Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to by the well, a lectionary based podcast preaches recorded on the land of the Wurundjeri people.
Hello, I'm Robyn Whittaker and you're listening to a special episode of by the well introducing the book of Revelation. We're doing that this year because this year in the lectionary cycle we get six weeks of Revelation in the Easter season. It's the only time in the lectionary we get a chunk of this text and we think it's a text well worth preaching, although with the warning that it is often a very misunderstood book. It's one we often ignore in the church. And when we hear it referred to in popular culture, it's often used in, shall we say, interesting kinds of ways. To help me have this conversation today, I have Adrian Jackson here stepping in. Adrian is often behind the scenes as our producer, but he studied Revelation in his theology degree and is also on the pilgrim staff. So thanks for joining me, Adrian.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Good to be here, Robyn. So let's just start with the basic question of for people who are like Easter, revelation used in those kind of pop culture ways, why should we pay attention to these texts in the Easter season? And why do you think they're in Easter?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Oh, good questions.
I'll start with the first one. I think Revelation is worth paying attention to because it's a vision of what the kingdom of God could look like as opposed to the kingdom of humans or in this case the Roman Empire. So it gives us a glimpse of the kind of eschaton, this end time reality of what it looks like when Christ reigns. So it's imagining Jesus after the resurrection and ascended with God in the heavenly realm. And I think the lectionary organizers probably put it in this Easter season for that reason. In Easter we're invited to reflect in lots of ways about what difference the resurrection makes. And I think this text is kind of answering the question when we still see suffering in the world, it doesn't seem like evil has gone away. What difference does Jesus resurrection actually make? And I think that's still a very relevant question. But what, what do you.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I think like if we look at dating of Revelation, it's one of the older texts in our New Testament, so the kind of the furthest from the events of Holy Week and the resurrection. And I think it is kind of the church trying to wrestle with Jesus hasn't come back yet. Our reality is still under Empire.
What's going on? Where is Jesus in our day to day lives?
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Yep, I think that's right. So it's probably worth saying just a couple of really practical things about the setting of this text. It's usually dated towards the end of the first century, so I would put it in the 90s.
Written by John is what the author calls himself. He considers himself a prophet, and most likely not the same John that wrote the Gospel of John. We don't know much else about him except what he tells us about himself in this text.
And it's an apocalypse.
So what does that mean?
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Yeah, so an apocalypse is literally an unveiling or a pulling back of the curtain. So it's like John sitting on his island and looks up in the sky and sees a bunch of images that kind of explain in various, somewhat creative ways what's going on in the world around them. And it's describing scenes that would be familiar to his first century readers.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: That's right. And because he does so in very symbolic kind of ways, using imagery that's familiar from the Greco Roman world from the first century, and from the biblical texts, the Old Testament, we as modern readers often have to do a little bit of work to really get the layers of symbolism.
So it might be a good point chance now, Adrian, to talk about, like, how we're reading this text as opposed to the ways it's sometimes read. And I'm thinking here particularly of, you know, there have been those in the Christian tradition that have read this as a kind of timeline, as if it's predicting human history. And if we can just say, oh, this event's happened here. You know, one of the popular things at the moment has been, apparently there's been a drought and the river Euphrates dried up a couple of years ago. And there's a reference in Revelation to the Euphrates drying up. So therefore we must be at this point in the text.
We're not reading it in that way.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the hermeneutical key, like the interpretive indicator, sits in the first verse that says this is an apocalypse of Jesus Christ.
So wherever we read it, we're talking about revealing Jesus Christ as a risen. The slaughtered lamb. Who's risen. Yeah. And there's. It's unpacked a little bit further in some of the throne room scenes. So in chapter five, you get this image of the Lamb is at the right hand of the Father in heaven as the same Jesus who was crucified. So it's not.
