Revelation 2.18-29
When our oldest son was in Kindergarten, my wife and I received an email from his teacher requesting a meeting. In her classroom early one morning before school, sitting across from her on tiny plastic chairs, she explained to us her concern that our otherwise cheerful and compliant child stubbornly and persistently refused to put his hand over his heart and recite the pledge of allegiance with his classmates.
“Well, what’s he do?” I asked her.
“He stands next to his desk politely and respectfully,” she said, “but— and I’ve insisted several times— he refuses to participate in the pledge.”
“Good for him,” I said, “I guess we’ve done something right as parents after all.”
“Um, excuse me? Good?””
“That’s what we’ve taught him to do,” my wife explained, “to be polite and respectful but not to participate in the pledge.”
She looked at us like we were strange.
“We of course teach our kids to love their country and to understand what makes it exceptional,” my wife added. “but we’ve also taught them not to pledge their allegiance to any other but their Lord.”
“I don’t understand,” his teacher said and, it was clear, she really didn’t understand.
“We’re Christians,” I said, “Jesus is Lord. We’ve taught them that their allegiance is to God alone. Baptism, bread and wine— those are the only pledges they ought to swear.”
“Uh, okay,” she said, “I just thought you’d want to know.
“Oh no, thanks for telling us” I said, “We’re so proud of him.”
She crinkled her eyebrows and opened her mouth furtively, “This seems like a pretty unusual interpretation. Have you talked to pastor about this?”
“We’ve definitely spoken to a pastor about it,” I said.
As we pushed back the little plastic chairs and got up to leave, she looked at us like we were the oddest people she had ever encountered.
Now, I offer that story not in order to offend some of you. And I certainly don’t share it to make me appear heroically holy. No. I divulge that story because, to my embarrassment, it is one of the only occasions when my faith has been sufficiently and publicly peculiar so as to require me to resist an allegiance other than Jesus Christ.
It’s one of the few instances when Jesus has made me weird.
The triune God is a Jealous Lord.
Nonetheless, most of the time I am adept at accommodating other lovers.
More often than not, I live the life of a functional atheist; that is, I seldom live so boldly that my life makes no sense if Jesus Christ does not live with death behind him. Rarely do I attempt the work of resistance and witness to which the the Spirit of Jesus exhorts the church at Thyatira.
“The words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze…I know your works…your patient endurance…But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess…Behold…I do not lay on you any other burden…Only hold fast until I come again.”
Endure.
Hold fast.
On September 2, 1982, Helen Woodson was arrested for pouring blood— her own blood, carried in her baby boy’s bottle— onto the Presidential flag, the U.S. flag, and the Presidential Seal during a White House tour. It was an odd, offensive, seemingly ineffective act. A self-described “Christian resister-mother,” at her trial, Woodson shared these words to the judge:
“For the past 18 years my life has been children— one birth child, 7 adopted children, and 3 foster children. Ten of my kids are mentally handicapped. We also share our home with a paraplegic Cuban refugee and with ex-prisoners and others who need shelter. All of these people are considered of little value by society. They are of no value in a society based on competition, profit, and war, yet it is these useless people who have taught me what I know of the preciousness of human life, the sacredness that transcends damage and imperfection…
Tragic death cannot always be prevented. Accident or disease may kill our children while we stand helpless to do anything. But death in war is preventable. It can happen only if we allow it, and if we allow it, we will come for judgment not before the Superior Court of the District of Columbia but before God and the murdered innocents.
The acts through which I serve life at home are considered exemplary and noble; my nonviolent witness at the White House is considered criminal. After more than two years of prayer which preceded my civil disobedience and after the 76 days I have spent in the DC Jail, I cannot, in all good conscience, see the difference between the two.”
“The words of the Son of God…I know your works…your patient endurance…But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess…Behold…I do not lay on you any other burden…Only hold fast until I come again.”
