Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 1^st of June 2025

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

Today, the last Sunday of the Easter season, as we listen to our final reading from the Book of Revelation, we are hearing the very last words of the Bible. The Bible is not to be read, as I thought it was to be read when I was given my first grown-up version at the age of eight, from Genesis chapter one verse one, to Revelation, chapter twenty-two verse twenty-one; from ‘In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,’ to ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.’ But the final verse from Revelation is not a bad ending for the entire biblical canon. There are variants in the original Greek that make this last blessing even more expansive, so in the King James and the New English Versions we read ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all’ and in the Good News translation we read, ‘May the grace of the Lord Jesus be with everyone.’ However we translate it, the last verse of the last chapter of the last book of the Bible reminds us that the gospel is meant to be good news for the whole wide world.

I have said before that in the Book of Revelation we see a contest between two competing ideologies, or myths. Every society is bound together by myths, not myths as ‘things that are untrue,’ but myths as stories that enable people to feel part of the community. The myth that sustained the Roman Empire was that after the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic, the Emperor Augustus had brought peace and prosperity to the entire world, or at least to all the parts of the world that mattered. Those to whom John was writing, the people who gathered in the churches of Asia Minor, were living in a culture that profoundly believed this. When reading Revelation we must remember that it is a letter addressed to people living in cities that had become part of the Roman Empire peacefully. John is not writing to Christians in Judea, Gaul, Carthage, or Britannia (not that there were Christians in most of those places). He is writing to a province whose last king had left it to the Romans in his will. Cities in Asia Minor had requested permission from Emperor Augustus to build temples in his honour. Members of the Asian elite had dual citizenship, of both their cities and of Rome itself. They eagerly built theatres, gymnasiums, baths, and schools to promote Roman ‘civilisation’. And they were all bound together by the imperial cult; modern historians suggest that the very word ‘religion’ comes from the words re and ligare, ‘to bind together again’.

Participating in the imperial cult gave people identity and security; they could buy meat from priests and transact business in the temples; they had access to the gods and could enjoy shared rituals. Christianity threatened all that, as we can see in Luke’s description of a riot in Ephesus in the Book of Acts:

A man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the artisans. These he gathered together, with the workers of the same trade, and said, “Men, you know that we get our wealth from this business. You also see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her.” (Acts 19:24-29)

There was no division between sacred and secular, church and state, in the Roman Empire; a challenge to the gods was a challenge to their followers’ identity and livelihoods, and to their city’s might.

The Book of Revelation reminds its readers that no matter how tempting and reassuring it might be, they must not be adherents of the Roman imperial cult. The Jesus they follow had been executed on a Roman cross by order of a Roman official in a rebellious Roman province. While Romans claimed that the emperors were worthy of worship, John reminds Christians that, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!’ (Revelation 5:12) The Roman imperial cult claimed to have brought peace and prosperity to the whole world, or at least all of it that mattered, but John proclaims that it is those who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb who will ‘hunger no more and thirst no more … for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes’. (Revelation 7:16-17) The Roman Empire gave people identity and security, but it is in the New Jerusalem, John writes, that ‘the home of God [will be] among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God’. (Revelation 21:3)

John’s claims are ridiculous, of course. How could anyone living in the Roman province of Asia Minor, in one of its tiny Christian communities, believe that their myth was true and the Roman myth false? And yet here we are, two thousand years later: still reading John’s words; still joining with the twenty-four elders, and the four living creatures, and the myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, in worshipping the Alpha and the Omega; still looking forward to the time when ‘there will be no more night; [and we will] need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be [our] light’. (Revelation 22:5)

Christians should not be too proud of outliving the Roman Empire, though. When Christianity replaced the Roman imperial cult, too often in too many places it behaved just like the Roman imperial cult. Christianity proclaims that the gospel is good news for the entire world, and too often Christians took this universalism and tried to force that good news on people, or indeed on entire nations. You heard me a few weeks’ ago on the dangers of trying to build the New Jerusalem through violence. That is not what Christians have been called to do. Instead, we have been called to share an invitation. ‘Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.’ Everyone who is thirsty is invited to drink, but no one is having their head forcibly dunked in the river. We even need to be careful in how we talk about the falseness of the imperial myth. As Madeleine L’Engle wrote, ‘We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.’[1]

That light so lovely is God’s invitation to everyone, God’s intention for the whole world to experience justice and live in peace. Because we know that the grace of Jesus Christ is for all people, we also know that as Christians we cannot care only about those closest to us, only about those who look like us, only about those who share our race, our faith, or our nationality. (The new Pope, Leo XIV, when he was still just a Cardinal, had an argument with the Vice President of the USA about this.) The universal claim of the gospel reminds us that our love also needs to be universal. Of course we must do the work immediately before us, and care for those immediately around us, but I suspect that when the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, comes to repay everyone according to our work, he will be unimpressed with people who have ignored the needs of ‘the least of these’ on the basis that they were out of sight and so out of mind. One way to distinguish a true faith from a cult is whether it cares only about its members, in which case it is a cult like the Roman imperial cult, or whether it cares equally about the people who do not belong to it. Christianity is not to be a cult.

‘The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints.’ Or ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all’. Or as The Message translation has it, ‘the grace of the Master Jesus be with all of you. Oh, Yes!’ The Bible ends with an expansive message of grace. As we have accepted the invitation to come and drink from the water of life, let us pass the invitation on, imitating the bright morning star by holding our arms open wide with love for the whole world. Amen.

[1] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1980), p. 122.