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Easter 4
8/5/2022

Revelation 3:14-22
Psalm 23
John 10:22-30

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In a sentence:
Biblical visions of tomorrow are about how we should be living today

(Last week, we “located” the book of Revelation in the category of “story”, seeing it as a story like any other, simply of a particular genre. Today we take the story-character of Revelation a little further).

There is a certain kind of person who, before reading the first page, likes to jump to the end of a book to see how the whole thing will end. About such people we will make no judgements today!

Concerning our personal stories, of course, and the story of the human being as a whole, the end is not as easily accessible. Nevertheless, now and again the question is put to us or a protagonist in a story we’re reading: if you could know the day of your death, would you want to know it? Take a moment to hear that question, and answer it.

Some will say Yes, some No. We might say No because we fear death, and to know that we will die, say, on the 8^th of May next year, will cast a shadow over every day between now and then, such that we die 365 times, rather than just the once. Here ignorance is bliss because knowledge would be torture.

Or perhaps implicit in the No is my being satisfied that I’m living the best life I can, and there’s nothing I would change if I did know the end. Knowledge of my death might be an inconvenient distraction from simply getting on with life.

Or maybe we’d risk knowing when we will die, hoping that it’s a long way off. If it is still distance, I can cut loose for a while and tidy things up closer to the date. The self-indulgent bucket list can be emptied, with time for righteousness later. Or, if the time is shorter than I thought, I could re-prioritise, go on the trip I’ve always put off, finally get around to writing a will, pray for forgiveness or call my mother.

There are doubtless many variations on these responses and rationales, but the point is that the silly question seriously tempts us to consider our present in terms of our future. If I knew that that is what is going to happen, then I might not do this, now. Knowing tomorrow changes today.

Of course, we already know this, although only in retrospect. If we had known 8 years ago that we were going to sell this property, we wouldn’t have spent all that time and money on trying not to sell the property. The link between now and our future becomes clearer when we look backwards from our present to our past.

This present-future dynamic is at the heart of Christian confession, not least in the book of Revelation. In the passages we heard the last couple of weeks, it was declared, “Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail” (Rev 1.7). That is, “all the tribes of the earth cried out”, “If only we had known, we wouldn’t have crucified him”.

Knowledge of the future is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. In apocalyptic thinking, resurrection is not primarily the resuscitation of a dead person but an appearance of the end – a sign of the present times. The risen Jesus is the declaration, “This is how it ends”. At least in the Palestinian context of the New Testament, the problem the resurrection presents is not merely that dead people don’t usually stop being dead, but that if one did, we would have evidence of tomorrow, today. And, if the one who was raised had just been crucified by people who imagine themselves to be godly, then the news about tomorrow is simply devasting. “If we knew that, we would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2.6-8).

If there are those in the book of Revelation who wail because they hadn’t seen what was coming – because they didn’t see the truth of the story Jesus lived – there are also those who did see it. These are the “martyrs”. The important thing about these for the moment is not that they might have been killed because of what they saw and believed, but that the word martyr itself simply means “witness”. These ones saw the future and testified to it, and judged the present in its light. Their martyrdom – being killed for this testimony – was they themselves being judged and condemned because of that vision of the future.

Yet, none of this is merely how ancient people thought. In the middle of an election campaign, we know that the scariest candidates are those whose vision of the future is least like our present. Incumbent governments have to trade on what they have already done. They argue that tomorrow will be like today because today is the fruit of all the good work the Government has done and will continue to do, in the same vein. The gospel – the good news – of the Government is that the kingdom has come.

In contrast, those candidates who preach a revolutionary vision of tomorrow – perhaps socialist, or environmentally radical, or “freedom, freedom, freedom” in the mode of right-wing reactionaries – these are the scarier electoral options. They are to the electorate like the book of Revelation is to Paul’s pastoral epistles: storms threatening the calm. These are the voices of martyrs – in the literal sense of “witnesses” – to different futures, wildly varying though those futures may be.

The real work of balancing the present and the future is that which Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition must perform. As the most likely alternative Government, the principal Opposition party has to appear conservative and radical at the same time. Perhaps it does not go too far to say that a failure to do this is why Mr Shorten is not Prime Minister. The Opposition has to argue that the kingdom has not yet come but is almost there – it needs just one more push.

