On Patmos and Piketty

A NEW HEAVEN, A NEW EARTH

Inside a cave--a cave that now serves Orthodox believers here as a tiny church--a French guide points through a small window.  "On a clear day," she says, "John could see the shores of Asia Minor, just as we can see Turkey this morning.  From his cave on Patmos, John could easily imagine collaborators in the seven churches, continuing their ministries, resisting Roman influence, breaking bread as Jesus directed.  He had these friends always in mind." 

Patmos Cave

She steps back from the window and stands before a panel of darkened icons.  "Remember the words of the twenty-first chapter," she says earnestly.  "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more."

This, she insists, is a poignant and personal moment in John's exile.  John loved the seven churches he counseled: he was devoted to their witness, to their faithfulness, to their leaders.  From his cave on Patmos, he could see the hills of Asia Minor and imagine his sisters and brothers in their churches.  Separated by exile, by the consequences of his work among them, he looked out nonetheless and envisioned a day when the sea between them would be "no more."  On that day, there would be a great reunion, a church made whole again, and a city like a New Jerusalem.

See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them; they will be God's own people,
and God will surely be among them;
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.

I'm warming up to the guide, and ever so grateful she speaks English so fluently.  She goes on to suggest that John's vision is one of unity and reconciliation: where all illusions of separateness and opposition are resolved in a new heaven, a new earth, a new and holy city.  "So often," she says, quite tenderly, "fear drives us to isolation.  Fear perpetuates our sense of loneliness, this illusion of finitude."  John, she insists, sees Jesus coming in glory to "wipe every tear" from our eyes.  "The home of God is among mortals."  And John experiences this intimately and imminently.  This is the gift of God in Jesus: that death is 'conquered' once and for all--so that our fear of death and suffering no longer influences our ministries, relationships, witness.  By grace we are set free.  By that freedom we are made whole and holy.  Easter as a way of life!  

John the Revelator

HOW TYRANTS RULE

But John is quite aware that life in the seven churches is anything but easy.  Roman imperialism is in full swing on the mainland: the Roman economy is robust and voracious; the Roman cult demands allegiance and promises prosperity. 

A near contemporary of John, Aelius Aristides, paints [this] picture in his panegyric on Rome: "Around lie the continents far and wide, pouring an endless flow of goods to Rome...One can see so many cargoes from India or, if you wish, from Arabia...that one may surmise that the trees there have been left permanently bare, and that those people must come here to beg for their own goods, whenever they need anything!"

Participation in the gaudy Roman economy helps tiny faith communities 'fit in' and eases the way for church growth and influence.  John's churches face enormous cultural and economic pressure: to conform to Roman values or face marginalization, impoverishment and worse.  It seems clear from the first few chapters of Revelation that some churches are bearing up, making a powerful and distinctive witness to the alternative gospel; others are giving way and accommodating the empire too easily.

Be Afraid?

Here it is that John--like Paul before him--offers a compelling diagnosis of fear, death and the powers that have their way with us.  Last week, I read a brilliant reflection on Paul's ministry and teaching.  In it, N.T. Wright interprets the powerful significance of resurrection in Paul's theology.  It seems equally relevant to John's theology and praxis in Revelation:

There is plenty of room, within the Jewish-styled monotheism redefined around Christ and Spirit, for a serious analysis on [Paul's] part both of the existence of principalities and powers in the world...and also for the view that they have been defeated in the death and resurrection of the Messiah, with this defeat then being implemented by the Spirit in new creation in the future and in Christian living (anticipating new creation) in the present...

Paul's thought moves to and fro, in ways natural to him but strange to us, between what we think of as purely spiritual powers, right up to sin and death themselves, and the obviously earthly rulers who crucified Jesus (I Cor 2.8).  What binds them all together is that they all alike rule over human being, and over the rest of God's world for that matter, through the power and threat of corruption, decay and death itself.  As the Wisdom of Solomon saw so clearly, earthly tyrants rule by establishing a kind of concordat with death.  Caesar rules through the power of sin and death, and they rule through him.  The point of Paul's redefined monotheism (AND PERHAPS JOHN'S TOO!), by contrast, is that the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of that new creation in which God's power over death itself is the means whereby creation is affirmed as good.

How is it that Rome rules the cities and communities and cultic centers of Asia Minor?  How is it, for that matter, that oligarchs and transnational corporations exert such pressure on nations, neighborhoods and neighbors in the 21st century?  "They all alike rule over God's world through the power and threat of corruption, decay and death itself."  In his own thorough commentary on Revelation, David deSilva notes that the emptiness so many feel in wealthy societies drives a kind of hyper-drive consumption--and this, in turn, feeds the ruling powers and transnational corporations.  We become consumers, not citizens; we devour rather than deliberate.  And all the while, the fears expand, deepen.  The emptiness remains.

