Tag: michael gorman

Being Human — Chapter Nine — What’s the story: mourning glory?

This is an adaptation of the ninth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

Content warning — we are going to be talking about violence; and I am going to touch on the way that violence is gendered, especially around family violence, and I do not want that to take people by surprise.

If I asked you to describe the stories you have been consuming lately in a sentence, how would you do it?

Here are a few of mine:

An elite soldier’s unit and family are killed as a result of a deep state conspiracy involving the military and big pharma, so he goes on a rampage, killing everyone involved.

Or…

A retired military police officer hitchhikes around the U.S. and manages to stumble into a deadly conspiracy; he uses his investigative skills and capacity for violence to solve it.

Or… and this one was a favourite… A folk-singing spy with PTSD, whose father works for the CIA, is sent undercover in an engineering firm so he can prevent the election of a pro-nuclear Iranian presidential candidate, or failing that, assassinate him; he sings his way through his trauma and questions about the cost of participating in violence.

At the time of preaching this series, Amazon had just launched the new Rings of Power Tolkien epic, which is fascinating because Tolkien thought very carefully about stories and their power — and about technology and the way it changes us.

In a letter about Middle Earth he explains that magic in his world — especially the destructive magic of Mordor — was a picture of the machine in ours.

“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or magic).”

— Tolkien

The machine is operating through:

“… all use of external plans or devices instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”

He sees this as the operations of “the enemy” — who he calls the “Lord of Magic and machines.” He says:

“The enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.”

This created stuff warps us — like the One Ring warped Gollum — and anyone who wields it, and perhaps like swords and weapons shaped those who wield them; coming with a cost — the sort that get explored through the violent battle for Middle Earth.

The thing about stories is that they are powerful; they shape our understanding of the world — they shape our imaginations and desires, just like images — stories are part of what Charles Taylor, and Jamie Smith (who was the guy who wrote You Are What You Love), call the social imaginary — the background to our beliefs; the stuff that shapes our imagination.

“A social imaginary is not how we think about the world, but how we imagine the world before we ever think about it… it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths and icons.”

— James K.A. Smith

It is not just architecture and images that shape us — stories do as well. They help us make sense of the world; stories are what help us figure out what data we receive as “truth,” and what we do not.

“These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by ‘lining’ our imagination, as it were, providing us with frameworks of ‘meaning’ by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it.”

You could argue that telling stories — whether it is history, or fiction, or the myths — the big stories we live by — is part of being made in the image of the God who has structured history, and his word, as a story; that one of the things that separates us from other living creatures is that we tell stories — you do not see koalas building libraries.

Stories also shape the way we live — they teach us how we should live. There is a philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, who reckons the modern world has become a bureaucratic machine, where asking “how should I live?” gets reframed as “what is the most efficient way to make things happen.” He reckons the way out of the machine is to recognise the place of story in our lives, and in cultivating virtue; and that we can only know how we ought to live in this world if we can understand ourselves living in a story — knowing our origins, our beginning, our setting, and our destination — and who we need to be to get there.

“I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ If I can answer the prior question: ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
— Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The “machine” means we often treat “non-fiction” — facts — as more important than stories, but this is making the mistake of treating us more like robots than humans; we live and breathe stories.

We spent some time previously unpacking Israel’s origin story — the creation story in Genesis — and imagining how it shaped the life of God’s people, not only living as God’s priestly image-bearing people in the Eden-like promised land, looking after the temple —

but imagining how that story might have shaped Israel to live differently in Babylon, where life was defined by an altogether different story — we dug into it a bit — the Enuma Elish — the story of the gods of Babylon creating the world through violence, from the bodies of dead and defeated gods.

Last week we talked about the powers and principalities that the New Testament describes operating to keep us captive; these spiritual powers are the animating forces behind the systems that make us less than human as we get swept up in them so that we are imprinted by them to represent those powers; to live, so to speak, as characters in their stories (Ephesians 6:11-12). In Babylon the powers operated through an idolatrous regime that celebrated violence.

Walter Wink was a Pentecostal theologian — he wrote a book called The Powers That Be about these systems that we can observe in the world. He was probably less inclined to see spiritual beings pulling the strings behind these observations, and more inclined to see collective human rebellion against God — but he talks about how the same story that animated Babylon, through its creation story — the idea that killing is in our genes; that to be human is to fight against evil, to destroy enemies, with violence — animates the empires of the modern West. He says of the way this story permeates our imaginary:

“The implications are clear: human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin story is violence. Killing is in our genes.”

— Walter Wink

It is this story, that he calls the myth of redemptive violence — the idea that whatever the problems we face, at the end of the day victory will take violence — heroic standing up against the forces of evil and triumphing, throwing them back into the abyss while wielding a sword.