Against the Government and the Opposition, the seemingly radical parties propose a secret hidden in today which will undermine the tomorrow we expect. This secret is the “true” tomorrow which doesn’t arise naturally out of today but comes to meet it unnaturally out of a future only partially glimpsed.

There is, then, a lot in common between the political platforms of the radicals and the book of Revelation. The question is simply, which vision of the future is the true mystery of today – the secret, the hidden thing, by which today is lived appropriately. Revelation offers a vision of tomorrow for a revision of today. We re‑vise – literally, re-see – today, as in a new light. Tomorrow has the crucified Jesus at the heart of all things, with the pressing question now being: if that is the case, how should we be living now?

There will be more to say of this in the weeks to come; it is enough for now to understand the dynamic. The fantastic imagery of Revelation is only the form of the substantial question, What is your personal and political tomorrow? In the case that you are unsure, it is revealed in how you live today.

You may have noticed that I haven’t come yet to the particular reading from Revelation we heard this morning! This is because all I want to do with that passage is de-sentimentalise one traditional reception of it in view of the dynamic of tomorrow and today we have been describing. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock”, Jesus says in the that passage, “if any hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to them, and will sup with them, and they with me” (AV, alt). This is not about opening the door of your heart and letting Jesus in. The wider Revelation context of this image requires that the door-opening not be about enclosing Jesus in our hearts but about becoming enclosed within his own heart.

Jesus is not cast as our present possession but our calling into the future. Our testimony is not merely what Jesus might do for us, but what will be done, and the difference this will make for us now, “on earth and it is in heaven”.

If tomorrow is the God-given resolution of all injustice, then today is to be coloured not by violent revolution but patient action, in which tomorrow might be glimpsed.

If tomorrow is the day of judgement of all guilt, today is to be a time of turning towards righteousness.

If tomorrow is reconciliation and forgiveness, so also is today to be.

Become then today then, what God promises:

become peace,
become reconciliation,
become justice,
become love.

The book of Revelation is a vision of the future given to change today.

In light of that future, let us become that change: tomorrow’s resurrection life in a world yet shrouded in death.

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Related sermons

27 March 2022 – On being a child of God

10 October 2021 – Against dreams and visions

19 April 2020 – A living hope

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Easter 3
1/5/2022

Revelation 1:1-8
Psalm 30
John 21:1-14

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In a sentence:
As strange as the genre is, an apocalypse tells a human story: our story within the story of God

With the book of Revelation, we come to what looks to be the end of the story. We will probably think many things about “the end” over the next couple of months, but seeing the book of Revelation as the end prompts another question: where does this story start?

This is less straightforward than it might first seem. The obvious place to start anything is at the beginning, but this is difficult because nothing in time has “a” beginning which doesn’t have a “pre-beginning” before it. Where does the story of the current war in Ukraine begin? Few imagine that began two months ago with the first incursion. Perhaps it began with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991? Or in 1917 with the Russian revolution? Or with the writings of Karl Marx in the middle of the 19^th century? In telling a story – a history – we have to choose a point at which to begin. We select some defining circumstance, and the story unfolds from there.

But there is another starting point of a story which is much less obvious. This is the perceived need for the story in the first place – beginning as purpose. The writer wants to tell a story. Even if this is merely to be paid and to eat, she will eat better if the story is a good one. Opinions about what makes a story good differ, but those which sell are stories which themselves justify being written and read; these are the stories which engage us.

Stories engage us by answering a question or – what is probably the same thing – by questioning answers we already have. All good stories have this in common, even though differences in genre make it less than obvious. The relationship between a Mills and Boon romance, a grisly murder-mystery TV series and a Marvel Cinematic Universe action blockbuster might seem tenuous, but they all treat the same basic thing. While the romance or the criminality or the spaceships mark them off from each other, each is deeply concerned with the actions and interactions of people like us in those very different contexts. Stories are always about us. And so Disney’s Toy Story movies are not about toys but about people who happen to look like toys but nevertheless do all things which people do. The children in the Narnia books do not interact with talking beavers and lions but with people who look like beavers and lions. A six-year-old knows that when Peppa Pig gets into trouble for being mean to Suzie Sheep, this is not farmyard ethics but schoolyard ethics. It means that she herself – the six-year-old – shouldn’t be mean to the other kids at school. The genre gives colour to the story but doesn’t change its essential purpose. Whether it is a dark indie dystopic tragedy or a mainstream children’s animated comedy, the story is told to tell us something about ourselves.

