Series: Confession of Faith

Jesus Break the Wheel

tl;dr: A sermon for Peace Sunday about Revelation. No, really.

Scripture Readings

Revelation 19:11-21

Ephesians 6:10-17

Introduction

It might seem like an odd choice for Peace Sunday to use two texts about battles. These texts are filled with violent imagery of swords and armies and blood flowing. This kind of imagery might be uncomfortable for a lot of people and I can understand why.

For me, though, this kind of violence wrapped up in fantastical imagery isn’t a big deal. I grew up with TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve always been drawn to media that wrestled with the idea that there was more to life than the obvious physical world we can see. They were big stories of good vs evil. They had a small group of humans at the centre of the story, but you knew their actions were a part of something so much bigger. Their decisions had consequences on this cosmic battle even when a lot of others around them went on with their normal lives oblivious that anything else was going on.

As a kid watching Buffy, it never crossed my mind to go out and stab people with pieces of wood the way she would stake a vampire. I think it’s completely missing the point when people read Revelation and think it encourages violence. In other words, violent imagery is not the same thing as promoting violence.

Revelation is a part of a genre that we call apocalyptic. Like Buffy, this type of literature is marked by fantastical imagery of the battle between good and evil. The apocalypse genre did go a step further than shows like Buffy, though.

When we say the apocalypse genre, we do not mean some futuristic end of the world scenario. The Greek root of the word apocalypse is an unveiling. It is a pulling back of the curtain to show us what’s really going on in the world that we can’t normally see. In some translations of the Bible, you will still see the word apocalypse in the title for this last book, but in English we usually translate to a revelation.

Revelation of What?

If it is a revelation, what is it trying to reveal to us?

Kurt Willems provides this summary. The last book of the Bible is a revelation:

• Of Jesus
• To John
• For the Church
• Against the Empire
• During the first century

We don’t have time to unpack all those components. You can look up more of Kurt’s work if you are interested in more about it. The big two I want to focus on here are “of Jesus” and “against the Empire” because putting the two together you really see how the message of Jesus and the message of Empire are at odds with each other, how there is this battle between them.

What do I mean by Empire? At the simplest level we could say the power of a political or military state to enforce the will of those on the top against those with less power. I think we can push a bit farther than that, though, and say that it is any systemic evil maintaining social hierarchies. Whether physical violence is used is not the determining factor in my opinion.

Against the Empire

It’s noteworthy in this Revelation text that Jesus comes to strike down the nations. He does not come to strike down select individual people who did the wrong things or believed the wrong theology. It is the political and military order that stands in opposition to Jesus, not the general population.

Revelation is against the empire on two levels. It is against the Roman Empire specifically. And it is against the concept of Empire more generally.

There is some debate about when Revelation was written. What we can say for sure is that it is within a context of being persecuted by a powerful and violent Roman Empire. The immediate goal of Revelation is to teach and encourage Christians to stand strong during this persecution.

At the beginning of the book, John names several churches who are the recipients of the letter. There is a common thread between these churches: they were all in cities that hosted a temple of the Roman civil religion. That probably isn’t a coincidence. There’s something about religion empowering Empire which was important for John to challenge. And then throughout the rest of the letter, John sets up a basic framework: there is a cosmic conflict between God and Satan. This battle is being fought on the ground by the church vs the empire.

This message is a radical one. The ways of Empire are fundamentally opposed to the ways of God.

Jewish people – and at this point most of the Church was Jewish – were well familiar with Empire. The foundational story of Israel was the escape from being slaves in the Egyptian Empire. After a brief period of autonomy, they traded being controlled by one empire after another. Assyrian. Babylonian. Greek. A couple of smaller fragments of the Greek Empire after it split up. And Roman.

The Wheel

In a more recent fantasy TV show, Game of Thrones, Daenarys also takes notice of the cycles of Empire similar to the one that happens over the course of the Bible. In one defining scene, she is asked about her quest to rule and why that makes her any different than the rest of the noble houses. She responds like this:

They’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top. And on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground… I’m not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.

