A Call to Community

The Book of Revelation and the Gospel of Peace, Part 4

This is final class of the four week Sunday school I wrapped up this morning on the Book of Revelation. You can find weeks one, two and three here and here. You’re in luck this week: I’ve got video of the class, as well as my written script (which I mostly stuck to!)

Today’s class has two distinct sections for us to explore. Now, this isn’t the original plan I had in mind for this final class, but I was struck by the way our conversation together ended last week. I’m specifically thinking about Julie’s comment about high and low Christology and how that shows up in the way we read and understand the story of Revelation. I’ve sat with this idea all week, because I think it’s important, and because I realized that it also highlighted a frequent blind spot of my own that often shows up in my theology. So, I want to unpack what we mean by Christology a bit, what it means to have a low or high Christology, and then what those both mean for how we read the book of Revelation.

So, first and foremost, Christology is the fancy theological term that basically means, the part of theology that is concerned with who Jesus Christ was and is. If you go to seminary, and take an entry level Theology course, one of the earliest sections or class topics will be Christology. Under the umbrella of Christology falls ideas like the Resurrection, Incarnation, the nature of Christ – that takes you into all those old debates the early church Councils debated, at Nicaea and such – and the meanings of Jesus various words and actions. If you want to get super academic, these can be sorted into three buckets: ontological Christology (what do we know about Jesus’ nature?), functional Christology (what did the things Jesus did mean?), and soteriological Christology (what meaning does the death and resurrection have?)

Now, Julie named high Christology last week, and then in a subsequent conversation we had, also brought up her own low Christology. So, what do those things mean? Well, high and low Christology refers to our relative starting points for understanding who Jesus was; other names for these concepts are Christology from above, and Christology from below. Now, progressives like many of us here often have varying levels of low Christologies. We prefer to start with Jesus the man, who lived and worked and acted in a particular time and place; it is from there, from the historical Jesus, that we then have an outworking of who Jesus was and what he meant.

High Christology, on the other hand, is the traditionally more orthodox position, especially in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and is also now associated with what we would term more “conservative” churches. High Christologies have as their starting point the divinity of Christ, or even the Christ on a throne in heaven. The book of Revelation itself, I would argue, has a high Christology.

Now, these siloing of low and high Christology into progressive and conservative buckets is not meant to be taken as always true. Lots of conservative Christians have low Christologies, especially in more charismatic churches, and lots of progressives, including Episcopalians, some Lutherans, and some Catholics, have high Christologies. While I consider myself pretty middle of the road personally on my Christology, I have trended over the last few years towards a higher Christology, especially compared to where I used to be when I first started doing theology. I imagine that drift is apparent in my words, and someone who is very theologically attuned – like Julie – will be able to pick up on that.

Now, I don’t bring this all up to have a debate about which Christology is better; there really is no right answer to that. What is right and wrong is what our Christologies cause us to do and say in the world. Many people with high Christologies find within that framework a warrant for a justice-oriented faith. Many people with low Christologies still find the space within that to turn their faith in something insular, bigoted, or damaging. What I do want to do, though, is try to think about how Christology shows up in Revelation, and more specifically, in how we read and interpret Revelation.

As I mentioned a moment ago, Revelation has a very high Christology; one of the central images of the book is the enthroned Christ, lording over a remade heaven and earth, acting primarily as a Divinity more than a person. That makes sense; this is an apocalypse, after all, and apocalyptic literature doesn’t often make much hay of images of everyday life and small actions.

But I do think there is a way to read a lower Christology in Revelation, and in fact, I would contend that in some ways, that is the entire project we’ve been trying to do in this class. I’ve highlighted the Christology present in Revelation throughout this class, especially last week, when we talked so much about the Horsemen and the Throne and the 144,000. But, when I talk about reading Revelation with Jesus in mind, what I want us to be doing is reading Revelation through the words and life of Jesus, as we find it in the Gospels, and not through the post-Gospel mysticism of a divine Jesus. That’s how Revelation has been read for too long. That’s what leads us to the bad readings of Revelation we’ve been trying to undo. And so, what that looks like is, when you encounter the Slain Lamb of Chapter 5, or the cosmic Christ of chapter 2, what I hope you’ll do is try to think about if you can square that image of Christ with what we know of Jesus, and if you can’t, then are we seeing Jesus, or are we seeing John take an apocalyptic twist to what we expect in order to get us to see something new? That’s part of what we did last week, when I put the words of Revelation 7 next to Luke 4; instead of the high Christology often read into the song of praise, I wanted us to understand those words as a mirror of the ethical program of Jesus – and to then understand that John is not projecting an end times war, but an apocalyptic reimagining of the world as it is meant to be – which comes about through us being the hands and feet in the world!

