With this week’s texts, we are caught up in a cosmic drama spanning time and space, and a struggle between two distinct kingdoms. The Apocalypse of John begins a message to the seven churches of Asia Minor, “Look! Christ is coming in the clouds for every eye to see…sovereign of the rulers of the earth…the Alpha and the Omega.” The prophetic book of Daniel catches us up in a dreamworld, gazing into the visions of the night, witnessing one who looks human, but somehow more than human coming from the clouds of heaven. And in the Gospel lectionary from John, we enter the Praetorium – the palatial residence of the Roman governor – standing between Pilate and Jesus, as the imperial governor questions Jesus, “So you are a king?” even as Jesus is on his way to the humiliation of state execution. 

Amid competing claims of sovereignty over our imaginations and our embodied lives, in what way do the psalmist’s words, “O God, you reign,” ring true? 

Reading apocalyptic texts is a difficult task on any week. But it is a task that requires great care on Christ the King Sunday. In Wisdom Commentary: Revelation, Lynn Huber and Gail O’Day remind us, “Revelation is not a text for every time and place. It is addressed to and meant for the oppressed” (15). 

Thus, there are two temptations when reading apocalyptic texts from positions of relative privilege and power. The first temptation is to see oneself in the place of the oppressed for whom the apocalyptic texts bespeak liberation. This can easily turn a text of liberation into a text of domination. That reading of apocalyptic theology has been played out repeatedly in church history. In early centuries the Christian church shifted from oppressed sufferers with Christ under Roman rule to those in the dominant religious position in the Empire, with the Constantinian turn in the fourth century. In our current era, white Christian nationalism’s ascent in the U.S. is often predicated upon the false belief that Christians in the U.S. are a persecuted religious group, rather than the dominant religious expression seeking to protect its privilege. 

Texts like Daniel and Revelation are apocalyptic texts, literally meaning to “reveal” or “unveil” something. They pull back the curtain on the seeming inevitability of the oppressive status quo to unveil another cosmic order – a vision of the world as it is when the empire’s hegemonic naming of reality gives way to the voice of “the One who is, who was, and who is to come” heralding the order of an upside-down reign of God, subverting the oppressive hierarchies of all peoples and nations. 

The other temptation of those in privileged and powerful positions of readership is to see these as escapist texts, moving us away from the flesh-and-bone realities of the material world into a fantasy world of the spiritual realm. Far from it! African American New Testament scholar, Brian Blount, compares the ways John employs his cosmic visions to propel his readers into hopeful action with the way enslaved people in the U.S. drew upon the images of the spirituals for similar purposes. He says, “Both John and the writers of the spirituals employed their visions as weapons in a war of resistance; they unleashed them so as to unbind a people from their fear. A people who are assured of their standing and existence in the world-to-come are more likely to risk their standing in the present in order to secure their future” (“The Witness of Active Resistance,” in From Every People and Nation, 32).

But as Revelation reminds us, if we are made into a kingdom by Jesus – the faithful witness, the first born of the dead – it is to be a kingdom of priests (1:6). The dominion of priests is service, not sovereignty, of peace over war.  

The liberating message in these passages, especially Daniel and Revelation, may not be meant for every reader or every congregation reading them on this Sunday. But they are meant for us to overhear in solidarity with all whose backs are against the wall of empire, in Daniel’s day, in John’s, and in ours. Those engaged in the struggle between two distinct kingdoms, remember that Jesus’s is an eternal sovereignty that will never pass away, and his rule and reign is one of love, liberation, and justice.

1. What is your “apocalyptic baggage?” That is, how have you encountered apocalyptic texts like Revelation in the past – in ways that have helped, in ways that have harmed, or perhaps in ways that have simply invited you to ignore them? 
2. What people or communities are you reading these texts alongside today? Whose struggles against empire’s oppression and toward the liberating reign of Christ inspire you to read these texts anew? 
3. What decision are these texts prompting you to make in your own life lived in the struggle between two kingdoms?

Fr. Daniel Berrigan SJ spent much of his life as an anti-war and anti-nuclear activist. The Apocalypse of John was a significant source of spiritual and theological reflection for Berrigan, and the subject of some of his writings. 

Berrigan believed in the proven inability of violence to cultivate a better world and dedicated his life and ministry to a witness of creative nonviolence against the ravages of the United States’ death-dealing and destruction of the innocent. His penchant for the mystical, the poetic, and the mysterious likely made Revelation an especially inspiring text to him and made him an able and inspiring interpreter of the Apocalypse. Of the book, he says,

“It thus attacks our habitual ways of thinking about ourselves, history, our place in the grand scheme of the world. Still, rigorously, it leaves us free: offering us an historic instance of one believing community, combating for its very soul with the imperial state. The book then advises: Judge your own time; this is how one community strove to be faithful” (The Nightmare of God, 19). 

Fr. Berrigan’s life was lived in creative nonviolent resistance to the unrelenting violence of the geopolitical status quo. This led him to many acts of protest, from burning draft files in the parking lot of a draft board office during the Vietnam War to breaking into the GE headquarters and hammering nuclear weapon nosecones in the 1980s. He spent several years in prison for his nonviolent interventions, alongside other Catholic activists.

Muñiz depicts many contemporary apocalyptic scenes harkening to the style of Renaissance art and Christian iconography. This turn in his art was instigated by Hurricane Harvey, which destroyed his studio in Houston, and Hurricanes Maria and Irma, hitting Puerto Rico and Florida where most of his family lived. The apocalyptic scenarios around which his art is shaped are those of climate collapse and ecological disaster.