The Dragon and the Myth of Redemptive Violence
It’s a terrifying time to read the book of Revelation. Given the brutal Hamas attacks in Israel, and the horrific war Israel is waging in Gaza, there are plenty of folks expecting the end times. It’s long been a staple belief of so-called “Christian Zionism” that the state of Israel’s military conquest, along with reclaiming the land parameters described in the Bible, plays a key role in God’s final-days salvation plan. I hope I’ve convinced readers that that is the wrong and disastrous way to read Revelation (not to mention the rest of the Bible).
Apocalypse as a genre, I’m convinced, is intended to describe not prescribe crises. It unveils hidden realities that parallel and shine light upon our own, similar to fantasy, sci-fi books and even horror films. We need the symbolic language of the fantastical—dragons, beasts, abysses, horsemen, and the rest—to help us grapple with systemic evil, suffering, oppression, and violence.
The tricky part is that throughout Christian history Revelation’s apocalyptic violence has been abused and misused. All people on all sides of many conflicts have to do to paint the enemy as incarnate evil is associate the other group with Satan (pictured below in Revelation as a dragon). The early church often accused heretics of being in league with Satan himself. Protestant Martin Luther basically called everyone who didn’t agree (Catholics, Jews, and more) with him “agents of Satan.” Puritans called Native Americans Satan worshippers, and so on. It’s dangerous to read Revelation in times of crisis, because one person’s angel is another person’s devil.
And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back. –Revelation 12:7
Let’s start with the obvious: there are dragons in the bible which I, for one, think is awesome. Dragons made cultural waves when Daenarys Targaryen from Game of Thrones rode Drogon into battle, but dragons have been around for centuries upon centuries, sitting atop their treasures, hiding out in caves, or dwelling under the sea in “dragon palaces.” We might be familiar with Smaug from The Hobbit, but we sometimes forget that the Bible contains monsters. It carries the possibility of speaking sacred truth to people’s lives, but only if we know how to read different genres. As author-speaker Rob Bell has written: “We need to read the Bible literately, not literally.”
There’s a conflation in Revelation 12 between the dragon and another familiar so-called beast—the serpent. “The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan.” –Revelation 12:9. It turns out that the English word dragon comes from the Greek word drakon, which means serpent. Before dragons became stuffed, hoarding, fire-breathing creatures in folklore and fantasy, they were first snakes. Many of us, I’m sure, are familiar with the deceiving snake of Genesis 3’s otherwise harmonious garden. But there’s also Moses and Aaron in front of Egyptian enslavers, throwing down their staffs and watching them writhe on the ground as snakes (or, from the Greek, drakon). Dragons symbolize the forces of chaos to be defeated by God (Job 7:12), and they also stand in for the evil injustice that imperial rulers commit: “King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has devoured me … he has swallowed me like a monster” (in Hebrew tanniyn, dragon or serpent, Jeremiah 51:34).
The book of Revelation envisions a cosmic war in the heavens and on earth, Michael and his angels waging battle with the dragon, Satan, and his fallen angels (known as demons). Conquering and killing the dragon eventually becomes a central artistic and legendary trope for the hero. Medieval European legends are filled with knights slaying dragons and rescuing princesses. But as you trace the dragon symbolism in Christian folklore and legends, a more interesting stream arises. Instead of slaying the dragon, there are traditions of saints taming the dragon, emerging victorious through nonviolence rather than violence.
Image: Josse Lieferinxe, St. Michael Killing the Dragon, 1493-1505, Wikimedia Commons
Here are a couple of examples, from a fascinating academic study of dragons in Western culture, literature, and religion: a saint named Golunduch “renders the Dragon of Babylon as tame as a lamb, to such an extent that it lays its head in her lap, and she fondles its head and lips” (196). Then there’s the medieval French legend of St. Martha who sprinkled holy water on a dragon’s tale, tamed it, and walked through town leading it like a sheep. Such saints befriend dragons as pets instead of destroying them as enemies. This seems to me where the gospel of Jesus, unveiled in Revelation as the slaughtered lamb, takes us—into restoring love rather than gridlocked war.
The Netanyu government, in its catastrophically cruel violence in Gaza, I believe has merged with the dragon, “devouring” and “swallowing” the people of Gaza, including nearly five thousand children, whole. It’s a great irony of history that the oppressed often become the oppressor. But there’s also a more mythic monster afoot today in the cycle of violence itself. Activist theologian Walter Wink called it the “myth of redemptive violence,” the indefatigable belief that somehow violence saves, solves our problems or otherwise generates order to a disordered universe. It is, Wink says, “the spirituality of the modern world… so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be in the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts” (Engaging the Powers, 13). Jesus subverts the cycle of violence by constantly calling for cease-fires, overturning assumptions about punitive and blood-soaked politics and religion. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God” he says (Matthew 5:9) and to brash disciple Peter, “Put away your sword. Those who use the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).
Photo by Katrin Hauf on Unsplash
This week I dove into the world of Instagram in earnest for the first time. I’m really enjoying the platform and I hope to create a prayerful space through which to engage with people (see you there!). But watching the Israeli-Hamas war unfold on Instagram has often felt like watching an earthquake split apart rock, leaving two sides of a canyon and everyone broken. As one friend said, recounting a coffee-shop conversation in which someone asked her “which side she was on,” “I’m on the side of humanity.” For me, that means solidarity with humans hurting or, as the wise Sikh activist Valarie Kaur put it:
I stand with the Palestinian people. I stand against the brutal occupation of Palestine and the ongoing subjugation, assaults, and killings of Palestinian people.
I stand against the ongoing antisemitic violence and persecution of Jews, past and present, including the vicious antisemitic attacks right now in the United States.
I have been mourning with Jewish friends who have family in Israel hiding in bomb shelters. And I have been mourning with Palestinian friends whose family in Gaza have no shelters to hide in at all. My mourning transcends political agendas. Your mourning can too. This is not about equivalency. The time has come to center the human cost of the conflict above all.
It is a time of apocalyptic unveiling and the temptation to fight, instead of tame, evil dragons is great.
I meant to tell you that I passed this on to quite a few people as it made so much sense.
Thank you for this fine commentary, Mark! We only need to read history to know that brutality toward our brothers and sisters has been ongoing since the beginning of human time—only now it’s magnified by the media for the world to see every gruesome act.