“Reading Revelation Responsibly”

(Rev 1:4-8; Jn 20:19-31) Easter 2, Sun, April 27, 2025, FBC Amherst, JG White

The Apocalypse begins with these words (translated by Eugene Peterson.)  A revealing of Jesus, the Messiah. God gave it to make plain to his servants what is about to happen. He published and delivered it by Angel to his servant John. And John told everything he saw: God’s Word—the witness of Jesus Christ!

Only once in the three year cycle of scripture texts for Sundays do we have this happen: a series of six readings in a row from the book of Revelation. So it begins today. We will hear from Revelation chapters 1, 5, 7, 21, and 22. Though, as one podcasting Bible scholar said, we get “Revelation, the good parts.” (Caroline Lewis)

If the Luke chapter 23 Easter sermon, last Sunday, was about knowing Jesus without seeing Him, today’s Revelation 1 message is about having things about Jesus revealed. (Not to mention the Gospel from John 20, with Thomas wanting to experience living Jesus in person like the other disciples did.)

Bible scholar, Michael Gorman, has a book called Reading Revelation Responsibly, which I used as the title of this sermon. I think those three words can focus our attention today. The first thing to do with this final book of the Christian Bible is to Read it.

A more famous Bible Scholar, N. T. Wright, tells of reading the whole book of Revelation one day, for the first time, back when he was a young teenager. (It’s only 15 or 20 pages, eh?) Wright says,

The funny thing is I am quite sure I didn’t understand what on earth it was all about, but I can still remember the explosive power and beauty of it, the sense that the New Testament I held in my hands had a thunderstorm hidden inside it that nobody had warned me about. (Following Jesus, p. 54)

Many who study these things notice how, in Christianity, there is a tendency for people to be either afraid and confused by Revelation - so they avoid it - or fascinated and even obsessed by it - so they give too much attention to it and the teaching about last things, the end, armageddon! We, folks of First Baptist, need not be extreme. We have been finding good, creative paths in Christian thinking for more than one hundred years here. At least since the huge Men’s Bible Classes that started in 1897, and the leadership of Rev. Seldon Cummings who taught on the social implications of the Gospel.

Just read Revelation… and read it periodically as you would all the other pages of your Bible. And take the next steps in your own understanding of this special kind of Bible book. 

I continue to be grateful for an awakening, an epiphany, a revealing about our Bible that came to me when I was eighteen years old: I don’t have to take all the stories literally, as history, in the modern sense. I had been discipled in a middle-of-the-road Baptist Church in the heart of the Annapolis Valley. We were not all strict and severe, though there were some touches of fundamentalism. The very influential youth leader - a very bright divinity student - was pretty conservative. But I was also a lover of science, which included a worldview with a 14 billion year old universe, the evolution of life on earth, and a cause and effect for everything. 

When I went off to college I soon came under the wings of a couple other Baptist ministers who opened the door of my brain to see the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 as beautiful and holy mythology, in one sense of the word. The authors of Genesis or Matthew or 1 Corinthians as teams of people, not individuals. And the style of Revelation and Daniel as a special kind of literature that was visionary and dream-like, not just predictions of some future. 

I remember visiting back home with some friends and our Youth Group leader, and rejoicing out loud about this permission not to take the Bible at face value. My former youth leader suggested I did not need to go whole-hog in that direction. But I did. 

All this to say - fear not the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation. Fear not the severity of the language, fear not that you won’t feel like you understand any of it, fear not that you will discover you or someone you know will be condemned and damned by it. As it says right here in the first words: Blessed is the one who reads the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near. This is the fist of seven words of blessing, scattered through these 15 pages. There is blessing in getting to know the Revelation. 

Because - point two of three - it Reveals things. Revelation - same basic word as reveal. Which is what ‘apocalypse’ means. This was written down in an old form of the Greek language. Revelation starts: Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ = Apocalypsis Iasou Christou…

This book could be called ‘The Apocalypse,’ but nowadays that would be misunderstood. Some movies of my lifetime are these: Apocalypto - an action film set at the end of the Mayan civilization around Central America, 2006. Apocalypse Now - an epic VietNam war film, 1979. Apocalypse Z: the Beginning of the End - a Spanish zombie action thriller, 2024. We think of an apocalypse as a destructive ending of the world as we know it. It means far more. 

Apocalypse means unveiling, revealing, opening the curtain on things. And this book of the Bible uses different methods than many others that are other styles: history, parable, poetry, and so on. Apocalyptic literature is its own thing. Because it is so wild and creative and visionary, it has gotten used in some far-our ways. But hear what Michael Gorman says about it, in Reading Revelation Responsibly. (2011, p. xv)

Revelation is not about the antichrist, but about the living Christ. It is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world. That is, like every other New Testament book, Revelation is about Jesus Christ… and about following him in obedience and love. If anyone asks, ‘Why read the Apocalypse?’, the unhesitating answer must be, ‘To know Christ better.’ 

This book is filled with scenes of worshipping Christ: this conveys things about Jesus. When He appears in some battle scenes, near the end, He takes the form of a Lamb that was slaughtered. He appears covered in blood - but it is his own blood. He brandishes a sword, but it is from His mouth: it is his words that have real power.

As the very first verses tell us, it is a message revealing Christ, given via an angel to a man named John, who passed it on via letter to the Christians of those early Churches. It reveals things about God and Christ. One verse right here speaks of Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

A third thing we do with this text is mentioned in the title of Gorman’s book: Be Responsible. For there are many irresponsible ways to wield the book of Revelation. 

(Do I dare give you this clue? Avoid Bible teachers who call it the Book of Revelations, with an S. Seems to me this tends to be used by fundamentalists, dispensationalists, and other conservative interpreters of scripture.) 

This book of the Bible definitely needs work, wisdom, and tender loving care. Verse four here mentions the gifts of grace and peace to those who receive these words; and how we still need these today! And verse six speaks of Jesus making those He saved to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father. Baptists for about four hundred years have spoken of every Christian as a priest, not just the ministers or pastors. We speak of the priesthood of all believers. In this role, we all have God-given capabilities to work with scripture, and sometimes to help others with it. 

So let us be responsible with the Book of Revelation. We can’t ignore it. We must receive what it reveals. We learn to come under its influence, by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. 

We are going to have five more Sundays of peeking into this text. Not to mention the rest of our lives. 

Read Revelation responsibly.