Revelation 15
I saw in heaven another great and marvellous sign: seven angels with the seven last plagues—last, because with them God’s wrath is completed. And I saw what looked like a sea of glass glowing with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and its image and over the number of its name. They held harps given them by God and sang the song of God’s servant Moses and of the Lamb:
“Great and marvellous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the nations. Who will not fear you, Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.”
After this I looked, and I saw in heaven the temple—that is, the tabernacle of the covenant law—and it was opened. Out of the temple came the seven angels with the seven plagues. They were dressed in clean, shining linen and wore golden sashes around their chests. Then one of the four living creatures gave to the seven angels seven golden bowls filled with the wrath of God, who lives for ever and ever. And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were completed.
The reading we heard this morning sets up what I have so far found to be the hardest passage in Revelation, chapter sixteen and the pouring out of the seven bowls of God's wrath, which releases a series of plagues upon the earth, a kind of cosmic violence. We should be getting familiar with these patterns of seven by now, and I think we are probably meant to understand the seven bowls as parallel rather than consecutive to the seven seals and the seven trumpets, another way of approaching similar themes of judgement. We've heard some pretty horrendous things already so far, but the level of horror is ramped up again here, with people afflicted by malignant sores and the waters becoming like the blood of a corpse and the sun scorching everyone before the world is plunged into darkness and the great river drying up so that armies can march unhindered and the worst earthquake since people walked the earth and a terrible hailstorm. Perhaps the violence is not really any worse than we have already seen, but it is more complete and I think it feels harder to bear because it seems to come directly from God, even more so than before. In fact, we are explicitly told that God has control of all these plagues, and the people curse God for them. This is not going to be an easy passage to deal with, but I want to begin by reminding us that what we find in Revelation are symbols of reality, not reality itself. This vision was given to John for a reason, and there are deep truths we need to learn from it, but we do not have to read it literally, and we do not need to be waiting for this exact sequence of events.
It is surely significant that these outpourings of God's wrath involve the natural world, and so it seems reasonable to think that some of the deep truths we should expect to find are concerned with the relationship between humanity and the environment. Simon Woodman, minister at Bloomsbury Baptist Church, who has written extensively on Revelation, says this: “It is an enduring feature of empires throughout human history that they perpetuate ecological as well as social and economic violence...the environmental judgements are not personally targeted punishments...but are rather images evoking the inevitable end results of the human capacity for empire and exploitation”. The malignant sores are said to be targeted at those who bear the mark of the beast, but after that the plagues are total and indiscriminate, and so it does seem that God's wrath is poured out upon humanity rather than individuals. So perhaps we come back after all to an idea we have considered in previous weeks, that judgement is not punishment but consequence, and it is not God’s doing so much as it is ours. We have created the conditions which enable these natural disasters, and God is controlling them only to the extent that God could prevent them but is choosing not to, so that we must face the truth of who we are and what we have done. As the late missionary and interreligious theologian E Stanley Jones suggests, God's law is exposition not imposition, it is not something that is forced up on us but an outworking of our own actions.
Throughout chapter sixteen, there is a repeated emphasis on the justice of the plagues. What we are being invited to witness is what we might call the righteous anger of God, what New Testament scholar Leon Morris calls “a strong and settled opposition to all that is evil”, and surely we cannot deny that God has every right to be angry at how we have treated creation, both the planet and one another. The plagues are disturbing, but there is some comfort in the thought that wickedness can not and will not go on unchallenged. And so even here, the vision is not without hope. Perhaps rather than seeing the violence of this passage as just, we might understand that whatever the plagues represent will not exceed the bounds of justice. It is also worth reflecting on the fact that there is an implication that the plagues continue because the people do not repent, which suggests a possibility that they could repent and stop the devastation. We are back now to Jonah as an interpretive lens, and the hope that like the Ninevites, we could head off this prophecy by changing our ways. I realise I've been saying the same things for a few weeks now, but I think that's the point of the repetitive structure of Revelation. God keeps covering the same ground until we get it. We might also note that the seven plagues of Revelation echo the ten plagues of Exodus, which ultimately led to liberation. I don't want to suggest that violence is itself redemptive - some of you will have heard me challenge the myth of redemptive violence elsewhere - but perhaps what is hinted at here is that violence can never deny or destroy the possibility of redemption.
After the plagues we are given an image of a woman riding a beast, seemingly representing all empires, past and present and future. She is named as Babylon, the empire which loomed largest in history. The beast she rides has seven heads, which we are told represent the seven hills of the place where she now rules, a very lightly veiled reference to Rome, the empire which dominated the world the vision was given into. And she is also called the “Mother of Harlots”, suggesting that though she may pass, the very nature of empire is to reproduce itself, so there will be more to come. We are told that she holds a goblet full of obscenities and impurities, and is drunk on the blood of God's holy people. It is not a flattering portrayal of empire, and clearly continues the condemnation that we saw in the passage with the beasts from the earth and the sea. Given the absolute disdain for empire that is shown in Revelation, I do find it interesting that earlier we sang “for all wreaths of empire meet upon his brow”, and I will be honest that I nearly didn't pick that hymn because of that line. Personally, I would argue that Christ is not the supreme emperor ruling over a better kind of empire, but rather that he offers something else entirely. Perhaps I am reading nuance where it was never intended, but it seems important to me that we talk of empire when it is Babylon or Rome, but kingdom when it is God and Heaven. It seems a distinction is drawn. An empire seeks to totalise and brutalise its way to domination, whereas a kingdom simply is what it is. As we will see in the closing chapters of Revelation, what we are offered is not just an improvement on the way things are, but a radical new vision of the way things could be.
(A quick side note here, because I think this portrayal of empire as “the great prostitute” is problematic, especially as the only other female figures in Revelation are the woman about to give birth and the Bride of Christ. We are given a classic set of female stereotypes - maiden, mother, temptress - and while they are clearly functioning as symbols, those stereotypes have created reductive ideas about women, and restrictive attitudes towards them. We do well to take a critical approach towards the imagery we read and use, and the unintended consequences it can have, but I will leave that there for now.)
Drawing this reflection to a close, the end of chapter seventeen seems to suggest that ultimately empire will destroy itself. The beast will hate the woman and bring her to ruin, they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire, for God has put it into their hearts to accomplish God's purpose. And the Lamb will triumph because he is Lord of lords and King of kings. Empire always falls because it is incompatible with God's heart and design for creation, and the Lamb conquers simply because of who he is. That last part leads me to something important. There are times in this series when it may seem that I have taken the passage in unexpected directions, perhaps even twisted the text to make it more palatable and soften God’s actions, but that is only because I read all of scripture through the lens of thirteen words that appear again and again. “The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.” That is simply who God is, and everything else - including the judgement and the disaster - must make sense in the light of that.
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