“This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.”

— Walter Wink

It is this story, not the Gospel, that shapes the politics of a post-Christendom world; and is the dominant religious story in our world; it is behind how we “imagine” the world before fleshing it out.

“By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”

It is the myth you will find making violence entertaining — in The Terminal List, and Reacher — and even in Rings of Power — deluding people into compliance with a deadly and dehumanising system. Our stories are a little more complex — all these stories are critiquing violent conspiracies and evil, even embodied in a deep state — but they are offering violent solutions, even if, like in Patriot and Middle Earth, the stories leave us asking questions about the cost of wielding the sword. These powers — idol machines — do not just use one story, but this myth of redemptive violence is built into our world, and it is destructive.

Wink reckons there is more going on under the hood in our entertainment, the stories we consume, than we realise. He says in this story politics becomes ultimate; the state and its armed forces are responsible for throwing chaos into the abyss, and those who buy the story will offer themselves up for holy war.

“Salvation is politics: the masses identify with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offer themselves up for the Holy War that imposes order and rule on the peoples round about. Peace through war; security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the domination system is found in every society.”

This myth props up what the former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex as he left office in 1961. We talked about this back in our Revelation series.

He was worried about the rapid development of an arms industry as a product of the Cold War. He said American factories once made ploughs, but they had learned to make swords, in a permanent industry of vast proportions designed to supply the armed forces.

“American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…”

— Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

He reckoned people had to be really careful about the way people making money from this industry would chase power and influence, because it had the potential to change the economic, political, and spiritual makeup of the country.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

And this seems a world away from us, here in a small church in a city across the world, but the degrees of separation might be smaller than you think. Our military industrial complex is a lot smaller than the U.S. We look at their gun culture as an idol, while consuming the same stories that justify those cultural norms — the same stories that prop up this idea that nations solve problems with violence — and these stories also prop up the idea that individuals should use violence to solve problems, and especially that men should; they shape how we understand masculinity.

Did you notice that the three shows I started out talking about all have violent men as heroes? There is a certain view of the world that sees masculinity as being about male power — the capacity for violence — so they can be protectors, and so women can swoon over such masculine men.

It is not just our entertainment — so much of our Christian content, the books we read, the stuff we listen to or watch, comes from the U.S. And the church in the U.S. has shown itself, in the last few years, to be marching in lockstep with the dominion system. This same myth of redemptive violence is used to justify grabbing hold of political power to win a culture war, or any sort of conflict against your enemies.

There is a writer in the States, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who wrote this book Jesus and John Wayne, exploring how this same myth has embedded itself in the church.

We are products of our culture; of what we consume, she says:

“The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit.”

She traces the way that the modern church has developed a sort of “militant masculinity” — idolising power and the capacity for violence, militant heroes like the western star John Wayne.

“For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself… Wayne modelled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence… Little separated Jesus from John Wayne. Jesus had become a Warrior Leader, an Ultimate Fighter.”

This is a picture of our “social imaginary” preconditioning us to read the Gospel stories in a particular way that is more Babylonian than Biblical.

She has the receipts — she quotes a guy named Doug Wilson, who, thanks to the Internet, enjoys a pretty wide readership in Australia. In one of his books, Wilson says it is essential for boys to play with swords and guns; to meet a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle. You might have heard stories like this; that there is this inbuilt capacity for violence that is necessary in case you have to save someone.

“… it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns. Boys have a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle.”

— Doug Wilson

Note: since preaching this series in 2022, Wilson’s infamy and influence has increased and in a recent “no quarter November” he was selling branded flamethrowers.

For Wilson, to beat our weapons into pruning hooks too soon — to not be part of the military-industrial complex and buying the myth of redemptive violence — that will leave us fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.

“And to beat the spears into pruning hooks prematurely, before the war is over, will leave you fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”

— Doug Wilson

Like Eisenhower, he has this passage from Isaiah in mind — where God will bring restoration and a transformed world, replacing war, violence, with peace, so that instead of making weapons people will make farming tools, pruning hooks and ploughshares.

“He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

— Isaiah 2:4

Folks like Wilson do not think that day of the Lord has come yet. For them we should still be armed and dangerous, with the weapons of the world.

Du Mez also points out just how angry Wilson got at the idea women might be warriors, for a bunch of reasons including that they are not as good at the “important work of violence.” Now, you have probably got your own thoughts about women becoming soldiers, but that is not the point. When you make the enemy someone who can be stabbed, you rob women of their place in the battle against the powers.

“… they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted ‘covenantal lines of authority,’ and they were not as good as men in ‘the important work of violence.’”

