True to Our Native Land, page 109
African Americans have their own recent historic version of two representative witnesses. The Islamic tradition of Malcolm X represented a resistant African American faith that trusted God’s justice when human injustice prevailed. In the mold of Moses, his powerful rhetoric threatened blood and plague against the purveyors of systemic racism. The Christian Martin Luther King Jr. operated with a nonviolent spirit that was equally powerful. Like Elijah, he withheld resources, boycotting communities until they understood that without African American participation, entire economies would dry up. Like John’s two witnesses, though they were cut down in life, they have stood up in history.27
Chapter 12
12:1–6, The Woman, the Dragon, and the Son
Chapter 12 starts the story. As far as “real” (as opposed to John’s narrative) time is concerned, the events in chap. 12 happened before John wrote, and, in fact, motivated his writing. Here John explains how and why the draconian siege of the church began.
In the celestial woman, John has combined many women/mother images and fashioned them into a representation of the church’s corporate existence. The sun robe, moon pedestal, and twelve-star crown indicate an intimate relationship with God. Indeed, the woman is pregnant with God’s Messiah (v. 5).
Is the woman, only in the story to give birth, as passive as some critics contend? I am reminded of the Vietnam War, the so-called helicopter war, which saw the highest proportion of African Americans ever to serve in an American conflict. Troops were ferried in and out of combat zones by helicopter. The active agents were the soldiers dispatched to fight and die. Yet every helicopter ingress and egress was made under the threat or reality of hostile fire. The aircraft’s desperate role was to give birth to a combat force in the midst of an agonizing labor of enemy fire. John’s cosmic woman, laboring against the pain of an impending birth that symbolized the persecution God’s people endured as they awaited the deployment of God’s messianic son and the forces who would follow him, is, metaphorically speaking, God’s lead helicopter. Hers, too, is a dangerous and active role.28
The dragon is Satan, the evil presence behind worship-seeking empires like Rome. In a display of power, it sports seven heads and ten horns (cf. Dan 7:7, 20, 24). Upon each head is a diadem, which represents its claim to ultimate lordship. Horns represent power. The Lamb was outfitted with seven (5:6). Qualitatively, since the Lamb has a perfectly complete number, it has more power.
The celestial woman gives birth to a messianic Son who will shepherd not just believers but all the nations with a disciplining, iron rod (cf. Ps 2:9). The implication is that he will steer the nations to repentance. Some critics ponder why John presents the child’s birth and then moves right to his ascension to the throne of God without talking specifically about his death. The birth is the death. His execution becomes the means to his glorification and his people’s future.
12:7–9, A War in Heaven
When war breaks out in heaven, the archangel Michael represents God’s combat capability. At the very moment that Jesus is historically dying on the cross, Michael and his angels are fighting mythologically in heaven. The snatching of Jesus to the throne, that is, the resurrection and ascension, is the historical metaphor that represents Michael’s mythical expulsion of the dragon from heaven. As Jesus rises into the heavenly realm, the dragon is thrown down into the historical one.
12:10–11, A Victory Hymn of Praise
This hymn’s praise has two rationales: Satan has been conquered; the reign of God has come. Witnesses participated in the inauguration of this reign. “They” conquered the dragon. They wielded both the blood of the Lamb and their own testimony about the transformative, revolutionary power of that blood to commence Christ’s lordship. John recalls how they defeated the dragon because he wants his contemporary hearers and readers to finish the witness work they started (6:9–11).
12:13–18, The Woman, the Dragon, and the Son’s Siblings
This material is a reprise of the vv. 1–6 combat between the woman and the dragon. John adds that the dragon now seeks out the other children of the woman. No longer able to target the future of God’s people as a corporate community (i.e., the church) or the life of God’s Son, it trains its vindictive sights on individual churches and believers instead.
Chapter 13
13:1–10, The Beast from the Sea
Daniel 7 echoes throughout John’s presentation of the first draconian beast, Rome. Like the dragon, it has ten horns and seven heads (17:3, 7, 9, 12, 16). The seven heads are the seven hills and the seven emperors (17:9). The beast is the entire system of Roman rule. The ten horns are ten kings (17:12; cf. Dan 7:24). The diadems on the horns apparently lay claim to the title King of Kings, which John applies exclusively to Christ (19:12, 16). The blasphemous names are a reference to Roman coinage imprinted with the heads of emperors alongside Greek titles like “god,” “son of god,” “savior,” or “lord.”
One of the beast’s heads has suffered a mortal wound. John describes its mangling with the same execution language he applies to the Lamb. The head also resurrects. John has in mind Emperor Nero, who was done in by a self-inflicted stab wound to the neck. Many feared that he would return from the dead and resurrect the evil image of Rome he had long fostered.
