The passage: John, calling himself the brother and companion of his readers in suffering and in the kingdom and endurance of Jesus Christ, was exiled on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and his testimony to Jesus. On the Lord’s day he was in the Spirit and heard behind him a loud voice like a trumpet, calling itself the first and the last, telling him to write what he sees in a book and send it to the seven Churches of Asia — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. Turning to see the voice, he saw seven golden candlesticks, and among them one like a Son of Man, in a long robe with a golden band across his chest. His head and hair were white as wool and snow, his eyes like flame, his feet like glowing brass, his voice like the roar of many waters. He held seven stars in his right hand, a sharp two-edged sword came from his mouth, and his face shone like the sun. John fell at his feet as if dead, but the figure laid his right hand on him and told him not to fear, for he is the first and the last, the one who died and now lives forever, holding the keys of death and the grave. He was told to write what he had seen, what is, and what will be; and it was explained that the seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches, and the seven candlesticks are the seven Churches themselves.
Whether or not we accept the common view that St. John had already outlived his fellow Apostles, the way he begins this passage is very striking. He usually lived at Ephesus, among the Christians of Asia Minor, who afterwards turned to him with the deepest reverence as the last living keeper of Christ’s own words. Yet he calls himself “your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ.” He makes no claim to apostolic authority, to his great traditions, or to any difference between himself and those he addresses. He is simply one of them, their fellow-worker and fellow-sufferer.
I do not point this out in order to draw any conclusion about the special humility of this divine teacher. It seems to me that St. Paul was just as humble when he was strongly asserting his claim to be an Apostle and denouncing the Judaisers who tried to rank him below the original twelve. Asserting oneself can be as much a duty as belittling oneself; both are wrong only insofar as they are the least bit put on; and one may spring from as deep a sense of personal weakness as the other. They may have the same source and, in different circumstances, lead to the same end. If St. Paul had held back from proclaiming his apostolic title and character, he would have given ground for the conclusion that his Lord, once he was no longer visible, had stopped governing his Church and stopped calling men to his work. The man who said he did not trust in clever words when he declared God’s testimony would in fact have been trusting in that cleverness rather than in his calling and in the Spirit that helped his weakness. If St. John had told the Churches of Asia Minor about the voice that once bade him leave his father’s nets, he might have led them to think that voice was now silent, or unable to reach them. If he had spoken of his apostolic commission or his special place among the Apostles, he might have made them think that when he left the world they would be stripped of the divine Presence, and only an oral or written memory of it would remain. But the lesson he was appointed to teach his own generation, and all later ones, was exactly the opposite; and so it was fitting that he should describe himself not by titles that set him apart from other men, but as their brother and companion.
1. He tells us he was an exile on the island of Patmos. Whether the local authorities of Ephesus sent him there, or whether it was a formal deportation ordered by the Emperor, his words do not tell us. Nor does this passage help settle the debated question whether his banishment happened as early as the reign of Claudius, as late as the reign of Domitian, or somewhere in between. On the cause of his banishment he sheds more light. Most of St. Paul’s persecutions were stirred up by Jews; the two notable exceptions were at Philippi, where he angered those who traded in magic, and at Ephesus, where a true instinct led Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen to see that he was harming their business, even though he had not attacked their goddess. But the charge the Jews used to stir up the mob at Thessalonica was in the end the effective one: that these men act against the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another King, one Jesus. That charge could not be permanently effective until it was joined to the one on which the rulers of the Sanhedrin had convicted our Lord of blasphemy: that he makes himself the Son of God. When St. John proclaimed the Word of God, who existed before all worlds, who had become flesh and lived among men, who is King of kings and Lord of lords, he struck a blow at both the worship and the political order of the Roman Empire. He set the God-man against the man-God. The best emperors, who tried to hide the rotten foundation of their power under respect for law, acts of mercy, and philosophy, had as much reason to hate this testimony as the worst emperors, who openly embodied the false principle in themselves.
