Revelation Reboot

There is something innately satisfying about revenge, even if the satisfaction is short-lived.

I have just finished watching a Netflix series about kings, queens and Vikings. It is filled with intrigue, deception, betrayal, shifting loyalties and revenge. Someone is always plotting. Someone is always in danger. And just when you think the latest betrayal will go unanswered, the balance shifts. Our hero escapes. An enemy falls. Often rather brutally.

And, honestly, there is a rush of satisfaction.

I find myself wanting the person responsible to get what is coming to them. The writers have made me care about the people they hurt. By the time revenge arrives, I am ready for it. The episode ends, and I want another.

The writers understand their audience. They have made revenge feel like a reward.

I wonder how much of that expectation we bring to the book of Revelation.

We arrive with our grievances, our fears and our sense that the world has allowed too many cruel people to prosper. We want someone to put things right. Perhaps, if we are honest, we also want to watch our enemies lose.

Some interpretations of the final book of the Bible seem almost designed to satisfy that appetite. The faithful will be vindicated. Their enemies will suffer. Everything will finally be settled, and we will discover that we were on the winning side.

It is easy to see the attraction. It is harder to ask what that expectation might be doing to us.

If I imagine God's ultimate victory as the humiliation and destruction of everyone I oppose, how will I treat those people now? Will I become more compassionate? More willing to listen? More concerned about their children, their suffering and their future? Or will I begin to regard their pain as something they have coming?

The book of Revelation gives us difficult material to wrestle with. There is blood, judgement, terror and destruction. We cannot simply turn away from those passages because they trouble our argument. We will have to read them carefully.

But at the centre of its vision stands a startling figure. John hears of a conquering lion. When he looks, he sees a Lamb bearing the marks of slaughter.

That is the image to which this book keeps returning. What happens to our understanding of victory when the one at the centre of the throne is the one who has suffered? What happens to our desire for revenge when we are called to follow him?

My argument is that reading the book of Revelation through the Lamb should challenge our appetite for retaliation. Its promise of justice should deepen our responsibility towards people who suffer and our determination to confront what harms them.

Justice matters. Victims need protection. Those responsible for harm need to be held accountable. Love cannot mean asking the wounded to keep quiet so that everyone else can remain comfortable.

Yet there is a difference between wanting suffering to end and wanting someone else to suffer.

That difference runs through this book. It also runs through me.

My struggle with the book of Revelation began long before that television series. In 1997, I was sitting in my dorm room at a Bible college in Australia, preparing to begin Masters-level papers on the book of Revelation. As an enthusiastic young man in my mid-twenties, I found the task daunting. As I began to unpack the text, much of what I had been told about this mysterious book began to unravel.

It belonged to an ancient world with its own fears, loyalties and ways of communicating. Reading it within that world made familiar explanations much harder to sustain. I finished the paper, received my mark and was left with a question an academic result could not answer: how was I going to live with what I had learned?

For years, I hardly mentioned it. When the subject arose, conversations quickly returned to the end times. People could be fierce in their defence of that reading. Sometimes even people with little connection to Christian faith were adamant that the book of Revelation existed to tell us how the world would end. Sometimes I thought I could see fear behind that certainty. Usually, I let the conversation slide.

But the question stayed with me. How had we become so absorbed in the world's supposed final catastrophe that we could miss the people living beside us? How had a wounded Lamb become an introduction to fantasies of overwhelming force?

In The Gospel of Death, I explored how influential systems of interpretation helped direct Christian attention towards prophetic timetables and contemporary events. This book follows the question into a different place. I want to explore what we might recover when we return to the world in which the book of Revelation was born, and what that recovery might ask of us now.

I write with some trepidation. Beliefs about this book can sit close to the centre of a person's faith. Challenging them may cost friendships. It may also open conversations I have spent years avoiding.

I do not want you to replace someone else's certainty with mine. I want us to look carefully, to admit where the evidence is difficult, and to notice what our reading makes us willing to do to other people.

The person I hope to meet again in these pages is the Lamb who was slain. The question I hope we carry away is how to follow him.