Kelsi Vanada
Dear Friends,
Today’s reading from Isaiah 61:1-4 is a proclamation of restoration for Israel:
“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn.”
This vision of a day of vengeance and restoration makes me think of the book of Revelation. Revelation doesn’t get a whole lot of airtime in our lectionary, but receives outsized attention in the Evangelical tradition I grew up in.
In the early 2000s, I read the teen version of the Left Behind series (a fictional account of a future “rapture” when Christians are taken to heaven and everyone else is left on earth to fight it out during the last days), and the idea of the world ending in tribulation was definitely in the water.
I’m learning to read Revelation anew with Saint Philip’s Women’s Bible Study: our current book is The End is the Beginning: Revelation, Hope, and the Love that Lit the Stars by Mathew Ian Fleming.
He argues that too often, Revelation is read to crack a code (think of those who use it to try to predict the end of the world), rather than “for its prophetic indictment of exploitation and oppression as well as its sustaining vision of justice.”[1]
Fleming reminds us that what he calls our “theological inheritance” and “social location” matter for how we read Scripture. He writes, “For a people experiencing oppression, Revelation can be a breath of fresh air, where the oppressors face justice and God consistently defends those on the underside of history. For people in power, it can be a threat.”[2]
May we stand on the side of those experiencing oppression in our day, proclaiming the good news as we seek to bring these Biblical visions of justice about, with God’s help.
In Christ,
—Kelsi
[1] Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, qtd. in The End is the Beginning: Revelation, Hope, and the Love That Lit the Stars, pg. 62
[2] Matthew Ian Fleming, The End is the Beginning: Revelation, Hope, and the Love That Lit the Stars, pg. 61