2. St. John does not tell us what he mostly looked at on that island, or what sounds beyond the roar of the Aegean reached him from the outer world. He says that on the Lord’s day, the day of the Resurrection, he “was in the Spirit” — withdrawn from the things the senses register, seeking his eternal and real home. Then a voice came to his heart, a voice like a trumpet loud enough to wake the dead, saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.” Like the name “I AM,” spoken centuries before to the shepherd in the desert, this was a witness to him that there is a living, personal ground of all things, which existed before temples, cities, earth, sea, and sky, and which will last whatever becomes of them. And like the message to Moses, it was not for himself alone: “What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches of Asia.” Those Churches were to learn what their own existence meant, what they had to do, and how they stood in relation to him who is the First and the Last.
3. “And I turned to see the voice that spake with me.” The voice comes from no created thing around me. It is not the echo of my own thoughts. It comes as a command to my spirit from the Ruler of my spirit.
4. “And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks.” Our first thought is that we are now entering a region of symbols. Are not these candlesticks like the one of pure gold that Moses was told to place in the Tabernacle, or like the somewhat different one that Solomon had made when he built a house for the Lord God of Israel? Certainly they are like these; and the Apostle loves them for the resemblance; they were meant to remind both Israelites and non-Israelites within the Church of a sacred past, of a worship that was soon to end. But, as we shall soon see, they were also meant to lift them out of symbols, to turn the signs into what they signify, and to show them among what practical realities they were actually living. No stronger testimony could be given, I think, than is given here — that symbols will always have a worth for human beings, but that the world’s infancy was over, that now the truths were to throw light on the parables rather than the parables on the truths, and that men were now to study the visions of an earlier day by the revelations of this later one.
5. For “in the midst of the seven candlesticks was one like unto the Son of Man.” That the candlestick pointed to the giving of light; that the light had to be spread out yet remain one; that it stood in the Tabernacle to signify him who was worshipped there as the Source of Light, and the worshippers as the instruments of spreading it abroad — this lesson needed no cleverness to draw out, and must have reached many hearts that would never have grasped it if put into words. But the more deeply it went home, the more questions it will have raised. Only those on whom it made no impression could be content simply to look at the candlestick or to hear the Scribe’s explanation of it. “How can this light reach me? How can I show it forth? Is it really a light for all Israel? Is all Israel to be a lamp to mankind? How can this be, when we are so often servants of darkness? And does God really want his light to go out everywhere? Isn’t it meant to be kept within his chosen people?” Such thoughts the symbol will have awakened in those in whom it did its work. Nothing they saw satisfied them. It drove them to seek for light, and those who sought found more than they dreamed of, though never enough. They found more and more signs of a Light near them, of a Light that lightens every man. They rejoiced in what was given. But they waited to hear that what they felt must be true really was true — that God’s Light was indeed man’s Light, that there was One in whom all the scattered rays of light were gathered up, from whom they could be received, and by whose power they could be spread abroad.
To see the Son of Man walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks was at once to declare that these candlesticks had a real meaning, and that their meaning was no longer merely Jewish and limited. They were no longer part of the furniture of the Tabernacle or the Temple. The one candlestick, with its six branches and its ten, had been lit long enough in Jerusalem. That flame had burned itself out. He who had kindled it as a witness of himself and his own presence with men was now truly present. It was the Son of Man himself, and not some substitute for him, no mere formal image of him, who was giving light to the sons of men.
6. Such a revelation must have been exactly what a Jew needed for comfort, if he mourned bitterly over the present state of his people and dreaded their still darker future; and it was exactly what he would have wished everyone to share. But it would have been very incomplete if only the golden candlestick in the Jewish Temple had been given its true meaning and raised to its highest power. In the worship of that Temple, things were not the most important part; the persons who ministered were far more sacred. What was even the holy of holies itself compared with the high priest who entered it once a year?
