Hard Texts:  What’s Up With John?

Revelation 1:1-3

October 8, 2006         (Click the date to see the bulletin)

 

1.  Imagine for a minute that we are sitting in the end zone of a football game, right between the parallel goal posts.  It’s been a tense game.  But it’s not any old game.  This game will determine the championship between our team and our long-time arch-rival.  The score is tied, and our team is in field-goal position.  The coach whispers a surprise play to the most seasoned kicker before he runs onto the field.  But before the center can snap the ball, the field-goal kicker trots over to the goal post and repositions it.  It’s still a goal post, and it’s still a crucial moment, but now the uprights are no longer parallel.  All the angles are off.  The people stare in amazement!  Will he still kick a field goal?  And if he does, will it count?  And, most important, will our team win?

2.  I know this would never happen.  It’s only an analogy, a way to set the stage for the Book of Revelation.  At end of the first century, the Christians and the Roman government were arch rivals.  The situation was tense.  The Roman emperor was incredibly threatened by the Christians, because they refused to honor him as their god.  And we know why!  The Christian God, our God, is the only God!  There are no others!  And because Christians insisted on being loyal to God, Caesar persecuted them.  Many died; many more were imprisoned.  The rest had to hide.  What would happen to them?  Would they all die?  Would all the work they had done to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ be flattened like a bug underfoot?

3.  Well, we know the answer, don’t we?  Two thousand years later, Christianity has spread farther and faster than anyone could have imagined.  But God had a message to give those early Christians who hid in fear.  Once again, God chose Jesus to give the message, and Jesus drew John a picture.  That “picture” of the future has no parallel in all of scripture – like the uprights of our imaginary repositioned goal posts.  In fact, everything about this book is unlike any other Book in the Bible; it is unlike the parables Jesus told to help the disciples understand how to live together the way God intends people to live.  The images in it are so graphic that only we who have seen Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings (or maybe Apocalypse Now!) can begin to understand some of the vision Jesus gave to John.

4.  But Christians have not always appreciated what John wrote to the Churches.  We’ve pretty much ignored it all these years.  It’s VERY difficult to read.  But, rather than find reliable help, we simply ignored it – pretended like it wasn’t even IN the Bible.  But times and events in the last 20 or 30 years have enticed new interest in the words a man named John wrote so long ago.  So, through the remainder of October, we’re going to find what’s relevant to us in this “Lost Book of the Bible.”  These four sermons will be in conjunction with, but not identical to, our five weeks of Sunday Afternoon Bible Studies during October. 

5.  The style of writing we find in The Revelation is called “apocalyptic literature.”  It  began to be popular in Judaism about 200 years before Jesus was born, and kept its “place on the charts” until about 100 years after he died.  Some of the books in the Old Testament have sections that resemble The Revelation, and there are other apocalyptic books that didn’t make it into the Bible.  “Apocalypse” is the New Testament word that we translate as “revelation.”  It means, as you might guess, “to reveal.”  If the word “revelation” means  to reveal, to unveil, to make clear, then why on earth does the Book of Revelation contain so many veiled and unclear passages?  This lack of clarity has lead some people to ignore it, and others to dislike it. 

6.  Martin Luther was one who didn’t like this Book.  He liked things plain and clear, and said this is neither plain nor clear.  The words of Peter and Paul and Jesus in the Gospels are plain and clear, Luther said, but not so John’s words in The Revelation.   And in addition to that, Luther wrote that John seems to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly.  For John to write that God would remove anyone who removed words from his book just didn’t make sense!  Luther thought the other biblical writings are much more important, yet none of them threatened to take away anyone who takes away anything from them.  Luther  said “Let every one think of [this revelation] as his own spirit gives him to think.  My spirit cannot fit itself into this book.”^[i]

7.  Martin Luther was the “father” of the Lutherans, and we’re not quite Lutherans.  But we’re first cousins, and we view the Bible in much the same way they do.  So I suppose we can trace our lack of interest in this book back to Luther’s disdain of it.  However, just because he didn’t like it does not remove it from the Bible.  The message Jesus gave to John way back then is also relevant for us.  Strange, but relevant!

8.  When John wrote The Revelation, the church was in crisis.  Even John himself  was in crisis.  The crisis was called persecution.    As Christianity spread further away from  Jerusalem, its evangelists ran right into a brick wall created by the Roman Emperor.  He resented being relegated to second place by Christians who lived in his territory.  So he terrorized them.  And it worked!  The Christians in the last years of the first century lived in fear.  John himself was in prison, on the Island of Patmos, which was a bit like our old Alcatraz Island – a prison completely surrounded by water.  No way of escape.  But Jesus showed John that there was nothing to fear.  God was still God, and God had not abandoned them!  God would bring about a new heaven and a new earth!   I don’t know if there is any way we can imagine the relief that flooded over John.  Jesus wanted John to tell the Church, particularly the seven congregations he knew intimately.  But John had to use coded language which could be understood only by those he sought to comfort.  That comfort came from their heritage – the rich history preserved in the Law and the Prophets and the Writings.  There are more than 500 references to Old Testaments writings in the 404 verses of The Revelation!  More than 500!  Many people read those references them in the future tense, without realizing the visions actually refer to the past, and all the ways God was faithful throughout their long history. 

9.  God had been faithful in the past.  But do John’s words have any meaning for us today?  Are we under any kind of persecution?  I think we are!   It’s less bloody than first-century persecution, but it’s nonetheless real!  Many popular TV shows regularly ridicule church people.  And extremists from one religion regularly reject people of other religions.  What are we to do?  Where do we look for help?  John gives us the answer!  We look to God!  God is still God, no matter how badly some people behave!   That’s the good news for us collectively, and the good news for us personally.  The good news may be very strange, like this strange goal post, but the “kick was good, the goal counts, and our team wins!”  The future is bright ahead of us!  Thanks be to God!  Amen!