Can you believe it? I’m getting tired of the news. It’s so depressing. And for a news junkie like me, that’s saying a lot. Between the Middle East and the Congo and Iraq and North Korea we hardly have time to notice the murders in the Sudan and the economic chaos in South America, and with all this seriously important stuff happening, what do we see when we turn on the news? Hilary Clinton’s book and the Lacy Peterson murders! If the news all by itself weren’t bad enough, we can’t even count on the media to focus on what’s important. How can we make sense of it all? What should we do? Turn the TV off and as Voltaire recommended, retire to the country and tend to our own gardens? Should we join advocacy groups, send money to worthy causes, write letters to the government, march, picket and protest? Or should we eat, drink, and be merry, since, as the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil.” [Ec 2:24]
And if the world itself wasn’t confusing enough, here we are again in what may very well be the most confusing book of the Bible. And even though this chapter isn’t as difficult to interpret as some, I suspect that it is not a passage that any of you naturally turn to for either comfort or enlightenment.
I mean, what does “a [pregnant] woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” have to say to ordinary people struggling to make a living and raise their kids?
Well, the reason I’m preaching on the book of Revelation is that it does help us to make sense of our times. And the key to the whole thing is perspective.
How many of you are familiar with impressionist painting? In the late 19th century, artists like Monet and Cezanne and Seurat started playing with color in a new way. Instead of mixing paint on their palette until they got the colors they wanted, they put tiny dots of color next to each other on the canvas, and let the viewer’s eye do the blending. If you’ve seen any original impressionist art, you know that
you have to stand a certain distance away from the painting before it makes sense. Yet by doing it this way, the scene appears more vivid, more alive. And that’s how we have to approach many of these passages in John’s Revelation.
I’m not saying that the detail doesn’t matter. It does, just the way each dot of color the Edouard Monet applied to his water lilies created the “impression” that he wanted to make. He wasn’t trying to illustrate a botany textbook, he was trying to convey to the viewer something of what it felt like to be there in those gardens at Giverny on a misty spring morning, or a hot summer afternoon. Just so does John
convey to us something of what it means to be actors in the cosmic drama that is being enacted around us.
Some commentators are sure that the woman represents the people of Israel [Gen 37:9] The sun is Jacob [Israel], the moon is his wife Rachel, and the twelve stars are the twelve sons of Israel. The purpose of Israel was to bring forth the Messiah into the world. Other commentators are equally sure that the woman is Mary, giving birth to Jesus. All commentators agree that the son “a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron” is, of course, Jesus. The dragon who tries to destroy the baby is Satan. Of course. And then we have the battle between the archangel Michael and the dragon.
Why do we need to know which interpretation is right? What is John trying to tell us?
I’d like us to step back and get a longer view of these images.
The middle view tells us that what is going on is a fight between Jesus and Satan, that Satan the deceiver is currently doing his best to wreck the world, that the woman, whoever she is, is off in the wilderness or desert being protected, and that Jesus wins. This is true. This is important. But this is also still a little too out of focus in a way. So let’s back up one more step and get an even bigger
picture. And three themes stand out.
First, whether the woman represents Israel or Mary, what we can all be sure of is that she’s on God’s side, and that she is in pain but brings forth life. She is contrasted, later on, with a prostitute in chapter seven, representing the seductive yet barren temptress Babylon. This is an eternal contrast between the hard reality that real life includes getting your hands dirty and maybe being hurt, and the
tempting illusion of self-indulgence. And it’s a contrast rather obviously linked with what it means to be female.
Second, Michael and his angels fought against Satan and his angels. Aggression and power have legitimate uses. And I suggest to you that this second image has something important to say about what it means to be male, with one of the roles being the protection of the innocent.
Third, the victory is won by two forces: “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is central, but without our words it might as well not have happened. Out of death and pain comes life, but as long as we keep our mouths shut, people will keep on avoiding the road to life and following the deceits of Satan. Another important detail is that the fall of Satan from heaven took place long ago. It isn’t an event that we have to wait and watch for. Jesus said so. He told the disciples after they came back boasting from a successful mission, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like
a flash of lightning. [Lk 10:18]
So I want to suggest to you that sex and violence, distorted and abused, are weapons of the adversary who is trying to sabotage God’s agenda. These constants are the backdrops against which all the rest of God’s salvation history is being played out.
But all is not lost. The worse things look, the easier the choices become, because the contrast between good and evil are clearer.
One of the things to remember about Satan is that he can’t invent anything new; all he can do is distort what God has created. Satan’s devices - from sexual temptation to violence as entertainment - remain the same today as they have always been. And each new tyrant repeats the cruelty and arrogance of their evil predecessors, hoping that people won’t wake up to what’s happening until it’s too late. It is the silence of God’s people that allows evil to triumph... We are only
now facing up to the reality that the people who we counted on to tell us the truth didn’t. Pulitzer prize winning journalist Walter Duranty, who covered up the forced starvation of millions under Stalin in the 1930's, may have his prize revoked. It’s about time. More recently, of course, it’s the Jayson Blair scandal at the NY Times and CNN’s silence about Saddam Hussein’s torture that helps people to realize that all other goods depend first of all upon truth.
Each generation has its own crop of antichrists, but the character of supernatural evil behind them remains unchanged until the Lord’s return, and Satan’s chief ally is our desire for comfort over confrontation. We are willing accomplices in our self-deception about the nature of evil. But the image of the wilderness reminds us that we cannot let the twin seductions of prosperity and peace dilute our
commitment to truth. “The woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God. “ Now, some survivalist group in the US have withdrawn into the wilderness in order to survive coming troubles, like a nuclear or perhaps a biochemical holocaust. But they misses the point of Revelation. The desert, the wilderness, is a symbol of renouncing the empty promises of the city of Babylon,
the luxury and selfishness which our culture encourages. We have to remember that our goal as Christians is not to escape suffering or death, but instead to announce Jesus to the world. The fact that the woman is protected in the wilderness warns us that comfort is not protection, but can be, instead, deception.
