Thought for the week - 25 May 2025

It can be harder to get a new message through to those who are comfortable with how things are than to those who suffer at the hands of a currently unjust situation. Many of the poor in the old DDR of Eastern Germany were very keen to see reform, but the more equal members of the party were not so keen, and you only have to speak to a Romanian over the age of about fifty five to hear the same thing about that nation, and thank God they rejected the chaotic nationalism offered to them at the most recent election. A Muscovite influencer may also extol the current regime, whereas a different story is heard in Tiksi, where Moscow is but a distant rumour. We find the same here as well, as the recent council elections have shown, to the feigned shock of our own elite. This all has as much to do with deeply felt political beliefs as it has to do with how hungry people are and on occasion, how much people who have disenfranchised themselves feel that they have been disenfranchised by others. But the hungrier you are, the keener on change you will be. It is a commonplace that most of those who were first attracted to Christianity were from the hungrier parts of their society. ‘Consider your own call’, St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘not many of you were wise, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is weak, what is low and despised in the world’.

Most of those who wrote the books of the New Testament, however, were a little better fed, for they had obviously had enough of an education to enable them to write in more or less correct Greek. The exception to this is the Book of Revelation, from which today’s second reading is taken. In the third century, a learned Egyptian bishop knew that some people in the church rejected this book, considering it to be unintelligible and illogical. It was not a revelation, that is to say, an unveiling, at all, they said. Rather it was itself veiled by a great thick curtain of unintelligibility and even now, it divides people, particularly along the line of biblical inerrancy, which is a foolish title for those who believe that everything in the bible happened exactly as it is written and will occur exactly as it is predicted, even when the entire book begins with two contradictory creation narratives and ends with a cast of thousands of monsters and seas of blood. Nothing is impossible for God of course, not even that He might often speak in allegory or, indeed, parable.

Denis of Alexandria was clear that the book was inspired by God, even if he hedged his bets about it being one long vision given to John on Patmos, although he did strongly suggest that its author could not also have written the Gospel or the letters of John, which themselves seem to form one canon of literature quite separate from the Revelation. One of his rationales is that whereas they are written in Greek that is eloquent and certainly learned, the language of Revelation is vulgar and often utilises poor grammar. Yet, if the author of Revelation cannot write without showing himself to be reasonably uneducated, he also shows himself by the standards of that time to be financially poorly off as well, however and this is a big and important however, in what he wrote we are able to glimpse how the Gospel of Jesus Christ transformed his life and outlook. That is, the Revelation is written by someone who knows the Gospels well and has a strong faith, which is worth more than education and wealth.

This same Gospel informs the authors strong belief that life is simply not just to be lived as a rite of passage to Heaven, where divine opiates wipe away all pain. The acceptance of the Gospel opens his eyes to the wickedness and injustice and oppression of the world he lives in, as it should do to ours as well. While this fills him with anger, it also fills him with hope, with the confidence that human society, not beyond the grave, but in the here and now, can be and will be transformed into the just society God intends it to be.

In the Holy city, come down out of heaven, to the earth, there will be no avarice, no oppression of the poor, for the baubles and the precious metals that the rich like to grasp to themselves will be as common as dirt in the street. And there will be no need for a Temple in this city, for the city itself will be the dwelling of God with human beings and the Temple in Jerusalem, home of avarice and theft, can assume the insignificance that it its due – earthly things may pass away, but the new Jerusalem, the heaven come to earth, is eternal.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that the time will come when God’s true worshippers will worship him neither on the mountain of the Samaritans, nor in the temple in Jerusalem, but will worship him in spirit and in truth. The John of Revelation longed for the coming of that moment, when God will dwell with human beings, not in a temple, but in love and truth, two virtues so deeply lacking in he world. He has seen what will come to be if human beings will allow that divine Love to come into their hearts and change them. He has seen the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down, out of heaven, to the earth, and he is telling us, urgently, to get ready for it.