Chapter 2 begins Jesus’s, via John, instructions to the first seven Christian churches. The messages follow a pattern:
Identifying some feature of Jesus that John described at the start of Revelation.
Praising what they’re doing well (omitted if nothing to praise).
Noting where they’re going astray (omitted if they’re not).
Warning them of what will happen if they don’t mend their ways.
A promise of receiving some aspect of life after life after death if they repent.
First up: the church in Ephesus. Today, tourists see only a magnificent city’s ruins; but when John wrote to the church, and for a few centuries afterward, it enjoyed the respect and veneration of Christians far and wide. Early Christians considered it a beacon.
“The one thing you don’t see today in Ephesus, or in the surrounding modern towns and villages, is an active church,” N.T. Wright writes in his study guide.
Note: I’m following N.T. Wright’s Revelation: 22 Studies for Individuals and Groups and his newest book 20th Anniversary Edition with Study Guide, Revelation for Everyone. See my post Prepare for Revelation for suggested materials.
Jesus had warned the church in Ephesus that if they didn’t repent, that is, return to showing the love they had in the beginning of their existence, Jesus “will come and remove your lampstand out of its place.” In other words, Jesus will wipe the church out of existence. God did.
A Warning Came True
You could say, well, the letter was written decades after Jesus’s death and the church at Ephesus was already declining, so no great prediction there. Except:
“For several centuries it held a position of pre-eminence, and one of the great fifth-century church councils was held there (AD 431).”
John wrote Revelation centuries before the church council in 431 AD. I suppose some humans can foresee the utter demise of a popular and thriving institution…it seems a little farfetched, though, that anyone could predict not a single active church existing. Like after the fall of Rome when the empire vanished and the city did not; the fall of the church of Ephesus would conceivably leave a small church struggling on — not no church at all.
Although this warning is aimed at a church, individuals can also take heed. If you’re so zealous for being right — even if the truth you espouse is right — you can forget to show love as Jesus taught us. Eventually, being right justifies punishing those who disagree or land in circumstances that contradict your belief. According to Lisa Cron during her writer Q&A today, the same neural pathways light up when someone challenges our strong belief as light up when someone comes at us with a baseball bat. That makes one pause and think about how being challenged can enrage you because the brain processes it as a literal assault that endangers your life. Anger arises against the challenge so that you remain “safe.”
If you believe that you show love because you did way back when and someone comes along and challenges you, pointing out you’re now more concerned about money or being right or controlling others or having things your way, you’ll likely rationalize that they’re at fault for their circumstances or injury or illness or poverty so as to remain “safe.”
The church at Ephesus did not repent. Maybe it simply could not. How would you find a way to go against your biology and repent?
Question 1
“Do you sometimes hesitate to speak up about things you really believe in out of fear that you might offend someone? Explain.”
This opening question Wright poses at first puzzled me. How does it relate to the message to the church in Ephesus? But as I ponder the direction this church took, I realize that early Christians rewarded it for its ability to weed out fraudsters and identify those with evil intent.
Truth versus Love
The church’s concern for identifying the liars and empowering the truth morphed into something they became known for morphed into their prime directive. Since the more time and energy you spend on one thing automatically means less on another, the church’s pusuit of the truth lead to abandoning showing love in practical ways.
We can see today how pursuing the truth of the pandemic, the truth of climate change, the truth of vaccines turned unknowns into lauded experts. It’s rewarding when you become known for something you’re good at or something you know a lot about. Since human beings are social animals, we inherently need to be liked, for being unliked leads to ostracism, which leads to being “thrown off a cliff” as Lisa Cron said in today’s writer Q&A about her book Story Genius. Evolutionarily, human beings needed each other to thrive and could not survive alone. The biological feature of being liked so as to remain safe and continue to live, remains within us today, just as it did for the Christians in Ephesus.
For them to repent would mean doing less of what made them popular and liked. Although civilization was fairly advanced in their time, it was still quite dangerous to be on the periphery instead of in the centre. For them to repent, meant facing the fear of speaking less about what made them popular and more about things that people don’t want to do.
Canada considers itself a progressive country; yet the way it treats people who are healthy and well off versus everyone else should shame all Canadians. Instead, governments get away with providing disability benefits so low, they’re half of the poverty line; with providing completion of suicidal ideation by another instead of curative health care; with penalizing those on welfare with no fixed address; with delisting more and more medicare services so as to shift Canadians onto private insurance and pay out of pocket for basic tests, doctor care, and care by all other health care professionals.
What has this to do with Christian love?
Governments developed as a way to pay for services and things that no group or individual could conceivably pay for, things that cost so much money that the only way to pay for them and, as well, make them happen was through an enormous group entity we now call government. In that way, it lowered the cost for each individual from impossible to affordable. What government pays for and establishes reflects the beliefs of those who elect them. (Some governments reflect the dictator-in-charge’s belief, but that’s another story.)
People who focus on the taxes they pay and resent it so much that they rationalize “efficiency” or “laziness” as a reason to pay less, in reality, don’t want to share. It’s also more popular to focus on taxes than talk about government existing to show love in practical ways.
Ancient Greece (Athens) birthed democracy, but representative democracy, though apparently begun by the Roman Republic, became the main form of government in countries whose main belief system was Christianity. For all the evils that institutional Christianity wrought, individuals and groups birthed radical beneficial, loving changes in the way we perceived, educated, and cared for human beings.
Speaking Up
To answer Wright’s question…I think, yes, I do hesitate. In speaking. Yet I often end up blurting out what I believe when writing my posts or books. Being the progeny of two belief systems — Christianity and Zoroastrianism — I developed a keen awareness that one group of people don’t hold absolute truth. This flies in the face of Christians who say there is one absolute truth and, that is, the only way to heaven is through Jesus. I struggled with this absolutism when half my family do not follow Jesus. How can any one human being say with absolute certainty that I won’t see them in heaven? That they will not share in the resurrection, especially when Zoroastrians were the first to believe in resurrection?
I don’t think you can.
Over and over, leaders say we cannot understand God’s plan. Jesus says not to try and predict. Every Creation story begins with God creating human beings, meaning that each and every one of us is a child of God. Jesus says if we humans who are evil do good things for our children, how much moreso does God.
You’d think someone like me who has already been cast out, ostracized, and isolated would have no fear of speaking up about spiritual and religious things, but biology is powerful. People of all faiths and beliefs, of varied opinions on many subjects, stroll the text lines of social media, the one place I feel part of. Is it any wonder then that I hesiate, choose my words carefully, before I speak up about my beliefs?
What about you? Why do you fear offending someone, intentionally or unintentionally, and limit who you talk with about your spiritual or religious beliefs on social media or in real life?