Revelation: Chapter 1, Verses 9 to 20

John on Patmos Meets Jesus in His Vision

To be vulnerable and open is to be free.

Note: I’m following N.T. Wright’s Revelation: 22 Studies for Individuals and Groups. I’m also reading the original Revelation for Everyone on which the study guide is based. See my post Prepare for Revelation for suggested materials.

Study Time

In verse 9, John tells his readers that he’s on the island of Patmos “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” (Quote from N.T. Wright’s translation.)

Question 5 on Verse 9

N.T. Wright asks in his fifth question in his study guide’s first chapter:

Question 5: Why would [John’s location and reason for being there] be important to John’s original readers?

I think this information provides credibility. His original readers had probably heard about a Jesus follower’s exile to Patmos; this line tells them that it’s him and that he has suffered for God and for providing testimony about Jesus.

Perhaps, too, because he has testified about Jesus to people wherever he went, he’s telling them he knows how to do it well, he’s experienced, he’s old aka a respected elder, and he would not need to make up something — like this vision — in order to testify about Jesus. He did just fine in spreading the word before it; so fine, in fact, that the authorities exiled him for being too good at it. So why would he need a vision to add to his evangelical repertoire?

Also, his experience in testifying about Jesus would perhaps lead him to recognize Jesus in the vision.

Sometimes, we may have a vision and doubt ourselves. Was it a vision? Was it our subconscious desire? Did we make it up and let our imagination run rampant?

Verse 9 tells us that this kind of skepticism didn’t assail John, and he wanted to let his readers know that they could trust him when he said he had a vision and he recognized Jesus in that vision.

People back then, and people in certain areas of the world today, didn’t see the world as material only. They understood that life included the unseen that made itself known through our little-used senses, think quantum physics.

Are we conscious of quantum phenomena? Hardly. Yet they affect our lives. Physicists have learned how to harness quantum physics to create computers that soar beyond today’s capabilities. We experience the coincidence of thinking about a person and that person calling us, like two quantum particles spinning far apart in space yet together in time. We have much to learn about how human beings are connected in ways that we cannot see physically, touch physically, hear physically, smell physically, or taste with our tongues.

Don’t at me about quantum particles: (a) we don’t know everything about them or the universe, and (b) I’m thinking out loud.

Takes Time

Wright notes that exile meant John had the time to pray and reflect. Zarathustra spent 20 years praying in self-imposed isolation before he received a message from God. Although Wright notes that time in prayer, “soaked in scripture,” may lead to seeing something in a dream, I believe it isn’t so much that prayer sparks imagination or rich dreams as about learning the heart of another.

It takes time to learn the real thoughts, feelings, and mind of another.

To go off on a tangent, romance means spending long hours in conversation, making the effort to observe and notice what another is saying about themself in action and words, remaining close to ignite sharing, and quivering with silent attention when the other exposes their heart. Modern Western romance reduces all that down to a physical act that reveals nothing about the other’s heart.

In the Korean version of Call My Agent (see more below), the main female character reveals to her love interest a life-altering lesson she’s learned about her superficial attitude to relationships. I’m still waiting for that scene in the French version. I think it was implied…but I only sort of saw it because of having seen the explicitly revealing-of-self scene in the Korean version first.

How much do we miss learning the heart of God, Jesus, ourself, and loved ones because we fear spending the time to reveal and to listen and to stay?

Question 6 on Verses 9 and 10

Question 6: Exile has given John time to pray, to reflect, and now to receive the most explosive vision of God’s power and love. How have you experienced God’s power and love in the midst of painful or distressing situations?

Oh wow. Imagine being in a group and each person answering that question. It’d open up caverns of vulnerability that many people I know in real life would evade in the most experienced of ways. A slipped-out word here or an errant phrase there would crack open a fissure to those caverns, giving you a glimpse, but we’re not in the freeing habit of sharing our most painful experiences in a way that reveals our true emotions, psychological coping, and physical changes.

This year I discovered K-Dramas on Netflix. Korean TV shows come in (usually) 16-episode arcs where the opening premise gets peeled away to reveal layer after layer of how psychological harm has affected the main characters. These dramas, even the comedic ones, show characters in full blubbering sobbing, in clinging to the one who shows them understanding, in letting go of their shields, in sharing the effect of tragic nationwide history such as the comfort women or IMF crisis or personal tragedies such as child abandonment. I can’t imagine anyone here talking and emoting as openly as they do. They show a freedom to speak their heart that’s missing in this society, and we wonder why loneliness pervades North America like creeping charlie a garden and why people seek social media to share their pain behind cute avatars and clever or haunting “names.”