She was right in how she diagnosed the problem. The wheel of Empire does keep spinning and it does keep crushing those on the ground.

She was wrong about how to break the wheel, though. She subscribed to a similar idea as the Roman Empire did, and to be honest, what most people believe most of the time. It was even a common phrase with Rome: the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. This is the philosophy of peace through strength, that we can create peace by violently stopping any opposition. If we can either wipe out the bad people or at least keep them under our control, they can’t hurt us. This often works for many years at a time, but empires always fall. The wheel keeps spinning with somebody else on top, still crushing the people on the ground. What Daenarys couldn’t grasp was that her rationale was not that different from many of the other noble houses. Most of them thought they were doing what was necessary to create peace, under their leadership instead.

Our modern equivalent of the wheel – of Empire - is more complicated than in the time of the biblical authors or in Game of Thrones. It isn’t quite as simple as a clear-cut political entity with a large army killing or imprisoning everybody who gets in the way. Our Empires are often built more on economics and social hierarchies, not going to direct violence unless that fails. But it’s the same idea of systemic evils keeping a few on top and most being crushed underneath.

Jesus vs the Wheel

So against this idea of Empire, Jesus shows up in Revelation 19 to the start of the battle already covered in blood. But if the battle hasn’t started yet, whose blood is it? The consistent answer within the New Testament is that it is his own blood. Jesus already won the battle through his own sacrifice. The original audience of this letter, the churches, would be familiar with this theme. There’s no indication that this is meant to be the blood of his enemies who he has already slaughtered even though the fight hasn’t started yet.

Jesus also has a sword, coming out of his mouth. That’s a weapon, clearly. But coming out of his mouth is not very effective if the goal is to attack somebody with it.

Imagine trying to stab somebody with a sword from your mouth. The imagery of his mouth suggests the same as we see in the Ephesians text. There it equates the Word of God to a sword. To the original readers of Revelation, the language of a sword coming from Jesus’ mouth would not have suggested physical violence. It would have suggested the power of Jesus’ life and teachings to confront evil.

Certainly, there is violent imagery around this picture of Jesus. But there is not a good reason to believe that it is meant to convey any literal violence committed by Jesus against people. I believe this vision is completely consistent with the Jesus we understand from the Gospels, the one who taught us things like loving our enemies. It’s just a different genre and requires remembering some of what we already know about Jesus.

This is probably why Anabaptists like to preach from the Sermon on the Mount so much. If there’s such a thing as a constitution of the Kingdom of God, then the Sermon on the Mount is probably the most succinct version. While the Empire runs on the philosophy of peace through conquest, Jesus’ Kingdom runs on the philosophy of peace through justice. Revelation says that victory comes through Jesus’ life and teachings, but we still need to have those teachings in mind as a starting point to understand how that works.

A key distinction is what we read from Ephesians today. Our battle is not against flesh and blood. Instead, it’s against the powers and principalities. You can interpret these powers and principalities to mean demonic forces, human systemic forces, or both. In any case, it is essential to remember that it is this wheel, or this mindset of Empire, that we are in conflict with. We are not doing battle with the people who are caught up in that system, even if they seem to benefit and reinforce it. I found the sermon last week fascinating on how it ties into here. In looking at the story of Daniel and the lion’s den, the preacher sympathized with the position of King Darius. He held more power than anybody else in all the Empire. And yet, even he got caught up in the wheel and felt like he couldn’t do what he really wanted to do to spare Daniel’s life.

And as she talked about, that should give us hope because we are often the ones on the side of Empire whether we realize it or not.

Samantha Field is one of my favourite bloggers. She wrote recently about her experience protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the U.S. She quotes from Brene Brown saying this:

However seductive the machine metaphor may be for industrial production, human organizations are not actually mechanisms and people are not components in them. People have values and feelings, perceptions, opinion, motivations, and biographies, whereas cogs and sprockets do not. An organization is not the physical facilities within which it operates; it is the networks of people in it.