It's kind of placing where the resurrected Christ is in the ongoing life of the world.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And it's giving us a very theological vision of what God is doing and a very strong critique of the world in the first century. And that is the Roman Empire, so the injustices of an empire. But I think while we want to be really attentive to the historical setting, we also don't want to only leave it there. I think the power of this text is that it gives us a way to continue to critique empires and, you know, systems that are evil and oppressive and to continue to think about the way God might want the world to be by contrast.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And in all of the apocalyptic texts we get in the Bible, you've got this someone writing in a present imperial context under our empire. And it's. The message is always God is above all of this.
And God is working behind the scenes.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: That's right. Yep. And God is watching. So it might be worth here saying what revelation is not. Because there's so many bits of misinformation about this text.
So this is what it is, not before we get into the texts in the lectionary. It's not a timeline of current world events that allows us to predict things that are happening. It's not a code for identifying the Antichrist, as if we can point, as people have to, that's the devil there. Or that's the 666 kind of number. In fact, the language of Antichrist isn't in this text at all. It does not include a rapture, even though that's often commonly thought. We're going to see actually the opposite of a rapture when we get to the end of the book. It's not about escaping this world and going up to heaven. It's actually a strong affirmation of the importance of this world.
And a lot of the conspiracy theories that this is. This is not about the number 666 being something tangible in our own time, like barcodes or microchips or vaccines or inserts conspiracy theory here.
And those are. Those are ideas you're going to see around popular culture. So if you are preaching this text, it is worth being really clear what it's not doing, as we have to do some unlearning, I think, with this text as well as learning.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: And that is a little bit helped by the lecturing editors in the. The passages we get here, you don't see dragons, you don't see base, you don't see conflict scenes, you don't see the. The woman in labor in these texts. So it. We're not being asked by the Lectionary to try to have to interpret these really complicated passages. But I'd also say that I think we're missing something of Revelations message when we skip over those.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we are with the lectionary gives us a very sanitized version of the text. But let's have a look at what's in there and along the way we can have a talk about what's not, perhaps.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: So the lectionary takes us into chapter one and a vision, or really it's John's greeting to the people he writes to, which are seven churches in Asia, which is in modern day Turkey, and they're named later in the book, places like Ephesus and Smyrna. And you can still travel to some of those ancient and modern sites.
But we get a lot of theology unpacked here in 14 in this benediction. So you're going to notice there's lots of language of worship in the book, which is why it can feel a bit familiar, because it's everywhere in our hymns and our liturgies, for those who follow traditional liturgies. And. And God is framed as the Eternal One, the One who is the One who was and the One who is coming.
So always in this threefold kind of way, which is a poetic maybe way of saying the One who is there in creation, the one who continues to be present primarily through the Spirit, and the one who will come ultimately to judge and gather up the world and all of that.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And then in the next week, we get this throne room scene and the hymn of the heavenly host saying, worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered. That kind of like adulation of the resurrected Christ.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: That's right. And one of the dominant images that's actually quite unique to this book is of Jesus. Lamb. It's a different word for lamb from John's Gospel, which is the other place in the New Testament, Jesus is talked about as the Lamb of God.
But the Lamb, it's what it's. If you're there in early chapter five, the Lamb in Revelation is slaughtered, not sacrificed.
So Jesus is depicted as one who's been murdered or killed, but has survived, has. Has come back to life, which is, of course, a way to refer to his death and resurrection. But John doesn't spend time retelling this sort of historical story like the Gospels do. He just assumes people know that.
The important thing here, I think, is that the Lamb is kind of enthroned with God. So it's a very high view of Jesus.
He's worthy to take the scroll which will unleash all the judgments of God on the earth. So it's very much this idea of Jesus as a judge and. And so he's declared worthy in the hymn we get in the lectionary. Although if you're going to preach on this, just read the whole of chapter five.
