All Saints Day, Year B 2024: Revelation 21:1-6a

John Calvin was a French theologian, pastor, and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, including its doctrines of predestination and of God’s absolute sovereignty in the salvation of the human soul. Various Congregational, Reformed, and Presbyterian churches throughout the world today trace their roots back to Calvin. In addition to his most influential work Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote commentaries on most books of the Bible, confessional documents, and various other theological treatises. His Biblical commentaries are noted for their pastoral nature, as their material often originated from lectures to students and ministers that he then re-worked for publication. Calvin wrote commentaries on the entire New Testament with the exceptions of the brief 2nd and 3rd letters of John, which total 28 verses between the two, and the Revelation to John of Patmos.

There are many speculations about why Calvin omitted Revelation from his catalog. One theory is simply that he died before he made it to Revelation, pausing his writing on the New Testament to work on Old Testament commentaries before coming back around to Revelation and he just never made it there. Another was that his commentary simply did not survive - plausible, since he died in 1564. A third theory is that he was simply not interested in dealing with prophecy or apocalypse which, however affirming that might be to anyone struggling through the symbolism of Revelation, seems entirely nonsensical. I don’t believe for a second that John Calvin was uninterested in prophecy. But whatever the reason, the result is we are left without the thoughts of one of the greatest Protestant theologians on some of the most confusing scripture.

I’ve heard Revelation referred to as “the joker in the deck of biblical texts” - it stubbornly refuses to fit into any of the usual theological categories, and is completely unlike any other book of the New Testament. Despite this, the Revelation to John has had a huge impact on western culture and politics. Because it is so difficult to interpret, it has spawned a wide variety of readings, all of which have political consequences.

Revelation is the go-to example of Christian prophecy. While it is important in Revelation to look to the end-of-days promise to which it points, we can’t do so at the expense of the two most important questions to ask when reading prophecy: How was this text meaningful for its contemporaries, and what does it call us to do today. The point of prophecy is never “wait and see what God will do if we just hang on long enough”.

Revelation is thought to have been written during the persecution that occurred in 64CE under Nero. Earlier parts of Revelation suggest the Temple was still standing at its writing, which would then mean it is prior to the year 70. Furthermore, the code name of the beast - the still well-known number 666, is widely thought to symbolize the name Nero Caesar. While it could have been written later as a reflection upon the time of Nero, it’s far more likely that John of Patmos was throwing shade at Nero rather than communicating that his readers ought to fear a code number. It’s not hard to imagine how John’s contemporaries would look to the overthrowing of Babylon, of their oppressors, and the establishment of Jesus upon the throne as a hopeful message in a time of suffering. The message being this will end, this being the suffering, not Creation.

Revelation calls us to follow the pattern of Jesus through countercultural suffering witness to the one God, rather than through acts of violent rebellion. What Revelation calls us to do has already begun - over 2,000 years ago. The message of Revelation is centered on the symbolic depiction of Jesus as crucified and triumphant Lord at the time of his Passion in history, at his coming again, and in all times in between.

God’s final response after all of the scrolls and letters, all the horsemen and dragons,  all the plagues,  angels and beasts - all of which, if you haven’t read Revelation, I promise are in the previous 20 chapters before today’s reading - the final response finally appears at  Revelation 21:5, the only passage where the text tells us that the one sitting on the throne is talking: ‘See, I am making all things new.’ And it does not occur until after the new heaven and the new earth appear, when the threatening power of the sea has been removed (21:1), and when the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, has descended from heaven (21:2). 

It is not by chance that this passage takes up central promises from Israel’s Scriptures again. But from now on “(God) will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them’ (21:3). This also means that all kinds of suffering and even death will come to an end: ‘he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away (21:4 and Isaiah 25:8). Revelation 21:5 makes clear that all this - promised already by the Scriptures of Israel, but as yet unfulfilled -  all this is not forgotten but will be encompassed through God Himself, the One who is sitting on the throne.” (149)

A dangerous way in which we sometimes misinterpret the Bible is to assume that everything in it is an example of what we should do unless explicitly instructed otherwise. This can lead to disastrous outcomes, like scripture being pointed to as a justification for slavery. But oftentimes on the flipside, when we are promised that God will do something, it’s a good clue that it’s something we ought to do as well.

What does the promise of the end of suffering say about how we are to live now? To answer that, we can look to a poem from one of John Calvin’s contemporaries, St. Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

In the midst of all of the confusion of Revelation, what we tend to get right about Revelation comes from today’s lesson: that Jesus now bodily dwells with us. But it isn’t in the smoldering remains of a destroyed world. It is in the beauty that results in God’s healing of His creation; of this world. We don’t need to wait for God to do the healing. The healing began with the resurrection, and we are to continue that renewing work until he comes again. Amen.