Naming the Beast and Choosing a Different Way

Readings: Revelation 13:1-8, 10-14, 19:11-16, 19-20,  Apocalypse Revealed #820 (see below)
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Photo by Sam Ferrara on Unsplash

Hello friends, and welcome to the second to last installment in our series on the book of Revelation. We are moving at lightning speed through these last chapters, with a focus today on the figure of the beast, who is handmaiden to the dragon from last week, and the rider on the white horse who will eventually vanquish him.

Last week we spent some time with the woman clothed with the sun and the red dragon. In our tradition, the woman represents a new way of being church that is centered in love, and wisdom drawn from love, while the dragon represents a way of being church that wants to get away with being selfish and justify it through an empty faith.

And so, we left off with the dragon enraged at being unable to destroy the woman and her child, and so he decides to wage war with the people of the earth. He does so by giving his authority to two beasts, one from the sea, and one from the earth. The beasts utter “proud words and blasphemies” and the people of world worship them and follow them. 

If the dragon represents an end-justifies-the-means kind of ideology, whether in religous or secular thinking, the beast represents the tools, the systems of domination, that the dragon employs. The text tells us that: The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. When we are certain that are right, when we are so certain that our chosen belief justifies anything we might do, what are the tools we might choose? How do systems of domination *do* their work of domination? Through propaganda, disinformation, manipulation. Though institutional disenfranchisement of minorities, though scape-goating the vulnerable, to name just a few ways. And most certainly, through violence, and the threat of violence.

Due to current events, I’m sure we may thinking of war today, and the way that war is used as a tool of domination. It is not my place to analyse the geo-politics of war, and I’m not qualified to do so even if it was. And while the question of “Can war ever be just?” *is* a very important question, it is not the question the text is foregrounding for us today. The text is asking us to look at tools of domination when they are employed and to see them for what they are. To see the Beast clearly, to know that human beings will very easily worship anything that tells them they are, or should be, “winning” over and against another.

And, you can’t get to worship of the Beast, without a whole lot of blasphemy. So, let me explain. We are told multiple times in the text of the beast’s blasphemy. Each head had a blasphemous name, he uttered proud words and blasphemy, it opened its mouth to blaspheme God. Blasphemy sounds so archaic as a word to us now, but as an idea, as a human tendency, it couldn’t be more present to us. It simply means to act in a way that is disrespectful towards God, and more specifically, disrespectful towards God’s character. It is a kind of willful misuse and misappropriation of someone else’s —God’s— legacy and ethos to serve our own agenda. It is “using” God to serve our own purposes.

A simple form of blasphemy is taking the Lord’s name in vain. When we do so, we are using, or borrowing in a sense, the import of God’s name to amplify the import of something we are experiencing. We might do so carelessly, and that’s really not such a big deal, we might do so intentionally, and that’s a bit worse. But the key to our understanding here is that true blasphemy is not about saying “Oh my God” in a moment of surprise or consternation, it is the practice of invoking the name of God to justify something that we know God would never support. Using God to justify Christian nationalism, using God to justify demonizing immigrants or disenfranchising the poor, using God to justify war, racism, transphobia, and more.

Nothing could be more disrespectful of God than willfully misunderstanding and ignoring God’s own essential command to love our neighbor, while still using God’s name to justify whatever cruelty we wish. In response to this misappropriation, God isn’t “offended” in the human way we might imagine it; God does not mirror the human ego. God is instead deeply saddened by it. God tells us to love a higher power and to love our neighbor not because God is gratified by telling us what to do and seeing us do it. God tells us this because it is the best way for humanity to be happy. Blasphemy hurts *us* in a two-fold way, not only because it is wrong on the facts of what will ultimately foster human happiness but because of the way we also delude ourselves into thinking that we are right - which puts us two full degrees away from the actual truth. 

This is why we need to be highly skeptical of anyone who claims to know “God’s Divine Plan,” and in particular anyone who uses the Book of Revelation to say that they know what is going to happen in the future, or worse, uses the book as justification for trying to make the events in it happen, to usher in the second coming of Christ. This is a dangerous misuse of the text and it leads to the sanctification of violence.

