Canter Bridge

For a reader like me who has lived without hunger and first-hand experience of judicial violence, it is difficult to fathom the venom that the writer of the Apocalypse injects into his depictions of cosmic villains. Babylon the great mercantile capital, figured as a woman, is a case in point:

So he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name, a mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.’ And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus. When I saw her, I was greatly amazed.

John sees an incorrigible evil in the world’s conventional arrangements that I do not. Where he detects the brazen drunkenness of a woman who has gulped won ‘the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus’ from a filthy goblet, I see a flow of goods and services that perhaps could become a bit more fluid if only the boys at the WTO would get their act a bit more together on the Doha Round.

This is what precisely what apocalyptic literature does: it lays an alternative, arguably more insightful view of reality down beside the one we’ve lived with and asks us to consider that ours pales in comparison. Apocalyptic is neither gentle nor nuanced. It breathes an air of that intolerance which thrives where spines have been stiffened by real things like the murder of loved ones and the grinding down of the poor to the point that their daughters become prostitutes and their husbands die of a lingering cough with no coin for a doctor.

When the book’s Seer begs for an explanation of this bizarre female barely sitting upright on her disgusting throne, he is given only a brief one:

The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.

The writer expects that people will understand that things are very bad indeed.

This kind of imagery battles against several assumptions that we find most inconvenient to question let alone to abandon:

* that evil is a minor dysfunction that can be lived with, ameliorated, or even fixed
* that cancerous wickedness in conventional arrangements affects only a few anonymous victims on the margins
* that ‘warfare’ is an unfortunate exaggeration of YHWH’s relationship with the world as it is
* that things will bump along forever

Apocalyptic would become a murderous owner’s manual if it existed on its own. Encased within the broader biblical anthology, it is a highly effective wake-up call to those of us who have owned the narrative that Things Don’t Matter This Much.

They do, says the Seer of the book of Revelation. It would be a tragic folly to be caught thinking otherwise.