Cultic propaganda surrounded the church in the ancient Asia Minor city of Thyatira. Statues and shrines, iconography and altars all declared the emperor to be the incarnation of Apollo and, just so, the Son of Zeus, the head of the pagan pantheon. It’s no coincidence therefore that Revelation’s only reference to Jesus as the Son of God occurs in the epistle to Thyatira.
If Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is the only begotten Son of the Father, then Caesar is merely a pretender.
And if a pretender, then everywhere lies and deceit engulf the believers in Thyatira.
And not just Thyatira.
In the Apocalypse to John, having carried the Beloved Disciple up into a vision of the heavenly throne, the Spirit of Jesus takes a name from Israel’s scriptures to describe false teachers in the church. These false teachers did more than excuse accommodation to the imperial cult. They encouraged it. And they foisted it off as a deeper, more sophisticated form of the faith. Jesus calls these teachers Jezebel. In the Old Testament book of 1 Kings, Jezebel is the pagan queen of King Ahab who manipulates her husband into introducing the worship of Baal into Israel’s devotion to the true God. In his unveiling to John the Seer, the Spirit of Jesus calls those teachers in his body who wish to mingle the piety of the nation with the lordship of Christ Jezebel.
Eating meat sacrificed to idols.
Accepting membership in Rome’s trade guilds.
Offering prayers before paganism’s fertility icons.
Pledging political allegiance to Caesar.
They’re mutually equivalent practices. They’re all component parts of a whole. They all participate in the idolatrous cult of the nation.
The danger looming over the church in Thyatira is not persecution but the avoidance of it.
The temptation posed by the false teachers is the seduction of comfort and common sense— comfort and common sense rather than the counterintuitive, cruciform way of the Lamb.
Jezebel presented to Christians a more realistic Christianity, one that allowed followers of the Lord Jesus to still participate fully in the social, economic, and political life of the polis. Under the guise of a deeper form of Christian faith, Jezebel was undoing what God had done to us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus is determined to make us odd.
Jezebel offers to make us reasonable.
Years later, while serving out her twelve-year prison sentence, Helen Woodson told a Washington Post reporter:
“I am not surprised that you have not heard of me. For the most part, the American media is not interested in the only true power at work in the world— the non-violent acts of Christ following that hasten the Kingdom. The world wants the church instead to accommodate our faith to the world so that we can comfort the world with the illusion we are no different from the world. Or maybe the illusion is not what the world wants but what the church wants.”
We can infer Jezebel’s effectiveness as a false teacher just to the extent that someone like Helen Woodson unsettles and offends us.
Friedrich Nietzsche said the fatal problem with Christianity is that there has only been one real Christian in human history and he died on a cross. A former teacher of mine, David Bentley Hart, writes that when he finished translating the New Testament— especially the Book of Revelation— the work left him with a deep sense of melancholy along with the suspicion that most of us who go by the name “Christian” ought to give up the pretense of wanting to be Christian. Notice the distinction. He didn’t say we should give up the pretense of being Christian. He said we should give up the pretense of wanting to be Christian. “Would we ever truly desire to be the kinds of people that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ?” he asks. And before you answer, consider the new way of life Christ gave his community to live.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with offenders.
By loving them.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with violence.
By suffering.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with sinners.
By eating with them.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with money.
By sharing it.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with debt.
By forgiving it.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with enemies.
By dying for them.
Christ gave us a new way to deal with a corrupt society.
By embodying the New Age not smashing the Old.
For the earliest generations of Christians, the Church was an alternative community with no second generation members, for it grew not through the family but by witness and conversion. Christians were the alternative Christ had made possible in the world through his death and resurrection. Thus, they took Christ at His word, loving their enemies and turning the other cheek and forgiving 70 x 7 times all the way to crosses of their own. Just so, Hart notes, the first Christians were “a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble, a disorderly crowd. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, family and safety.”
They did so, Hart argues, because one thing that is in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense.