These protestors including Samantha were arrested and locked up for 12 hours without food or water for their non-violent protests. She says that one of the officers arresting her asked "why did you make me do this?" and she was initially confused because she did not make him do anything. She then explained this, looking back on it:

They view themselves as just a part of the system, just doing their jobs. It’s not up to them what happens, they’re just "enforcing the law," they don’t set policy they just enact it … but the reality is that they’re not just wheels grinding away in a machine. They’re people, and they have choices about what they do.

But how do you help them realize that they do have a choice? She also quotes Walter Wink saying this:

You point out to them where they are abusing you or the situation and you open them to the opportunity to learn and change and grow.

One of the ways to demonstrate that is from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus talks about going the extra mile with a Roman soldier. It is tempting without knowing any of the context to think this is encouraging you to be passive about doing whatever authority tells you. But it’s more complicated than that.

A Roman soldier was legally entitled to force a citizen to carry his equipment for one mile, but that’s it. Anything more than that, the soldier would get in trouble. If you were to insist on carrying for an extra mile, that would put the soldier in a very tough position. By voluntarily offering that extra mile, it asserts your humanity and ability to make that choice.

The soldier would likely know that he was only entitled to one mile and try to stop you from giving an extra mile. You can imagine a scenario where you and this soldier are fighting in the middle of the town about whether to keep going. If you really are an equal human capable of making that decision, it draws public attention to the fact that even the first mile is unfair. That soldier is stuck choosing between whether to continue to dehumanize citizens or to get out of the harmful system.

That rule of carrying equipment an extra mile doesn’t make any sense in our context. But the principle does. A modern equivalent may be like those ICE protestors who got arrested. Maybe that officer who spoke to Samantha went home and realized that he does have a choice. He does not have to keep doing this. He is not a cog in the wheel. He is a human who could do something different.

In other words, one of the primary goals in non-violent resistance is to reveal the humanity not only in the person who is oppressed but also in the person who is doing the oppression. It asserts that the person being oppressed is fully human and should not be treated this way. And in doing that, it shows those people doing the oppressing that they have a choice to turn away from the ways of Empire. It jars them out of "just doing my job."

This is essential in understanding the difference between the Empire’s peace through victory and Jesus’ peace through restorative justice. The peace of Jesus does not wipe out its enemies. It loves its enemies, with the goal of making them no longer enemies.

The Necessity of Hope

To me the biggest question in theology is what God is like. For example, is God truly love? Does God really care about oppression?

The second biggest question to me is: what’s the point of all of this? What are we moving toward?

This is the question of eschatology. The word eschatology just means the end goal, the kind of world that we are building toward. A healthy eschatology helps you see beyond yourself. If you believe in the Kingdom that Jesus taught and modelled for us, that should be a hopeful thing. It is not simply Jesus spinning the wheel and putting somebody else in charge who will do the same things, like most of human history. It is Jesus breaking the wheel. The Kingdom of God does not operate on the same terms as Empire. The Kingdom of God loves enemies and actively seeks to free everyone from oppression, both those being oppressed and those doing the oppressing.

On the surface, it’s easy to see these texts like Revelation as less hopeful than other simpler passages about peace and love. But I find it much more hopeful. It acknowledges the realities of systemic evils. It is not a naïve feel-good sentimentality. It is a message that steps back and reveals that we are all a part of a big picture. Your day-to-day decisions might seem insignificant, but we are all a part of this battle over what kind of a world we are building. Do we keep spinning the wheel, perpetuating injustice? Or do we choose to fight back by loving our enemies? Do we choose the true peace through justice that Jesus taught and lived, or do we settle for the pretend peace through victory?

The world is complicated and we are all probably both oppressors and oppressed in some ways. In some ways you are probably fighting against the ways of Empire with everything you have. If so, there is hope in Jesus breaking the wheel, saving you from being crushed. In other ways you are probably propping up these systemic evils, intentionally or not. There is hope in Jesus breaking the wheel there too, helping you see the humanity in those you are crushing and calling you toward a better way.

When we say things in church like "the peace of Christ be with you," it is this kind of peace that we pray for and work towards. We do not seek simply an absence of conflict. We seek a world that is made whole with justice.