Canter Bridge

It matters very much whom we worship.

The otherwise diverse biblical witness finds unanimity around this point. We may wish for some wiggle room, some space for our personal preferences to be registered. Alas, Scripture allows none. (more…)

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The Book of Revelation is apocalyptic literature.

This scholarly term places the ‘Vision of John the Seer’ alongside other early Jewish literature that majors on the revelation of events and sequences that would otherwise be inaccessible to human minds. The Greek verb ἀποκαλύπτω means to reveal and lends its meaning and its name to this body of revelatory work. (more…)

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Here in Indianapolis, the sun will set on the year 2016 in ten minutes. And counting.

It has been an extraordinary year, both personally and for our human race.

When it has not driven us to distraction or drawn despair too near for comfort, it has thrown up glimpses of new things and fresh possibilities. It’s an easy thing to say, bereft of historical discipline, but I’ll say it anyway: This has been a year like no other.

Meanwhile, the Bible’s last chapter reminds me that we are neither the first nor perhaps the last to groan for a day with no darkness, a year’s end with no threatening penumbra.

And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:5 ESV)

The seer John’s vision of a life-giving proximity to ‘the Lord God’ that removes mediation is part of a wider vision that is continuous with what we know here and now, but relieved of the Curse that afflicts us.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:1–5 ESV)

All is provided. Nothing lacks.

All is pure and clear, all is life.

No more night.

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The Bible’s ‘apocalyptic literature’ is no easy read.

Composed in periods of deepest affliction, ‘apocalyptic’ gives vent to the assurance that the Lord has not lost control of history and will finally vindicate those suffering human beings who have maintained their loyalty to him at great cost. It is black-and-white in its moral clarity, a dualism that manifests itself in clear definitions of who is on the Lord’s side and who is not.

Our age has little taste for apocalyptic, although a patient and self-critical evaluation of our besetting myopias ought to caution us against dismissing it on the grounds of aesthetic trend-lines and personal preference.

The book of Revelation is perhaps the most well-known example of this strain of biblical expression. Sadly, its character has been much warped in the public eye by popular treatments that border on the paranoid.

Babylon figures as a kind of great world system that in its arrogance defies the Creator and claims the blood of his servants. The reader who identifies with faithful, afflicted suffers is assured that Babylon’s downfall will come suddenly:

When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power!

In one hour your doom has come!’ (Revelation 18:9–10 NIV)

With dark, smokey imagery the book of Revelation describes the collapse of Empire Babylon and the grief and wonder that fall upon those who have been complicit in her rapacious economy. When Babylon falls, the whole world staggers under the weight of her loss.

When they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, ‘Was there ever a city like this great city?’ They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out:

‘Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth!

In one hour she has been brought to ruin!’ (Revelation 18:18–19 NIV)

Yet Babylon’s downfall is, within the conceptual frame of apocalyptic literature, good news for those little ones who have been tormented by her.

Rejoice over her, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you.

Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea, and said: ‘With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again. The music of harpists and musicians, flute players and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again. No workman of any trade will ever be found in you again. The sound of a millstone will never be heard in you again. The light of a lamp will never shine in you again.

The voice of bridegroom and bride will never be heard in you again. Your merchants were the world’s great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.’

In her was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth. (Revelation 18:20–24 NIV)

Ease and privilege with almost predictable effectiveness dull our ears to biblical apocalyptic.

We find it impossible to believe in a World Empire that enriches those who control its levers at the cost of those who will not pledge the allegiance it demands. We consider ourselves too sophisticated for such simplistic, conspiratorial reductions of complex reality.

We do not find the blood of prophets and saints to be worth so much fuss.

We hold tight to our membership cards, with their precise, regularly updated data. Without remembering exactly when we did so, we have chosen sides. We rather like our Babylon.

We belong.

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Although John the Seer reserves pride of place among the human virtues for that costly quality that we unjustly but necessarily abbreviate as ‘perseverance’, he is sure that the future does not flow from human exertion or construction. Rather, it is the doing of the Lord’s own generosity.

The eschaton is, before all else, gift.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Yet its singular and super-human provenance does not for one moment render this, God’s future, antisocial, individualist, or otherwise constrained.

No sooner does the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flood out from the place of deity itself than it courses through the city’s streets. It is the life-source of a most urban reality. What is more, it irrigates the tree of life, now standing inexplicably on both sides of the river, so that its leaves might heal the nations.

Reference to the twelve kinds of fruits is not to be missed. YHWH’s gifted eschaton remains decidely Israelite in its instrumentality. Jesus’ instruction that ‘salvation is of the Jews’ persists, in John’s visionary economy, through and beyond the end of history. Yet it is not in any restricted way for the Jews. Rather, it heals the nations.

No specifying adjectives are any longer licit. No grammatical restrictions, with their formative grip upon the reality we imbibe, are tolerated. The nations stand unconditioned, for the riverine course of YHWH’s provision now drenches every one and all.

Were we to read a few clauses further in, we would stumble upon John’s laconic, pregnant sentence that ‘the curse will be no more’. For now, we swim over our heads into the river that appropriates streets upon which we no longer need to busy ourselves sorting things out, breaking up fights, scratching for bread.

Wet, we dive, we laugh. Faintly, we remember hints at our earlier scrabbling about but, as we come up for air, they fade away. They were not large enough for this wet, resourced, healing current.

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Not for nothing do the terms ‘climax’ and ‘climactic’ figure importantly in multiple spheres of human endeavor.

One learns, in this life, to wait and to anticipate. One learns to long. Life educates one to grasp, white-knuckled, hopes and desires that a more prosaic mindset might counsel one to abandon.

A sober-mindedness stands behind such counter-cultural, stubborn hope. Despite appearances, such unyielding refusal to cave to the way things are is more truthful than the cynical compromises we are urged to make. One sees, out of this stubborness, possiblity that has become invisible to pragmatism’s intoxication. (more…)

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The biblical drama bends an ear to the ground, straining to detect the cry of innocent blood spilt into the soil by callous hands who seem too often to have got away with murder. The biblical anthology’s meta-narrative squirms and frets before the unresolved dilemma of the innocent victim, his voice muffled if not snuffed out, his death too often unobserved. A bullet in the head in some Polish wood, a prisoner’s last breath given up while even his guard is too bored to notice, the hasty grave-mound hoed out in some forgotten field.

Yet the first assassin—a fratricide, no less—learns in the book of Genesis’ Ur-drama that the blood of his murdered brother cries out from the soil into which it has flowed. Flood narrative and Torah ritual prescription both reckon with the enduring value of human life, blood standing in as visual, liquid condensation of the life for which it is essential. One barely gets started in the gospel narratives of Christ’s passion before the impact of innocent blood once more jolts the conscious. (more…)

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This morning’s newspaper chronicles, in a manner of speaking, the movements of kings, princes, and their armies. Such human jockeying for power and the ‘outcry in the streets’, the end of which the psalmist longs to see, sound a constant beat in the rhythm of human affairs.

Yet there is, in the newsprint of a dying print medium, no similar register of dark, demonic forces. One is left to understand that powerful men and women make the world, plowing deep, bloody furrows by their unrelenting ambition. (more…)

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