When Eve is created as Adam’s helper (Genesis 2:18), it is the word ezer; a word with military connotations — more like ally — that is used of God throughout the Bible. Ultimately this myth of redemptive violence, that wants men wielding swords and fighting people, is the myth of redemptive patriarchy; a myth of redemptive male violence.

It is a myth built on the cursed pattern of relationships in Genesis 3 where “he” rules over “her” — not where they rule together and she is an ally in the cause. And we do have a problem with the myth of redemptive patriarchy and male entitlement through power here in Australia. It is expressed in the rate of family violence perpetrated by men in our country, and the soaring numbers of sexual assaults perpetrated by boys in our schools. This does not come from nowhere; it is supported by narratives that paint heroism as using power to make the world what you think it should be. Domination, rather than the sort of dominion we were made for, is built into our lives at a societal level, and an individual level.

I am not sure these folks going on about taking up the sword, with a vision of masculinity that sees an inherent capacity for violence, have read their Bibles, where our enemy is not flesh and blood, but the devil, and his schemes, these powers, spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:11-12) — a real gun is not going to be much more useful than a toy one at this point.

And the “armour of God” we use in this fight — it is not armour geared towards violence; the sword in this war is the word of God; get your kids to play with it. And the way of life that prepares us for this fight is not playing with guns, it is prayer (Ephesians 6:17-18).

Plus, even though our enemy is the dragon-serpent — if we take up the sword and respond with violence, the story of the Bible seems to be that we defeat ourselves and choose his side — and the victory over the dragon comes through non-violent redemptive sacrifice.

Satan enters the scene as some sort of legged serpent, a dragon (Genesis 3). And then, when Cain is angry at Abel, God says sin is crouching at the door — like some personified wild animal, a power, desiring to have him (Genesis 4:7). And when he gives in to that power, he gets violent; he kills his brother (Genesis 4:8). This is a thread we traced through Genesis; to Nimrod, the violent killer who built Babylon and Assyria (Genesis 10:9-12).

The temptation Satan offers through the powers is the same one he offers Jesus in the wilderness — as we saw in Matthew — the temptation to grab hold of the kingdoms of the world with power (Matthew 4:8-9); to play the Babylon game; to run a domination system, or enjoy its rewards. To bow down to the dragon and serve his kingdom, embracing his way of death. And Jesus does not grasp. We do not actually fight the dragon — we are not the hero. Jesus does. Jesus is. And he tells us his kingdom features peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), that his people will reject violence, and turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), and love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and he tells his disciples to put away their swords, because those who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).

The whole point of his life was to model something different to a life under the powers, the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, because he came to model the kingdom of God, and invite us to join him in it. Even if Revelation depicts him defeating the dragon, his victory is won at the cross, through the blood of the lamb (Revelation 12:9, 11). He confounds the beastly myth of redemptive violence and provides an altogether different story for us to live by, just like Genesis did for Israel. And he calls us to put away our swords, deny ourselves, and take up our cross — following him (Matthew 16:24). Jesus invites us to life not under the powers — the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, but in the kingdom of God. He invites us to life in a different story — the story told in the Old Testament from start to finish — from Moses to the Prophets — Jesus says he is what holds the story together (Luke 24:26-27). He says the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets — the whole Old Testament — are written about him; that he has come to fulfil them (Luke 24:44), and that this fulfilment is not found in wielding a sword, but suffering and death on a cross, by being crucified by those who wield swords, so that he might bring forgiveness of sins and new life by the Spirit (Luke 24:46-47). His death and resurrection are the climax of history, and of the integrated collection of books in the Old Testament.

The whole story of the Bible is a story that invites us to be truly human by resisting violence and domination and the powers, and finding life in God’s kingdom.

In this story we are not the hero. We cannot save ourselves or fix the world, and the military industrial state cannot throw back the forces of chaos, because they are often aligned with the forces of chaos, even as God appoints them as the sword. Heroism in this story is not about the sword; the sword is deadly. It does not just kill our enemies as we swing it, it destroys us with every blow; violence disintegrates us, taking us further away from the life of love we were created for, that Jesus embodies.

The way of life that comes with the story of Jesus is to take up our cross. It is the life Paul describes in Philippians 2 (Philippians 2:5). A life shaped by Jesus and his story, because his story is now our story, and it provides the pattern for all our relationships. And I want to suggest that life in this story is going to involve two commitments that change how we engage in the world in ways that make us truly human — first, a commitment to being better readers of stories, and second, committing ourselves to living in God’s story, the story of Jesus, and so embracing non-violence as we embody the story of Jesus.

