Behold, I Am Coming Soon

Meditations on the Apocalypse of John

Mari Leesment

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532650222
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book contains twelve meditations on the New Testament book of Revelation, written by theologians, biblical scholars, historians, and clergy. In short, easy-to-read selections that are profound and relevant to life, the meditations--along with three or four accompanying questions--help the reader engage more deeply with the Scripture passage. Given the potential challenges of this final book of the Christian canon, these meditations help the reader find a way to enter in and experience more fully what John, the author of the Apocalypse, wanted us to hear and see.

1

An Encounter with the Living One: Revelation and the Healing Invasion of God

Joseph Mangina

The book of Revelation opens with a bang, bombarding us with a flurry of words, visions, and images that disorient and confuse us, and the assault does not relent over the following twenty-two chapters. Revelation does not want to argue or convince us of anything. It is too late for that: “The time is near” (Rev 1:3; 22:10), “Behold, I am coming soon” (Rev 22:7, 12; cf. 22:20). Rather, the book seeks to capture our hearts, renew our love grown cold, strengthen us for resistance to the ungodly powers, and summon us to that patient endurance without which we have no hope of being saved. Like the LORD God himself, the book of Revelation seeks neither our assent nor our approbation, but only our obedience.

What is Revelation, anyway? It is, to begin with, an apocalypse, or rather the Apocalypse—its name in Greek, and perhaps a better name; “Revelation” (from the Latin revelatio) sounds just a bit too intellectual and cognitive. Apocalypsis means a disclosure, an uncovering or unsealing of heavenly mysteries—the mysteries of God! Events of this sort are a regular feature of Israel’s Scriptures, usually occurring at some critical juncture in the biblical story. Jacob falls asleep and dreams of a ladder reaching to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. He awakens and exclaims, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17). Centuries later, Ezekiel finds himself among the exiles by the river Chedar, where he receives visions of God, beginning with the divine chariot supported by the kerubim and their whirling, many-eyed wheels (Ezek 1). Then, in Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism, we are told that Jesus saw “the heavens opened and the Spirit of God descending on him like a dove” (Mark 1:10). Again, in John’s gospel, when Nathan expresses astonishment that Jesus saw him under the fig tree, Jesus declares “You will see greater things than these . . . You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:51). Notice the important role that angels or angelic beings play in many of these stories. They indicate that something is going on beyond all earthly reckoning; that the world of ordinary experience is not all that there is; that our lives cannot be limited to the grim story of biological determinism and moral nihilism that is our culture’s default narrative concerning human nature and destiny. When the heavens open, when God is revealed, earth itself appears in an entirely different light. “Nature” is now shown to be “creation,” and when the Creator has dealings with his creatures, anything can happen. This is very good news indeed.

Revelation is not simply “an” apocalypse, however, whether in Scripture itself or in Jewish tradition. It is the Apocalypse—apokalypsis Iesou Christou, the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. Does that mean Jesus is the one who does the revealing, or does it mean that Jesus is himself the substance and content of the revelation? Yes. It is both these things. God gives the revelation to Jesus, who gives it to an angel, who delivers it to John, who writes it on a scroll and shares it with the seven churches. Christ is the medium, but he is also the message. He is the very word of God itself, as we are told quite explicitly in Revelation 19:13. So here is a piece of counsel: read the Apocalypse as one long exercise in de-familiarization that forces us to re-examine the Jesus we thought we knew:

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades (Rev 1:17).

Jesus is not only alive, he is the living one. He did battle with Death, and Death won, which is to say, Death lost. To be joined to him is to know and experience the very life that God is and that God wills for his creatures. If one had to choose a single theme that runs through the Bible it might well be that of life, although often life appears sub contrario, under its opposite, the experience of death and judgment. The Apocalypse is one long demonstration of this truth. As we hear the book and let its visions wash over us, we are caught up in the reality of the God of life, named in treble as the One who is, and who was, and who is to come; as Jesus Christ the faithful witness; and as the seven spirits before the divine throne—a liturgical and doxological way of saying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who is none other than the LORD God of Israel (Rev 1:4–5). As you read Revelation, never forget that you are reading a Jewish book, although it is a Judaism that (like Paul’s) has been seized by the revelation and authority of Jesus Messiah.

