How do we hold faith in the modern world? Oddly enough, I believe we see glimpses in the book of Revelation — guiding us to a deeper story of creativity, desire, and hope.
See earlier posts on Revelation here: What Do I Really Want?, Seeing, Wonder and Revelation 1, Communities as Spirituality, How to Be Subversive, Carrying Tension, Creating or consuming?, and Can I be a witness?
I: Dragons
Finally – finally – we have a dragon. You can’t reveal how the world really works without one.
It’s taken the writer of Revelation twelve chapters to get to his. Of course, in The Hobbit it takes us some time to get to Smaug, the dragon; Falkor – the Labrador dragon in The Neverending Story – takes a long time to arrive; in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a dragon only toward the end; Shrek, interestingly, introduces the dragon early in the story, but then that dragon turns into more of a romantic partner than an evil villain.
We’re careful with our dragons today. We know, deep down, that they don’t exist. But with dragons we’ve kicked out evil altogether: every villain is a misunderstood child. As an example, children’s movies used to end with the villain being defeated. Prince Phillip kills Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, just as the wicked step-mother in Snow White is killed, just as Scar must be killed in The Lion King, or Ursula in The Little Mermaid. The villain must be defeated in fairy tales.
(You’ll note that many new fairy tales don’t end with evil defeated, but with a speech where the hero reveals some secret information and implores everyone to get along: this is fairy tale as motivational speaker for your child – or inner child – and refuses to confront the darkness within us.)
But thinking that there are no villains – or that there are no such thing as dragons – is part of a post-narrative society. This is a world where we have work time and free time, and the endless alteration of the two. As Byung-Chul Han writes in The Crisis of Narration, such a life:
Trudges along from one moment to the next, from one crisis to the next, from one problem to the next, slows to mere survival. Living is more than just problem solving. Someone who solves problems does not have a future. It is only with narrative that future opens up, for narrative gives us hope.
Revelation 12 and 13 have a resounding claim: there is a villain. And with a villain, there is narrative.
II: Fairy Tales and James Bond
The two chapters, however, are a fairy tale mixed with a nightmare. A pregnant woman is ready to give birth. A dragon wants her baby. She delivers, and the baby is swept up to a throne – a king! But the woman flees to the wilderness. The dragon first lays siege to heaven itself, and when that doesn’t work, he goes after the woman and her (presumably other) offspring.
Who is this woman? The child seems to be Jesus. Is the woman Mary? Someone else? Giving birth is hard and dangerous – something we see in Genesis 3 with Eve. Like a good story, she isn’t easy to pin down. She’s a symbol.
War in heaven shows that things have completely run amok. Heaven is God’s space. War is not supposed to infect God’s space, where he rules. This is meant to be a place of peace, of love, of justice. But war ensues, and the dragon is thrown out of heaven. If you’ve read it, think of the opening of Paradise Lost – Satan, or the dragon, kicked out of heaven and wondering what to do next.
In this moment, two opposite ideas are proclaimed. First, salvation and power and the kingdom of God have come, for the dragon/accuser in heaven has been tossed out. And second, the dragon pursues the woman and her offspring on the earth to make war against them. This seems to be where we live today. We simultaneously experience the hope of heaven – even those outside Christian faith find moments of transcendence – and the war of this earth.
The story feels true to our experience, even if it involves dragons and the wilderness and beasts to come.
The war takes shape in chapter 13, as the dragon calls for two beasts, one from the land and one from the sea. The sea beast has a mortal wound which has been healed. The land beast arrives and brings great signs and wonders, and orders people to worship the sea beast that has been wounded and healed. Even more, the land beast insists people must have a mark in order to engage in economic activity.
This is the popular “mark of the beast,” that occurs on the hand or forehead. Of course, it’s symbolism too – it isn’t a real mark. It’s a mark of self-gratification and aggrandizement. The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson lays bare what’s happening here:
Dragon, sea beast, and land beast are a satanic trinity that infiltrates the political world in order to deflect our worship from the God whom we cannot see to the authorities that we can see, and to deceive us into buying into a religion or belief-system that has visible results in self-gratification.
Revelation 12 and 13 is an unveiling of the story. We see what’s really going on. Essentially, this is the scene in a James Bond movie where the evil villain lays out his plan. Here’s how he acts – mimicking God. And don’t forget: we’re in a battle, and a battle with a story-shape to it.
III: The Power of Stories
A narrative, Byung-Chul Han writes, does not solve problems for us. It simply tells us how to continue the story. It explains less of why something happened (our modern confusion over Genesis 1 and 2 comes to mind) and more of what to do because something happened. In fact, the more events resist easy explanation, the more they require narration.
In my life, I feel the gravity of information and data. These are not bad things. But they are not stories. They do not allow for villains. I feel the gravity of a villain-less life, one that sees things only on the surface, one that floats from event to event, life slowing to mere survival. This is the pull of our modern life.
In Mark 8, Jesus begins to tell his disciples that he must suffer and die. He’s giving them a glimpse of what’s going to happen, of the next chapter in the story. Peter begins to challenge him, and Jesus utters a famous phrase: Get behind me, Satan.
Peter is arguing for a story-less way forward. He’s arguing for a religion that has visible results in self-gratification. This, the Bible claims, is the way of the dragon, and the war is fought around our desires and understanding of this story.
Villains appear anytime we worship a religion that gratifies us and simply makes us feel good. Villains appear when we worship politics and political figures as solutions to our problems rather than – at least in the U.S. – people who are quite literally working for us. Villains appear in churches when we are told that God helps those who help themselves, and the modern therapeutic dogma of church that seeks sin management rather than falling to our knees before an ultimately unknowable God.
These villains appear as they urge us toward easy paths of power and success. And when we deny these villains, when we say they don’t exist, we lose the whole plot.
The story, as laid bare in Revelation 12 and 13, has to do with seeing and with enduring.
The great temptation to refute how to see and how to endure is often around screens today. They are the biggest temptation – one of the great villains – in my life. I seek to anesthetize rather than feel. Han reminds us that screens are a buffer: Etymologically, a screen [schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us off from it.
Of course, this is true. A screen, by definition, blocks you from something. A screen door blocks bugs. Sunscreen blocks certain sun rays. A windscreen (I realize this is British English) blocks wind.
What if our screens are villains that block us from life? What if they de-story us?
In the middle of Revelation 13, as the writer tells of these beasts, he jots a line: Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. Ultimately, Revelation reminds us that we are living a story. In this story, there are dragons and beasts and life is charged with significance. Moments are fraught battles between a dragon and the offspring of a woman who has brought life to this earth – Eve, Mary, motherhood in general – yes to all of the above. We, like this mother, are in the wilderness. And we triumph by our patient endurance and embrace of the transcendent.
We cannot have endurance without story. A story – and one that extends beyond our own temporary lives – is necessary to continue to live with creativity, with joy, with faith. This is a life of orientation to a story above information about what is.
We cannot escape the latter in our world. But we must search for and seek the former. May we find orientation to a story that enlivens us with new courage and faith, knowing our role as one of seeing and enduring while our God defeats the villain.
Heck, he’s already gotten him to announce his master plan. This must be the third act. It means he’s ready to save the day.
Excellent post, Gabe! Love the Eugene Peterson quote!