I spent the week trying to keep an emotional distance from the horrific news of the Ulvade shooting. The horrific shock of more kids killed by guns in the United States hung in my psyche along with the hard truth of not being shocked at all. This is what happens in the United States, it seems, where we collectively give our allegiance to guns rather than each other or a common good.
To grapple with that paradox as a parent of young children, and as a Christian, seemed overwhelming and I did not feel up to the task. I still don’t, really. I don’t envy those in pulpits these days, either; trying to speak a meaningful word connecting our world to the Biblical Word is no small task.
At the same time, I’ve been sitting this month in reading and prayer with profoundly disturbing images from Revelation chapters 8 and 9: trumpets are blown, plagues are issued; woes are cast; and a great and fearsome abyss from the underworld is opened, giving rise to terrifying, demonic locusts. Crazy, right?! What are we to do with such passages? Why even read them at all?
But the more I’ve been reflecting on the week’s news, and the more I’ve lingered with Revelation’s plagues, the more I’m convinced that Revelation is made for our time, and every time that evil seems to be overtaking the world. Because the genius of apocalyptic literature in the Bible is that it gives us a symbolic myth to describe the evil and the oppression that is happening to us and all around us. Apocalyptic myths “unveil” the hidden or obfuscated truth.
In other words, to describe what is happening in the United States only in the realm of policy is not enough, even though, as many have pointed out, the political solutions to solving our crisis would seem simple: put bans on guns, as other countries have done. But then, if the solution was so simple, we already would have done it.
Something more is going on than policy disagreements in the nexus of Washington’s political impasses, the stranglehold that the National Rifle Association (NRA) has on Republican legislators, and the aggressive and determined way that many Americans now believe it’s their “God-given right” to carry firearms. To attempt to describe our phenomenon takes more than analysis. It takes what the Bible might call “discernment of spirits”: the ability to name collective evil, and a symbolic language and mythology large enough to face such evil and not be crushed. The book of Revelation provides this because what are we as a people if not collectively possessed?
I’m going to use some spiritual language here and in following posts about demons, angels, and beasts that is not often used in mainline Christianity, but which, if we are to traverse the book of Revelation, is unavoidable. But to bring in the language of “demonic” is not to overly spiritualize the matter. I’ve been influenced by the pioneering work of activist-theologian Walter Wink, who understood demons to be the actual, interior spiritualities of systems. So, Nazism’s demonic realities, he says, were not disembodied beings floating in the air like in Frank Peretti novels (if you grew up reading them, you know what I mean); they were inherently connected to the political shape of “Hitler Youth, the SS, the Gestapo, the cooperation of the churches, the ideology of Aryan racial purity, and the revival of Norse mythology. The demonic was the interiority of the German state made into an idol” (page 54, Unmasking the Powers).
Systems have spirits. The gun system in the United States has a spirit, and it is evil.
Just listen to this assessment from a former gun company executive, quoted in Jim Wallis’s Substack God’s Politics:
Last week’s Buffalo murders are the byproduct of a gun industry business model designed to profit from increasing hatred, fear, and conspiracy. How do I know? Because for years I was a senior executive in the firearms industry. . . Sadly, there is nothing broken about what we’re experiencing. . . The system is working exactly as intended. We are all now living, and dying, with the consequences.
When the system that is working exactly as intended is not serving life, but instead is slaughtering people, it has taken on what I view as a demonic identity and presence. It serves death.
Note that the language of the demonic should not be used only in an individualistic way. That’s easy to do, especially when confronted with individuals who have committed heinous acts. The mass shooter at Robb Elementary School was surely possessed by evil, as are all mass shooters. But it is far too easy to focus only on the individual evil by pointing to mental health concerns, or through calls for prayer, thereby leaving the systemic evil unnamed, unseen, and un-exorcised. To exorcise the demon of gun violence in the United States will require naming and confronting the systemic powers that possess such shooters in the first place: the NRA and the gun lobby, the manufacturers, and the politicians who take their money.
It would also require resistance to the culture of mass consumption and distraction that encourages us to turn a numb or despairing eye to evil. And then to challenge such evil typically takes incredible courage, spiritual imagination, political will, and a nonviolent mass social movement. Wink suggests, for example, “the march across the Selma bridge by black civil rights advocates was an act of exorcism. It exposed the demon of racism, stripping away the screen of legality and custom for the entire world to see” (64, Unmasking the Powers). That’s what apocalyptic vision does. It unveils evil.