This will mean becoming better readers of the Bible — the sword we are meant to wield — and participants in its ongoing story, so it shapes our lives and actions (Ephesians 6:17). I reckon, often, we are not great readers of the Bible, and part of the key to reading the Bible well, especially in narrative bits, is not just to see Jesus as the fulfilment of the story, but to ask “am I seeing behaviour that is like Jesus in this story, or like the pattern of the dragon, or cursed relationships?”

The Bible is full of descriptions of violence, but that violence normally gets destructive and out of hand rather than being redemptive. So we will celebrate David slaying his giant — explicitly without a sword (1 Samuel 17:50) — but not notice how violence becomes embedded in his family system and basically destroys everything as his sons go to war with him, and each other (2 Samuel 12:10). And somehow we will say Christian men need swords or guns or violence (or flamethrowers). The story of the Bible exposes the problem with our hearts, and with the idea that we can turn to violence to solve our problems.

Being better readers of stories might also mean reading better stories. Karen Swallow Prior, who I mentioned last chapter, is a professor of literature. She has written a book called On Reading Well, about how the stories we choose to engage with can be paths to cultivating virtue, because stories do actually teach us how we should live. She reckons stories work better than facts, or other forms of education that focus on techniques, because they let us imagine different experiences so we can explore new ways to live.

“Literature replicates the world of the concrete, where the experiential learning necessary for virtue occurs. Such experiential learning does not come through technique.”

We see characters reacting to situations in ways that are concrete where ideas might be abstract. So the sorts of stories we watch, and the sort of characters that shape our imagination — that matters. As we judge the characters we encounter that shapes our own character.

“… the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character. Through the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience.”

But this will also mean being more sensitive to the formative power of stories around us — not just the myth of redemptive violence, but visions of the good life built on grasping and consuming and being the hero of our own story — so we can spot the powers and disarm them, and expose them to rob them of their power over us and others; and that we might even choose stories that cultivate virtue in us.

And maybe we need more Inklings — more Tolkiens and Lewises telling stories — whether in books, or TV, or video games, or just to our kids at night — that subvert the powerful myths of our world, that offer escape, and even what Tolkien called “the eucatastrophe” — the unexpected happy ending.

“The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale… the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’”

— Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Tolkien believed our hearts desire this eucatastrophic moment because we are created to experience the unexpected happy ending caught up in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels… among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe.”

So that is the first bit. The second bit is a commitment not just to believing the story of Jesus is true, but to living in it — which will mean letting it provide the shape of our life. That will mean rejecting the myths offered by our world, by the powers, including the myth of redemptive violence, and arming ourselves instead with the sword that is God’s word by taking up our cross and following Jesus. This is harder than it sounds, but it is also less abstract than it sounds, because it is exactly what Paul is describing in Philippians 2. This is, in MacIntyre’s words, the story that teaches us “what we are to do” in any moment. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of the story of the Bible — the story that reveals the truly human life to us, both the way to life and a way of life.

The theologian Michael Gorman has been mega-helpful to me with this stuff, and he reckons Philippians 2’s retelling of the Gospel is both the central organising story of Paul’s life, and of our life as Christians. He says in the cross and resurrection Paul sees God revealing that faithful and holy opposition to evil — redemption — is not found through inflicting violence, but through absorbing violence and death, turning the other cheek.

“Covenant fidelity, justification, holiness and opposition to evil are not achieved by the infliction of violence and death but by the absorption of violence and death.”

I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that if you are being abused by the sort of person who believes that violence is a legitimate answer you should stay subject to that relationship, or the violence. What I am saying is that responding with violence, taking up the sword, produces a vicious cycle, and to forgive and relinquish that right to take up the sword and destroy your enemy is to embrace the way of Jesus. Wielding the sword, turning to violence, will always shape us, and it will shape us to believe and participate in a story that is counter to the Gospel. This also does not mean we do not let those whom God has given the sword — the government — pursue justice.

But this is where we go wrong when we think the idea for raising masculine men is teaching boys to play with guns and swords, encouraging them to kill the giants or dragons in their lives, to be the hero, and teaching girls to look for a violent protector, rather than teaching them to fight evil not by repaying evil with evil, but by embracing life in God’s story.

In this story the dragon loses as God’s power is displayed in the weakness of the cross, in Jesus’ refusal to grasp power the way Satan tempts us to, and as the full weight of the violent dominion system is brought against Jesus, God is liberating humans — his violent enemies — by forgiving us instead of crushing us and destroying our rebellion.

“The normal human temptation to squash enemies, to eliminate the impure other, is not the response of God in Christ. Instead, God reaches out to reconcile: people to God, and people to people.”