The Book of Revelation, for example, is:
“A relentless torrent of exorbitance and extremism in which there is no comfortable median, no area of shade, for everything is cast in the harsh and clarifying light of Christ’s returning reign.”
Our passage is a clear example of such unyieldingness. To the church at Thyatira, the Spirit of Jesus lays down a strict either/or.
Either, you are allegiant to Christ the Lord.
Or, your devotion is to the false idols of God and Country.
Either, you are following the way of the Lamb.
Or, you are acquiescing to the lure of the Dragon.
“Behold…I do not lay on you any other burden…Only hold fast until I come again.”
Everything is cast in the harsh and clarifying light of Christ’s return.
To be the kinds of people the New Testament affirms, David Hart concludes in his preface to the New Testament, we would have to become strangers and exiles, sojourners on the earth, daring to witness peacefully to the Lordship of Jesus and to resist nonviolently all others who would claim our allegiance.
Except, at least according to the Apocalypse to John, this is exactly who God has already made us in Jesus Christ. Just so, this is exactly the danger posed to the church by the teachers Jesus calls Jezebel.
A question posed by the Apocalypse is key to understanding it:
How much of our faith in Christ is wrapped up in and unintelligible without our faith in our nation and its power?
How much of our faith is actually only a Jesus-flavored expression of our politics? tribe?
How much of our faith is bound up in ethnic or racial tribes?
You’re a long way to understanding the Book of Revelation if you know that its central theme is not altogether different from Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians.
The false teachers in Galatia had muddled the gospel with the law and preached a Christ + Commandments message.
Likewise, the false teachers in Thyatira muddled the gospel with civil religion and preached a Christ + Nation message.
The uncompromising conclusion Paul draws for the Galatians is the same judgment Jesus lays upon the church under the spell of Jezebel.
Christ + ______
= No gospel at all.
It’s anathema, the apostle writes. It’s God-damned.
What’s a little meat sacrificed to idols?
Where’s the harm in genuflecting to the icons of the empire?
Who’s really hurt— it’s just the red, white, and blue?
Why not go along to get along?
By accommodating their Christian faith to the piety of the nation, Jezebel’s gospel offered the possibility of Christians being good Romans.
But what would make them reliable Romans is precisely what would render them suspect Christians, Jesus dictates to John. That’s the argument at the heart of this letter. Jezebel offered Christians the opportunity— the safety and security— to be reliable Romans. Don’t forget the single indictment with which Rome sent the first Christians to their deaths, atheism. The first Christians died as martyrs because, Rome charged, they were atheists. By proclaiming that Christ is Lord and America— I mean, Caesar— is not, Rome labeled Christians as atheists.
And according to the logic of the nation’s piety, Christians were atheists.
Paul and Jesus both inflexibly insist that Christ + ______ is no gospel at all. Because, of course, the gospel of Jesus Christ and the civil religion of the state are very often irreconcilable with one another, and, as Christians, we cannot pretend that the will of God is unknown to us. Jesus self-attests in his letter to Thyatira. He calls himself not our Teacher or Prophet, not our Guide or Guru, not our Coach or Inspiration. He calls himself the Son of God. Thus Christians have no other recourse but to attempt lives that make no sense if God has not raised Jesus Christ from the dead and made him Lord of heaven and earth. For if Jesus is Lord, then we are his subjects. As Karl Barth said— correcting Martin Luther, “the Lordship of Christ is the article by which the church stands and falls.”
The Lordship of Christ is the article by which the church holds fast, Barth could’ve said.
Holds fast or lets go.
Holds fast or gives in.
Holds fast or goes along to get along.
As Calvin says:
“Those who conceive of God in naked majesty have an idol, for God the Father wills to be known only in God the Son.”
And because the true God is not some vague, numinous transcendence onto which we can project our own prejudices and desires but is Jesus Christ, not one of us can pretend we don’t know what God wants and what God does not want.