It is this high priest who is at once brought to mind by the first part of the description of the Son of Man. He was “clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.” There can be no doubt this is priestly clothing. Enough is said to show that the Son of Man claims and fulfills the office once given to the children of Aaron: that he blesses the people in God’s name, and stands as their Representative before his Father. The Alpha and Omega takes the place of the man whose work was nearly over, who had ceased to be any witness for God or for man, and had become rather a barrier between them.
But the seer moves quickly from the priest’s clothing, from what is merely official, to the person himself. “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow.” What St. John had glimpsed for a few moments on Mount Tabor, when the face of the Man of Sorrows shone like the sun and his clothing became white as light, was now shown to him as a lasting glory. “His eyes were as a flame of fire” — looking into the heart and spirit, exposing whatever is false, and burning it away with their love. The feet bear the marks of endurance and suffering. They have walked over the earth and been scorched and made holy by it. They are “like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace.” The roar of the sea is in the ears of the lonely man on Patmos; its strange and varied notes are blended in the voice of the Son of Man, which is “as the sound of many waters.”
8. From the robes that mark the priest we have passed to the form of the Divine Man — a form expressing purity, struggle, victory, and calm reconciling power, but never suggesting mere qualities or attributes apart from a Person in whom they live. Then we return to where we began. This Son of Man is walking among the candlesticks; he is the center of light. It is a heavenly light, not belonging to earth, though reaching into the farthest corners of the earth. The light is no longer in the Tabernacle or the Temple. “He had in his right hand seven stars.” The Persian who worships the night, the Greek who worships Apollo, may still see in the forms of nature the witnesses of the true King. “And out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.” The forms of nature, beautiful and true as they are, must bow to the word that speaks to man. Out of his mouth comes that which separates soul from spirit, joints from marrow, that which divides the good from the evil, the false from the true. How essential this feature is to the picture of the Son of Man we shall feel more and more. Its effect, joined to the former, is to turn the images of night into images of day. The stars were in his hand, but his “countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.”
9. “And when I saw him I fell at his feet as dead.” Years of dwelling on the Son of Man had not lessened the old disciple’s awe, but deepened it. Mere power does not make him tremble. But before the form of Divine Goodness, before eyes that are like flame, he is as weak as a child. Even lesser revelations must be moments of terror. The first glimpse of a discovery in nature, though it sometimes brings the cry “I have found it!,” as often crushes the one to whom it comes with a sense of his own smallness and a wonder at what may lie behind it. To be assured that he stood before Him who is the First and the Last — was that not enough to make this poor exile, though the most favored of the Apostles, fall at his feet as if dead?
10. And what words raise him up? Are they, “Do not fear; I am he whom you knew at Cana or on Tabor; I am he who placed you nearest to myself”? No — but, “Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” It could not comfort or revive St. John to be told what had been done for him, how he had been singled out from the rest of his people. What did restore him was the assurance that the face he could not bear to look upon was the face of One who had been under the power of that death and that grave appointed for every criminal as much as for every apostle, and who had risen as the Conqueror of them, and Conqueror for men. Yes — to hear these words ringing in his ears, “I have the keys of hell and of death,” the keys of all he fears, of all that man fears, of all that sin has made him fear; to be convinced that these are the words of the Son of Man — this must be a comfort to every apostle and martyr such as no thought of his own life, or witness, or approaching death could ever give. When all such memories are drowned in the memory of evils done and evils present; when death and hell seem as if they might be deeper abysses for him than for any poor outcast who never thought of them at all — then this trust in One who has plunged into those depths because he is the Son of Man, and has found something deeper than they, and holds the keys of that kingdom as well as of heaven’s — this message meets him as fully satisfying, precisely because it overturns every selfish confidence and forces him to rest on the Redeemer and King and Lover of the universe.
11. And because this is so, he is raised up to do a work for his fellow men; and only by doing it will he be able to keep hold of his own trust. “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.” What he has seen are not private illuminations for himself. They are facts that concern all men — the principles of human life and fellowship. The Son of Man is not walking among the candlesticks only at that one moment. He is always doing so. St. John must write of the things that were, in order to write of the things that would be hereafter. He can serve as an interpreter to lands he never saw, and to times of trouble that would come after he had gone to his rest, only by faithfully interpreting the situation of the people closest to him, of those who were his contemporaries and companions.