Is. Is really worshiping Jesus in very similar language to the way God is worshiped in the text. So there's nothing attributed to God really that isn't also attributed to Jesus in terms of power and wisdom and all of those things.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: And I would say here I have preached on Revelation 5 at Easter.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Great.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Because it is just a great image of what. What's going on for the resurrected Christ post the events of 33 or wherever we talk. Dating the resurrection.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, if we want to link this back to the Gospels, it is only like in something like Luke's Gospel, it's only right at the end when Jesus is. Appears to them resurrected and is about to ascend that he's worshipped for the first time by the disciples. So there's a very strong connection in early Christianity between Jesus resurrected status and therefore his sort of deservedness of being worshipped in the same way as God is worshipped. We might also notice in 5:13. It's one of the things I love about the Book of Revelation. It moves us beyond just the human. So it is the whole creation that worships Jesus. It's every creature in heaven and earth and under the earth and in the sea. So there's this cosmic sense that we get in some of Paul's letters of the whole of creation, participating in the acknowledgment of Jesus. It takes us beyond ourselves, beyond an individual relationship of just us and Jesus to this kind of. The whole cosmos is shaped and changed by this event.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: And this passage also has one of the best bits of Christian artwork, the picture of like a lamb with blood coming out of it that you'll see all over the place. But anyway, so then we go later on to chapter seven and you've got the great multitude. And it's this picture of the host, of the people who. And it's kind of this martyr language going on here, isn't it, Robin?
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Yeah, we do definitely have hints in this text that the people of God have suffered.
There's a Reference in Chapter 2 to an Antipas who's been killed for his faith. So there's this little thread of martyrdom all through this text that. That Christians will sometimes suffer and die for their faith like Jesus and So we get images of robes washed in blood made white, the sense of overcoming.
And I think there's resonances of baptism here that, you know, through, through being washed. White is used as a symbol of holiness.
Jesus appears later in the text as a white rider on a white horse. And I just want to put a caveat here. Whiteness can be a problem. So we need to just be careful with the way we talk about white as a symbol.
In the ancient world, white clothing was actually really hard to achieve just because they didn't have modern day bleach. And even white was probably more like a beige color.
So it becomes this hard to achieve kind of thing that, that, you know, symbolizes cleanliness. But we just need to be a bit careful about the way we talk about that, particularly if we say dark is bad. Right. So just be careful with that. But what else do you notice in the scene about the multitude and what's going on in chapter that the lectionary might want us to think about?
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Well, I think that's also the key station. Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb. Like that's core theology there.
But I think the thing that strikes me in this passage, and we're in chapter seven, is these are the ones who have gone through the greater ordeal. They have washed their robes, and for this reason they are before the throne of God. And I think that's a really kind of powerful statement about suffering and its relationship to worship.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you say more about that, what that relationship might be?
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I, I find it difficult because you, you, you've got these people who have gone through a great ordeal.
And I think we often kind of picture people going through suffering and going, okay, God's not the solution to this suffering and going, leaving the church.
But the, I think this is the kind of saying, the ones who endure and come through the suffering are placed in a recognition of the salvific elements of Christ's suffering in their own suffering.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And I mean, even this statement, salvation belongs to our God. I mean, that's partly in its context, a political statement. It, you know, you're not saved by the emperor, you're not saved by wealth, you're not saved by any other number of things. Salvation is something that belongs to God and is the work of God.
The other thing I notice here, and this is theology we get throughout Revelation, which is why it's worth actually thinking about preaching these texts. I think this is a vision of people who've died. So if we think of this as written to Christians on the ground at the end of the first century, who might still be struggling and wondering, what difference has all of this made? It's giving them a vision of people like them, but who've died and saying, look, they're now in heaven. They're saved by God, they're happy, they're worshiping God. You know, all is made right.
So it is a kind of a looking at one's future self.
