The passage: This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him so that he could show his servants what must soon happen; he sent and made it known through his angel to his servant John, who testified to the Word of God and to the witness of Jesus Christ and to everything he saw. Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it, because the time is near. John writes to the seven churches in Asia: may grace and peace come to you from him who is, and was, and is to come, and from the seven Spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of earthly kings. To him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and made us kings and priests to God his Father, be glory and power forever. Look, he is coming with clouds; every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So be it. “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,” says the Lord, who is, and was, and is to come, the Almighty.
Many people have tried to interpret this book, and one after another has failed; that is the general opinion among educated people. But I suspect that opinion is not broad enough. It ought to be extended from this one book of the Bible to all the books of the Bible, and from the books of the Bible to every book at all that contains truths worth seeking. Those who try to interpret fail; the writer turns out to have expressed thoughts they did not grasp or reach the depth of; then others come with their own rules and measures, overturn their predecessors, and are overturned in their turn. The same thing happens with the simplest Gospel as with the Apocalypse, and with a poem, whether Latin or English, as with the Gospel. Commentators have become a byword; nearly every reader imagines he has caught something in the author they discussed that they missed or twisted.
But perhaps every reader also discovers, sooner or later, that this or that commentator has helped him see something he did not see before. He discovers that he too has the ambition to fence his author in with rules and theories of his own making. He begins to suspect that each of us might help the next person if we were more childlike, more reverent toward the subject we study, and more willing to learn its laws rather than impose our own. The kind of criticism that is not a teacher looking down on a pupil, but a pupil looking up to a teacher, may after all have the most insight in it and bring the greatest reward. Everyone is qualified to practice that kind of criticism. Some will carry away more and some less, but each will be shown something that may make his mind clearer, his heart purer, and his actions more consistent.
1. The verses I have read to you speak of the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ the Son of God, which God gave to him. So the very opening of the book takes us at once beyond the book. What is revealed is not a doctrine—not anything that can be put into set terms—but a living Person. The letters do not make or give the Revelation; God gives it. We are not belittling the letter when we say this; we hold to the letter religiously. We contradict the book when we put it in the place of the One from whom it comes. In doing so we contradict the plain language, not only of the Apocalypse, but of the whole Bible.
2. How strictly I mean to follow the letter of this chapter, and of all the later chapters, you will see when I come to the next clause: “to show to his servants things which must shortly come to pass.” I would only be repeating myself if I stopped to weigh that clause here. The phrase “the time is at hand,” and several other phrases in this passage, will soon bring it to our attention.
3. “He sent and signified it.” The word “signified” is not a lazy word for which any number of equivalents would have done. As everyone admits, the Apocalypse is a book of signs. That is assumed to be one reason for its obscurity. We think that if we could only translate all the emblems into ordinary speech, we would understand it perfectly. But are we sure that signs and emblems, if they are chosen by God, may not be the best and simplest aids to grasping truths that would stay obscure if they were presented in what we call ordinary speech? Are signs not a common, human way of speaking, one that puzzles the learned man more than the peasant, precisely because the learned man is not in touch with the facts of life the way the peasant is? If the Revelation is really to be the revelation of a Person, may the signs not point to his actual presence, while abstract words could only express certain notions about him?
4. So in this book, as in all the earlier books of the Bible, God himself is presented as speaking to people through words or signs. Whatever methods or persons are used as the means of the revelation, he is the one who reveals. He removes the veil that keeps us from knowing what is close to us, or the veil over our hearts that keeps them from perceiving it. That must be kept in mind before we turn at all to secondary agents. Here one of them is said to be an angel: “he sent and signified it by his angel to his servant John.” I take this name, as most people would, to mean a messenger from another world. But I must remind you that it is also used for people living in this world, in every respect like their fellow human beings, committing sins and certain to die. And I must remind you that when it is used that way, the writer does not say, “Now I am using the word in a different sense than before.” He plainly wants us to feel that the sense is the same. He believes that whether or not mortal weaknesses are present, this does not disturb the basic fact that the ones he speaks of are messengers of God, receiving light from him and passing that light on to those he means it for. If there is anything spiritual in a human being, it must be able to receive such communications; if there is nothing spiritual in a human being, the Bible would never have been written—there would have been no need for such a book, and no possibility of one. But I think we shall learn from this book, more than from any earlier part of the Bible, how people’s dreams about an unseen world and its inhabitants are given substance, and how their thoughts about contact between that world and this may become, not fanciful and superstitious, but calm and orderly.