12. And how is he to carry out this task? He is told at once to strip the veil from those outward images he had been looking at, the very images that seemed as if they were to take the place of the images of the older dispensation. But those images are not to replace the old ones; the things the images represent are to replace them. The mystery, the inner meaning, of the candlesticks and the seven stars is to be declared: “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.” And so this verse follows naturally from the one before. The prophet is to write things he has seen, and that are, and that shall be hereafter. He has seen the candlesticks, and the One holding the stars in his right hand. These Churches existed then, and were to exist afterwards. They were then distinct from one another, each under its own minister. Each minister was an angel or messenger of God. Though distinct, they formed one whole. There was one Church among many Churches. The whole body was sent into the world to spread light through it. Each separate body was to spread light over a sphere of its own. Each minister was to be a star of light to the body he served. Each was to understand that his light came not from himself but from the Center of light. Each would fail in his office if, under one temptation or another, he forgot this condition of his very existence. And each, by failing in his office, would harm the society he was meant to enlighten, infecting it with his own evil. These things were. The future would be shaped by the present; in principle they would be the same. These Churches were formed not for a day or a year, but for an ever-renewing life. They were to last on even as one star after another vanished, because the Son of Man was walking among them. The Church would endure even though particular Churches ceased to exist, because the Son of Man was in the midst of it. If all of them perished, he would not perish. These were not revelations for the apostolic age only; this revelation was especially meant to prepare the way for the ending of that age, so that no one might suppose the Church depended for its stability or life on those who had been its first pillars, and so that no one might suppose any single one of them was its center. The mystery of the seven candlesticks and the seven stars, then, is a mystery that the struggles of that time were to unfold, and that the struggles of all later generations were to make clearer. By the sins of particular angels or ministers, by the sins of one Church or another, no less than by the light one or another was able to spread, every aspect of this mystery would be brought into fuller view. More and more it would be seen that a Church which does not spread light must increase darkness, and gather darkness into itself. More and more it would be known what temptation each Church has to become a servant of darkness, and how great that darkness is. More and more it would be seen what judgments rouse Churches from their sleep, and what the signs of their doom are.
13. This is only part, and a small part, of the Revelation. But if we open our hearts to receive it, many of the doubts that trouble us in the later parts of the book will be cleared away. We shall be far less tormented by the question, “If these words concerned Jerusalem or Rome in the days of Galba or Vespasian, how can they concern London in the days of Queen Victoria?” The mystery of the seven golden candlesticks must apply to both if it applies to either. If Churches still exist; if the Bible is the book from which we are to learn why they exist, how they may serve that end, and by what sins they may frustrate it — then we need not doubt that we shall find just as many lessons about Medieval Churches and Reformed Churches, about how particular Churches relate to the Catholic Church, and about the domination of Emperors and Popes, as the commentators have worked out who have twisted the whole Apocalypse into a testimony about such things. We shall find these lessons, not by changing present tenses into future ones, but by noticing that the present tenses are tenses of continuance — that the principles worked out at one moment must govern every moment that follows. We shall find them when we are not looking for them; they will press upon us most strongly when we are least trying to make them fit historical events, or historical events fit them. Above all, we shall understand them best, and be most able to use them to link different events and ages in the story of mankind, when we let them bear most directly upon ourselves.
Primitive Churches, Medieval Churches, Continental Churches, seats of Papacy and of Empire — yes, it is good to know what we can of them. But are not you a Church, a body of people from whom light is meant to go out? Does it go out from you? Are there not ministers in the Church of England? Will not the Son of Man, who walks among the candlesticks, ask each of them: “Are you uttering your own dreary, secondhand commonplaces? Are you pouring out your own dreams and speculations? Are you strutting your little hour like an actor on a stage, or the oracle of some school? Or do you care to be a messenger of My purpose, a star in My right hand?”