March 30, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Lent

“Daring Questions: 4. End Times”

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

 Our worship themes in these weeks before Easter grow out of the daring questions you sent me last month. Here are this week’s questions:

• Why was book of Revelation written? How should we view it?  
• Would be interested in your “take” on these scriptures and if you too see its predictions coming to pass.

We would have a much easier time understanding the Book of Revelation if it weren’t in the Bible!
 
If we could read the Book of Revelation alongside a dozen other Jewish apocalyptic books written around the same time, it would be so much easier to compare and contrast it to other writings in the same genre. We wouldn’t imagine for a minute that it should be read as predicting the future; we’d see it for what it really is: one more example of a wild and supernatural style of social commentary – exaggerating the evils of the world and their possible consequences in order to make a point. It’s only because this book appears among our holy texts that we imagine it is intended to be taken as a divine prediction, rather than as a human work of imagination.
 

But the Bible is really a whole library of different kinds of writings. There are imagistic poems, and teaching stories; there are proclamations and laws and rules; there are genealogies and historical narratives; parables and miracle stories. There is history remembered and history revised for theological purposes; there is history hoped for but never realized. Almost none of it was ever intended to be read as literally as we sometimes do today! Like modern libraries, the 66 books in the Bible cover a wide swath of fact and fiction, written over thousands of years. It shouldn’t be surprising to us that in the midst of that variety there are some bits so culturally distant from us that it’s hard to even begin to wrap our brains around them.
 
So where does the Book of Revelation fall within that list of different kinds of writings? In the mainline churches we  see it as social commentary, rather than predictions of a future; stories told to depict the emotional truth of the despair people were living with, and their longing for a God to rescue them. Like an editorial cartoon, it doesn’t pretend to be “real”, but it captures a truth about the reality they struggled with that ordinary words can’t match.
 
We don’t tell supernatural stories about devils and angels in that same way any more, but it doesn’t mean we never use story to depict warnings or emotional truths. Instead of using religious imagery for those kinds of stories, we often rely on quasi-scientific imagery. Think about stories like Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or George Orwell's 1984. Those books, and others of that genre, are emotionally powerful – even devastating – warnings of what might be, if the world continues on the shaky course it’s on right now. Attwood's and Orwell’s stories urge us to reach for a hope outside the strength of any individual human being to set things to rights, because they portray the evil we face as too powerful for ordinary humans to fix.
 
Are their stories true? I guess it depends on what you mean by “true.” No 20^th century author accurately predicted the future that we're living in; Attwood and Orwell both got important details quite wrong when they spun their tales! But the “truth” of their stories doesn’t depend on those details. The truth of their stories is found in the ways they accurately warned that an authoritarian government could steal our humanity and dominate us.
 
Revelation, and the other apocalyptic bits scattered around the New Testament, are “true” in the same ways as The Handmaid’s Tale is “true.” I don’t believe that the author of Revelation was any better at predicting details than Attwood was, but he was a remarkable describer of the emotional fear that he and his congregation lived with. They must have felt hopeless, to describe the world in such violent and depressing ways!
 
Revelation is the most controversial book in our Bible. It took centuries before there was general agreement that it had anything useful to teach us! It almost didn’t make the cut. My hunch is that it was only included because of the luminous passages in Chapter 20 and 21 about how God is big enough to rescue us even from the worst horrors a human mind could imagine, and gentle enough to wipe away the tears from our eyes. Frankly, those are almost the only bits of this book we ever read on Sunday mornings any more!
 
I keep wondering, though, if some of the hopelessness that the 1^st century apocalyptic authors expressed has resonance with the times we’re living in too. There is a lot we fear, these days. American tariffs could lead to 600,000 job losses in our Province within a couple of weeks; climate scientists warn that large swaths of our world could become uninhabitable within my life time;  Artificial Intelligence already makes decisions in ways that no human can follow; Gaza City has been turned into rubble. There is as much reason to despair today as there was in the first century when Pilate crucified hundreds of rebels to terrify the Jews into submission. We too have reason to fear the end of the world as we know it: the end of American-Canadian relations that we’ve relied upon; the end of liberal democracy. End-times writing is ramping up among lots of our social commentators too, and while they’re not predicting Four Horsemen, they are preparing us for catastrophe. What is strong enough to hope in, when human strength is overwhelmed?

Join us on Sunday as we explore apocalypse ancient and modern, and ponder what people of faith should trust in.
 
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