I hope that makes some sense. Enough Christology, let’s dig into the last thing I want us to explore in Revelation: the call to community.

So, we’ve come to the end of Revelation, chapters 21 and 22. Gone are the images of war and destruction and strange creatures and all that came before. What we are left with here is the final vision: the New Heaven and the New Earth. So, what I want to do here, is go through the images contained in chapter 21 especially, and pull out what the new world John is imagining looks like, and what those images mean. A bit like what we did last week with the Horsemen, to get at what’s underneath the surface here. And here’s why I want to do that:

Remember back, all the way to the first week, how we talked about that what apocalyptic literature is trying to get us to do is to see in a new and unexpected way the world and the ideas and the events all around us. Apocalyptic literature wants us to open our eyes differently, to look at things with fresh eyes and to be able to seize on a vision of a different way things could be. John, especially, is writing a hopeful apocalypse, one that looks at all that is wrong and broken all around us, and sees not hopelessness and despair about where we are headed, but instead how all that brokenness will slowly unravel and be superseded by the love of God.

So, with that in mind, what John is trying to get us to see here at the end is the world as it could be. Jeremy Duncan phrases it like this, that John is creating “an imaginative space as we contemplate” a better world. We should see here “renewal, not replacement.” This isn’t a vision of God destroying the world and putting in place a new one, a bit like Noah and the flood, which, remember, God promised never to do again. Instead, we should see a vision of what the world could be, if we all could just be free to live the kind of life Jesus called us to: one centered on love for others, compassion for the poor and oppressed, justice and mercy and grace and authenticity and a rejection of power and an unwillingness to use coercion. When John pictures a new heaven and a new earth here, he laces those visions with little hints of the message of Jesus for us to pick up on. Let’s pull some of those threads.

First, threaded through the whole chapter is the story of the ever expanding and inclusive love of God, for more and more people. This is conveyed through the intermingling of Jewish and non-Jewish images in the description of the new city. Remember, John is writing as a Jew, to Jewish readers, grappling with the destruction of the Temple. In a time of crisis like that, it is likely there would have been some natural impulse to turn inwards and towards the familiar, to want to pull shut the windows and define who is in and who is out. John doesn’t allow us to do that, because this is neither a wholly Jewish nor a wholly Gentile city. It is a multicultural place, to use a modern term, one that makes space for all. Here’s how: right out of the gate, we see this city called the New Jerusalem, in verse 2; and in verse 12, we are told the names of the twelve tribes of Israel are inscribed on the gates. So, there are Jewish roots here. But then, we get told in verse 14 that the twelve names of the apostles are also inscribed, on the foundations, which also adds a distinctly Christian aspect to this city, in the very foundation is stand upon. But he’s not done. Looking further down, in verses 19 and 20, he says that the foundations are adorned with twelve jewels, named in this order: jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst. Does anyone know what those twelve stones, in that order, is referencing?

Those twelve stones are the stones associated with the figures of the Zodiac, like Taurus and Leo and Aries, etc, as the ancient Greeks would have understood it (not birthstones). John names them here in the sequential order of the Zodiac as you would have seen it depicted at the time. So, what does that have to do with the city John is describing? Well, if it starts as a Jewish city, and then expands to a Christian one, what John is doing here is expanding this city beyond the Jewish faith and a specific sect, to a wider understanding, associated here with the Greco-Roman world that John would have understood to be ruling over the entire world. His reference to the zodiac stones here is a universalizing image, one that opens this city to all peoples. God’s love, inclusion in God’s city, isn’t limited to just Jews, or to Jews and Christians, John is saying; all peoples are welcome here.

This is reiterated in verse 25, which reads “Its gates will never be shut by day.” There are no gates to keep anyone out, who wants to be in. But that openness is slightly qualified. John says the gates are always open – but then, in verse 27, also writes “But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” So, we have no gate keeping anyone out, but we also have a city free of the kind of death and destruction we saw embodied in the four Horsemen last week. This infers that some people, still caught up in the old ways and unable to break those cycles have chosen not to enter the city.

