I confess I am a Star Trek fan and the episodes where Captain Picard gets captured by the Borg and begins the process of assimilation into its evil hive mind captivated me. ‘Resistance is futile’ became a catch phrase, but in the end resistance wasn’t futile for his crew, and spoiler alert, Captain Picard was eventually freed. It wasn’t easy, it was painful and for him there was a lot of suffering.
I bring this up because repeatedly John is telling 
us through his visions about the cosmic battle between Satan and the Lamb, Jesus, which really is a battle between evil and good, that resistance is not futile. Faithful witness to God, Jesus, Holy Spirit will win the day even though acts of nonviolent resistance will not be easy and there will be pain, suffering and even death.
This week, John’s vision feels very weird – there is a dragon, a beast from the sea and a beast from the land also known as the false prophet. Collectively, they represent the whole of the Roman empire – the evil – John notes it is powered by a satanic force – the scapegoating – the deception designed to tell all in its orbit, that the Caesars and the Roman deities are who you should worship, because they will bring you reward, they will tell you who to blame for your troubles, they will convince you that your loyalty needs to be to them. And, if you resist, you will be severely punished or killed.
The dragon, the beast of the sea and the beast of the land as envisioned by John try to show they are more powerful than God and Jesus. They are the ones that deserve to be worshiped, not God. And, they will do everything in their power to get all the people, including the Christ-followers to do so, by force or deception. But through his vision, John exposes their evilness and reminds his hearers then and now that evil will always try to get you not to see it as evil.
How do we know this is what John is doing? First, there is a lot of symbolism in John’s vision. Our dragon is red – the color of slaughter. Though the beast of the sea is not described as red, like the dragon it has seven heads and crowns and ten horns. The Lamb if you might recall only has seven horns – so who has more power.
The Roman empire would like us to believe that it does, but no, what it has in quantity, it does not have in quality. Jesus is the Lamb who is worthy of our worship – Jesus is all about love, inclusion, mercy, forgiveness, even accepting suffering and death to stay faithful to his mission. Rome is not worthy of our worship – Rome is about conquest, violence, exclusion, and oppression.
For John, Rome is the resurrected evil satanic empire of empires throughout history (remember Egypt and Babylonia) determined to exert its power and authority over all the people and determined to stamp out any worship to the God we claim. John is desperately trying to get those who claim to be Christ-followers to see the evil and not be deceived by it.
But oh that is so hard to do when the beast of the land arises. Known as the false prophet, this beast practices the kind of deception to which the Christ-followers are not immune. It tells you who to blame for your circumstances and tells you there will be great rewards if only you let it mark you as loyal. A word on this verse about not being able to purchase or sell anything unless you are marked.
As Brian Blount points out in his Commentary on Revelation: “Shut out of the economic system, a person would be hard-pressed to progress socially and politically, perhaps even to survive…accommodation to imperial cultic practice…is such unholy accommodation that he [John] depicts through the symbolization of the mark that contains the name or number of the first beast.” (page 260-61).
That would be Nero – a Roman Caesar who was unbelievably cruel to both Christ-followers and his own people, so much so that he was cast out by his own leadership. To be marked by Nero?! To give in to such evil and deception! To basically deny that evil exists in order to get ahead or in fairness, to survive in an economic, political and social imperial cult. What a choice to have to make!
John’s fear is that Christ-followers will make the wrong choice. That they will buy into the resistance is futile lie, abandoning their faithful witness to the God and Jesus we claim, in favor of giving in to the evil empire. That they will believe the deceptive lies of the empire that only they can make a “positive economic, social, political, and religious difference in their lives. Those imperial images are supposed to bring them a life of rewards that a reliance upon the lordship of God and Christ could not.” (Commentary, page 258).
We like to think that evil doesn’t exist in our own time – yet we’ve seen it in the 20th and the 21st century. We’ve seen it in Nazi Germany, we’ve seen it in South Africa apartheid, and we see it now. Where does faithful witness stand now. In Germany the state church bought fully into what Hitler was doing – and yet, a group known as the Confessing Church wrote the Barman Declaration (primarily written by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen) that stood in opposition to what Hitler was doing.
In South Africa, the Belhar Confession was written by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in opposition to what the white government and church was proclaiming about apartheid. Both of these confessions are in our own Book of Confessions, and in both cases, resistance was not seen as futile but gave rise to non-violent action.
We saw it in the Civil Rights movement here in our own country – with non-violent active resistance to Jim Crow laws and the lawlessness of the Ku Klux Klan led by religious leaders across ecumenical and interfaith lines. Our Confession of 1967 is rooted in that struggle and the need for reconciliation.
Evil exists and it will always try to deceive us into following it. Evil resurrects itself over and over again, always claiming to be able to overcome good. But what John and other religious leaders have said to us throughout time, is that that is not true. Good will overcome evil every time, but it can take a long time and there will be much pain and suffering which makes us all crazy!
But if we buy into the notion that resistance is futile, we’ll give up before we even start. John is telling us in our time and place to not give up, to resist but do it in a non-violent way. Do not meet the violence of empire with violence of our own. Do not give into hopelessness. Do not give into despair. Do what you can when you can. Stay in community because that is where we find our support.
First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem is one community that supports one another and claims as its values this: we are Christ-centered, we have an inquiring and active faith, and we are expansively welcoming. Wherever God is calling us in our current day and time and with the knowledge that evil exists, let us live our values. Let us respond to evil with “resistance is not futile.” Let us respond out of love and compassion, not hate and fear. Let us be non-violent but not silent. Let us be the imitators of Christ that John asks us to be. May it be so. Amen.