And part of this great multitude is that they come from every nation, all tribes, peoples, and languages. So revelation also gives us this really great multicultural vision that cuts across, you know, some of the very narrow ways we think about salvation or even imagine that everyone who's saved looks like us or our people. It's a very expansive vision of who's actually in this kingdom of God.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: And it's also always offering us an eschatology of hope.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: So similar to our Old Testament prophets of the years of locusts have destroyed. I will repay. Here we get. They'll hunger no more, they'll thirst no more, and God will wipe every tear from their eyes. It's a vision of a God redeeming the world into a future that is blissful or is.
Is. It takes us out of our suffering. In the eschatology.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah, there's healing, there's transformation, all of those things. Now, the lectionary in the next week jumps all the way to chapter 21. So it might be worth at this point saying, what have we skipped? Because we've skipped a lot.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah, there's only 14 chapters there we've skipped.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: So chapters six to 16 in Revelation really give us the bulk of these series of judgments. And they come in blocks of seven. So there's seven seals being opened, there's seven trumpets being blasted, there's seven bowls being poured out. And each of them brings some sort of judgment onto earth and to those who don't repent. And it's kind of like a cycle that they build each time. But I think it's telling the same basic story, which is that God will judge. So that's the tension in this text. There's hope, there's promise, there's also judgment. We can't separate those things.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: And in broad terms, who's God judging?
[00:18:51] Speaker A: I think God is judging most harshly those with power and authority who are abusing that power. So in chapter 13, we meet this image of a beast that symbol, most commentators agree, symbolizes the Roman emperor and the agents of the Roman emperor who really demand people worship Rome, if you like. And, and the things of Rome that, who act unjustly. There's a long list of all the things, the sins of rome in Chapter 18 in a kind of lament.
And the fact that Rome has become wealthy on the backs of slavery, of injustice, of violence. And, and we know there's a historic reality to that in terms of the military might of Rome. So in some ways this text in its context is, is really satirizing this idea of the Pax Romana, that there was the peace of the Roman Empire and saying, well, yes, there might be peace and stability, but it's peace achieved through military might and absolute abuse of those who are not in the elite citizens of the world of, of the Roman Empire.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: So we touched on this a little bit earlier, but just to clarify, this is not like coded for. There's a, there's rebel, there's Russia in there, there's papacy in there, there's America in there. It's not talking about those things, is it?
[00:20:16] Speaker A: No, I, I don't, I think to think that any symbol in Revelation is only pointing to one thing or one thing in our time is, is to misread it.
Symbolism works in these kind of expansive ways. So we are supposed to get that this could refer to an emperor or to a, a ruler, a political leader, but it's more about the attributes of what that person does. It's not saying there will only be one iteration of evil. And I mean, I could talk about this for hours, but I'll try and be short.
I think one of the clues is the way evil is talked about in this text is in multiple names. So we get Satan, devil, ancient serpent, the dragon, this image of a dragon, which is a way of really capturing all the ways that the anti God forces in the Old Testament act. So taking us right back to the Garden of Eden and the, the, the snake that tempts.
It's, it's the opposing forces of God. And of course the, those that oppose God will look different in every context and every place around the world.
I don't know if that answers your question.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: What you're kind of saying is images help us recognize attributes in kind of ways that can be very hard to articulate in long form text. Yeah, and I think we also. So we've just talked about it in those kind of the ways evil is manifest in revelation, but it's also doing it in the text that we get here that are describing heavenly realms.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Because we're talking about like we have to remember theologically, when we talk about God, we're describing something that is wholly other to the human experience.
And so whenever we use language about God, we're almost always reaching for metaphor. Yes. And metaphor or myth or imagery, however it appears in our biblical text is not a literal representation of what God looks like, but it helps us kind of create a image or a story that we as collective Christian believers can kind of relate to about what is the heaven or the kind of fullness of God or the fullness of the resurrected Christ in our world.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And, and so we shouldn't think of, if we shouldn't think of the, the evil in the text in this kind of one to one literalistic way, we also shouldn't even think of the heaven imagery. Right. This is all just painting big pictures that spark the imagination and are supposed to offer sort of hope and, and that kind of stuff. So even God in this text, in chapter four, is, is described, not really even in physical form, as the one seated on the throne. And we might imagine a human when we think of that language, but actually God is described as gemstones and colors. And you know, there is no physical form described. It's, it's just all the kind of light and colors that emerge from God as if this almost rainbow like creature in heaven.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: So physical form. This brings us to these last couple of chapters, 21, 22, which like the heading in my Bible here is the new heaven and the new earth. Is it new?
