When Hope Becomes Your Most Radical Act: Rereading Revelation for Dissident Disciples
I'll never forget the sound.
Standing about fifty yards from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, our group of Black faith leaders had just finished walking through hundreds of metal columns memorializing lynching victims. We'd gathered outside for prayer when we heard it—a piercing scream from inside the memorial. It's probably the worst sound I've ever heard. Maybe someone had discovered a relative's name. Maybe they'd realized the soil they'd grown up on was soaked with the blood of lynching victims. Or maybe they'd simply become overwhelmed by the injustice of it all. By the how long, O Lord of it all.
At that moment, I knew something with absolute certainty: something of the book of Revelation must be true. I can't be a Christian unless something of it is true.
That might sound dramatic, but here's what I mean: if the arc of history doesn't ultimately bend toward justice—if the oppressed don't win, if those who've resisted empire throughout history aren't vindicated—then what are we even doing? The book of Revelation isn't some lovely idea to trot out at funerals or an opiate for the masses that Karl Marx warned us about. It's not escapism designed to keep people at the bottom of the social order from engaging in revolution. Instead, Revelation is a manual for living under empire. Any empire. Every empire that crushes human flourishing.
When a Professor Changed Everything
Several years ago when I was in seminary, I took a few classes with Dr. Josiah Young. Dr. Young was this handsome, older Black man who carried himself with a certain gravitas but also managed to be kind of suave. He was cool. Some of us students would joke that he reminded us of Billy Dee Williams—and he ironically was the person who inspired me to at least consider wearing jewelry as a masculine-of-center woman. (Five years later, I've got one necklace and I'm moving forward, okay? I'm trying.)
But beyond his style, Dr. Young was an expert in the theology of writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. He was brilliant at seeing how their explorations of the Black experience and Black understandings of God could teach us all something about the divine. One day in his systematic theology class, Dr. Young pointed out a simple line in Revelation 20:4 while discussing resurrection theology: "Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God." Dr. Young explored that verse and encouraged us to consider how it might include all those throughout history who have been killed unjustly at the hands of empire. How the love of God might bear them up, restore their bodies in justice, and seat them as those closest to God.
That was the day I fell in love with the book of Revelation.
A Scream That Won't Stop Echoing
About two years after that class, I found myself at a conference of Black churches fiercely committed to racial justice. We were meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, and the first night of worship took place at 16th Street Baptist Church—the site where four Black girls were killed by the Klan in 1963.
I had never in my life experienced worship that was so full, so prophetic, so defined by both allegiance to the Lamb and resistance to Empire. You could feel both things at once: the radical love and the radical refusal to go along with death-dealing systems. A few days later came that visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Walking among those columns, I couldn't escape how completely frivolous all the supposed crimes were. A Black man accused of stealing hogs. A teenage boy who allegedly made inappropriate remarks to a white woman. Excuses for murder masquerading as justice.
And then that scream.
"At that moment, I knew something with absolute certainty: something of the book of Revelation must be true. I can't be a Christian unless something of it is true."
That sound crystallized everything for me. The message of Revelation is essentially this: The oppressed will win. Those who resist empire will win. Those who follow the Lamb will win. If you don't remember anything else, remember that.
The Vision: More Than Funeral Comfort
Revelation 21 and 22 give us one of the most stunning visions in all of Scripture. John writes: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them... He 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'" (Revelation 21:1-4).
The new creation is described as God's home coming down. What one scholar calls "rapture in reverse." God doesn't beam us up out of this mess—God comes down into creation and makes it home. Just as God once walked in the garden with the first humans at the cool of the day, just as God traveled with the Israelites in the Ark of the Covenant, God in the new creation dwells fully with God's people. John sees this holy city, the New Jerusalem, laden with precious stones. Its gates and foundations memorialize the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. It's described as a perfect cube—1,500 miles high, wide, and long—just as the Holy of Holies was a perfect cube.
