19.01.03
Michael Epiphany
2 Revelation
5. 1 – 14 , John 1. 43 - 51
The
Gospel of John wastes no time in getting down the business. Not for John romantic accounts of the
childhood of Christ. He moves straight
from the theological account of the meaning of the incarnation to the baptism
of Jesus to the calling of the disciples. And for John this calling is not
happenstance but destiny. Andrew seems to be the linchpin. Andrew was both the
brother of Peter and he came from the same town as Philip who in turn was the
friend of Nathaniel. Nathaniel of course is famous for the saying ‘can anything
good come out of Nazareth’ which I once heard Richard Holloway suggest is
rather like someone from Morningside trying to believe that the messiah came
from Cowdenbeath. Jesus it seems already knew about Nathaniel in whom he said ‘there
is no deceit’. Nathaneal was a man of truth, a man with a gift which Jesus
would find useful.
In
his new book Straw Dogs the political
philosopher John Gray has suggested that there is no evolutionary advantage in
the quest for truth in human life. Animals he says mostly survive by deceiving
one another - pretending to store food in one place while really putting it in
another; changing colour or looking like a stick or a tree to deceive a
predator, or a predator pretending to run one way and then running the other to
deceive its prey: there is John Gray suggests evolutionary advantage in deceit
rather than truth. The mistake humanists
make arises from the fact that humanism is still infected by Christianity and
shares its assumption that the quest for truth, the need to reflect on the
meaning of life in the light of divine truth is the only way to achieve a fulfilled
life. For John Gray on the other hand
human fulfilment and truth have very little to do with each other.
Truth,
its proclamation, its verification, and witness to it are all essential to the
Gospel of John. Think how many times
Jesus prefaces his words with ‘very truly I tell you’ or recall his
conversation with Nicodemus ‘very truly I tell you we speak of what we know and
testify to what we have seen’; and then at the end the Gospel the author
himself says ‘this is the disciple who testifies to these things and has
written them and we know that his testimony is true – the disciple referred to
is the one who is euphemistically described in the Gospel as the one whom Jesus
love, who was John. From the beginning
to the end of the Gospel truth is the heart of it.
Truth
is not held in high regard in our culture today. Government regularly lies to us and so regular has this lying
become that we have a new word for it: it is called spin, and the purveyors of
it are spin doctors. I heard on the radio this week that six Algerians had been
arrested in London for the crime of growing castor oil plants on their window
sill. We were told that traces of a chemical weapon can be synthesised from
castor oil seeds and that this had been found in the flat. I expect some of us
will remember the arrests in the Seventies of the Birmingham six and the Guildford
four on the basis of similar kinds of claims based on forensic evidence of
minute chemical traces again detected by men in white coats with test tubes and
electron microscopes. We heard later in
the week that empty chemical weapon shells had been found in Iraq and representatives
of the US government proclaiming already that Iraq was now clearly in breach of
United Nations Security Council resolutions. My own image of the American East
Coast press was strongly formed in the 1970s just after the Vietnam when
President Richard Nixon’s vast web of crimes and deceits was unravelled by a
couple of investigative journalists on the Washington Post whose daring
exposure of the most powerful man in the world led to his downfall and was
rather well portrayed in the film All the President’s men. The American media these days are just not
interested in that kind of all-out pursuit of truth and truthfulness –
patriotism is more important than telling it how it really is, truth telling is
anti-American. No wonder then that the American public we are told now believe that
it was Iraqis who drove those planes into the twin towers in New York 15 months
ago, and not Saudi Ararbians.
At
the end of a course I have been teaching this term in New College one of my
students – a woman a few years younger than me – said that she found it more
difficult to watch the news now because she did not know whether to believe
what they were telling her or not.
The
devil is known as the father of lies. We are lied to constantly – every day –
hundreds of times in this culture – so much so we get lulled into a false sense
of security. The small lies – eating this yoghurt, driving that car, taking out
this loan will make you healthier, happier, more satisfied. And the bigger lies
– ‘we’ do not want congestion charging; ‘we’ can’t afford to bring back trams
and trains to our city centres; ‘we’ can’t afford cradle to grave social
security any more; ‘we’ can’t afford to refurbish our publicly owned hospitals;
our society is under threat from people from Muslim countries; we need to go to
war to preserve our freedom.