Cultural Differences in Sharing One’s Heart

I saw first the Korean version of Netflix’s Call My Agent. Now I’m watching the original French version. Same exact storylines and main characters, yet culturally different in both format and how they play out scenes. In one episode (spoiler alert), there’s a scene between the senior agent and his daughter who he hadn’t acknowledged until she snagged a job at his agency. He asked her what she wants for her birthday. In the Korean version, she tells him, and we watch them play it out. In the French version, we don’t hear her answer. Instead, we cut to the scene of his wife and son unable to reach him, deciding to go to his office. We see that scene, too, in the Korean version but cut into and out of the scene where the unacknowledged daughter and father are drinking whisky in his office, chatting and laughing like father-daughters do. In the Korean version, you see how much she yearned for this kind of interaction and how much he’s realizing he now wants this, too. In the French version, you catch only a glimpse of this as the wife and son stumble upon them talking together in his office, drinking champagne. Neither knows she’s his daughter. After that, the Korean and French versions pretty much jibe.

The French — the Western version — has us infer the emotional heft, of how much this means to the daughter. This version shows us only her happiness and his relaxation as she chatters while they’re standing drinking champagne. The Korean version shows us all the emotions while they’re sitting together drinking his favourite hard liquor.

I find it sad that we live in a society that requires us to categorize some of our emotions and psychological consequences as ones to be hidden.

Jesus wept openly. Yet men today do not. Even women. It’s safer to rage or be angry or cutting. Anger does protect us from feeling painful memories. But at some point, like the characters in K-Dramas, we must express them. The actors in K-Dramas don’t care about “ugly crying” as Oprah called it. They just let go. How freeing! I experienced that freedom through brain injury. And, boy, was it smacked back. Pathologizing the emotional, psychological, and physical consequences of great harm is how Western society responds instead of empathizing with the cause and treating it through the village motif.

I find it sad that mistrust coupled with most people having not learned how to respond to pain, has lead to Westerners hiding their painful and distressing moments.

God, Jesus, wanted us to be fully open to them and to each other. After all, the Holy Trinity is one of relationship. We’re designed through our social biology to be present without ceasing when a loved one or a neighbour experiences illness — like the friends who carried the paralyzed man to Jesus — or injury or inexplicable catastrophe — like when God asked Job to ask God to forgive Job’s friends for blaming Job for his wretched circumstances. In being fully open, Job learned a significant lesson about himself and how God wants him to treat all people.

God is not a fan of friends and family who leave one in distress. There are no toxic people in God’s parlance.

My Writings Sharing Distress, God in the Midst

At this point, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t written my answer to Question 6. That’s because I wrote a whole book on trauma and grief from brain injury, including how Jesus manifested to me and the role of God in my recovery.

I’ve written on my Psychology Today Concussion Is Brain Injury blog a couple of posts on Jesus. And my memoirs, original and revised, cover my pain pretty extensively.

After awhile, you get sick of writing about these things when it’s all one-sided, and the other side is blathering evasive BS about their own painful situations while labelling you for what you have the courage to do that they do not. (Yes, yes, brain injury gave me the courage by first blowing up the filter between thought and mouth and then making me realize how freeing that was. And yes, I’ve relearned how to raise shields so that I can stay sane in this lonely, blame- and shame-driven, abandoning society…though not so much in my writing.)

Wright asks many questions in this study guide for verses 9 to 20. There is much to unpack, yet I imagine a group study would allow for only minimal sharing. That would suit the Western mind. But if the K-Dramas are a fair representation of Korean society, with their long, drawn out scanning of faces and bodies where people confront each other or their pain, then this question would create deeply healing, satisfying conversations for them. Perhaps here in the West, they’d happen in cliques or between best friends. But Jesus asked us to love one another not only those like us.

Jesus in John’s Vision

“‘one like a son of man’, wearing a full-length robe and with a golden belt across his chest. His head and his hair were white, white like wool, white like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like exquisite brass, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters….and a sharp two-edged sword was coming out of his mouth. The sight of him was like the sun when it shines with full power….

He touched me with his right hand. ‘Don’t be afraid’” (N.T. Wright’s translation.)

A two-edged sword cuts armour like it’s soft butter. It slits a human open from stem to stern, no matter how tough our outer shell, yet Jesus tells John — and us — not to be afraid. A sword that reveals our hearts and minds — us! — to ourselves and to others is not to be feared. Jesus’s sharp two-edged tongue is freedom!