And here's what's wild: that 1,500 miles corresponds to just about the same size as the entire landmass of the Roman Empire at the time John was writing. The New Jerusalem replaces the eternal city of Rome with the eternal kingdom of God. This is the ultimate judgment on every colonizing system of domination throughout human history. But John also tells us what's not there: no sea (the source of chaos and evil throughout Scripture), no death, no tears, no curse. No temple, because God is the temple. No sun or moon, because God's radiance alone drives away every shadow. And—this is crucial—no closed gates.
Making All Things New
One of my favorite things about John's vision is the clarity with which he expresses God's desire to restore rather than destroy. God's heart for composting rather than disposal. As one writer puts it, this is "the making of all things new, not the making of all new things."
The new creation doesn't erase human history. It doesn't cast off the physical world as something disgusting or inferior. This isn't, as scholar Michael Gorman points out, an escape from the materiality of existence—it's the very fulfillment of material existence. It doesn't eradicate human culture or creativity. Instead, it builds on the good things that have come before.
Revelation 21:24-26 says: "The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations."
Think about this trajectory: Earlier in Revelation, the kings of the earth are described as immoral and deceived, following the beast. We see them gathering for war against God. We see them utterly destroyed. Yet here in chapter 21, there's this beautiful image of them bringing their glory into the city.
"Somehow God's inclusive love is for the healing of the nations. Even those who are outside seem to have this possibility—even in the new creation—of pledging allegiance to the Lamb."
The gates never shut. There are boundaries that protect what is good, yes. But there's also a never-ending possibility of transformation into that good. God's greatest dream remains salvation and reconciliation, even when our greatest hope on hard days is just for judgment.
Theologian Brad Jersak writes about this reconciliation to come: "At Christ's table, former government death squad members and terrorist rebels embrace. The disappeared reappear, resurrected to speak the word of release to their torturers. Occupying forces bend the knee before those whom they sequestered in refugee camps... On God's holy mountain, all harm is abolished."
Living Inside a Different Reality
This vision isn't meant to be some pretty idea we pull out when someone dies. This passage, this book, was meant to be read aloud so it could be performed. It opens before us a theology of radical involvement in the world and a commitment to very public discipleship.
Revelation asks us to engage in worship as a dissident practice.
Every time we gather and sing, every time we proclaim "Jesus is Lord," we're implicitly proclaiming that Babylon and the beast are not. We're invited to daily discernment—saying a clear no to the culture of death and a clear yes to the culture of life.
It calls us to radical imagination, using more than common sense to guide our lives. It invites us to Christ-shaped, nonviolent resistance against that unexplainable weight that always seems to press down on us, whispering that alternative communities like ours don't matter, that our ordinary testimony has little value, that it's time to just give up, go along, survive.
When I think about worshiping at 16th Street Baptist Church or moving through those memorial columns or just reading the news about our criminal justice system, I'll be honest: some days, the greatest hope I can muster is for judgment. Those discordant notes we read about some people being forbidden from the city's beauty—some days they just feel right to me.
But for the good news to actually be good news, it has to be about both judgment and salvation. About boundaries protecting what is good as well as never-ending possibility of transformation.
The Questions We're Invited to Live
So Revelation asks us at least three simple questions: Whose reality will you live inside of? The reality of empire and the deathly forces underneath it, or the reality of this symbolic vision? How will you perform the script of faithfulness to the Lamb who really is a lion?
How will you exchange your need for certainty with the hope that beckons on every single page of this book?
These are the questions we're invited to live as dissident disciples of Jesus. And when all is said and done, the book calls us to hold tightly to something very similar to the dedication I saw written on the wall entering that lynching memorial in Montgomery: For the hanged and beaten. For the shot, drowned and burned. For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law: We will remember. With hope, because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage, because peace requires bravery. With persistence, because justice is a constant struggle. With faith, because we shall overcome.
Y'all, thank God for the book of Revelation. May it be a blessing every time you read it, and even more as you perform it in the world.