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Oh, no, I would say it's recreated.
So new things are good in this text. I know not everyone likes new things, but there's. When there's a new song and a new whatever in Revelation, new is good, but it kind of stands as a way of saying recreated or transformed. So it is the same heaven and the same earth, but I would say remade or renewed by God. So there's almost a sense that the new Earth is a return to some sort of Eden or Earth as it was intended before it all went wrong.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: And who are the agents in that recreation? Like, are we.
Is this text saying that we shouldn't contain, care about the environment because there's a new earth coming? And if this earth is destroyed, well, so be it.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
This is one of the ongoing tensions of this text because for those who've interpreted it quite literally, this idea that everything gets kind of destroyed by God and then remade has been used as an excuse by some Christians to say, therefore it doesn't really matter. We can use up the earth because God's going to Remake it all. Anyway, I think that's a misreading of this text.
I think the fact that there is a new earth and a new heaven. And in fact, if we look at the start of chapter 21, God comes down from the heavenly realm to earth. And there's this wonderful line that the home of God is among people. God will dwell with them.
So God's dwelling place ends up being on the new earth. And I think it's a radical affirmation of the earth and of all the created order. But what do you think? What have you.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Yeah, So I was going to say, what's our positive reading of this text? And I think this is. We have a situation where there's an empire who is just not great.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: And it's creating a picture of what if God was the empire?
Like, what. What would the world look like if we gave up on human pursuits of power and gave God sovereignty?
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. And. And what we see is a picture of no more suffering, no more death, no more pain. So the passage that might actually be quite familiar to people in Revelation 21, because we do tend to use it at funerals as, again, this promise of this future life. But just remembering in the context here, this isn't about some individual beaming up to heaven.
This future life is imagined here as the movement of God towards us. And I think theologically, I mean, I'm a bit biased. I love the Book of Revelation, but theologically, for me, it. It mimics the movement we see in the incarnation of. If we think of Jesus as God moving towards us and living amongst us and therefore showing us what full humanity and life could look like, this. Is that on a grand scale of what happens if God's very self moves and lives with humans and.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we see a little bit of this kind of metaphor of what God living with us, and nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. That's like we're not. Not picturing a kind of blinding light that you can't walk around and no one's ever going to get any sleep ever again.
It's a picture of what are the effects of God's goodness in the world in kind of colorful language to kind of help us think about it.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Evoke a response to us.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: Yes. And if we move towards the end of 21 and into early chapter 22, there's a few big theological statements that are quite important symbolically. So one of the things that no longer exists is the sea and that's because in the biblical tradition, the sea represents a chaotic force where creatures come that oppose God. So this is very much in the apocalyptic imagination, getting rid of a dangerous kind of place. It's not saying the sea is bad, our physical sea is bad, but there's also no sun or moon because God is light. So, again, very much in imagery here. And there's no temple, because if we think of the temple in the Jewish tradition, the temple was built as God's house to house the presence of God, so people would know that God was dwelling with them and had this holy, holy place that only certain people could go because God's presence was so holy. But it was a physical symbol of God's presence with them. And what this text is saying is, you won't need that anymore because you'll have God. Right. So there's great intimacy, I think.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: And this is also a message of theological hope. After the sacking of Jerusalem, the temple has been destroyed 20 years earlier.
