Canter Bridge

Rarely does the identity of a drama’s principal players come so clearly stated. At the beginning of the apocalyptic scroll that we call John’s Revelation, both the Lord God and the work’s human author declare themselves. It is a most pregnant juxtaposition:

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

The Lord God declares himself earlier and later than all reality that is knowable from our human perspective. He is its antecedent and its epilogue. There is no seeing beyond him, no shape or substance outside of him and his creative will. He has no shelf date, no competitor in the race of time.

This is conventional stuff, though hardly superficial. Faith in one God is capable of absorbing these statements without violence to its tissue, although the knowing of God in the flow of time will absorb all the energy, conviction, and life of those who determine to know him here.

John’s self-declaration is less anticipated. He is, he informs his readers, their brother who shares with them ‘persecution and the kingdom and the endurance that are in Jesus’. Their common life has been taken up into the reality of Jesus. Strikingly, the experience in that place three things that are not commonly laid side by side: the persecution, the kingdom, and the endurance.

Curiously, John does not elaborate. It is likely the entire work fills out this statement. He must have intuited that his readers’ experience would make this odd description accessible to them, that his words would fall upon receptive minds, that they would understand what he means.

His calling and theirs, the summoning of their lives to some cosmic project, has placed them in the way both of deep suffering and of a royal dignity. It demands of them long, heroic, self-denying endurance.

Surely this is not a plot to which they would have been attracted had it not come to them as part of the package in which their life and destiny is absorbed in Jesus’ own.

Apocalyptic literature by nature brings the Great Battle into the arena of small lives, yet seldom with such elegant, poignant, sobering syntax.