Two Burdensome Beasts

I would not have chosen Revelation as my summer study. 

My attitude has always been that we don’t really know who wrote it or why and, certainly, it was not written for twenty-first century readers. So why bother?

The last time I remember reading Revelation was in 1969. I was in college taking a course in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. A cursory understanding of Revelation was necessary to understand Yeats’ pessimistic poem, “The Second Coming.”

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Maybe you had to dwell in the psychedelic sixties and attend a conservative Christian college to feel the full impact of those images. Experts argue about what Yeats, an Irish Protestant, is saying. He seems to be asking what comes next now that two millennia of simple faith are being torn apart by science, the theory of evolution, democracy, and the breakdown of class systems. Obviously, Yeats was not optimistic.

Whenever I re-read this poem the image of the rough bast slouching toward Bethlehem haunts my unconscious mind.

But was John – whoever he was – any more optimistic? His beasts do not slouch. They explode off the page with perfect posture.

So who are the beasts of John?

Beats me.

I said as much when I posted on Facebook last week that I was preaching on Revelation 13 Sunday and prayed I would understand it before I stepped before the mic.

Immediately my Facebook friends leaped to my aid with a flurry of posts.

Alan, a learned scholar, warned me about the second beast with its famous mark, six hundred sixty-six.

“You can’t understand Revelation without assistance from two or three good commentaries,” he warned. “It isn’t self-explanatory.”

“On the other hand,” Alan re-posted, “(the beast) is obviously Donald Trump.”

But what does 666 mean?

My friend Doug, a Hebrew scholar, said, “My own interpretation is (the) numerical substitution in the Hebrew alphabet: W = 6, S = 60; QW = 600.”

That seems logical. But why?

My friend Vince also came to my rescue. Vince is a personal hero of mine because we started out in the same class at Eastern University but he dropped out. Nearly 50 years later he went back to Eastern to finish his baccalaureate degree: a daunting task for anyone of a certain age, namely, my age.

Vince quoted from Michael J. Gorman’s Reading Revelation Responsibly:

The most prominent theory is that (666) is the numerical value of "Nero Caesar." The Greek "Neron Kaisar," transliterated into Hebrew is "NRWNQSR." The numerical value of the Hebrew letters adds up to 666. In some manuscripts, the number is 616, relying on a transliteration of "Nero Kaiser" to "NRWQSR."

The Beast is the evil emperor Nero? That works. The infamous persecutor of Christians is certainly anti-Christian if not anti-Christ. Be that as it may, the term antichrist never appears in Revelation. It appears in first and second John. But this John – not necessarily the writer of Revelation – warns of many antichrists, which certainly muddies the theological waters. 

So perhaps the best advice I received was from my friend and former ecumenical colleague Kurt, a Lutheran layman and political activist in Iowa:

“If and when you get Revelation figured out … well, let’s just say you might be the first,” Kurt wrote.

He added his own explanation of John’s visions: “My personal theory: an early discovery of the use of LSD.”

The one clear reality of Revelation 13 is that it is, as Lutheran Seminary New Testament Professor Craig R. Koester points out, one of the most read, most discussed, and most debated parts of the book. There are thousands of theories about what it means, some logical, some insightful, some wacko. So it all comes down to this: it isn’t self explanatory, and maybe it is all a wild LSD trip on Mount Patmos.

As an amateur cartoonist I have spent some time trying to draw the strange creatures of Revelation: the lamb of God, the four horsemen, the two beasts of Revelation 13. That is why I like Professor Koester’s explanation so much:

The most helpful way to think about the word pictures in this passage is by comparing them to the word pictures used in political cartoons. In American media you find an elephant and donkey representing political parties, a bull and a bear representing the stock market trends.

Some of you may remember Herbert Block, the Washington Post cartoonist who drew under the name of Herblock.

Herblock had two notable characters: a benign Uncle Sam who represented good-will and peaceful aims in the world, and a snarling, unshaven, uni-browed atomic bomb representing danger and evil. For years readers said the uni-browed bomb scared the dickens out of them. The cartoons reminded readers to strive for peace over war, good over evil.

If we are able to untangle the knotted quagmire of theories, misinterpretations, psychedelic fantasies, and outright idiocies that obscure the meaning of Revelation we come down to this:

Two burdensome beasts who dare us to figure out who they are.

The beast from the sea representing the invincible powers of tyranny and in justice. 

And the lamb who sacrifices itself to demonstrate its power to destroy evil and free us from its icy grip.

The beast who vanquishes by tyrannical invincibility is conquered by gentle self-sacrifice and the power of the Creator God.

 Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. (Revelation 5:6)

Just as Herblock used cartoons to challenge readers to choose good over evil, John is using cartoon-like images to remind his readers who they are: people who cower beneath the forces of destruction or embrace the liberating power of the lamb.

“Now is the judgment of this world,” Jesus said. “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:31-32)

Amen.