Jesus
praised Nathaneal even before he met him because he knew he was the kind of
person who found it hard to lie, and he knew that this was the beginning of
discipleship. Truth was at the heart of what Jesus taught and said and did and
it was his constant preoccupation to expose the lies of the religious and
political leaders of his day. Truth and the love of truth was the way to the
love of God and the redemption which God brought about in Jesus Christ – ‘I am
the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the father but by me’. Peace
between God and humanity would not be achieved through lies – peace can only
come when people believe and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, that there
is no other Lord whom they ought to serve.
The
Christians to whom John of Patmos wrote in the Book of Revelation were used to
living in a culture of lies - the lies were even more invasive than they had
been in Jesus’ day for the Emperor Domitian was the head of a cult of worship
which required all the inhabitants of the Empire to worship him as Lord, and to
be prepared to put their lives to his service. The Empire – Babylon – was
founded on lies, and the deepest lie of all was that peace, the peace of the
world, could only come through devotion, sacrificial service, to the Emperor.
Commitment to the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord not only of the lives of the
disciples but of heaven and earth involved the rejection of all imperial claims
– and withdrawal from many aspects of life in the imperium – refusal to worship
its gods and attend its temples and cultic processions. Such refusals would
eventually put the church of God and the Empire of Caesar in direct opposition:
and already under Nero, and then under Domitian, Christians were being used as
scapegoats for disasters that the Empire suffered – such as the fire in Rome in
AD 64. Even if they did not get official sanctions in the first century – for
official and systematic persecution did not take place until around AD 250 –
nonetheless withdrawal from the daily life of the empire would have resulted in
Christians being ostracised, regarded as socially unacceptable, subject to
exclusion from social events, trading or even mob violence.
The
Book of Revelation was written precisely to encourage Christians to resist the
Empire, even and despite the consequences to their own social status. The real
threat to their lives was the spiritual threat of submitting to the lies and
deceit of Babylon, real peace and security was to be counted among the saints
of God, who ‘are gathered from every tribe and language and people and nation
and who have been made a kingdom of priests serving God who will reign on earth’.
Revelation pictured persecution as a necessary consequence of being numbered
among the Saints – perseverance in the midst of it would bring though an even
greater reward.
How
though can we square John’s claim that they would reign on earth with the
reality that under the reign of the Caesars they would eventually be persecuted
and the very existence of the Church be threatened? Apocalyptic writing has a
different understanding of time than the understanding which dominates in our
own society. There are two deep beliefs about time which are prevalent in our
culture – one is that we humans are makers of our own times, creators of our
own destinies, that time and its ends are all down to us, and the other is an
attitude of constant deferral of those idealised and intended ends – peace,
justice, liberty – to some future point. In the mean time we need to make
sacrifices to get to that state. Thus when Christians called for an end to
Third World debt a year or two ago governments said well we can’t afford to do
this right now for that would undermine the authority of the world’s banks and
monetary systems – but if these countries make certain sacrifices, impose user
charges on their schools and hospitals etc, then in a year or two we will let
them off some of their debt. We cannot afford to disarm now – yes the cold war
is over, yes the Russians are on our side now but there are new threats, new
dangers, the world is changing. We still need to arm for war in order to
guarantee peace for the children of tomorrow. Perpetual war for perpetual peace
– that is the way to bring peace about.
Lies
– they are all around us. But these lies have a particular character. They tell
us that the future is ours to make but getting there involves sacrifices of
others lives in the present and in the future this will bring us to our
destiny. The writer of the book of Revelation believes something completely
different.
For
John the fundamental truth to which Christians are committed is that Jesus
Christ – the lamb that was slain – has already conquered. He is already living
in the heavenly places, already enthroned with God above the stars. The
conflict between good and evil which began with a war in heaven between the
angels is a conflict whose outcome is now already decided and already made
known. We don’t have to worry about the outcome any more. It is not up to
Christians to decide or determine the end of history. History already has an
end – and the end is the eternal reign of Christ, the reign of peace.
But
at the same time Christians live in the time of the antichrist when the father
of lies sets up in the holiest of places – Jerusalem, Rome, Washington,
Baghdad: emperors, presidents, world leaders will seek to lead even the
faithful away from devotion to the truth that God has already conquered evil,
non-violently, in the lamb who was slain.
