Jeremy Duncan: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. The upside down apocalypse is all about reading revelation through the light of the peace of Jesus, and we just finished a series on our values here at commons, intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, Jesus at the center.
But commons is grounded in this conviction that the point of Christianity is to read everything through the lens of Jesus. We see our histories differently, our personal stories in the light of Jesus. We see the Bible differently, reinterpreted through the way of Jesus. We even see God differently now, trusting that Jesus came not to change God's mind about us, but to repair our imagination of God, to show us what God is really like, to show us how God is really alive in the world. And this transformed perspective of God is what we call Christianity, But the reason it's important, particularly for this series, is that the book of Revelation is a notoriously difficult text to interpret.
It's one that uses a lot of violent imagery and narrative, one that is incredibly flexible interpretively because of all the complex metaphor it employs. And that means that the only way to stay Christian in our reading of Revelation is to choose very deliberately from the outset to read with Jesus at the center. Anything less will slowly take you away from the gospel of peace and toward the apocalypse that John actually wants you to avoid. Now today, we're just gonna get our feet wet, and we're gonna set the stage for reading Revelation well by talking about some of the structure and ideas we need to have in the background. Over the next 7 weeks, we'll then dive into the imagery in Revelation.
But first, let's pray. God of grace and peace, who has always been grace, who has always been peace, Who has always been love and welcome, gift and reception from before there was time. We come today to a difficult text. Many of us from a difficult week or month or maybe even year. We trust that you meet us here in the midst of our struggle, greeting our search with open arms and wide smile today.
We trust that you are present in our hard week, and we trust that you are here in these hard texts for us to uncover, and that your love leaks through the cracks everywhere in our lives so that we can discover and encounter and then be healed by your love wherever it finds us. May your peace and grace guide us. Might we know that you never abandon us. Might Jesus always lead us forward. And through this, might we slowly come to know and express your compassion and grace in the world.
Might that truly turn everything we see upside down. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Here we go with the upside down apocalypse. And today, we're not gonna get very far into Revelation.
The goal is simply to set the stage with some of the background that we need in order to read Revelation well, but on the agenda today are three things. What we mean by reading through Jesus, what is an apocalypse anyway, and the structure of revelation. And Jesus at the center is one of our values at commons. You've heard it a 1000 times. But it's not just that we are a Christian church, and therefore, Jesus is at the a through the lens of Jesus.
The Bible is fascinating. It's beautiful, but it's also very complex. The Bible is actually a library of books written across various centuries and cultures. It records both the ways that human beings have encountered and imagined God, but also the ways that the community of God has preserved and compared and wrestled with these different stories. It is an incredibly profound and inspired text, a gift from God, no doubt, But what it is not is a replacement for the Word of God, capital w.
The logos of God, as John says, the Jesus who walked through ancient Palestine to reveal God to us. Scripture itself tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, that all the fullness of deity lives in Him, that He is the only exact representation of God's being and character. And that means that as Christians, we are already bringing certain ideas about God. Everything that we saw in Jesus, we are bringing that with us to a text when we read it. We don't read objectively.
We read through Jesus. And all of this becomes doubly important when we're dealing with a book like Revelation. See, Revelation is an apocalypse, a very particular genre of literature that was prevalent in the 1st century. And that genre is characterized by a number of things. We'll explore some of those in a moment.
But one of the things you realize pretty quickly in Revelation is that this is a highly metaphorical book. No one reads Revelation literally, at least not that I've ever seen. Some people believe that Revelation is describing actual historical events that might happen, But I have yet to come across anyone that actually thinks giant locusts are going to attack us, or that 7 headed monsters are going to take control of the world one day. Even the most ardent person who is deeply worried about things like the mark of the beast or the antichrist, they are interpreting symbols in a particular way. They're not reading anything literally.
And what that means is that revelation is inherently malleable. It can say almost anything you want it to. And if you don't have a North Star to orient yourself around, if you don't keep Jesus at the center of your reading, you're going to end up very far off course. In fact, this is where we end up with an entire industry of revelation interpreters that offer us a Jesus that we want, one that looks nothing like the Jesus of the Gospels. A Jesus who will one day return a Rambo like, drenched in the blood of his enemies, wielding a claymore and lopping off heads as he rides through town in a vengeful massacre.
But I've actually heard sermons where famous preachers have come right out and said, Look, the namby pamby yellow sweater wearing Jesus of the Gospels is nothing like the fearsome Jesus that will one day return to judge the world, so you better get ready. Problem is, if the Jesus you hope for, and the one you're looking forward to looks nothing like the Jesus of the Gospels, the one that scripture tells us is the only exact representation of God's character, that's not Christianity anymore. It's a new religion, a cancerous distortion of Jesus, remodeled in the image of John Wick. And look, I loved that movie too, but that's not a Jesus that I'm interested in following. See, if you don't constantly center Jesus, and you don't ground revelation in the gospels, then the very fact that this book needs to be interpreted will subtly import more and more of the world around you into your reading.