For me, this evokes one of my favorite books: “The Great Divorce” by CS Lewis. “The Great Divorce” could be understood as a modern-day apocalypse, in some ways: it is a story of a man who, like John, gets to tour the afterlife and see how it works. In Lewis’ vision of heaven, there are also no gates and no exclusion, of anyone. But Lewis is not a universalist: he has this image of scores of people forever refusing to enter heaven, because they can’t let go of their pride, or their anger, or their hate, or their lust, or their gluttony. Hell, for Lewis, is self-inflicted and chosen, and God respects our free will enough to allow us to choose our own fates. This is like the horsemen: not image of God’s wrath condemning us, but our own choices and failures doing so instead. We can always choose differently; there is no upper limit of time for us to make that choice.

That’s what I see in the open gate and those who choose not to enter the New Jerusalem here. And, if go back a few verses, to verse 8, we get John recounting the announcement that, alongside the new city, the lake of fire still exists, as the place where those things that hold us back will be purged and purified, before we can enter. I don’t know entirely what to make at that; there are hints of Purgatory here; but the broader point for me stands: all are welcome in the new city; we just have to choose to take up residence. I like the way Duncan describes this:

“I don’t think it’s a stretch to hope that this verse describes not a torment for souls, but instead a destination for all those broken identities that can, at last, be discarded now that God dwells among us.”

Another aspect of that universality is found in verse 22: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” There is nothing between us and God, not structure needed to mediate for us. More importantly, there is no framework needed to justify or “save” us, and that means, in this new city John is imagining, no need for scapegoating or exclusion of an other in order to make ourselves clean. This ties in with the previous image of self-exclusion and the choice we make to enter the new city: without a temple structure, the ability to compete and compare is removed. Our salvation, so to speak, is between us and God, only, and each works that out on their own, input and judgment from others not needed.

We also should remember that John’s vision of a city lacking a temple comes, again, the wake of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem within the lives of his readers. This is not only an image evoking a universal heaven, but one that would have hopefully dispelled some of the anxieties of his readers: Jerusalem has no temple any longer, but neither does the New Jerusalem, and yet God still walks the streets and has a relationship with the people. No intermediary needed.

One last image to close with: one of the most well-known parts of these closing chapters of Revelation is the new city that is festooned with jewels and gold and pearls and all manner of precious things. We’ve already addressed the twelve stones named here, but there is more to unpack. Verse 21 says, “And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass.” While we are inclined to focus on the grandeur and the pure wealth in this vision, we should remember: this is an apocalypse. John is turning these images upside down and asking us to see them in a new way. So, what could he be doing here?

I’ll quote Duncan again, because he highlights this so well:

“The city of heaven suggests that everything we have given inordinate value will one day be as insignificant as asphalt. The jewelry and gold we have worked so hard to acquire, now buried underground and trod underfoot. Heaven is an indictment of our fascination with wealth, not a celebration of it. Just as one more way our expectations are flipped.”

We aren’t to be dazzled by the wealth here; we are instead to see it as what it is: stuff, rocks, just materials. Again, if we are reading through the eyes of Jesus – through things like his admonition that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for the rich to go to heaven, his reminder that we can take no wealth with us when he dies – then we begin to see these images not as the final victory of wealth, but as the dismantling of it.

That’s what all these pictures of the new city are here at the end of Revelation. John is trying, again, to open up the imaginative space we need to take an apocalyptic look at the world, and see how it all points towards the final victory, not of death and war and famine and destruction, but of the love and acceptance and justice that Jesus made real for us, and that we have latched into him for. Revelation, when you get to the end here, is not a vision of the end of the world as the final advent of death and sin; instead, we are left with the overthrowing of those powers in favor of a beloved, upside-down community, one we are called to make real, right here.

I love the final vision we get, in chapter 22: “Then the angel^[k] showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life^[l] with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ Nothing accursed will be found there anymore.” This whole time, we thought we were looking at a new city, but John has one last apocalyptic upheaval for us: what we thought was a city was in fact a garden, with beautiful trees, and a river running through it all, free of anything accursed. That’s the apocalypse I want.