sends us back to a new beginning. Or as Wallace Stevens put it, ’Alpha continues to begin. Omega is refreshed at every end.’ Amen.