Operating from the background of Jeremiah 15:2 and 43:11, John explains that if someone is destined for captivity, that person goes into captivity. The conditional statement fits John’s belief that God has scripted everything. Those who witness for the Lordship of Christ can expect to be taken captive by a beast whose primary goal is to institutionalize its own exclusive lordship. John turns his attention to death by the sword. As did Jesus at Matthew 26:52, he means that the proper response to bestial violence is not more violence but a faithful endurance that witnesses to one’s confidence that God is in control.
Here is the hypomonē (endurance), which is the faith of the saints. One’s ability to endure is a measure of one’s faith. Some will be imprisoned, others will be slain by the sword. Keep resisting! This hypomonē should not be so weakly translated as “patient endurance.” This kind of intransigent, obstinate trust in God’s direction of human history was a hallmark of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States. Many civil rights leaders and followers endured social ostracism, political persecution, police brutality, and death with a faith resolve to continue the fight against segregation no matter the consequences because of their belief that ultimately God, not the beast of racism, was Lord.
13:11–18, The Beast from the Land
The second beast, symbolizing Rome’s surrogate Asia Minor officials, rises from the land. It has the welcoming look of a lamb but the mouth of a dragon. No doubt John’s hearers/readers recalled the Matthean Jesus’s warning about false prophets who come looking like sheep but are in reality ravenous wolves (Matt 7:15). John portrays this bestial false prophet in exactly the same way (16:13; 19:20; 20:10).
The false prophet issues an identifying charagma (mark) on the right hand or forehead of those who responded positively to its invitation to participate in the religious, social, economic, and political rites associated with the imperial cult (13:16, 17; 14:9, 11; 16:2; 19:20; 20:4). Clearly a parody of God’s seal (7:2; 14:1), the mark has a commercial connection. Without it, a person loses an ability to engage in the commerce of Asia Minor. Shut out of the economic system, one would be hard pressed to survive. John was concerned that his people were so interested in social and economic advancement that they would pass themselves off as devotees of the idolatrous rites, like eating meat sacrificed to idols (2:12–17, 18–29), that were required to maintain good standing in trade and guild associations.
Passing
Nella Larsen reflects upon a scene between two very light-skinned African American sisters: In a rare moment, Clare confides to Irene that the economic and psychological impact of the (white) aunts’ beliefs drove her to discard her black identity and become white. She “wanted things,” she tells Irene, and clearly she means not only material goods but love and emotional comfort, as well, for she wants “to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham” (159). The aunts’ definition of blackness attempts to rob Clare of her humanity, so she must shed that black identity to be human. To do so, she must literally turn white by passing, accepting the demands of assimilation to avoid the ramifications of what Joel Kovel refers to as the “Ham Myth of Expulsion” (79).
—Neil Sullivan, “Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Fading Subject,” in African American Review 32 (1998): 375. See also Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Something similar happened in early African American fiction. Many novelists before and during the Harlem Renaissance dealt with the phenomenon of light-skinned African Americans passing themselves off as white to reduce social ostracism and increase social opportunity. These writers used the trope not only to describe what had actually happened, but also to demonize the societal circumstance that made it necessary. Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929) makes the critical point that the greater evil is not the regrettable “blending” in which some light-skinned African Americans participated, but the “evil” evolution of society that made this “passing” not only possible but in many cases preferable. In a corresponding way, John makes use of early Christian “passing.” Though he clearly sees a problem with what Christians are doing in accommodating themselves to Greco-Roman life, his agenda ranges far beyond a critique of the Christians themselves. He wants the Christians to see that they are caught up in a draconian, prostituting system. The only challenge to that system resides in the will of those who refuse to participate in its many social, economic, and political benefits. Whatever it costs them, those Christians must not “pass.”
The name on the bestial mark is Neron Caesar. When the Greek letters for Neron Caesar are transliterated into Hebrew, the numerical value of these Hebrew letters is 666 (see sidebar below). For John, perhaps, the number also suggests a desperate and futile attempt to reach completeness. Even as it flaunts its strength, the beast wallows in weakness. It is always a six, never a seven.
Chapter 14
14:1–5, The 144,000
John’s hearers and readers already know that the 144,000 standing with the Lamb are protected (7:1–8). Their very existence is a testimony to God’s ability to protect God’s people in the present. That present testimony acts as a future guarantee that God will protect, that is, save God’s people in the future.
The heavenly multitude in 7:9–17 sings a new song of praise to God that only the 144,000 can learn. The 144,000 have successfully resisted the lures and threats of Roman lordship. That resistance enables their learning. No doubt John means that they are the only ones on earth who can learn the song. Clearly, the song has already been learned by the multitude of victorious witnesses (7:9–17) who sing it. Their resistance, too, must have earned them their capability. The 144,000 are unique because they learn the song while they are still on earth. Perhaps this ability resides with their remnant status. Perhaps this is a marching song whose cadence can only be comprehended by those who parade with the Lamb on the eschatological battlefield (cf. 19:14). If the content of the song is integrally connected to its cadence, then one would expect that only by taking up the march could one learn the lines.