What Jesus does--in service and humility, in death and sacrifice, in resurrection and new creation--is finally to dismantle the empire's logic of fear and consumption, consolidation and accumulation.  We are, says the gospel, even now a new creation, set free from death, alive in Christ who lives in us.  His resurrection is even now our reality, our liberation and our promise.  And this means that Rome, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Disneyland, all of it: it's all unmasked.  Christ is Lord.

Kampos, Patmos: Orthodox Church

CRITICAL DISTANCE

It fascinates me that John came all the way to Patmos--as distant an isle as isles can be--to channel his vision of a counter-cultural church.  In his cave on a hill, he sees into the way things are and lifts the veil (that's the true meaning of 'apocalypse') on the way things will be.  He's not at all interested in a great American fundamentalist version of the End-Time.  What he's after is a radically engaged and defiantly principled church: a church that sees Rome for what it is and devotes its energies to the beloved community of Jesus, the kin-dom of heaven on earth.

David deSilva says that it's all about "critical distance"--it's all about insisting that Christian communities see their situation in culture with new eyes and fresh courage.

John wants 'conquerors.'  He wants his hearers to 'overcome' the challenges to faithful discipleship and the forces, social and spiritual, that conspire to defeat disciples in their contest to keep the commandments of God and to keep faith with Jesus.  And for John, 'overcoming' entails gaining critical distance from, and engaging in prophetic witness in the midst of, the domination systems of Roman Asia Minor.

As an 'unveiling,' Revelation serves John's goal of opening the eyes of the Christians to the spiritual dimension of the world that surrounded them and the significance of their choices and allegiances within that world.  John did not write this book to manufacture a crisis for a people who had become complacent about the empire.  Rather, he tried to reveal that this complacency about Rome was the crisis, if only they had 'apocalyptic eyes.'

During my five days on Patmos, I've taken a dive into the very thick and widely read work by the French economist Thomas Piketty.  It seems to me that Piketty's conclusions in Capital in the 21st Century are relevant to a 21st century 'unveiling' in a church devoted to Jesus the Feeder of Multitudes and Lord of the Harvest.  This summary comes from John Case of the website, People's World:

1. Increasing concentration of wealth (primarily returns to capital) in the U.S. and Western Europe is returning to its historic dominance in the capitalist system after a brief 35-year period of relative shared prosperity. Economic surveys defining the "top" incomes as the top "20 percent" disguised the rate of concentration in recent years. When looking at the top 1 percent and higher, the actual travesty of inequality is uncovered. Standard government economic data collection missed this. But tax records reveal it.

2. The wealth of the 1 percent, and even more the .1 percent, is increasing at 2-3 times the overall growth rate of the economy (GDP). The median income worker, on the other hand, received virtually no gains from increased productivity. And workers who fall below median income have seen their share of national wealth and income dramatically cut.

3. Concentration of wealth historically leads to concentration of political and institutional power, and concentration of political and institutional power leads to more concentration of wealth. This is a stunning conclusion, at least for many mainstream economists, who assumed more faith in automatic market stabilizers for imbalances in national income and wealth distribution.

But, there is a reason Piketty chose his book title to echo Karl Marx's classic work. One of his conclusions, and a central theme is: the abandonment of classic political economy (the interaction of economics and public institutions) by many professional economists in the academic and government communities in favor of very mathematical models, was, and is, a mistake.

4. Global capital is too strong and mobile now for any one country to regulate it. A global tax and redistribution mechanism must be in place to prevent inequality trends from tearing up not just individual nations, but sending the whole world into a hell not unlike the one that ended the last "Gilded Age" in 1912: World Wars I and II.

Piketty's thesis identifies the billionaires and the transnational corporations they control as the principal challenge. Without mentioning the word "socialism," he includes the little-mentioned but pervasive presence of Marx's Capital in the background.  In that sense he does, I believe, a great service: he establishes, in very close to scientific terms, the economic foundations of a profound democratic program that can unite nearly all working people, peoples of color and many national origins, men and women, young and old, professionals and small business. It is a foundation that unites the democratic outlooks of Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene Debs, Cesar Chavez, Mother Jones and Abraham Lincoln - even Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Joseph Stieglitz and Sam Webb too!

So there it is.  Our complacency about domination systems--because there are domination systems in 2014--our complacency is the crisis.  In the church.  David deSilva uses the language of liberation in urging the 21st church to 'come out' of empire, just as he imagines John insisting the seven churches of Asia Minor 'come out' of Babylon/Rome.  If we're truly an ekklesia (the people called 'out'), it's time to unveil the structures of domination--economic, political, military, racial, the works.  And it's time to 'come out' as the people of the risen Christ--the one whose death and resurrection set us free from all fear and all terror and all worry.  "Seek first the kingdom," Jesus said in the Galilee, "and all the rest will be added to you as you need it."

So much for steering clear of the Patmos Syndrome!