And this is kind of, well, God is coming to dwell on all of the earth, and so we don't need that temple anymore.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, Exactly. And in 22. Four, it's one of my favorite lines. There's the promise that they will see his face or they will see God's face. So this idea that the barriers that exist between humans and gods now, the. The sense of fear that we often get in the Bible associated with seeing God, all of that is done away with, because in this new world, there's the possibility of living so intimately with God that we can look upon God's face and not be afraid and not fear judgment or anything else.
It's really quite a radical affirmation to be held in tension with this very grand vision we get of God ruling on a throne in a heavenly realm and yet a God whose face we can look at. And if God is like this king figure on a throne, you got to remember, in the ancient world, no one looked at the king's face. Right. One of the ways of showing respect was you. You bowed down. You didn't make eye contact with a king.
So this is, again, upsetting any notion that God is a remote king or a, you know, disengaged king or someone who wields power over. This is a king you can look at.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: And it's also kind of addressing some of the stuff we're looking at earlier in this lecture in a year about Moses and the unveiling.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: And the impact of coming face to face with God Right. At the end Here we kind of have a kind of blessing.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: What's going on here?
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Oh, who knows? No, I mean, quite honestly, there are parts of Revelation I still puzzle over, but we have these concluding blessings and actually curses, although the rep. The lectionary likes to leave some of those out. There is a sense of blessing for those who stay faithful and keep the prophecy. So I think it is about promise, blessed of those who persevere. So, I mean, typical, like the Beatitudes in the Gospels, almost an upside down idea of blessing. You know, you're blessed if you do these things that might not make you popular or powerful on earth.
Yeah. What do you make of this ending and how do we read this in the contemporary world, Adrian?
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Well, I think we've also. It's come out of this kind of picture of the river of life. So where the sea was the kind of realm of the monsters, the river is the source of life giving water.
And we've got that river. And now there's an invitation for the church to come and drink from that river.
And so there's this Lovely line here, 2217, and let everyone who hears say come, and let everyone who is thirsty come. It's an. This is probably the best text if you want to make an argument for universal salvation.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. And there are scholars that everyone. Yep. Yeah. For all the judgment in this text, there's a lot of scholars who would say that at the. At the end of all things, these visions we get in chapters 21 and 22, there continues to be invitation for people to come into this new Jerusalem. And it's why we shouldn't read this in some sort of linear chronological fashion, but rather as painting these big picture things. But like the city that's built this new Jerusalem, the gates are always open. Right. The invitation is to come anyone who's thirsty. So there's an almost ongoing invitation that anyone can come into the kingdom of God at any time. So radical grace there and inclusion, I think.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Great. So thinking about where we're going with this.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: We've kind of done a very helicopter view straight across all of these texts. For someone who's thinking about maybe actually touching across these texts across the next couple of weeks throughout the lectionary, how can we. We engage our congregations in reading these texts and kind of not being.
Bringing too many kind of preconceived ideas to it, like how do we resource our preaching here?
[00:33:11] Speaker A: Are you asking about books and what we should be reading or just how we approach?
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, how would we. How would we Bring someone who may have never read Revelation into these texts. How do we introduce it? How do we get our congregations taking the revelation as a blessing from the Bible that it is, rather than that kind of like the text that comes out whenever they want to have a kind of religious crazies in a TV series?
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.
I think one way is to use art and music. We have lots of wonderful art of Revelation and lots of hymns like the Crown Hymn with Many Crowns, Holy, Holy, Holy. Lots of really traditional hymns as well as contemporary Hillsongi hymns actually use images from this text and to invite people to just, even just take it a bit lightly and imaginatively. Like, imagine if the world was like this. Imagine if the future looked in this kind of way. Imagine if God was actually covered in rainbows with bright shiny things and, you know, freaky looking creatures running around.
How does that perhaps disrupt some of the ways we think about the divine? How does it challenge the way we've domesticated God?
How does it invite hope?
