Since we’ve been talking about movies a lot recently, I have a confession to make. Many folks would consider some of my favorite films to be completely inappropriate for a pastor.
For example, I enjoyed the Omen series, a three movie series from 1976 to 1981 and focused on the coming of the Antichrist. It’s not that I believe the Revelation of John should be taken literally. I don’t even think it should be in the biblical canon! But the Omen movies were exceptionally well done.
Looking back over thirty years, with so much hatred in the headlines, we might find the portrayal of evil a little cartoonish. At the time however, the depiction of evil as seductive, of evil characters as sympathetic, was groundbreaking, especially in the second film, Damien, Omen 2. In it, 13 year-old Damien Thorn slowly comes to understand his own nature as the bringer of the Apocalypse. In a powerful scene, the boy discovers the mark of the beast, 666, hidden in his hairline, just as a Satanist told him he would. He flees from his dorm room, into the blowing winter, distraught.
Our sisters and brothers in the literalist heresy are, of course, obsessed with the Revelation, Apocalypse in the Biblical Greek. Witness the millions made by those involved with the Left Behind series, first Tim LaHaye’s books, then frightfully bad propaganda movies with former child star Kirk Cameron.
These misguided believers see the world as filled with a cancerous evil that originates with Satan and Eve, an evil that taints the entirety of creation, though in order to make this bad theology match their Neo-platonic understanding of God, they have to come up with the implausible explanation that a God who is love would, nonetheless, be emotionally needy enough to create tiny ignorant little beings called humans, then to test them to see if they would voluntarily love their creator. I am glad to say I do not share this belief, in a God who plays games with human souls.
But here is this figure, this Antichrist as the Son of Satan in the same way that Jesus is Son of God, appearing in apocalyptic, in art and literature, often paired with the Whore of Babylon, another figure in Revelation. And in today’s text, there it is, “the spirit of the antichrist.â€
Except for a few small problems. The beast in Revelation 13:18, the one marked with the number 666, is not identified as “Antichrist.â€
In fact, the term “antichrist†does not appear in that text at all. It only appears in the letter we are studying, 1st John, and in the following text, 2nd John. And it does not refer to a person. It literally refers to the spirit of being anti-Christ, against Christ, we brought the prefix “anti†directly from the ancient Greek, bypassing Latin roots altogether. And the term anitchrist in this text refers specifically to a heresy of the time, an opposing interpretation of Jesus that believed he was not incarnate as a flesh and blood human.
I am sure this is a relief, because, you know, we keep getting told that the president is the antichrist. So at least that turns out not to be true.
Even if we can let our guard down about the coming of the Satanic forces in the form of a president with dark skin, we’re still left with a difficult text here. Following the dualist pattern of dividing things into strict binaries, much like last week’s division of dark and light, this week’s text sets God against the world.
Or does it. This is a classic case of context-means-everything. Because the author is not pitting God against a corrupted creation, against the world as the preachers of apocalypse would have it. This entire paragraph and all of the language in it points back to that single dispute, something we might miss across the space of two millennia and multiple translations.
Our reading is an argument for one interpretation of Jesus, and like any polemicist, the author argues that those who do not understand Jesus in the same way are against not just the author, but against Christ himself.
What is the dispute? And how can it possibly matter to us?
No one knew what to make of Jesus. The text tells us that their experience of him was of a miraculous healer, a shocking teacher, a rebel against both the religious and political structures of his time. The things he said were incredible, to most blasphemous.
He referred to Yahweh as “poppa,†announced that he was one with God and was a part of God’s plan of salvation. He declared a new kingdom. And so the establishment does what the establishment does. It killed him. And since this establishment was the real Roman Empire, not the prettified Romans from history class, but the actual brutal and bloodied Romans, they executed him in a slow, tortuous, and public way, not dissimilar to the way we murder murderers in the United States, much like this week’s execution in Arizona.
But then, his followers experienced him as still being present with them. They had to reconcile, to construct for themselves, ways to make sense of this person who changed their lives and announced a new cosmic order with the facts on the ground of a human who was killed. And here we are, two thousand years later, still debating exactly what Jesus meant, what and who he was, hopelessly I would suggest, if those who were actually with him couldn’t figure it out. But oh, what a life, what an amazing short life, that he should so change the world!
But how could he be divine and human at the same time? It’s a puzzle. And even more troubling, how could God-with-Us be tortured by Roman soldiers and executed? That doesn’t seem like a very powerful god! So, some posited, maybe he was never really a human at all. Maybe he was just a Spirit that took on the form of a body, but it was fake. Which would explain all sorts of stuff, like walking on water and through walls and the whole not being dead thing that was sort of important to the Christian message.
And the author of John is arguing against this interpretation. The author is insisting that Jesus was “en sarki†“in flesh.†To this church it very much mattered whether or not Jesus was a real human or not. Jesus that is only spirit, not “in flesh,†does not have the power to save.
Ironic, is it not, that today we have exactly the opposite problem. We are more than willing to make Jesus a flesh and bone human. It’s the divine part that we find suspect.
Antichrist. Against Christ. Which means those who believe Jesus was not fully human. Not Damien Thorn, or the Beast of Revelation.
Roman Catholic author Gary Wills thought he had a great retort to Evangelicals when he said the question “What would Jesus do?†was illogical, because Jesus is divine and can do what we cannot do. But the ancient author of 1st John thought it was important to emphasize the flesh, the human Jesus. Because it is meaningless for Jesus to tell us to lay down our lives out of love for our sister and brother if he was not willing to do the same. What would Jesus do makes sense when you de-emphasize the divine and stress the flesh and blood…
The Jesus who has the power to save is a Jesus who can suffer, who bleeds, who bears the marks of crucifixion. The Shroud of Turin may be a hoax, and we may be repulsed at the corpus statues of the Roman tradition. But it is only a Jesus that experiences who we are that has the power to invite us into who he is. So that we who are in flesh can know what it means to be in Christ, Christ must become in flesh.
A Jesus who dares us to take leaps of faith must know what its like to suffer a rocky landing. And he does. A Jesus that demands that we walk with our head high into the gaping maw of death must have made that journey and emerged, victorious, on the other side. A Savior that demands that we love beyond reason must have so loved, and he did, surrounded… James and John and the Magdalene and that hard-headed Peter…
There is this slang expression: “Can you feel me?†And with Jesus, the answer is always yes. Yes, he can. And the question he asks you is “Can you feel me?â€
Jesus Christ, our Savior, in flesh, God-with-Us, strange and overwhelming, but real, to the authors of today’s ancient text and to us, experienced in our lives. To deny that reality is to be against Christ, antichrist, now and forever.