THE GREAT ORDEAL

The next section of John’s Revelation portrayed a great disaster about to befall the church community. He described this ordeal as a myth, a story told about the remote past designed to interpret present reality. Cleverly to disguise his real intent, John used this pagan myth in 12:1-6 common to many cultures in ancient times. The myth told of a Mother Goddess who gave birth to a son. It contradicted the current political situation, source of the church's suffering.

In this instance, the mother was not Mary and the son Jesus, but the messianic community and the faithful witnesses. The mother’s birth agony referred the suffering endured by the people of God waiting for their anointed Messiah. John was not thinking of the Nativity but the death on the Cross by which Jesus came to reign with God over God’s eternal realm.

The strange figure of the seven-headed red dragon about to devour the newborn infant derived from an old Canaanite myth still evident in a number of Old Testament references (Ps. 74:14; Jer. 51:34; Ezek. 29:3). The mother’s and child’s escape from the dragon referred to the first consequence of the crucifixion and ascension of Christ. As long as Jesus lived he was tempted to yield to Satan’s temptation, to do that which was not God’s will. His death freed him from Satan’s power. In other words, by his death and resurrection Jesus and the believing community escaped to the security of eternal life.

Yet there is ambivalence in what John was saying, reflected in symbols from the Israel’s Exodus from Egypt to wander in the wilderness. While the church remains in the world amid great evil and suffering, it is sustained by God just as Israel escaped to the freedom of the desert to be sustained by God in their wandering for an extended period.