But yeah, what, what would you say? What, how would you preach or approach preaching? And I know you and I have both preached from Revelation.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's always going to be a layer that you kind of have to realize that there's the preconceived ideas about the text. But I think it is important to preach what the message is, how the gospel comes through. In this text there is a clear message that God is going to answer your suffering. God is going to be on the side of the oppressed. God is going to stand against the oppressor. Yep. So this is, this is a vision of salvation is for the whole cosmos too. It's not, it's not a vision of you're going to get an escape. It's your, your whole society. It's, the systems are going to be overhauled.
And I think pointing to those kind of larger views of salvation is a really important message that we need to remind people about.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And, and to, I mean, the temptation. And I, I, I struggle with this when I preach because I teach revelation and the temptation is to want to sort of explain things or give it all that historical context. And I think as preachers it's important to be aware of some of that, but actually as you've said, to pick up the message. So if the message here is one of hope, how do we communicate hope? If the message is like at the end here of the, the book, an invitation to come for those who are thirsty, how do we actually talk about that? And you know, we might use imagery from Revelation or we might use different imagery, but it is always inviting us to kind of reimagine the world. And in Australia, as we head towards a federal election, it might invite us to imagine what the world would look like when, when ordered, you know, if it was ruled by God in this kind of way, if, if actually we didn't have injustice and we actually had a, a kingdom according to the values we see in the gospel and the kind of early Christian teaching.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: And Revelation is a text that's designed to be heard. Yes, it's the describing things is the entertainment of the first century world. Like you didn't have as ready access to printed media or TV or whatever. So I reckon it must have been kind of a pretty awe inspiring experience for the early church sitting there and listening to this text being read and imagine like their brains coming alive with imagination. And I think that still is the case, even with these small snippets that we get through the lectionary. Read them, read them for the wonderful imagery that they provide us in our churches.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Yep. And the drama it is. I think of Revelation as like an ancient version of a multimedia display. So it is engaging our senses and whatever you can do in worship to engage those senses through song and poetry and art and hearing the text proclaimed, you know, it's a, it's an invitation to think about faith with perhaps a set of images and symbols we choose we don't often use.
So lastly, on a practical question, Adrian, what would you read or listen to, apart from this obviously excellent podcast about the book of Revelation, if people wanted to dive a bit deeper and prepare themselves to preach a series?
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think a couple of resources immediately come to mind. A colleague of ours, Yuan Low, has a podcast called Unveiling a Apocalypse and there's a couple of episodes with Robin on that. I'm looking across the table, a book by Robin called Revelation for Normal People. And she was actually reading from it earlier in the episode. So I think those are two really good entries into what the text is saying.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: There's also a great little intro to Revelation, similar length to mine by Scott McKnight. And we'll put a link to that. We'll put a link to all of these in the show Notes.
That's very readable. Scott McKnight comes out of the more evangelical tradition, but is certainly reading the text in the kind of ways we've been talking about, not. Not in these predictive kind of ways. And then I have two favorite commentaries on Revelation. There's an oldie, but but a goodie by a scholar called Eugene Boring. It's in the Interpretation series. It's shortish, it's theological. And I think still a really interesting commentary for preachers in particular because it will pick up the theological aspects of the text. And a more contemporary commentary for those who might want something a little different is by a friend of mine, Lynn Huber. She's an American scholar and she's written one in the Wisdom commentary series called Revelation. And that will bring in much more strongly perspectives from feminist and queer theology as well as but always with that eye to the ancient world and the original context, but also to ours. So it's a bigger commentary. But if you're going to actually do some stuff on Revelation, well worth diving into.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: And this is one time where I really do caution people, don't go Google what the text is meaning here. Make the most of your local theological library. If you're in Melbourne, come to the Dalton McAfee or whatever your local seminary's library is.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: But whatever you do, don't Google it. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
By the well is brought to you by Pilgrim Theological College and the Uniting Church in Australia. It's produced by Adrian Jackson. Thanks for listening.
