Christ the Harvester

The adolescent me was terrified of God. I pictured God as an unstable, but surely perfect and unquestionable, being who functioned similarly to Sauron’s eye. I’ve written about this before. I imagined God casting his piercing gaze across the world, into my heart, and there, as if glimpsing Frodo from across the wasteland of Mordor, God zeroed in on the evils within. God saw my pride, lust, and envy, and was mad. And when God was mad, punishment followed. It didn’t all make sense to my young psyche, but I knew there was hellfire and eternity at stake. With fiery, lasting torment on the line, I knew I had better shape up and confess all the misdeeds and mistakes that I knew about, as well as the ones I may have done, and the ones that I had not done yet.

This territory runs near the theological thicket of atonement theology and the ways it filtered to my emerging self: I was a sinner. God was angry at sin and all sinners deserved eternal death. Jesus died for my sins, absorbed God’s anger and punishment, and saved me from it. There are more complex ways of articulating it, but the felt sense of an angry God for me was to be afraid of God and afraid of myself. God’s love flowed somewhere in the equation, but I didn’t feel it. It was subsumed in anger.

I’ve avoided the more troubling biblical texts of divine wrath and punishment for a long while. It brought up too much, and my associations with God as Sauron’s eye prevailed. Studying the book of Revelation, though, has me facing my avoidance of the most difficult biblical texts and, oddly enough, praying with them. I can’t fully explain it, even, except that I realized several years back that I wasn’t afraid of God anymore, and that I didn’t want to be afraid of the Bible, either. If I can watch The Last of Us and its fungi-induced apocalypse and resulting zombies, I can surely read the book of Revelation.

So, here we are, readers. We squarely sit in the wrath-filled, violent part of the book. John’s apocalyptic visions cycle in sevens. We have seen seven letters sent to churches in modern-day Turkey (Revelation 2-3), and seven trumpets that symbolized God’s battle cry against the Empire and injustice (Revelation 8-10). Chapter 15 will prepare us for the seven angels pouring seven bowls of wrath, resulting in the corresponding seven plagues. For background on the seven trumpets in relation to America’s gun violence epidemic, see this one:

Demonic Locusts and the Gun Lobby

Before the bowls of wrath are poured, though, John sees several angels and gives us a vision of harvesting. First, John pictures one like the “Son of Man” (stand-in image for Christ) with a sharp sickle in his hand used to collect crops from over the earth (Revelation 14:1, 16). The “Son of Man” reaps the harvest. I don’t know about you, but that’s always been another scary image for me, akin to the Grim Reaper wielding his blade. Christ, the Grim Reaper, or maybe a Harry Potter Death Eater. But harvest is a time of profound joy and celebration in agricultural societies. At the farms I’ve known even peripherally, the harvest is an all-volunteers-welcomed time of hard work, long days, abundance (on good years), and feasting. An occasion to drink tasty beer, try out an apple or pumpkin pie recipe, and swap stories with friends and neighbors. Christ the harvester is not at heart a scary image; it’s a joyful one of bringing all friendship, mercy, kindness, peace, and justice to fruition—finally!

Photo by Aleksey Oryshchenko on Unsplash

It’s understandable that we would be afraid, though, because the next thing John sees is a different being with another sickle, an angel who is harvesting grapes—and throwing the grapes “into the great winepress of the wrath of God” (14:20). Picturing God in a winepress is, on the one hand, a lovely, even joyful, image. A barefoot God stomps on grapes to make wine—a method of releasing grape juice before mechanical methods were available. But why does the potentially exuberant image of trampling in a winepress take such a terrifying turn, and why is it equated with God’s wrath?

Like many of its verses, this verse in Revelation reflects other metaphors from other books in the Hebrew Bible. In particular, John has in heart here a short prophetic book called Joel. In that brief, angry book, amid God rousing opposing armies’ soldiers and threatening holy war against enemies, Joel’s God says: “Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Go in, tread, for the wine press is full. The vats overflow, for their wickedness is great” (Joel 3:13). In the wine press, the Divine Warrior tramples foes in battle and stomps out injustice and evil (see, too Zechariah 10:5). But note here that, as in many places in the Hebrew Bible, God is doing the fighting—not the people. So, to place this troubling text in a hymn of a nation, say, as in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is a Christian nationalist total misuse: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

The following verse raises the violence further: “And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle.” That sounds like the third act of Ryan Coogler’s new movie “Sinners,” when the blood flows high and it’s all wooden stakes and silver bullets on deck for the battle against blood-sucking vampires! But on close examination, John is doing something fascinating with this verse, which he often does throughout Revelation: he’s undermining the violence of the Empire with the nonviolence of the Lamb/Jesus.

Here’s the logic, from an insightful, short commentary on Revelation by N.T. Wright: outside the city is a reference to “outside the city gate” in Hebrews 13:13, where Jesus is thought to have been crucified (“Let us go with him outside the camp/city gate, bearing the disgrace he bore.”) The grape trampling occurs “outside the city,” just as Jesus is crucified “outside the city.” A little later in Revelation, the Christ figure appears again, in a robe dipped in blood (19:13-16)—but it’s Christ’s blood, the Lamb’s blood. What are we to make of this?

God is angry, and blood is flowing, but it’s the blood of those killed by the Empire, not God. It’s the blood of the martyrs (Revelation 6:9-11), victims of Empire, the tortured and disappeared, the separated immigrant families, the Palestinian people suffering catastrophic violence and hunger—and it’s the blood of the Lamb-Christ himself. It’s the cup of wine that all Christians who dare follow the nonviolent Jesus are invited, no, called, to drink, “the cup of the new covenant” (Luke 22:20).

God’s wrath is still there for us to reckon with. It’s wrath against the Empire, against injustice and violence, against the abuse of power, deportations, cruelty, violence, and lies that took place in John’s time, and that are taking place in our time. And still, the psychological impact of an angry God lingers for me and many. So, is there something more complex going on in the Bible’s treatment of God’s anger than Sauron’s eye glaring at my soul? To be continued…