Time
for John is different you see from time for imperial Rome, or time for imperial
America – ‘the hour is coming, and is now here – says Jesus in the Gospel of
John – when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.’
The truth is already manifest, already made known, and the Spirit who
is the Spirit of truth will lead them into all truth, will unite them with the
vine who is their source and origin, will give them the desires for peace and
love which will unite them, eradicate conflict, enable them to live in the new
Kingdom of God even as they continue to dwell in the kingdom of this world.
Revelation
does not tell simply of a time which is future – it is not some complex and
mysterious key to the end of time which, if we only knew how to read it aright,
would tell us the year and the day and the hour when Christ will come again.
Revelation is about the co-existence side by side simultaneously in history of
two Empires, of two Kingdoms, of two Lords – the Lord Jesus Christ and the
Antichrist – the beguiling earthly leaders who will try to tempt even
Christians from living in the Kingdom.
This
understanding of the simultaneity of the forthcoming of the kingdom and of the
Empire of Rome is so important for us today: so often in recent history we have
been encouraged to believe that at last the values of the Kingdom which Christians
are committed to are values which are coming about through events in this world
– and not least the quest for peace. But Revelation teaches us that we cannot
put our trust and our hopes and our desires for an absence of conflict, for
true peace, in events in this world. Yes we as Christians can and should attend
protests against the world’s plans for war, we must witness against them, we should
expose the lies which lead to them, but when wars still happen we do not lose
hope because we know that without a conversion to the Lordship of Jesus Christ,
we cannot expect the world to become the Kingdom.
As
Christians we have divided loyalties – ‘in the world you will have tribulation’
says Jesus in John’s Gospel, ‘but I have called you out of the world’. But yet
we live in the world. What to do in
the meantime. The Book of Revelation is clear despite its confusing language -
we are called first and foremost to worship, to devote our minds and souls and
bodies not to the hopes and aspirations of the Empires of this world and their
lies but to the life of heaven. God is first and foremost to be worshipped and
adored and praised. And then, and then, we are called to witness – ‘worthy is
the lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and
honour and glory and blessing’ (Rev. 5. 13).
Time
and again in Revelation it is false worship which leads to lies – it is the
demands of Babylon and of the antichrist to be worshipped which is the heart of
their deceit and time and again Christians are those who resist this false
worship. The ones robed in white, the ones who sing worthy is the lamb, the
ones who burn the great bowls of incense – the imagery is fantastic and rich,
as rich as any filmic portrayal of the good life on cinema or TV screens.
Christians
change the world by living as if the other world is already in their midst.
They witness by worshipping the God who has already brought history to an end.
They make peace by loving the Lord of truth who did not win victory through
violence but by becoming the Lamb who was slain so that the saints and the
creation itself might be redeemed from violence and death.
But
of course the division between the two worlds is not just out there – it is in
here, in our own minds and hearts, in our own divided loyalties, in our own
daily lives. It is hard, not easy – we were not promised an easy life. It is
easier to believe what the world tells us – if only enough nations disarm, if
only enough people protest for peace, if only enough journalists expose the
lies, then we will have truth, then we will have non-violence and not war as
the way of ruling the nations. But this is not what we read in the Gospel of
John or the Book of Revelation. Our first duty is to worship the Lamb who was
slain and to sustain the Church, to live in community with those who share this
truth, this alternative ending to history, this good news of God’s Kingdom.
If
it is all down to us, and then if peace does not come from the protests around
the world yesterday, or a march in Glasgow in two weeks time, if after invading
Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein, the promised peace does not come and threats of
terror and of more invasions of more countries continue, we as Christians need
not be cast down, we need not be despondent, we can continue to praise and love
and worship God. We do not, need not, cannot expect that the antichrist, the
culture of death, the empires of this world, can bring perpetual, eternal peace
– there is only one who brought this peace, and it was the one who eschewed
violence for the cross and so we can go on praising, go on rejoicing, go on
singing, knowing that we shall overcome, because we already live in peace, for
in Christ God already has overcome, already made peace where there was a sword,
already beaten swords into pruning forks and shields into ploughshares:
Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering
thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled
the throne and the living creatures and the elders. 12In a loud
voice they sang:
"Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!"
13Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the
earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing:
"To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!"
Amen.
Back