Kindoms Becoming

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.” —Revelation 11:15

Hi everyone, it’s been a little while. March weekends disappeared while I attended kid basketball tournaments, and here we are, continuing our foray into the wild of apocalyptic, biblical territory.

This verse from Revelation has been circling through my mind, heart, and imagination for about a month. It does have a sonorous ring to it, made melodically famous by Handel’s Messiah, but that’s not the real reason it’s lingering for me. What the verse captures, in one proclamation, is nothing less than the path of transformation itself. The realms and realities against Love (kingdoms of the world) have given way so that Love is all that exists (kingdom of our Lord). Or, as John Lennon aptly put it, “All you need is love.”

But the movement of “becoming” is decidedly not a smooth ride. Love might be all we need, but to make it through the peaks and valleys of the day-to-day—not to mention the global crises of climate catastrophe, economic rapaciousness, and so on that we face—such love must be, as preacher-teacher Jacqui Lewis says, “fierce love.” The message of Revelation, I think, is that the kingdom of the world does not become the kingdom of our Lord without confrontation.

And so the book of Revelation is about a confrontation of power—the empire and its oppressive impact on one hand and the nonviolent way of Jesus on the other. To be sure, there’s plenty of cringing “No, God didn’t!” and “Oh, man, I wish that part weren’t in there.” Because of Revelation’s horror/sci-fi mash-up, as I’ve written about often, it’s easy to ignore Revelation’s insights completely, or take them literally and thus reinforce toxic images of a violent and abusive God. If you’ve been reading these posts over the last couple of years, I hope I’ve convinced you that there might be wisdom amidst the perplexity of Revelation’s shocking imagery and visions. It shows us the stakes of love, which unavoidably must take its own powerful stand. Growth in love, after all, is not easy. It takes a lifetime and all of our strength.

To put the verse in its context, it’s important to crack open a dusty Bible to Revelation 11 and see the music lyrics lined out on the page. This victorious proclamation—the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of God—comes after a seventh angel blows a seventh trumpet and is followed by twenty-four heavenly elders joining in a hymn sing. (Revelation features vision cycles of seven; check out this post for a reminder of this repetitive scene). In other words, it’s worship. It’s musical. And it’s confrontational: “We give you thanks, Lord God … for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.… [It’s] the time for … destroying those who destroy the earth” (11:16–18).

I don’t believe the God of Revelation actually takes destructive matters into Divine hands. Some do, but I can’t go there. This is ancient Jewish, sci-fi horror, after all, and I just don’t think we’re meant to take any of this literally or read such a work in a way that contradicts the loving witness of Jesus. Instead, this ancient graphic novel gives us hope that when love, justice, and wholeness arrive, the climate polluters and the authoritarian, power-hungry have nowhere to hide. (And by the way, a dear friend sent me a Harvard Divinity School student’s brilliantly creative thesis on Revelation that captures this exact sentiment.)

Biblical theologian Brian Blount puts Revelation’s hymns in cultural context and calls them “Raps against Rome”: “Like rap, Revelation is a dangerous blend of memorable music and recalcitrant rhetoric. But, like the spirituals, Revelation never gives up hope. Its liturgical hymns witness to the promise that God is relieving Rome of its historical command. Right now.” (Can I Get a Witness?, page 103). So, that’s what is happening when the “kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God.” Hip-hop icon 2Pac takes on the racist prison-industrial complex, rhyming that “It ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact / The penitentiary’s packed, and it’s filled with blacks” and Revelation raps that “You (God) have taken your great power (from Rome) and begun to reign” (11:18). We can’t necessarily call this a peaceful transfer of power, due to its overly colorful language, shock art, and the shaking of foundations it ushers in. But it is a nonviolent, revolutionary upheaval in which love wins through fire.

Revelation gives us plenty of fire through which to walk. But instead of avoiding the upcoming flames in the latter half of Revelation, let’s walk through them to see what lies on the other side. Sure, I’m scared of fire, but that’s what makes it a such powerful symbol. And fire has been grossly misused to signal torment instead of the transformational metaphor that it is. Biblical fire, I’m convinced, is instead the mythical, threshold process of “the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of God.” In an article for this publication, I wrote about fire and the idea of “thresholds”:

Fire is the painful part of transformation. The Celtic poet and author John O’Donohue points out that the word “threshold” is etymologically related to threshing, which is what farmers do when they separate grain from chaff. John the Baptizer predicted this would be indicative of Jesus’ way when he envisioned Jesus holding a winnowing fork in his hand at the threshing floor (Matthew 3:12). Christians turned the image into hell’s torment and thus missed the metaphor: Entering a liminal threshold involves threshing, or a necessary stripping down. As O’Donohue says, “threshold is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.”

The kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of God is cataclysmic and cosmic—Revelation’s visions unfurl from heaven’s throne room, after all—but this kin-dom becoming (more helpful to drop the “g” and move beyond the royal hierarchy, in my opinion)—is also an intimate invitation to a threshold that singes hearts that are ready.

To take a memorable image of “becoming” from Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila’s mystical classic Interior Castle, transformation in God is like a silkworm becoming a butterfly. I’m no biologist, not be a long stretch, but Teresa understands the silkworm’s life cycle as a death and resurrection pattern akin to the paschal mystery of Christ, which then mirrors the transformation pattern for us all. The silkworm eats mulberry leaves, spins a cocoon, and is reborn as a moth. But in spinning silk, the silkworm also “build[s] the house wherein it will die.” Then she adds, “I would like to point out here that this house is Christ. Somewhere, it seems to me, I have read or heard that our life is hidden in Christ or in God” (Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, dwelling 5.2-5.4). Teresa says it much more gently with her earthy imagery than John of Patmos’s fiery visions. They are, of course, profoundly different writers; yet they both call for wholesale growth into newness that inevitably involves the death of the old.

Revelation begins with John writing to individual households of God, encouraging them in their witness. Revelation ends—we’re still a long way off there, yet—with a city filled, not hidden, with Christ. Call me crazy, but I can’t help but think of John’s wild visions as the cocooning stage in which all the kindoms dying and rising and becoming take place.

As always, I love hearing from you. I hope you’ve been well.