5. “He sent and signified it by his angel to his servant John.” Students have found it very hard to identify the writer of the Apocalypse with the writer of the Gospel and the Epistles. The earliest church historian hints at another John, to whom many have been willing to assign this book. The latest and most advanced school of German Rationalists has rejected that view. Those scholars credit the Apostle himself with the work, in which they can detect nothing but fierce Jewish prejudice and hostility to St. Paul. Yet they too, like those who look for another author, see the sharpest contrast between the Apocalypse and the Gospel. They date the Gospel to the second century. And suppose the heading of this book did not match its contents—suppose it were not a revelation of Jesus Christ the Son of God but only a collection of predictions about the future—then I do think it would take an overwhelming amount of external evidence to convince us that it could come from the man who wrote of the Light that gives light to every man coming into the world, who recorded the conversations with Nicodemus, with the woman of Samaria, and at the Feasts of Tabernacles and of Dedication. There is an enormous difference between the two books as long as we hold to the popular idea about the Gospel—an idea I do not think we can ever really forget, however much we force ourselves into believing the two books had a common origin. But if we assume the writer is able to define his own purpose, and if that purpose is visible through every vision and prophecy that follows, then I believe no one was more likely to write about the fall of Babylon or the New Jerusalem than the man who testified to “the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, and all the things that he saw.” There is a peculiarity in that description that a clever debater could never have reached. He might have referred to the Son of Thunder, or to the beloved Disciple. He might have referred to the Theologian who wrote about the Divine Word. But this one sentence combines the opposite qualities of the writings the Church has received as St. John’s. The writer of the fourth Gospel dwells more than the other evangelists on what is lofty and mysterious. He also sets out more than they do what is visible and tangible. He never separates the one from the other. In the plainest language he presents his Master’s plainest acts as manifestations of his eternal character and nature. Those two aims which commentators have found so hard to reconcile, and which have led them into the most contradictory theories about the fourth Gospel, are here blended with a childlike skill. How they are blended in the Apocalypse itself we shall see as we go on.
6. The next sentence: “Blessed is he that reads, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep the things written in it: for the time is at hand.” Writers who wanted to fix our attention on this book, and to overcome the listlessness or despair with which so many regard it, have quoted this blessing again and again. “Do we not have here a divine promise,” they ask, “that we shall be the better for undertaking this study? Should we not rely on that promise and hope for results, even if earlier students have been disappointed ever so often?” The argument is very strong in itself, but in many minds its force has been weakened by the clause that ends the verse. If a teacher of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth century could persuade his hearers that the “time” said to be at hand meant the year, the decade, or the half-century following the one in which he was speaking, he would have a good chance of engaging their thoughts, even if they were deeply absorbed in other pursuits. So this has been a common effort of interpreters: that date must belong to events that happened just before our own day; this one must point to events yet to come out of a not-distant future. But if the seventeenth-century commentator was not wrong in his forecast, then it occurs to the hearer or reader that the nineteenth-century commentator must be wrong in his. And if the seventeenth-century commentator was wrong, why should his successor be any luckier in his guess—or, at any rate, why should we give up certainties in order to find out whether he is? And there is always another, more serious suspicion behind these. Did the original writer not use words in their plain, natural sense? If he told the readers and hearers of his own day that the time was at hand, did he not mean them to understand that it really was at hand? Can he possibly have meant that what he states so definitely should be taken indefinitely? Can he have backed a divine promise with an assurance that events proved false—or with what, in an uninspired writer, we would call a pious fraud?
7. I confess, my brothers, that these questions seem to me deeply serious and even awful. I can find only one answer to them. I take the words in their most direct and straightforward sense. I believe that the time John wrote about was at hand when he wrote. I no more suppose him to have been mistaken about its nearness than I suppose him to have been a deliberate deceiver. Yet I do not admit that the promise is any less good for the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, because I hold that events happened in the first century that were of surpassing importance, that marked the end of an age, and that deserved to be described as the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Before I could hold that this passage is drained of any of its worth or reality for us because the revelation was made centuries ago, I would have to change the meaning of one of the words in it—or at least abandon the scriptural meaning of that word for a vulgar heathen one. St. John speaks of the words of this prophecy. If prophecy were merely an announcement of future events—if it had no more force than the Babylonian soothsayers and fortune-tellers gave it—then I would grant at once that once an event has happened, any prophecy about it is used up, except perhaps as evidence of the predictor’s accuracy. But the Jewish prophets, far from wanting to be lumped in with those soothsayers and fortune-tellers, regarded them with horror, and protested fiercely against those of their own people who imitated the soothsayers’ practices while daring to use the sacred phrases, “The burden of the Lord” or “The Lord has said.” Prophecy, as they used and understood it, is the utterance of the mind of him who is, and was, and is to come. Events, days of the Lord, crises in a nation’s history were manifestations of his everlasting mind and purpose. The seer was to explain the past and the present, and only in connection with those did he speak of the future. He told what curses people were bringing on themselves by breaking the laws that individuals and nations were created to obey. He told how the purposes of God’s will were unfolding in a steady progression despite all the resistance of human self-will. He told how they would go on moving forward until everything God intends for man, for the universe, and for his own glory has been accomplished. That is prophecy, if we take our idea of it from the books we accept as authoritative, and do not shrink and twist them to fit some notion we have picked up elsewhere. But if that is what prophecy is, why should a past event be any less powerful and meaningful for us than one still to come? If we can find an interpreter to tell us what it signifies, may that meaning not be of the deepest interest to one age after another? May each age not catch some glimpse of it that another missed? May it not link that glimpse with events it has itself experienced—events happening in God’s world, and so subject to the same law, the results of similar deeds, and heavy with results not unlike those the prophet spoke of? Surely there can be a blessing on the hearers and readers of his oracles, even though we believe those oracles were not ambiguous and that he never played with double meanings. Surely times may be at hand for people in every generation that make it deeply necessary for them to try to enter into the meaning of the times that were at hand in his generation. And surely, as an age—or as we sometimes call it, a dispensation of God—moves toward its completion, the need may grow greater, and greater too the hope that we shall be allowed to profit from past illuminations and past mistakes and confusions.
