Easter 2C

Revelation 1:1-8

¹The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, ²who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.

³Blessed 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.

⁴John to the seven churches that are in Asia:

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, ⁵and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, ⁶and made us to be a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

⁷Look! 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.

So it is to be. Amen.

⁸"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

Easter is 50 Days

In its place in the church's chronological year of grace, Easter is 50 days, a week of weeks—7x7. However, Easter is actually 24/7/365. You may remember Lenten Sundays are in but not of Lent? That's because we celebrate every Sunday as a day of resurrection.

During the fifty days of Easter, the first reading comes from the New Testament book of Acts rather than from the Old Testament. In Matthew's year A, Mark's year B, and Luke's year C, the gospel usually is from John, the fourth gospel that doesn't get its own year in the RCL. Easter season scripture readings begin with accounts that mostly feature people who followed Jesus during his earthly ministry. As weeks roll by, the stories reach further outward to begin introducing and embracing people from other places and cultures. On the fiftieth day or eighth Sunday of Easter, the Day of Pentecost initiates the long Season of the Spirit/ Time of the Church.


Revelation

From the second through the seventh Sunday of Easter during this Revised Common Lectionary year C (Luke's year), the second reading comes from Revelation. The book that concludes the New Testament is highly apocalyptic, written mostly in coded symbolic language only insiders would know how to interpret. Apocalyptic uncovers or reveals something that's hidden. The author John the Revelator is not John the Beloved Disciple whose community brought us the fourth gospel; clearly he is not John the Baptist who was beheaded.

John may have been exiled to prison on Patmos, a type of Alcatraz for Roman prisoners of state, probably in present day Turkey in Asia Minor. Or Patmos could have been a scheduled stop on John's preaching circuit. Revelation was written during the late 90s during the reign of Roman emperor Caesar Domitian. In addition to other content, it includes a famous series of pastoral letters to seven churches; very briefly, the book shows us how empires everywhere operate. Contrary to the traditional view, recent scholarship says there's no historical evidence of widespread persecution of Christians at that time, but pressure instead on Christians to take part in the imperial cult—remember, the empire was a god! Beyond religious, the empire's cult was political, economic, and social. John the author challenges too much accommodation to empire of too many supposed followers of Jesus' way that subverted conventional religious, political, economic, and social ideologies and practices.


Genesis to Revelation

Bookends in the canon of scripture reveal God as origin and end of all things:

Genesis 1 and 2, the first books in the canon of the bible bring us the original creation with:

• tree of life.
• river of life.
• a garden.

Revelation, the last book in the biblical canon, brings us the new creation with:

• tree of life.
• river of life.
• a city that grows out of a well-tended garden. Is this a new Garden of Eden? Not quite.


Where We Live

Like all scripture, Revelation was not written to us or for us, but like the rest of scripture, we can interpret quite a lot of it for our own context, always keeping in mind our first question needs to be the historical one about the text's origin. Revelation shows how empires everywhere operate. It's somewhat of a guide book for living baptized amidst empire—or any agent of death that threatens to overcome us.

During his ministry, Jesus called, taught, and showed his followers into God's earthbound heavenly way of justice, love, mercy, and inclusion. In the wake of his death and resurrection, Jesus calls us to live baptized into the fullness of the new creation. Regarding the book of Revelation, responsible interpretation calls us out of the post- or pre-millennialism of the Left Behind series and similar literalist fiction. BTW, I've read some about which is what, but it's not part of my theological tradition or education and I can't clearly outline much of it.

Whether political (biblical Egypt, Babylon, Persia; later on Spain, Netherlands, Great Britain; present-day USA, Russian Federation), or economic/consumerist (Nestlé, GM, Exxon Mobil, Samsung, P&G, Amazon—what's on your list?), every one has swallowed up dozens of smaller entities on the way to market domination. Empires seek to assume the place of God; they surreptitiously creep into almost every aspect of existence and frequently become gods according to the definition of a god as humanity's ultimate reference and final recourse.

If in fact John was exiled and imprisoned on Patmos when he spoke out against Rome and its death-dealing violence, it's no stretch to interpret his situation as parallel to Alexei Navalny's imprisonment by Russia today, and similar to that of too many less well-known political dissidents.

As it ideally continues to do in the power of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, early Christianity symbolized and routinely acted as subversive resistance to economic, political, social, and religious powers that be. The way of Jesus brought life amidst the agents and realities of death, just as Navalny does today. How about us?