What is Revelation, again? It is not only an apocalypse, but a prophecy, uttered “in the Spirit” (Rev 1:10). The prophet is commissioned to speak the Word of the Lord to the Lord’s people in a particular historical moment—usually when the fate of the covenant hangs in the balance. The Lord is faithful to his covenant, but will Israel be faithful? Or in the case of the Apocalypse, will the church be faithful? As usual, the Lord’s Word is hard to hear, but it is a Word that we cannot live without, for it is life and health and salvation for us. In his great, difficult book The Identity of Jesus Christ,1 theologian Hans Frei speaks of the Christian as one whose pattern of life “has seemingly suffered an inexplicably wounding and healing invasion”—an invasion by the grace of God. Frei had in mind, I think, primarily the individual experience of grace, but his words are apt on a broader scale. We, the church, are those who live by the wounding and healing invasion of the Word. That is why we cling to the words of this prophecy. It is why the Apocalypse is indispensable.

What is Revelation—one last time? What we call the book of Revelation is in fact a letter: “John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from the one who is, and who was, and who is to come” (Rev 1:4). That Revelation is a letter might not seem obvious amid all the apocalyptic fireworks, and certainly St. John’s epistle is very different from those of St. Paul—although you might want to read Revelation side by side with Romans 8! Still, John the Seer shares his visions with the Christian assemblies in seven cities of Asia Minor. John is joined to his churches in a relation of profound solidarity: “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (John 1:9). It is this solidarity in suffering that lends credibility to John’s testimony. The Apocalypse is played out on a historical, political, even cosmic scale, but it is also local and particular—lived out in the daily lives of those baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. The Lord apocalypses himself in Ephesus and Smyrna and Pergamum, in the shadow of empire and the reality of persecution; and he apocalypses himself into our own lives, cities, and homes in these strange, late modern times—a post-Christendom that is perhaps not unlike the pre-Christendom of John and his churches. Strange times, and yet the Lord’s time, as the risen Jesus shows himself among us. We are the ones who suffer his wounding and healing invasion. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near” (Rev 1:3). Amen.

Revelation 1

Questions for Further Reflection

1. Read Revelation 1. How is this book an apocalypse? What words and images disclose the heavenly world? Who addresses the readers and what do they say?

2. How is the apocalypse revealing Jesus Christ? How is Jesus described? Is this a different perspective of Jesus from what you know or what is common?

3. The apocalypse is written as a letter to ordinary Christians in their ordinary lives. How are the readers/hearers described? How does this impact your own reading of the text?

4. What does it say about Revelation that its culminating vision is of a city, the “New Jerusalem”? What clues does this give us about God’s intentions for humanity?

1. Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ, 70.

2

Babylon, the New Jerusalem, and the Cities in Between

Terence L. Donaldson

The book of Revelation is in large measure the story of two great cities and the conflict between them. On one side there is Babylon—“the great city that rules over the kings of the earth” (17:18); “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations, drunk with the blood of the saints” (17:5). On the other side is the New Jerusalem—“the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2); Jerusalem, the city by whose light the nations of the earth will walk (21:24), the city in which “death shall be no more” (21:4).

Both of them are linked in essential ways with real, bricks-and-mortar earthly cities. Babylon’s earthly manifestation is clearly the city of Rome, the city set on “seven hills” (17:9). This city of Rome/Babylon is at the center of a world-wide empire of subjugation, domination, exploitation, and wealth. The New Jerusalem, of course, is the purified and renewed version of earthly Jerusalem, described elsewhere in Revelation as the “holy city” (11:2) and the “beloved city” (20:9).

But the cities and the conflict between them exist at a more cosmic level as well. The cities are archetypical as well as actual. As with other apocalyptic literature of the period, the conflict experienced by the faithful people of God is just the earthly manifestation of spiritual realities and conflicts taking place at a cosmic or heavenly level. Chapters 6 to 22 of Revelation tell the story of this two-level conflict—a story graphic in its detail and sometimes confusing in its sequence, but a story whose outcome is clear: the final overthrow of Babylon...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Encounter with the Living One: Revelation and the Healing Invasion of God
• Chapter 2: Babylon, the New Jerusalem, and the Cities in Between
• Chapter 3: “Come up Here”: A Glimpse of Heaven
• Chapter 4: Unsealing the Scroll: Facing What We Repress
• Chapter 5: Who Is Able to Stand?
• Chapter 6: “Take and Eat”: Knowing God in Worship
• Chapter 7: Standing Fast in the Meantime
• Chapter 8: Reading Babylon from the Margins
• Chapter 9: Is God Violent? Implications for Christians
• Chapter 10: He Will Come Again to Judge the Living and the Dead
• Chapter 11: The Tree of Life
• Chapter 12: In the Fullness of Time
• Contributors
• Bibliography