Check out this powerful image of Christ breaking a rifle, by Otto Pankok.
Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets made ready to blow them. –Revelation 8:6
On to Revelation. As I’ve said before, we’re about knee-deep in the vision cycles of Revelation, all having to do with the heavenly number seven: seven letters to seven congregations, seven seals opened by the Lamb of God, seven trumpets blown, and later, seven bowls of wrath poured out. One reason that the book is so confusing is that we’re reading vision sequence after vision sequence. John of Patmos is a troubled mystic sharing his visions with us—and he’s not telling us what they mean. He just leaves them with us to ponder, pray, fear, and hopefully, respond with transformed lives that anticipate a renewed world. Additionally, the commentators I’m following believe that the sequences of seven visions are all different vantage points of the same visionary event. That’s why I said in last month’s post that if we are moving in chronological time, the book takes up very minimal space. But that’s because we’re in visionary time.
Seven angels are blowing seven trumpets, which are sounding an attack on the Empire, symbolized later in the book as Babylon. Each trumpet blast is followed by devastations that directly mirror portions of the Exodus plagues, so John is consciously linking the Israelites’ enslavement by the Egyptian Empire with the persecutions, violence, and economic oppression of John’s community under the Roman Empire. Both empires are evil to John, which means that the book of Revelation specifically unveils systemic, imperial evil.
Here's a little more on the trumpet blasts: they were not musical instruments but, Bruce Malina points out, “instruments to signal power” (quoted in Howard Brook and Gwynther, Unveiling Empire, 143). If you grew up with the Bible like I did, you might remember Joshua, the battle of Jericho, and the walls that came crumbling down after the blowing of trumpets. Trumpets are a battle cry. And after the first trumpet blast by the angel, a plague of hail and fire is let loose, similar to the Exodus plague of hail (Exodus 9:22-26). The God John believes in is on the side of the oppressed and assails the Empire through plagues. Here’s South African liberation theologian Allan Boesak:
It is true: the Pharaoh of Rome is the Pharoah of Egypt. But it is also true: the God of the exodus is the God of Jesus Christ. Each plague is God’s challenge to the power of the Caesar. Each trumpet blast is a ringing command from the Liberator God: “Let my people go!” (Comfort and Protest, 76).
It doesn’t make John’s imagery any less violent, but it’s important to consider when reading this material that 1) it’s a vision and not literal; 2) that John is writing from the perspective of the oppressed and; 3) that he’s using symbolic and disturbing language to name and confront systemic evil.
Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the scorpions of the earth. . . In appearance, the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold.” —Revelation 9:7
After the fifth trumpet blast, things begin to get really weird. The angel is given a key to the underworld, opens it, and we receive a full-on graphic vision of destructive evil in the form of demonic locusts. I know! Smoke pours out from the furnace-like abyss. In a reversal of the smoke accompanying God’s presence at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:18), the smoke now is a prelude to evil. It’s horror movie material. I even google-searched “horror movies with insects,” which prompted a long line of almost-certainly terrible movies to come up (although I do want to see Bug with Michael Shannon, well, because I just love Michael Shannon and think he’s brilliant.)
I haven’t been able to get these locusts out of my mind. If you think you can stomach reading it directly in Revelation, I encourage you to do so. Not for devotional depth, but for symbolic representation of evil. There’s even a demon of the underworld with a scary monster name: Abaddon in Hebrew; Apollyon in Greek (9:11). Either way, his name means Destruction.
Image credit: Wikimedia
For ancient, agriculturally based Middle Eastern people, a swarm of locusts would have meant the devastating eradication of entire crops. In addition to being a plague God sends against Egypt (Exodus 10:13-15), an army of locusts is a recurring image in the prophetic books for coming destruction: “what the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 1:4). One Bible dictionary says that “as the swarm of locusts moves across the land, it devours all vegetation, high and low.” In Revelation, these locusts are intensified and given evil properties fit for battle, such as the capacity to wield pain against humans (scorpion tails), scales like armor, teeth like lion’s teeth, and so on (Revelation 9:7-11).
A plague of locusts is not a modern image that makes much sense for destruction—or is it? Check out this shocking scene from Apocalypse Now, in which U.S. military helicopters fill the sky (thanks to this book for the association, trigger warning: images of war and systemic evil enacted).
How about you? What might the locusts symbolize for us in our time, today? If not locusts, what symbols capture the evil being unleashed in the United States right now through the systemic power of the NRA and the gun lobby? And what might the God of liberation and love call us to do about it?