In Jesus Christ we have received more of God’s will for our lives than any of us want to do.
It’s no wonder Jezebel’s false gospel still lands upon eager ears.
Orlando Ogushoney teaches the Apache language to students, kindergarten through fifth grade, at the Theodore Roosevelt School on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. Orlando grew up on the Rez. He went on to earn multiple degrees at UC-Berkley. He taught in large, august lecture halls and worked in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Two years ago he returned to the Rez to teach his native tongue for a meager wage.
On Wednesday evening, I sat with Orlando at a picnic table outside the girls dormitory where our mission team was lodging for the week. The tribal schools and dormitories were a realist, progressive invention of the federal government in the nineteenth century, designed to educate indigenous youth by killing the Indian in them. Sitting at the picnic table and waiting for dinner, Orlando pointed to the second floor of the dormitory and said:
“My grandmother was raped up there. Her sisters were too.”
I said nothing, wondering if it had happened in the room where I’d slept last night.
He pointed to the boys dorm at the end of a browned-out, neglected football field and he said:
“My grandfather was ripped from there and put in the Army to fight in World War II. At the time, he’d heard neither of the war nor of someone called President Roosevelt."
Again, I said nothing.
He gestured to Fort Apache all around us.
“This place is our home. But this place is also our Auschwitz, and, I’m sorry if I’m the one to break it to you, Christians like you— you are our Nazis.”
And he pointed again to the dormitory where I’d made my bed:
“This building is monument to murder and rape, death and despair.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, unsure what else I should say.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said and wagged his finger.
“Don’t be sorry. Be Christian.”
I just stared at him.
“We’re the people who were ground up underneath your Manifest Destiny. And all the colonizers who came to us came in the name of Christ. They still so come. All of my classes today, every one, K-5, watched you all out the classroom windows, to see what you were doing and to wonder what you might do.”
“Why?” I started to ask.
“They watched what you were doing because you’re not the first Christians to come here. Generations of Christians have come here. And pretty much all of them have done it wrong.”
“No pressure,” I said and laughed a nervous laugh.
Orlando didn’t laugh.
“With all respect, you American Christians have almost always brought division and despair and disempowerment. You’ve raped us and you’ve robbed us and you’ve wrecked the ties that bind us, stealing our children and our language and our culture. All too often, what you American Christians have offered us is a far cry from faith, hope, and love.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I replied.
“Not saying anything, just listening to people like me, is a good place to start,” Orlando said.
I nodded.
“I’m telling you all this so you will know that most American Christians who have come to this place have been more devoted to America than to Christ. I’m not a Christian, but if you’re going to work and witness in a place like this, then, for God’s sake, think about what you’re doing. Be here, do so as a follower of Jesus and nothing else. Be here as a follower of Jesus no one else."
I didn’t realize it in the moment. He had just told me to turn away from Jezebel. He had just asked me to hold fast to Christ and Christ alone.
Orlando is a teacher now. But I’m a preacher.
Which means—
I can’t leave you where he left me. I can’t leave you with a summons.
I must hand over the goods. I’ve got to give you a promise.
So hear the good news— well, actually, first hear the bad news:
The bad news is that if we were handed a course catalog for Christianity, then we would choose Jezebel as our teacher not Jesus.
Every semester we would choose her over him.
Every day we do.
Whether our politics are Red or Blue, every one us thinks we can mingle the blood of the cross with the stars and stripes.
This the bad, honest news about ourselves. Almost all American Christians are more American than Christian. Face it.
And hear the good news:
Christ’s offer of repentance and mercy extends even to Jezebel.1
And, just so, it extends to you too, Jezebel’s eager students.
So come to the table where bread and wine mix and mingle with no other additive allegiance. Come to the table. Take and receive your only Lord, body and blood. So having him is your best hope for holding fast to him.
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2.21
Christ Hold Fast