The 144,000 have not been “defiled” with women; they are virgins. John is working figuratively with the image of purity, in which, through abstinence, male soldiers readied themselves for holy war. John used the term parthenos (young woman, virgin) in a similarly figurative sense. He does not intend to exclude women from his portrait of the faithful but uses the term to convey both the male and the female faithful who resist accommodating (“defiling”) themselves to the lures of the Roman imperial cult. Still, the language is disconcerting. The devaluation of both women and sexuality implied in a literal reading have borne negative consequences for more than two millennia. Affirming public readings should convey not the verse’s words, but its intent: that is, “They are like virgins who would not be seduced by the idolatrous lures of the beast from the sea.”
The 144,000 follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They follow him in resistance. Their status as the “sealed” or “protected” ones implies that they do not follow the Lamb to execution. The key emphasis for them is not death but witnessing.
The 144,000 are the first fruits of the harvest. As such, they act as a guarantor that many more will be successfully harvested (cf. vv. 14–16).
14:6–13, The Gospel of Justice
John initiates a parade of six angels, three of whom come before, three after a seventh figure, one like a Son of Man (Dan 7:14). The theme of judgment is continuous and unbearably harsh. Punishment operates as an enduring, eternal torture. The language, though, was not meant to be taken literally. John intends to dissuade believers who are considering an accommodation to Roman economic, political, social, and cultic pressures and expectations. He wants them to feel the ensuing consequences. There is a horror greater than even the worst penalty the Romans can impose.
14:14–20, Harvest Time
John presents a picture of a harvest that is both positive (for those who respond properly to the call to fear God and give God glory) and another that is negative (for those who refuse). Joel’s image of the sickle reaping the grapes and the treading upon them in the wine press is surely his inspiration (Joel 3:13). In both harvest images (vv. 14–16; vv. 17–20) he includes the sickle and dramatically ends with the wine press and its horrific results. Whereas the harvesting of the vineyard includes both the reaping and treading, the harvesting of the grain fields at vv. 14–16 includes a reaping but no thrashing or winnowing (cf. Mark 4:29). There John has purposely left off the judgmental image. He expects that people of every nation and tribe and language (v. 6) can respond with repentance and find eschatological relationship with God.
This mixed language of hope for redemption, the possibility of repentance, the assurance of salvation and the threat of horrific judgment also existed incongruously within the language of some of the African American spirituals. One song in particular, “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” simultaneously applauded God’s grace while fearfully acknowledging the reality of God’s judgment. First, a generous but realistic appeal: “Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass, And die and lose your soul at last.” Then, an assurance of grace: “I know that my redeemer lives, Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass.” But a warning of depravity: “Sinner, Oh see the cruel tree, Where Christ died for you and me.” And a final military appeal that threatens combat-like retribution: “My God is a mighty man of war, Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass.”
Chapter 15
15:1, A Sign of War
There are only three places where a portent, a sign, appears in heaven in Revelation. The first two occurrences were the woman and dragon of chap. 12. This third one signals the end of the flashback of chaps. 12–14 and sets the narrative back to its reflection of the end-time approach in seven stages. This final perspective on the end-time will adopt the metaphor of bowls.
The bowl series kicks off with a wrathful God playing the role of cosmic prosecutor and judge. This is the language of justice that must be worked out against the injustice that has plagued the land. It is not the language of emotional, vengeful, vigilante wrath, but directed, measured, justifiable wrath against evil. When this wrath deploys, it will search out those who are deserving and pour out its full measure upon them.
Christians are typically uncomfortable with the language of God’s wrath. Grace, love, and forgiveness are the preferred divine metaphors. But in a world wracked with sin and evil, wrath, while undesirable, is a necessary component of justice. For John, to eliminate wrath is to cheapen grace, to make its work meaningless. Evil cannot be allowed to prosper unchecked by regulatory force. When it does, those who are defenseless are condemned to perpetual suffering.
Writing from apartheid South Africa, Allen Boesak echoed the thoughts of many Blacks around the globe who have endured the hostilities of race hatred and need God’s wrathful response to it: “People who do not know what oppression and suffering is react strangely to the language of the Bible. The truth is that God is the God of the poor and the oppressed. . . . Because they are powerless, God will take up their cause and redeem them from oppression and violence. The oppressed do not see any dichotomy between God’s love and God’s justice.”29
The good news is that God’s wrath will end. A better reading would be that God’s wrath will be accomplished. Once evil has been destroyed, wrath will have fulfilled its mission.
15:2–4, Songs of Praise
Circling the burning sea of glass in the heavenly throne room are the redeemed conquerors, harps in hand. The imagery recalls 14:1–5, the 144,000, and the new song sung by the multitude of witnesses. The song itself recalls the exodus; the conquerors sing the Song of Moses (Exod 15:1–18) and the song of the Lamb. John intends a parallel between the work of Moses in the exodus and the liberating work of the Lamb. The liberating, justifying wrath God displayed in the Exodus event will be replayed in the apocalyptic conquest of the Lamb.