You will see your politics, And you will see your economics. Now all of the things that you want or subconsciously wish Jesus would support reflected back to you in your interpretation. In other words, if you don't ground revelation in the gospel of peace, revelation will slowly turn Jesus into a reflection of your worst fears. And that, ironically, is exactly the opposite of what the writer intended for us. Because Revelation is an apocalypse, just not in the way that anyone expected.
See, Revelation is a violent book. There's no point denying that. Apocalypses were a violent genre. But notice here, I speak of apocalypses. Revelation is not the only apocalypse.
It is fairly the almost famous one, but it exists within a body of literature that was incredibly popular around the end of the 1st century. So we should start by asking this. What is an apocalypse? Let's start with that word, apocalypsis, because even though the genre has particular tropes and rules, the basic goal of an apocalypse is to apokalups. That's the Greek word, and it literally meant to reveal something.
That's what apocalypse means, revelation. It doesn't mean destruction. It doesn't mean despair. It doesn't have anything to do with barren wastelands and one armed Charlize Therons racing Mad Max through the desert. Although, also a good movie.
You should watch that one. To apocalypse simply meant to make something that was hidden clear. Now, if you ever tried to read Revelation, that might sound strange. Right? Like, there's very little that's clear in this book.
Hey? In fact, everything seems obscured, and veiled, and hidden, and riddles, and mysteries, and obfuscation. But the actual point of the genre was this idea that something was not quite right with the world, and we were missing it. And it needed to be brought forward. And so what apocalypses did was they tried to pull apart the world and put it back together in unexpected ways that would help us notice something new.
And when you think about it that way, that is essentially what all art does. I remember visiting the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London years ago. And the Tate is amazing, but the chance to be there a couple times, if you ever get the chance, definitely go. But there are a few exhibits that will always stick with me. 1st was a Rothko exhibit.
If you don't know Mark Rothko, he paints big squares. I know it sounds silly, but he's one of my favorite artists. And I got to be there at a time when there was a whole exhibit of Rothkos. I sat in a room of Rothko's. It was amazing.
Great. 2nd was seeing Jackson Pollock's Summertime 9a in person. I'll admit, prior to that, I was never really into Pollock. He's that guy that would drip paint and splatter it around on a canvas and call it a day, and that never really seemed all that compelling to me. But standing in front of this massive canvas and all of this swirling activity and emotion absolutely transformed my perception of what Pollock was doing.
But 3rd was a Picasso display I got to see on one trip. And Picasso, you probably think of from his surrealist or cubist period. That's when he was painting all those weird looking portraits with bizarre faces. But Picasso actually first became famous. He made his name by painting very normal, very boring, very blue portraits.
We call that his blue period very uncreatively. However, at some point, as war started to take hold of Europe in the middle of 20th century, Picasso became frustrated with his attempts to capture emotion by painting it. I mean, he could see emotion in someone, but just putting that onto a canvas wasn't doing it for him anymore. And so he began to experiment with this, style of pulling apart a scene or a face and imagining it from different angles or perspectives, and then reassembling it into one image. That's what happens in his portraits.
You see a nose from this side and an eye from this side and an ear from over here, all put together strangely. But the idea was that in a painting, you could show more than you could see by just looking at something. During this period, he created a piece called Guernica that depicted the bombing of a city in Spain at the hands of the Nazis. This has since become recognized as one of the most poignant anti war pieces of the 20th century. Here it is on the screen.
It's bizarre. It's disjointed. All the images have been disassembled, and then put back together in kind of unsettling ways. It's a very violent painting. But to simply see the violence here and assume that's the point of the painting is to completely miss what the artist is trying to reveal.
The artist wants you to read the cold, the clinical, disembodied reports of war in the newspaper, But then to feel the agony and the fear, the helplessness of being caught in war through these images. That's what apocalypse as a genre is trying to do for us. It's not predicting a violent future. It's trying to wake us up to what is wrong around us right now. And just like Revelation, some of the images in Guernica seem odd.
If this is a painting about war in the 20th century, why is there a bull attacking someone? And is that a bull? It's even hard to tell. Once you know that this painting is about the impact of war on a small town in northern Spain, The bull as an image of violence makes a lot more sense culturally. Same thing happens in Revelation.
A lot of what seems inscrutable on the surface is actually deeply rooted in cultural, political, and economic imagery that absolutely would have made perfect sense to anyone living in the 1st century. Still, just like Picasso's Guernica, apocalypses were pretty dreary. And with some history, you can understand that as well. Apocalypse was mainly a Jewish genre. By the time of the 1st century, things had gone not particularly well for the Jewish people in a very long time.