This is not the myth of redemptive violence but the story of redemptive love and grace. Our normal human impulse to squash our enemies is not the way God works. God works, through Jesus, to reach out and bring reconciliation; between us and him, and between us and each other.

This experience of love as the story of the Gospel becomes our story shapes how we live as disciples of Jesus; as we take up our cross, not because we have to throw the forces of chaos back into the abyss, but because we recognise that this is how Jesus did it, this is how he resisted the powers. He did not grasp, or embrace violence, but gave his life, suffering death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

Gorman says these verses are showing us what true humanity looks like, in contrast to Adam, and what true divinity looks like, as we seek to bear God’s image in the world. He says to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike — and for Paul, and for Gorman, this means to be crosslike in our life in the world.

“The incarnation and cross manifest, and the exaltation recognises, Christ’s true humanity, in contrast to Adam, as well as his true divinity. Therefore, to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike.”

The Gospel is a story that does not just restore our relationships from a pattern of sin, to a pattern of godlikeness, it transforms the way we see masculinity, or femininity — our humanity — it reshapes all our relationships, and how we understand life imitating our hero as we are transformed into his image. It calls us from violence and into communion and love and a life of reconciliation and peacemaking.

He says the church is a community that inhabits the life of God by inhabiting God’s story, as God inhabits us by his Spirit and transforms us into people who reveal his character in our lives. Our life story, in relationships pursuing the way of Jesus, embody and proclaim the story we are part of. The participation in this story and retelling of this story shapes us because it becomes the story that shapes our actions in the world.

“The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church. Thus the church’s life story embodies and thereby proclaims the narrative identity and gracious saving power of the triune God.”

God is inviting you into his life, and into his story — to leave the stories of the powers behind, the violent ways of death and destruction, and find life together with him, and so to become truly human. Will you keep living as people shaped by his story as we dwell in it together?

Revelation — A lens to use to see the world fully

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 38 minutes.

Last time round we set the scene for Revelation by looking back through the Bible at the way some of its key language ties up a big storyline thread. The idea is that we humans are either destined to become beastly, like the serpent, Satan, or beautiful, reflecting the glory of God. We saw that this choice boils down to who, or what, we worship — Jesus, and through Him, the God who created the heavens and the earth, or beastly rulers of the earth, and through them, Satan.

And we saw that this was a real and present challenge facing John’s first readers — those he wrote this strange book to. The challenge for us now is not seeing the big story this book fits into, but figuring out how to read it in our circumstances here in Brisbane, two thousand years later.

Just what sort of book is Revelation? What place does it have in our lives as followers of Jesus? What is its message for us?

The book gets its name from the first line — this opening — the ‘revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Revelation 1:1). There is a lot to unpack here as we figure out how to read it, and the first thing to note is that this word is literally ‘apocalypse.’ It is ‘the apocalypse from Jesus Christ.’

Now, we think we know what an apocalypse is, right? You have probably got an escape plan you have figured out for the Zombie apocalypse — especially after Covid — right? Or maybe that is just me.

We know an apocalypse is about the end of the world. Don’t we?

Only, that is just what we have made this word mean because of one way this book has been read, and I’m pretty convinced that is not the right way.

An apocalypse is not about the end of the world like ‘how it all falls apart,’ It might be more connected to the ‘ends of the world;’ the way philosophers talk about purpose, or like some of you might have learned, ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But the thing is, this word more literally means something like revelation; an unveiling. It is about truth being revealed that helps us see events around us — to see the world — the right way — and in the sense it is used in the Bible, it is like a veil pulled back moment where we see earth and its purpose — and our purpose — from the perspective of heaven.

Now, it is possible this apocalypse is all about the fire and brimstone end of the line for the earth — that it is an ancient document predicting events in the far-off future. That is one possible reading of the book. The locusts could be Apache helicopters, and the mark of the beast could be bank cards — but these are readings of the book that always put present or future generations in the audience seat, at the expense of the past.

And that can be tempting.

The Biblical scholar Michael Gorman has a book called ‘Reading Revelation Responsibly,’ which has this great graph to explain how people read the book. He reckons all of us naturally fit somewhere on this graph.

We can treat — from top to bottom — the book as though it only describes events in the past, or as though it is about the present or the future, or a thing that encompasses all points in time. On the left right axis, we can treat the vivid apocalyptic symbols as codes that describe particular phenomenon located at a certain time (the up-down axis), or we can use these symbols like a lens; a way of seeing the world, and events either everywhere on the up/down axis or in a particular spot. So we either approach the book decoding symbols to discover precise moments they correspond to in history, or see the symbols as analogies that will explain various things that might happen at any moment — giving us a language to understand reality.

You might remember how I’ve got these colour-blind lenses that allow me to see colours I did not know existed; reds and greens like never before. These lenses change the way I understand the world by revealing things I could not see without them.

I am going to suggest — like Gorman — and like a couple of other people I will reference along the way — that we should be thinking of Revelation as supplying us with a set of lenses to see the empires of the world with God’s eyes — and that this had a particular and urgent meaning in first-century Rome (where the symbols do have a coded meaning), but we can use these lenses today too.

Part of what this book does, as a lens, is it sits us in the heavenly courts — in the heavenly realm — away from the day-to-day trenches of normal life and it invites us to see that not only is that realm real, it is the one that matters — because what goes on in the heavens, in the Bible, shapes what happens on earth.

And this means we get a bunch of vivid language, and out-there pictures, to try to disconnect us — dislocate us — from earth.

But we also get earthly things described in caricatures that expose or unveil them as what they are.

There is a good analogy for this in a piece by Aussie theologian George Athas, where he talks about how Revelation and other literature like it functions like political cartoons that exaggerate certain features to expose them.

For now, let’s imagine that when John writes his revelation, his goal is to give us a lens that unveils the world for us and invites us to see it as God does. Also, it can be so easy for modern readers to think Revelation is a coded message book about evil beings and spiritual opposition and all the bad stuff that applies — that these are the focus; but Revelation points the lens somewhere else. First and foremost, and from start to finish (like the rest of the Bible), Revelation is about Jesus.

It is not just from Jesus (Revelation 1:1). The way Greek works mean this could either be a ‘from’ or an ‘of.’ You will find English translations that do this — it is an unveiling that does not just come from Jesus, but it is a book that unveils Jesus for us and invites us to see the world anew, having seen Jesus as he is.

Revelation zooms in to the throne room of God where Jesus now rules from the throne as King of Kings and the Lord of All Nations.

But that is not all John tells us, and here is one of the first reasons I think the book sits where it does on that graph. John tells us that this vision of Jesus, from Jesus, was given to him, by God, to show his servants — his people — what must soon take place (Revelation 1:1). Now, we might think that ‘soon’ applies to us; that we are the generation these words have been waiting for. But, it is much more likely that this is a letter that first applied to the present and very near future of its first readers — and that it drew on analogies and imagery from the whole Old Testament to reframe their understanding of life in Rome.

Revelation is absolutely soaked in Old Testament references or allusions — one scholar who tabled them all up — Stephen Moyise – did up this graph of the books John draws from. He found Revelation draws extensively on the whole Old Testament as it paints a vivid picture using big cosmic language.

One scholar says there are more allusions to the Old Testament in Revelation than the rest of the New Testament put together. This depends a bit on how you define an allusion, but what cannot be denied is how richly Revelation sits in that tradition and applies symbols and language from the Old Testament to a particular moment in time.

Or that the central message is the idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectation that God would reign as king.

And that is what John has come to testify — to the things he saw — and John can sum up his vision by saying that what he is testifying to — is the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus (Revelation 1:2).

And it is this same testimony that Jesus is King, not Caesar that has John in a prison island — on Patmos. He is there because of ‘the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus’; the same thing verse 4 says is the heart of this message he has passed on in this book (Revelation 1:4, 9).

And this book — it is not just an apocalypse — an old bloke yelling at clouds about a broken world — to nobody; it is a mix of genres. John is like an Old Testament prophet. There is a prophetic dimension to the book.

John describes himself being in the Spirit; of being taken up to see things from heaven and being told to write down what you see. This is the classic way that an Old Testament prophet, like Ezekiel, or Daniel, would introduce an apocalyptic vision or prophecy like this. John is plonking himself down in that role (Revelation 1:10).

But it is also a letter sent to particular churches at a particular time (Revelation 1:4). It is like any other New Testament letter. We have to figure out what it says to a church in its immediate context before we apply it to our moment in the sun.

And while the number 7 gets a fair bit of air time in Revelation as a symbol of completion or perfection — even in our passage today — these seven churches were real churches, and John names them: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergameum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. John’s vision is for them (Revelation 1:10-11).

So this apocalyptic prophecy is, first of all, a letter to real churches, in real cities living under Roman rule. It’s a mix of genres, but it’s written by a person, to other people, at a particular point in history.

Whatever we want to make of it — wherever we want to see Revelation speaking, it feels odd if we say it has nothing immediate to say to these seven churches.

I reckon this means we can’t think so much of the text as a code that speaks to the present or our future, as though what John saw corresponds directly with events still to come that had nothing to say to these churches. And yet, at the same time, John uses the number seven over and over again in the book as a number of completeness. There would’ve been stacks more churches just in the towns and cities of the provinces he mentions, but he picks seven because seven is a way to say “this is for the full church.”

It has a particular and immediate audience who received the written work, who it must be meaningful to — just like Daniel and Ezekiel were to their first readers — but also a sort of ‘universal’ audience as well.

These churches are soaked in the religious and political messaging of Rome — churches called by the bright lights of the big cities, and by the bread and circuses of Rome to worship the emperor.

Which, if you remember last post — was an empire whose “proper procedure” was, at certain points, to execute those who would not worship Caesar.

So John dips back into Old Testament imagery that is used as a lens to look at Old Testament empires and says “hey, have a look at this Roman power from God’s perspective,” but more than that, it says “have a look at Jesus from God’s perspective and choose who you’ll worship.”

And the last thing to notice from the intro is that it’s not a book that is meant to be read and atomized — primarily — into verse by verse ‘pull apart the grammar’ stuff like we modern people like to do — and one of the reasons we do this — that we have to — is that the symbols in this book all mean something to the first hearers based on how familiar they are with their own context, and with the Old Testament. We don’t have that familiarity, or that context.

But it’s a book to be experienced — to be read aloud and heard (Revelation 1:3). The symbols are meant to come thick and fast, like a good audio-visual experience; leaving us a bit breathless and overawed by what we hear.

But also hearing the message and taking it to heart, and as one more hint that John has immediate concerns, he says the time for applying this is near (Revelation 1:3).

This decision to take this unveiling to heart, to re-see the world through the lens it supplies is what leads to blessing, that’s going to be a big theme the book picks up right at the end as it returns us to a picture of a world not marked by the curse of sin and death.

Revelation — this apocalypse — is meant to do a work on its hearers reframing the way they see the world, and its rulers.

And if, as we saw last week, the presenting challenge for these first-century churches is choosing who to worship and what kingdom to serve, the apocalyptic letter opens by framing our vision by pointing the lens firmly not at Rome, but at the heavenly courts.

John is writing on behalf of the Ancient of Days — the one who was and is and is to come (Revelation 1:4-5). John uses a whole lot of different titles for God in this book, and he uses them really deliberately in patterns that help structure the book, but this is such a big way to describe God.

God isn’t just a being in creation, he is the I Am — that ancient name for God, and he always has and always will be. John plays with the I Am name in his language here to say God always is, and God the father is giving grace and peace to his church.

And so is the Holy Spirit — and here’s another time the number seven pops up in this book and most scholars see this “Seven Spirits” reference as a reference to the completeness of the Holy Spirit (Revelation 1:4), but also as a way of saying this is the Spirit at work in the seven churches, because it’s the Spirit at work in all the churches.

And John is also writing from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness and ruler of the kings of the earth (Revelation 1:5), these are hints that for John, Daniel’s vision that we saw last week has been fulfilled already.

And then John, overwhelmed by this sense of God speaking to his church, breaks out in a moment of spontaneous worship (Revelation 1:5-6). This is what some of you might know as a doxology — which is a word that means words giving glory to God.

John is giving glory to Jesus, and to the Father, because Jesus has created a kingdom; not a beastly kingdom but a priestly kingdom; a reference to what God made Israel to be in Exodus (Exodus 19) but applied to the church.

Not a kingdom of violent dominion but a kingdom of servants of God, for his glory, secured by his blood.

John grounds his vision — his unveiling of reality — in the victory of Jesus that has already happened; the victory of God over sin, and death, and Satan and all the beastly kingdoms and humans who follow the way of the serpent into beastliness.

And here’s one of those points where John just combines Old Testament references. You’ve got Daniel 7, which we looked at last week, and Zechariah chapter 12. But here is also where John starts giving us the perspective of the heavenly courtroom where the Son of Man is coming with the clouds — the ascended Jesus is taking his seat, fulfilling Daniel’s vision (Revelation 1:7).

Where God the father, the Almighty — the one who was and is and is to come — now calls himself what John called him in verse 4 and adds that he’s the Alpha and the Omega — the first and the last (Revelation 1:8). This is a big picture of the God who sits on the throne of heaven and rules all nations; the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being, who has the past, present, and future in his hands.

And so the message for God’s people is that they have to pick their king.

They have to choose a kingdom.

They have to choose between this God’s beautiful forever kingdom and the violent and beastly kingdoms of the world.

And John, as he looks into this heavenly court, doesn’t just hear God’s voice — he sees the voice coming from someone, and when he turns he sees this figure like a “son of man” among these seven lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13).

We’re told later are churches (Revelation 1:20), but this lamp imagery also comes from the temple, and a heavenly vision of the temple in Zechariah; and this speaking figure is in this cosmic temple present with the churches, and he’s dressed like a royal priest and looks like the Son of Man from Daniel’s vision.

