The Bible probably does not contain one single text that rivals the Book of Revelation with respect to the sheer nuttiness that it has caused. It is the feeding ground for all of the religious loonies, or it makes religious people loony. There are preachers who have created a whole career preaching sheer nonsense about this very strange text. The Book of Revelation provides a forum for this sort of weirdness because it is filled with very odd symbols. At times, it has an almost hallucinogenic quality. Thus, you can make of it what you want, which is exactly what has happened.

Ultimately, however, what the text actually reveals is this enthronement of the Lamb, this great cosmic celebration of the whole world bowing before this slaughtered Lamb, the great symbol of Christ. And all of this cosmic symbolism (the horrors and miasmic obscurity) is supposed to act in favour of clarifying this one moment - - the whole point of the universe - - this celebration of the victory of the Lamb, of Jesus.

Hence, the Book of Revelation ought to be clarifying human life instead of obscuring and mystifying it, instead of making religion a kind of weird sideshow, as many of its commentators have. What is being celebrated is very simple: the triumph of a life, of a man who simply told the truth all of the time and was absolutely open to everybody. The main point is that this life has cosmic significance. This life is exactly what the whole human operation is about, and, is leading to. And it is only because we have trivialized and sentimentalized Jesus' life that it sounds odd even to say it. We can use the passage from Revelation to cast light on these other two readings because they give instances of the difficulty and extraordinariness of Jesus' achievement.

In Luke's text, the disciples who are filled by the spirit of the risen Jesus say outrageous things such as this: "We must obey God rather than any human authority". A human authority does not just mean the police, the government, or the boss> It simply means my neighbours, my colleagues, and my kids. In other words, to be faithful to God in the face of all of these multiple voices and messages that we hear telling us how to be, where to be, who to give obeisance to, and who to watch out for, etc., is to simply cut through all of these authorities and say, "I am being faithful to God as much as I can be, despite everything else". How many of us really do this? Imagine a life that simply cuts clearly through all human authority, a life absolutely obedient to God. It is quite amazing. Ultimately, this is what the universe was created for, and did produce, in this one man, Jesus.

And then, of course, in this interesting epilogue to the Gospel of John (this strange passage about Peter, which was added later), we get two more instances of normal human behaviour which are absolutely abnormal; namely forgiveness, in that Jesus clearly forgives Peter. How often does this really happen in human life? How often is it that one feels that one can move straight ahead, unencumbered by one's own failure, by one's own faulty past. And then clearly, the person who wrote this text and later added it to the Gospel of John wanted to talk about Peter as an individual who held a position of authority. Every biblical scholar agrees that Peter, whatever position he held, clearly had some sort of principal job in this text. Look at the words: "Feed my men. Tend my sheep". The text does not contain the words "manage them" or "boss them". It reads: "nourish them, give them life". What human authority completely functions in this fashion? I do not know any that do. For instance, I know that everybody is calculating - - I too am calculating - - all of the time. Basically, our primary interest lies in finding a way to get through this life unscathed, no matter where we are or what we are doing.

Because we are all so skilled at obscuring the outlines of the issues in our lives, acting unselfishly does not seem particularly notable. I know this is true for me, and it seems to be true for everybody that I know - - that ultimately, we operate in terms of calculating and securing our own benefit and safety. To live a life absolutely beyond this, to be boss as the servant of all, to be ready to forgive, to say the truth as one knows it, all of the time - - not out of bitterness or as a way of getting even, etc. - - but simply because this is the Godly thing to do. This is what God is all about, and ultimately, this is what is illuminating. This is what the God of Jesus is all about. This is why the Book of Revelation can have the enthronement of this man, - a man who lived this utterly Godly life - as its ultimate celebration. Hence, this is why Jesus was raised from the dead and this is why preachers like Jack Van Impe's mystification of this text is so awful. It turns religion into rubbish and acts, of course, as a great distraction from the real issues in our lives. This is the real search for the God who will enable us to tell the truth and to act as humane and forgiving authority figures all of the time.

So, Easter ends up doing what I suggested that Lent does: to clarify human life and set out the issues of our existence clearly. It is not some vague triumph of good over evil, a life-force conquering a death-force, or spring and eternal rebirth. It is simply the absolute goodness of God manifested in this man's life and validated by God raising this man from the dead, and celebrated in the weird language of the Book of Revelation.