The Assyrians had first conquered the northern kingdom of Israel almost 7 centuries earlier. A century later, the southern kingdom of Judah fell to Babylon. Next Persia took control, and then the Greeks, and now the Romans had rolled through, all the while the Jewish people were subject to foreign powers in the lands they believed were theirs. Now earlier in that experience, if you read Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the minor prophets that were largely written around the time of the Babylonian exile, the resounding message of the prophets over and over again is, do right, and God will intervene. Stop ignoring the powerless.
Stop elevating the rich. Stop turning into ritual that doesn't land injustice for the disempowered, and God will make things right for you. In fact, the central premise of the prophetic genre in the Hebrew scriptures is, you can change the world. No one is evil. Their actions are, and the right prophetic word spoken at the right moment, truth to power can change the world.
That's the heart of Hebrew prophecy. Except, now it's been centuries, 7 centuries, and God hasn't intervened, and we are still under the boot of our enemies. And so slowly, the optimism of the Hebrew prophets has given way to the pessimism of apocalypse. As Elizabeth Schuessler Firenze, one of the preeminent scholars of Revelation today says, in Judaism, apocalypticism is the successor to prophecy. Where once the prophets trusted the truth, spoken in the right moment to the right person could change someone's heart and alter the course of history.
The apocalypticists started to believe that the best they could hope for was God to show up and crush the bad guys. And so around this time, we get texts like 2nd Baruch, and 4 Ezra, and the apocalypse of Abraham, and the apocalypse of Adam. All of these Jewish apocalyptic texts that called for God to violently write the world. The problem for our boy, John, is that Christianity started to slip even faster and harder into that same kind of despair. After all, Jesus had been crucified.
All our hopes were dashed, but then he was back. He was resurrected. It was true. Rejoice. Except then, as Bobby talked about last week, he floated off into the sky, and we haven't seen him since.
And that kind of give and take, and push and pull was really hard for the community to make sense of. In fact, persecution of the nascent Christian community, even though it wasn't at all systematic or widespread, it was unsettling for the community, and that added to the anxiety. And maybe because there were all of these really popular Jewish apocalyptic texts floating around, narrative that spoke to that anxious moment, this kind of pessimism took hold in large parts of the Christian community and fast. And this is precisely what makes Revelation so fascinating, because it has all the hallmarks of apocalypse. Like good art, it pulls the world apart and then reassembles it in unexpected ways.
It reveals the violence of the world that is often hidden from the surface of our lives. It leans into our natural desire for vindication and vengeance. But it does all of this to turn all of that upside down. See, the most fascinating thing about Revelation is that it is not actually an apocalypse, at least not the way that anyone expected. It is, better said, a prophecy.
No. Not a prophecy about the future. John is not trying to fortune tell here. He is using the genre of an apocalypse, a style that people wanted to hear at this time, to smuggle in that same prophetic hope about how we can participate in the healing of everything. Revelation is a Trojan horse.
And to create that, what he does is he models Revelation on the book of Isaiah. See, the one thing that Revelation believes unwaveringly is that Jesus has saved the world already. Except, what John knows from studying the prophets is that salvation is wide. Salvation is the healing of our relationships. Salvation is the repair of our politics.
Salvation is the setting right of the universe itself. And all of this comes from the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. And so what we get in Revelation is essentially 3 stories, or better said, one story that's told to us three times. First, the healing of communities and neighborhoods. 2nd, the healing of politics and empires.
3rd, the healing of the cosmos and the end of evil. And that structure, that repetition is absolutely essential for understanding what's happening in Revelation. It's not linear. You can't map it onto a timeline. You're not reading the words of a fortune teller.
You're experiencing the imagination of an artist. Saint Victorinus wrote all the way back in the 3rd century, and he said, Revelation is synchronous, Think cyclical rather than successive. Think linear. Or as modern scholar, Elizabeth Fiorenza says, the book is not chronologically ordered. It is theologically, thematically conceived.
And again, all of that comes from Isaiah. So let me show you some things here. Look at the opening of Isaiah. This is chapter 1. Your rulers are rebels, partners with thieves.
They all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless. The widow's case does not come before them. Isaiah 123. In the same chapter, the prophet says that God hides God's face from your worship.
But if you take up the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow, then together we will be called the city of righteousness, and the faithful Zion will be saved with justice. So it's all about our relationships with our neighbors, the marginalized, how we care for each other. How does revelation start? To the 7 churches in the province of Asia, grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come. We'll look at this section next week, but one of the things that has thrown off interpreters of Revelation for years is, why does a book about beasts and dragons and very scary grasshoppers start with a pretty reasonable straightforward address with some practical advice to local churches?