What we receive in the hearing or reading of stories, however, is no mere information about ourselves. Certainly, we learn what kind of world it is in which we live and what kinds of creatures inhabit it. But, more importantly, we learn how to navigate that space. We are given instruction and warning: this is how it should be done, or not how it should be done. We learn what we are, what we do and what we can expect. Stories locate us in the world – they tell us the nature of the time in which we live.

The point of recognising here the human purpose of stories is to “locate” the book of Revelation. Its genre is 1^st century Christianised Jewish apocalyptic. Instead of the safe combination locks of the great heist, it has scrolls and seals; instead of the superhero it has the archangel Michael; instead of the belligerent geopolitical superpower, it has a seven-headed, ten-horned dragon. Yet that’s just how you write a story in that genre. For all that is strange about it, this too is simply a story revealing something about human being.

If there is anything which distinguishes the book of Revelation (as a story) from other stories, it is only that it is explicit about its purpose. Most stories don’t tell us what they do as stories. This is implicit, but it’s also possible that the writer and the reader might not even be aware of it in the writing and the reading.

An apocalypse – as a kind of storytelling – is literally an unveiling or a revealing. It tells you what it does – with all stories – and what we are exposed to in hearing stories. This – declares an apocalypse – is what it means to tell or hear a story. And so the opening verses of Revelation declare that it will uncover what you are by uncovering what God is, in the uncovering of Jesus as the Christ. Revelation intends to tell us who we are, what we do and what we can expect.

But again, this uncovering doesn’t merely give us information, although the text of Revelation is often treated this way. Like those maps we find at a zoo or in a shopping centre, the story lays out the terrain and locates us with a glaring yellow arrow: “You are here”, the “here” being now not a location but a condition: you are like this, and you will likely do that, and this is what will happen to you.

The question then is not, Does the way Revelation locates us “make sense”? It makes as much sense as any other location a story might propose for us, whether it’s the bowels of a starship where we work out our daddy issues with a lightsabre or a garden party hosted by the Queen of Hearts.

The question to ask about Revelation is, Is this true – in the way that stories try to be true? Because stories – as accounts of how we are and act – have to do with the truth about us. And, while they propose to locate us, they can get it wrong. There is a story which says that if they are weak and we are strong, we can take what is theirs. There is a story which says that when the going gets tough, stay in bed. There is a story which says he cannot change. There is a story which says “The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war.” These are not good stories, at least from the point of view of Revelation.

The test of the value of a story – including the story Revelation tells – is whether it tells the truth about us, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. Does it speak truly what we are, what we do and what we can expect? This requires honesty and careful reflection, which are not virtues to cultivate.

The apocalypse – the revelation – of Jesus Christ has at its centre the throne of God, around which the action of history flows and from which comes judgement of all that happens. The story places us in the midst of all this with a big cross and a declaration: You are here. This is the truth the book invites us to consider: Does this “You are here” – that cross on the map which is the very cross of Jesus himself – locate us truly?

We will have more to say about this in the weeks to come, but today it is enough to ask, What is the story which speaks the truth about us? Perhaps, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”. Perhaps, “We can construct heaven, but the bricks will have to be made with bones and the mortar with blood.” Perhaps, “Fingers crossed…”

Or perhaps the story which matters is the proposal of the Apocalypse: “Behold, I am coming soon” (Rev 22.7). Blessed are those who read, and hear, and keep this story, writes John the Seer at the beginning of his apocalypse of the world in God (1.3), for this tells you where you will finally be found.

Regardless of where you find yourself now, you will find yourself with God, your story within the story.

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Related sermons

6 February 2022 – On being a true lie

16 August 2015 – Our true story

27 June 2021 – The full story