“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”
Except for the final benediction, these are the last words of the Book of Revelation; the last words of the whole Bible. They provide an appropriate conclusion to Revelation, a text that reveals its author’s discomfort with the present on every page and in which John offers a powerful and attractive vision of a future in which Jesus Christ reigns triumphantly and God has made all things new. Continue reading
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter. It’s referred to informally as Good Shepherd Sunday, because each year on this day we hear similar readings. The gospel reading always comes from the 10th chapter of John which is Jesus’ discourse on the Good Shepherd. The Psalm appointed for the day is always Psalm 23, the best-known and most-loved of all of the Psalms. The image of the good shepherd is an important one historically, and in spite of the fact that we have come very far from the pastoral setting of subsistence agriculture in ancient Palestine, the notion of God as a good shepherd who cares for us as a shepherd cares for his flock, continues to resonate. Continue reading
We’ve been reading from the Book of Revelation during this season of Easter. This is the only sustained engagement of the lectionary with the last book in the New Testament. That’s a shame, I suppose, because the richness of the other readings and the difficulties inherent in interpreting and preaching Revelation divert our attention. Looking back through my sermon files, it’s hardly a coincidence that my sermons in the Easter season rarely deal substantively with Revelation before the Fifth Sunday of Easter. There’s another reason for the sudden appearance of Revelation in my preaching in the Fifth and Sixth Sundays of Easter. It’s because, the lectionary readings for those weeks introduce John’s vision of the New Jerusalem.
As a reminder, on earlier Sundays we heard from the very beginning of the book (Rev. 1:4-8) and two different visions of heavenly worship: Rev. 5:11-14 and Rev. 7:9-17. Taken together, these readings along with those for the sixth and seventh Sundays of Easter do little to provide a full introduction to this complex, important, and enigmatic work. And I can’t do that in a blog post, either. Barbara Rossing’s commentaries on Working Preacher offer some introduction and her books also provide understandings of Revelation that go beyond the sensationalistic end-time prophecies of Hal Lindsey and Left Behind.
I spent a good bit of time during my academic career both as a scholar and a teacher, thinking about apocalyptic literature and the apocalyptic worldview. As a preacher and pastor, I have been especially interested in the contrasting images of human community and urban life presented in Revelation. There are two cities described in the book. One is the city John sees coming down from heaven, the New Jerusalem. We only catch a glimpse of it in this week’s reading but God, speaking for the first time in the book since its opening verses, has this to say:
“See, the home of God is with mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
He will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
A fuller description of the New Jerusalem is provided in later in chapter 21 in 22 (excerpts from which are the reading for next Sunday). The key feature highlighted by the lectionary is the absence of a space set apart for God: “I saw no temple in the city; for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb.”
The New Jerusalem is the second of two cities in Revelation. The other is Rome. We see its fullest description in Rev. 17 when John sees a vision of a whore clothed in purple and scarlet, with the inscription “Babylon the Great, Mother of whores.” She is seated on seven mountains, a clear reference to the seven hills of Rome. Revelation is a text that seeks to instruct its readers in the evils of Rome and in its eternal and totalistic enmity toward the Christian faith. John’s readers were meant to receive assurance that their suffering would be rewarded and that at the end God would prevail.
The vision of a city filled with the divine presence and filled as well with people from all the nations of the world joined in their worship of God redeems the overwhelming biblical understanding of the city as evil, from Genesis, where it is said that Cain founded the first city although through to Revelation itself. The New Jerusalem though is a redeemed and re-created city, inhabited by God and mortals, a community where there is no religious, social, or ethnic difference.
We have all sorts of ideas about ideal human community. In the twenty-first century, we might think of the nuclear family as the model for human community and many of us think of the church as “family” as well. I would guess that few of us would imagine a city as an ideal human community. Cities are dirty, noisy, full of crime. But cities are also redemptive and places where God’s grace is present. They might also be places where God is present everywhere and not just within the boundaries of the buildings or boxes within which we try to confine God.
I previously blogged on Pagels’ most recent project. She lectured at UW Madison a couple of years ago. Here’s what I said then:
she seemed to suggest that the author’s Judaism was in some way more important for making sense of the visions than his belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. I think you can do that only if you separate out the letters to the seven churches from the visions. For if the same audience is implied then the most important context is the relationship between Christianity and the empire, not Judaism and the empire.
More troubling is her blaming Athanasius for the canonization of Revelation. His wasn’t the leading or primary voice. There were too many other things in its favor, particularly, by that time, the universal assumption that the author of the gospel of John and the author of Revelation were the same person. And it wasn’t just Athanasius who attacked alternative visions or revelations. Early Christianity is filled with such visions, and attacks on them. Unfortunately, Pagels’ bias against orthodox Christianity, the Great Church, whatever you want to call it, in favor of the personal experience emphasized by the Gnostics and others, blinds her to historical reality
Adam Gopnik’s review in the New Yorker is here.
Martin Marty comments here.
An interview with Pagels is here.
Preaching Grace on the Square 