It feels kind of out of place. Unless that is, you know the pattern of the prophets. You don't get to talk about the salvation of the cosmos, until you talk about how faithfulness changes your posture toward your neighbor. Salvation starts small. Small as a mustard seed, you might say, and it grows uncontrollably from there.
So next, the story expands. In Isaiah 13, the prophet explicitly says, we're in a new vision. And this time, it's a warning about the day of the Lord. Armies mass for this battle against God. And then at the climax we read this, Because of this all hands will go limp, every heart will melt with fear, terror will seize them, pain and anguish will grip them.
They will writhe like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at each other, their faces aflame. Opposing God does not go well for anyone. Make a note of that in your journal. Good one.
But, we are also told that on this day of the Lord, they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. So all of this anguish ends in peace, not just for Israel, but for all of the nations. Salvation that starts in our hearts and changes our attitude towards neighbors eventually changes our politics, our empires, our nations, our wars. What happens in Revelation?
Well, in chapter 4, John says, He was taken into the spirit again. A clear signal, just like Isaiah, he's starting the story again. This time we get riders of the apocalypse, and seals, and trumpets, and a throne room encounter that looks a lot like the worship of the Roman emperor. We even get a confrontation between an army and God, just like Isaiah. But then in chapter 11, we read, we give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was, who's no longer to come anymore, because you have taken your great power and begun to reign.
This is it, the end of the story, the kingdom of God on earth. God is reigning in the world. Salvation has come for all the nations. Hooray. Except, just like Isaiah, we're only halfway through the story.
And so we start again. In Isaiah this time we read, death expands its jaw, opening wide its mouth. We hear that the earth is completely laid waste and totally plundered. And then we hear, behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up.
Do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah goes on to say that death will be swallowed up forever, and the sovereign Lord will wipe away all tears from every face. Those are lines that John lifts directly from Isaiah, and uses in his conclusion as well. In fact, he writes this, God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will pass away. He who is seated on the throne will say, behold, I am making everything new.' It's the vision of Isaiah scaled up even bigger. It's no longer a new thing. It's everything made new. In fact, just at the back at the start of this section, after John told us that God already reigns the earth at the end of chapter 11, John says, now comes the time to destroy that which destroys.
Remember this. The earth is not getting destroyed in Revelation. You are not getting destroyed in Revelation. Your enemies are not getting destroyed in Revelation. Sorry.
That which destroys is being discarded in Revelation. Everything that tears at God's good creation, evil and greed, and violence, the anti God forces of sin and death, that is what is left behind in Revelation. Because what Isaiah and John both knew was that the salvation of the world, born in God's people, completed in Jesus, it begins in our hearts and the ways that we look at each other. It orients our politics towards those in need, towards our neighbor, and that same love eventually overcomes the world and transforms the cosmos in the end. It's one story told 3 times because over and over again in Revelation, we will see how John will show us the apocalypse we think that we want.
Vengeance, and violence, and retribution, and revenge, only at the last moment to pull back the curtain. And to meet all of our pessimism with hope to reveal the unexpected grace that comes to find us in the end. Because this is the belief that has undergirded the prophetic imagination from the very beginning. There is more to hope for than revenge on your enemies. There is real peace.
And there is life abundant, and it is possible. The apocalypse is around us in our world. They want our attention. They want us to believe that that is all that can exist, and the best we can hope for is for our enemies to be crushed. But real peace starts when we are willing to look our neighbor in the eye with new eyes.
Real peace grows when we start to view our politics with new perspective, caring for those who are pushed to the edges. Real peace wins when we walk the path of Jesus' self giving life every day trusting that we are part of the healing of the world. And that is how John turns the apocalypse upside down. Let's pray. God of all grace, who comes in peace to show us a new way to move through your world.
We come today to a difficult text, and again, some of us come from a difficult week. But we trust that by your Spirit, you are here in our conversations, in our reading, in our pursuit of Jesus at the center of what we see. God, might we see in this text both our long held desire for revenge, to be vindicated, to find a vengeance on those we believe have hurt us. And then might we see that pulled back in the way out from under us to reveal your grace and peace that actually changes the world. Right?
We see that at every level of our lives. Our encounters with neighbors and strangers, our politics in ways that we participate in the systems of the world, our hope that in the end, evil will be undone, death will be defeated, and you will transform the cosmos into your image. God, in all of these ways, right, we actually come to believe that we are part of a grand narrative, that our choices, our actions, the ways we choose to treat each other, all of this is part of the healing of the world. It started in the prophetic imagination, that came to fruition in the death and the life of Jesus, and that now lives in us as we follow your path of peace through the world. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen.