Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I was just talking with someone the other day about how uncomfortable I am that the Revelation to John is included in our Daily Office Lectionary. As a young child in fourth or fifth grade, I read Revelation and was terrified...I literally had nightmares about it. It didn’t help that my only access to an interpretation of Revelation was Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth with its insistence that John was writing symbolic headlines for a newspaper in the future (oof), or the late televangelist Jack Van Impe who succeeded in convincing me that the Great Beast was the European Union. But apart from fueling children’s nightmares and appearing to fund bankrupt approaches to prophecy, Revelation has also contributed to some extraordinarily bad theology, serving as inspiration for Doomsday death cults and Apocalyptic sects over the centuries. It’s no wonder that the Orthodox Churches refuse to read it liturgically, and while Cranmer and the architects of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer included portions of it to be read on select occasions at the Eucharist and for the Daily Office (notably Saint John’s day and All Saints), they were incredibly judicious in their selections—Revelation was the only book of the New Testament not appointed in the Office lectionary to be read in its entirety and not read multiple times over the course of a year.

And all that having been said…I love the Revelation to John. It’s one of the most bizarre, crunchy, poetic, exultant, kaleidoscopic, horrifyingly beautiful, structurally unique, theologically challenging and compelling books of the Bible. It’s magnificent and terrifying. It’s a constant—better: relentless—unfolding of the nature of reality as layer upon layer of symbols are employed only to be stripped back to reveal more and more of the shape and contour of the Real. It’s a multifaceted diamond. As Allan Boesak wrote in his book on Revelation seen from the perspective of living under the oppression of apartheid in South Africa: it’s an indictment of Empire, a comfort to the oppressed, an assurance of the goodness and inevitability of God’s will and its accomplishment, a lesson on how to sing victoriously when you’re bleeding (nothing enrages and confuses the Dragon more, says Boesak).

I write all this by way of (lengthy!) introduction because we’ve been reading Revelation in the course of the Office for the last week and a half now…and I’ve been reluctant to comment on it given what I’ve written above. But there are things about today’s reading that are completely irresistible…also given what I’ve written above (!).

So, for instance: there’s a beautiful parallelism between the impossibility of rest for those who worship the Beast, and the promise of rest to those who live and die in Jesus Christ. Parody and parallel, inversions and subversions and conversions are part of the rhetorical engine of the Revelation. But O, Beloved Friend! How frequently is it the case that we convince ourselves that we can accomplish the good on our own steam, that we can help build the Kingdom or the good society or the New Jerusalem by our own efforts, only to discover in our utter exhaustion that our Utopias, our political parties, platforms, certitudes, ideologies and regimes have a way of perpetuating the evils we deplore, and often demand we turn a blind eye to them (or that we learn to explain them politely away) so that we can continue laboring for the good we desire but will never receive at our own increasingly dirty hands? How necessary our labors seem! And how completely inadequate.

Friend, is this not what it means, at least in part, to serve the Beast? To be in bondage to the Beast? No one, in serving the Beast in this way, understands their service as wrong, or sees the object of their service as particularly evil, as a counterfeit God, or as anything but completely necessary. But a counterfeit God it surely is all the same. We can convince ourselves that it’s our job to build the Kingdom, forgetting all the while that the Kingdom is not ours to build but God’s. And in the meantime we gradually, usually without noticing it, substitute one kingdom for another.

But Friend, Christ desires to build the Kingdom in us and among us—our job, such as it is, is to let Christ do just that: to trust Christ enough to allow grace to work in and among us; to move with the rhythm of grace, according to grace’s steps, not ours; to find ourselves following the Love that loved us into being, discovering ourselves partners in a wondrously beautiful dance with the Spirit of God, in which the music is grace, the steps are grace, the language of movement is grace, and all is experienced by us as a graceful sweetness of rest as we relax into the love that holds and upholds us.

Our passage bids us to “keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.” This isn’t, however, an encouragement to “do” more. Because the truth is we can only keep the commandments if we hold fast to the one who fulfilled them: Jesus. And to hold fast to the faith of Jesus isn’t just to maintain the Christian faith or to have faith in Jesus and trust in him, though it certainly is those things…but those things are only possible on one condition: if we hold fast to the faithfulness of Jesus; if we allow Jesus’ faithfulness to live in us and transform us; if we let Jesus’ faith be our own faith; if we accept Jesus’ faith as our own. What a wonderful Mystery! The faith that saves us, that gives us rest, that allows the shape of the Kingdom to be discerned in us and in the world, that enables us to have faith at all—it’s not our own, it’s Jesus’!

What good news on a Thursday morning…or on any morning for that matter! As uncomfortable as Revelation can be to me, I thank God for it, discomfort and all!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+