8. In trying to set out the idea of prophecy that I find in the earlier prophets of his nation, I have borrowed some words from the next passage in this chapter. At first you might treat that passage as merely a burst of devotion. But the more you reflect on it, the more, I believe, it will explain the whole purpose of the book. “John to the seven churches in Asia: grace and peace to you from him who is, and was, and is to come, and from the seven Spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and made us kings and priests to God his Father—to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen. Look, he is coming with clouds, and every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him. So be it. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord, who is, and was, and is to come, the Almighty.”
To these seven churches St. John declares the revelation God has made to him. It is the revelation of him who is, and was, and is to come; the revelation of him in his own perfect and absolute nature, as the source from which all the grace and peace ever known by any of his creatures, and all that can ever be known, has flowed. It is the revelation of that one Spirit—seven being the perfect number, the expression of unity within variety—who dwells in their churches, who gives them their distinct graces and gifts, who binds them into one: the Spirit of Grace and Peace. It is the revelation of Jesus Christ, who has these three titles and descriptions: (1) that he is the faithful and true Witness of the Eternal God—the one in whom the Spirit dwells without limit, the one who displays his Father as perfect Goodness, Truth, and Love; (2) that he is the firstborn from the dead, the Conqueror of man’s enemy, the Conqueror on behalf of the whole family of God; (3) that he is the Prince of all the kings of the earth, the actual Lord over men, to whom all must at last do homage. What he is, and what he has done for our race, cannot be set out in cold, dry statements. It can only be expressed in thanksgiving to him who has loved us with a love that is, and was, and is to come; to him whose love has shown itself in action and suffering; to him whose actions and sufferings have been for the deliverance of people from the sins that set them at war with him and with each other, and were the cause of their misery; to him who was not content merely to wash us from our sins in his own blood, but has made us kings under him—rulers over ourselves, rulers over the earth to which we are naturally slaves—and has made us priests under him, to offer holy sacrifices to God his Father. To him be glory and praise forever and ever.
9. I have called this the Revelation or Apocalypse. And I believe that as you go on studying the book, you will find it occupied throughout with that divine Name into which the Christian churches are baptized, in which all of us live and move and have our being. Such an Apocalypse must be meant for every age that was to follow, just as every age before it was preparing for it. The full revelation of this Name must be the Revelation of Revelations, the one that throws light on every other. But what about the words that follow? “Look, he is coming with clouds, and every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him.” Keeping to the order and the letter of the words, I cannot doubt they were meant to tell the seven churches how they should regard the dark events that were to happen in their own time—the time of a tremendous crisis in the Roman Empire, the time of the overthrow of the Jewish nation. In the dark clouds of that time they were to recognize the coming of the Son of Man. The Judge was there, acknowledged by every human conscience, acknowledged even by the consciences of those who had pierced him as a blasphemer and a criminal. The churches would be able to read these signs. They would know what luminous form stood behind the clouds, and would hear, in the mourning of the peoples of the earth, their crying out after the very King and Deliverer they had rejected and now trembled before.
10. I do not want to anticipate what may be said better on future occasions about these seven churches, or this awful Name, or this coming with clouds. I take these verses only as a series of pointers that the book is going to unfold. In that same light I receive the closing verse, which is repeated in the vision that follows. As some have thought, it may have been shifted here from that later place by accident. But we need to be reminded at the very start, and in many ways, of who the subject of the book is, so that we are never tempted to see in it only a scattering of rays of light with no center from which they came and to which they return. We need to be reminded that it is not enough to trace all things and all people back to their origin, unless we can also find the end for which they exist. We need to know that only a living person can be the Alpha and Omega, the starting-point of Creation and its final Rest.
I shall be glad if I can give you a few hints about this great book that will help your own reading of it. I am sure it will reward the study of the layman just as much as the priest; that it need not tempt him into any fantasies, but may deliver him from a great many; that God may use it to guide us through dark roads and tangled thickets where we are all likely to lose our way; and that it will become clear when we ask its help in practice rather than in speculation. The blessing on the one who hears and on those who read is one of those that will not pass away. May it come down richly upon us from him who is the Author of all blessings!