The most powerful weapon we have against all of the deceptions that surround us is truth. That is our job as the church, that is our calling as Christians.
When our culture emphasizes personal sexual gratification, we can respond by speaking of the truest love found in Christ, who will never betray us. The love which reflects God is always a committed love, one which gives up self for the other, and out of which flows life.
When the world packages its violent action heroes, we can speak of the truest hero, who lost more than just comfort to our violence, and shamed what is wrong with our values. Christ did not forbid us ever to use force - remember his treatment of the money-lenders in the temple - but he showed us that our aggressive instincts must always be subordinate to God’s larger purposes, and that truth-filled words are our most powerful weapon. True manhood lies in using strength to protect and defend, not to dominate or control.
The image of conflict does remind us, though, that God’s people must always be ready to confront the world’s opposition. We are permitted to fight directly against evil; but as Paul says, we have to remember that the victims of Satan’s deceptions are not our enemies. “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic
powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [Eph 6:12] One of the ways which Satan uses our own strengths against us is to re-define words and concepts like “love” and “peace” so that speaking or acting against evil become offenses against peace or love.
As always, our own model for action and speech must be Jesus Christ’s. Jesus never backed away from truth. He spoke the truth in love, but he always spoke the truth. And the way he could tell the difference between the people who were simply deceived, and those who were actually enemies, was in their reactions to truth.
Now, we don’t have the same insights into why some people are willing to listen to the truth about Jesus Christ and why some are not. It may be because the love that makes unpleasant truths palatable may not be convincing - or may actually be missing altogether. It may be that for a time comfort and self-indulgence are more attractive than truth. For both of these conditions, continuing to speak the truth in love is the course to follow. But there are those for whom no inducement is sufficient to accept the authority of Jesus Christ, and the painful truths that his life and death teach us about ourselves.
Instead of embracing the sometimes difficult life that can be found only in Jesus, some people look for cost-free spirituality, picking and choosing elements from New Age and Eastern mysticism. Others, desperately looking for the rules and boundaries and structures that our society has discarded in favor of an illusory freedom, opt instead for the rigid authoritarianism of Islam. Still others look for political solutions, seeking happiness by forcing other people into one or another utopian mold, from Marxism to radical feminism. All of these share the commonest illusion of all, that we can earn or create our own salvation. It’s hard to accept the reality of our own sinful nature and the truth that redemption can only come through internal change by the Holy Spirit. But as the angels themselves learned, the greatest rebellion is rebellion against Christ’s Lordship, acting as if our own lives belong to us.
One of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers, said over half a century ago, “Hope is not for the wise; fear is for fools. Change, and the world (we think) is racing for a fall, open-eyed and helpless. In every newscast, that is the news. The time’s events would seem mere chaos, but all lead in one direction. “ [Robinson Jeffers]
What he is trying to convey to us is that neither hope nor fear are appropriate responses to the chaos and confusion we see around us in the world. Everything is changing so fast. Is there going to be peace in the Middle East? Are we going to see a renewal of moral and religious values in America? Will we win the war against terror? Is the economic prosperity we are so addicted to going to return? You know what? Every generation has asked these same questions. You
know why? Because every generation in turn has placed its hope in worldly prosperity and peace, instead of in Jesus Christ.
Our only hope is in Jesus Christ, our confidence that he is already won is our shield. We cannot afford to place our hope in the comforts of Babylon - they are all temporary.
But fear is equally irrelevant. If we belong to Jesus Christ, nothing can harm us in the long run. These truths are the only constants on the battlefield between good and evil, between life and death, between Christ and antichrist.
Change is a constant, and the only way to keep it in perspective is to understand that what we see and experience is only one scene in the cosmic drama - but even our walk-on parts matter. Newscasters and pundits talk about meeting new challenges with new tactics. But in fact, the challenges are the same old same old, and the only tactics that work are to continue to point to and act on the eternal
truths of God and his salvation in Jesus Christ.
The real point of the desert in this passage is not a call to universal monasticism, although self-denial is certainly part of it, since as I said before, we are called to resist the self-indulgent addiction to comfort that Babylon promises. But the second meaning is an echo of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, a reminder that the present era is a time between our first and final redemption. After Israel signed on account of its bondage and God redeemed his people from slavery in
Egypt, they experienced an interim period, led by God in the desert, until they entered their ‘inheritance”. This condition is a preview of the period between the first and second comings which explains why God brought salvation in two stages.
In other words, Christians live in what some scholars call the “already/not yet”. We have begun to live the life of the coming world even though we have yet to enter it fully. Our bodies remain mortal, but God has empowered us to live our lives in obedience to the ways of the future kingdom. The desert theme is thus an image of a journey, not of a retreat; yes it contains suffering and detachment from
material wealth, but the movement is always forward into the promise.
If we are going to get anywhere on that journey, though, it is absolutely essential for us to remain clear-eyed, clear-thinking, and clear-speaking. The fog of war can only be dispelled by accurate reporting. The battlefield right now is more than anything else a fight over what it means to be human. Arguments over sexuality, violent entertainment, and religious speech all, ultimately, boil down to whom we belong to. If our lives do not belong to Jesus Christ, in all dimensions, than we belong to the adversary, the enemy of our souls. Neutrality is not an option.