When John describes him he says:

“The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.”

This pulls all sorts of Old Testament imagery about God together — the ‘voice like the waters’ bit comes from Ezekiel, and there’s a throwback to Daniel here too (Daniel 7:9).

John brings Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days, God, together with Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man arriving, so that God and the Son of Man are brought together in this rich new way where the Son of Man is speaking as the voice or word of God.

He sees Jesus as this glorious bright glowing light. White and bright.

Just like animal skins were a code for beastliness in Genesis 3, this sort of imagery is a code for glory; for a heavenly being; we see it at a few points in the story of the Bible.

Like at the transfiguration — another unveiling — where the disciples see Jesus as he really is — one shining like the sun, and dressed in white (Matthew 17:2).

And it’s the same imagery at the resurrection, this time with an angel of the Lord whose appearance is “like lightning” and his clothes as white as snow (Matthew 28:2-3).

Hebrews talks about the son, Jesus, as the “radiance of God’s glory;” another shining word (Hebrews 1:3). John’s point with all this language is that he is the glorious ruler of the heavens and the earth — the heavenly bodies that were viewed as being divine beings in the ancient world reflect him, rather than the other way around.

John is picturing the Son of Man as this triumphant and victorious heavenly king who is glorious — shining with the light and life of God himself and who rules the heavens and the earth — the seven stars — if seven is about completeness are a picture of Jesus’ authority over the heavenly bodies as well as the earthly ones (Revelation 1:16). John tells us at the end of the chapter that they are a picture of the angels, or heavenly beings, being in Jesus’ authority.

Whatever all this means, whether we understand the imagery or not, it is intended to be beautiful, glorious, and terrifying in its over-the-top glory. It pulls together threads of similar unveilings in the Old Testament to emphasize that Jesus, whom Christians might follow as king, is divine.

John concludes this by describing Jesus as the first and the last (Revelation 1:17-18), in the same manner he has been describing God. He connects Jesus’ victory over death, Hades, the dragon, and his curse to Jesus’ own death and resurrection. Jesus is the living one.

John’s testimony about Jesus is that the crucifixion and resurrection reveal God to us, for in them the God-man, the son of God and Son of Man, is unveiled and victorious.

When we see Jesus this way, John’s response is to fall down in awe, worship, and submission (Revelation 1:17). No other king or god commands John’s devotion through their presentation of their glory.

Remember Trajan, the emperor whom Pliny wrote to. He agreed with the notion that citizens must worship Roman gods, including the emperor, or face death. However, he offered salvation from death, a pardon, through repentance and worship.

The choice facing first-century citizens was to repent and worship Caesar and his empire to receive his pardon and life in his kingdom, or repent and worship Jesus and receive life in His kingdom.

John’s vision is the lens he wants the church, the seven churches he is writing to, and all the churches they represent, to see the world through. This lens challenges us to look beyond any other pretenders to the throne, anyone or anything else that might command our worship.

How can other empires compete with the glorious one? How can we worship anything else?

This lens is something we might want to use in our own times too, as we look at empires, agendas, and objects of worship that offer us life and call us to give ourselves up, pulling us away from God and His kingdom.

Choosing between God-kings should be easy if this is what the throne room of heaven looks like, and who the one on the throne appears to be. Jesus isn’t a distant king; He is Lord of His church.

The Jesus John sees is not just in heaven, absent from the concerns of His people. He is present with His church, operating as a priest for the church in the heavens. This is a theme we see elsewhere in the New Testament. He brings us into God’s presence, which is where the book will lead.

He is the faithful witness who shows us what God is like and what faithfulness to God in the face of beastly empires looks like, trusting God to win and bring blessing. This is where the book will go.

Jesus, the living one, was dead and is now alive, offering hope of new life and resurrection to His people. This is where the book will go. As the first and the last, he will return to make God’s victory and his kingdom absolute, bringing all other kings to their knees because God is the Most High, and Jesus is his voice and chosen ruler (Revelation 1:17-18).

He has freed us from our sins, from the curse, death, and the claws of Satan by His blood, through His death and resurrection. Like in the Exodus with Israel on the mountain, He has made us a kingdom of priests, acting as our priest before His Father (Revelation 1:5-6), even as he, himself, is God. He is the one to be worshipped and glorified, with His Father.

In doing so, we too will be clothed in glory; we too will be swept up in the beauty of God’s vision for His people (Revelation 7:9).

This vision will drive what John has to say about politics and economics — about how we live as people, as the church.

Is it your vision, your lens for looking at reality?

Does it shape your worship?

Your life?