“Go Down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go”
“Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus”
My point in lifting up the lyrics of these two Negro spirituals is to demonstrate that the lyrics are in code. They are veiled, they are disguised, so white oppressors would not know what the enslaved Africans were really singing about.
In both the examples I posted here, Africans who sang them were signaling to other enslaved Black people that they were going to escape to freedom later that night. I use those examples to also illustrate that the New Testament book of Revelation was first written by and to an oppressed group of people who also wrote in code to keep the imperial cult of Rome from knowing their intentions.
Last week I left off discussing how the Great Awakenings in this country were heavily saturated with hellfire and damnation preaching, designed to scare people into the Christian faith.
The book of Revelation was in heavy rotation among the fire-breathing preachers trying to scare people into joining the Christian faith so that they would not spend eternity in Hell. Revelation was taken out of context to create a narrative that it was about the end of the world and that the end would be violent, grotesque and grizzly. I say it was taken out of context because Revelation has nothing to do with the end of the world as we think of it.
Oppressors in this country and Europe created an interpretation to make people think more individually and selfishly about their lives after death because oppressors in Europe and America wanted to profit off the lives of the people they colonized in this life.
Remember, the religion of Jesus, as Howard Thurman calls it, was started among the poor, the peasants and the persecuted in Northeast Africa. It was a faith that went contrary to the societal norms of the occupying forces from Rome.
Things began to change, however, after people like the African Apostle Paul and others took the faith in Jesus into Europe. Once the religion of Jesus became the religion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Emperor Constantine, the interpretations of the faith shifted to a more individual, pious point of view.
Leaders of the Roman Empire could not have a religion that questioned their greed, violence and subjugation of other people, so they devised theologies that focused on personal salvation rather than equitable distribution of wealth gained from the hard labor of the peasant class.
Leaders of the Empire married faith in God to one’s faithfulness to one’s citizenship in the Roman Empire.
And Great Awakenings preachers here in America picked up on the theme of the fear of hell and twisted the message of Revelation to scare people into the religion of Jesus. I can recall older adults in my childhood who would make comments like, “I’m afraid to read Revelation because of the frightful scenes, images and visions,” or statements that many still make today like, “We are living in the last days.” This is because they were taught to fear not only Revelation but that they would spend eternity burning in hell.
It was taught this way to distract ordinary people from focusing on the sins of a government that uses people for profit, takes resources from other people’s lands through military invasions and funnels wealth to a few, while the masses of people spend their lives thinking about not spending eternity after death in hell.
It would shock many people then and now to know that Revelation actually brought comfort, not fear, to the oppressed in the writer John’s time (we will discuss this next week).
Let me point out that the book of Revelation belongs to that body of religious writings called Apocalyptic literature.
The word Apocalypse in the Greek language means to uncover, disclose or reveal.
The author of Revelation was well versed in the Jewish tradition known as Jewish Apocalyptic writings. The Revelation of John is the New Testament version of an old and ancient expression by oppressed people who have or had given up on human intervention to change a corrupt society of exploitation and looked to the Divine to intervene.
Some Jewish Apocalyptic writings include Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, the Assumption of Moses, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Baruch.
Some characteristics of Jewish Apocalyptic writings are that first, with the exception of the Revelation of John, are pseudonymous. Jewish apocalyptic writings are assigned to the personalities of great heroes in Judaism’s past. Oppressed people like in the spirituals not only used coded language but also did not use their real names to avoid identification by their oppressors. The Revelation of John differs in this area, but it is clear that John used images from other Jewish Apocalyptic writings in Revelation.
Next, Apocalyptic writings address the inequities of a society that persecutes and punishes the poor living under subjugation.
Not only has the Revelation of John been used by governments to create an otherworldly, fear-focused theology of personal pietism, it is the go-to book for conspiracy theorists who misinterpret the visions, images and figures of Revelation to expose “hidden hands” of the “illuminati,” or other shadowy government figures’ attempts to psychologically control people.
We have all by now heard the conspiracy theory that uses Revelation 13:18 where it is found that the number of the beast as 666 is used to prove that the government intends to brand everybody by implanting a chip in them, or that AI and social media are being used to brainwash people.
I am, however, not trying to dismiss the concerns about wicked people who are in privileged seats of power who would try to control the populace for their own nefarious ends, but the book of Revelation is not addressing those concerns, and this is my point.
Revelation is not a kind of Nostradamus predication on how the world will be consumed by nuclear weapons or demonic figures who take control of people’s lives.
The writer of Revelation is addressing what he and his church faced in Asia Minor of the first century under Roman occupation.
I will pick up here next week with a deeper discussion about what the writer John was actually addressing in his book and why he wrote in this fashion.
What’s up with the Church? There has been a twisting of the religion of Jesus that leads people to be obsessed with the devil and hell after they die, rather than with the devils in this life who have them living in a kind of hell now, all while robbing those same people of meaning, value, wholeness, wealth and dignity in this life.
Be well and be encouraged!
Rev. John E. Jackson
Rev. Dr. John E. Jackson, Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ-Gary, 1276 W. 20th Ave. in Gary. “We are not just another church but we are a culturally conscious, Christ-centered church, committed to the community; we are unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian.”