That is not what the Book of Revelation was written for. It was never about predicting the future but rather revealing the truth about God, humanity and systems of domination. In the words of Benjamin Cremer: “It pulls back the curtain on earthly empires and names them for what they are: beastly.” It spoke powerfully to the people in John of Patmos’ day because they saw the tools of domination being employed by the empire of Rome. The themes will speak to us similarly today because of the ways we might see tools of domination being employed in our circumstances. 

Yet, the book does not only speak of tools of domination. It also speaks to their ultimate emptiness. Which brings us to the second half of our text for today: the rider on the white horse. A rider called Faithful and True and who acts with justice, supported by a heavenly army. They capture the beast and throw him into a lake of fiery sulphur.

This figure of the rider is traditionally understood to represent Jesus Christ, his cloak dipped in his own blood as a sign of his sacrificial love for humanity. Swedenborg sharpens that representation even further. We might remember the figure of God that John encountered in our first week of this series; the rider today *also* has eyes of blazing fire, representing divine love, and a sharp sword coming out of his mouth, representing divine truth. Further, as we heard in our reading, the white horse represents a spiritual (deeper) understanding of God’s Word, which is the complete opposite of the blasphemy of the Beast, which tries to use God’s Word for its own purposes.

This white horse is the animal we must ride, the conveyance we must use to further our own thinking and action in this world. For, a deep understanding of God’s Word will always lead us away from the tools of domination used by the Beast. This is how we will know if we are reading it rightly, this is our compass. Are we being led away from us-vs-them thinking, are we being led away from right-makes-might ideologies, and are we being led towards caring for our neighbor and beloved community for all?

In the words of Cremer again: Victory in Revelation does not come through superior violence. It comes through faithful witness, sacrificial love, and divine judgment enacted by truth itself. The conquering Messiah conquers as the slain Lamb, not as a beast.

Here we encounter echoes of Palm Sunday, which we will celebrate in just a few weeks, with Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a humble donkey, rather than a war horse. 

We are currently governed by an administration who sees force and power as the ultimate currency, and seems to care little for the suffering that the use of this power might cause, whether that be civilian casualties in a war of choice, immigrants held in inhuman conditions, citizens killed on the street for trying to protect the vulnerable. Earthly empire is beastly, in all its forms, full stop. 

And any individual heart can be full of empire too. Anytime we have been tempted to say “it's my way or the highway” that is the beast. Anytime we have been tempted to use power and privilege for self-dealing, self-aggrandizement, self-centering, that is the beast. Revelation lifts up these images for us so that we might be vigilant against the Beast’s deceptive siren call in all things. The good news is that God has given us another way. Pictured in the multitude of all nations, pictured in the woman clothed with the sun and her protections, pictured in the rider on the white horse and his angel army, pictured in the New Jerusalem just around the corner, we have been given visions of what a heavenly future in our life and in our world might look like. We can’t choose between options that we can’t fully see. So today we see The Beast and we commit ourselves not to look away. And then, we choose differently. We choose to not to worship empire, or to become like it. We choose the peace that comes through the sacrifice of ego, curiosity around difference, care for our neighbor. These are not always easy choices. But they are the right ones.

Amen.

Readings:

Revelation 13:1-8, 10-14, 19:11-16, 19-20

1 The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.
2 The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.
3 One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast.
4 People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?”
5 The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months.
6 It opened its mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.
7 It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation.
8 All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. 


10b This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people.
11 Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.
12 It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed.
13 And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people.
14 Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.


19:11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war.
12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.
15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.
16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.


19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army.
20 But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.

Apocalypse Revealed #820

19:11 Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. This symbolizes the spiritual sense of the Word revealed by the Lord and the deeper meaning of the Word thereby disclosed, which is the coming of the Lord.

Seeing heaven opened symbolizes a revelation by the Lord and a disclosure then, which we will take up below. A horse symbolizes an understanding of the Word, and a white horse a deeper understanding (no. 298). And because this is the symbolic meaning of a white horse, and a deeper understanding of the Word is an understanding of the spiritual sense, therefore that sense is here symbolized by the white horse.