John’s Patmos

Above, monastery of St. John the Theologian, Patmos.

Several of my blog entries have somehow disappeared.   I am not sure that they successfully published.  I can’t replace them as they were, but I can add some new ones, meditating on the sights that I’ve seen in the last week on Patmos, Kos (Cos in the Bible) and Rhodes.

I am sorry that I can’t offer a photo of the cave of the Apocalypse (Revelation) on Patmos.   It was really a cave, with a silver ring where John supposedly laid his head, a silver ring where he used a handhold, and a cloth and book where his scribe supposedly wrote down the Book of Revelation.   Seven times - since John wrote this supposedly for the seven churches. 

While I was visiting I listened to Revelation.   I have a Common English Bible from Audible, so I have been listening to the books related to my journeys as we go.  Revelation is, of course, a widely misunderstood book.   It’s often seen as a prediction of the future, but is actually a critique of the contemporary times of St. John, and of the Roman occupation of his time and it’s excesses.   That said, when I was listening I was struck by how the middle, violent part of the book is dwarfed by the rest of it.

The rest of it is about how churches are and are not churches, with warnings about failures that we fall into, things that are sometimes common in today’s churches, not just the persecuted churches of Asia Minor that John was preaching to.    How often, for example, are we neither hot nor cold but lukewarm?  Kind of following Christ, but not really going the full way to do so, maybe just happy with our Sunday to Sunday experience and not really putting ourselves out there?  And at the end of course the glorious vision of the end of the war with God winning, and the New Jerusalem descending. 

Because that is the real message of the book, that God wins, despite our failures, despite the real presence of evil in the world, despite, even the lack of religiosity in our current times - God wins.   Not actually in an “apocalyptic” end times way - that is a fable designed to teach us a little of how evil manifests itself in the world, today, as well as in the days of the Roman Empire - but in an irresistible, inevitable way.   God wins.  Amen.