“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev 22, 12)
Some years ago I spent a while working in the United States, and I found myself in a house where there was no Bible. So I went out to buy one. The only edition I could find was an Authorised Version with (as it said on the cover, its unique selling point) “the sayings of Jesus in red.” As you turned the pages the red print of the sayings stood out from the black, right through the gospels and into the Acts of the Apostles. But what surprised me was the amount of red in the book of Revelation.
Now we know that the earliest traditions about Jesus were passed down by word of mouth, and that different groups of Christians remembered different things; so that it is not impossible that in the late first century the Christians of Ephesus, the community that produced the Book of Revelation, might have preserved some sayings that were lost elsewhere. Certainly Revelation contains some very familiar sayings, such as that in chapter three: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him and he with me” (Rev 3, 20). In sayings like that, Jesus’s tone of voice does seem to sound clear and recognisable for us to hear.
But some of the sayings in Revelation are rather strange and not what might have been expected. This evening’s text is one such: “I am the Alpha and the Omega ... the beginning and the end.” Not inappropriately, these words appear twice, at the beginning and the end of the book, in chapter 1 and chapter 22. They bracket everything else, as though this insight, that Christ’s being embraces and includes all other being, were John’s main point. It is certainly a powerful and memorable statement and one that has often been imaged in Christian art. But the words remain strange, in more than one way.
First, they show Jesus using an image based on the Greek alphabet. Alpha is the first letter and Omega the last. Does that mean that Jesus knew the Greek alphabet? Scholars have suggested that, in first century Palestine, Jesus would have had contact with Greek. Did he speak some Greek? Was he literate in Greek? Or was John simply devising an image that would work with his Greek-speaking readers?
A deeper strangeness is that in these words Jesus makes an atypically philosophical point. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”: that rises above the immediacy of Jesus’s gospel sayings—all those earthy stories that we call parables—to the level of metaphysical statement, an assertion of his relation to being as a whole.
A fair conclusion might be that this probably isn’t a remembered saying, but an expression of what the early Church had come to understand about Jesus. There is some agreement that the Book of Revelation, though not written by the John who wrote the fourth gospel, nevertheless stands in the tradition of that gospel, that there is an intellectual line of descent from John the Evangelist. In that tradition, there is a sequence of cosmic images of Christ: from the first words of the gospel itself, where Jesus is identified with the logos, the word of God from which all being emerges, to the opening of John’s first letter, where Jesus is the light that was from the beginning, to these words in Revelation, where Jesus declares himself to be the beginning and the end.
This sequence of imagery, all of which relates Christ to the primary logic of creation, suggests that part of what the early Christians experienced in Christ was the rationality of being as a whole. Christ somehow made sense, not just of individual lives, but of everything that there was. He revealed, alongside the personal love of God, the rationality of God that suffuses all being; so that they saw the universe not as chaotic or irrational, not the product of unknowable forces or whimsical spirits, but as a profound and rational order in which the reason of humanity, our power to make sense of things, has a place.
To see how Christ might have prompted this recognition, we might look at the way reason is understood in our own day. Very often rationality is set in opposition to religion; it is associated with science, and religion is seen as a force of unreason which misdescribes the universe and corrupts the rationality of human affairs, whether personal, social or political. To be rational is to reject the unreason of belief in God and all that goes with it.
There are things to be said. First, it needs to be recognised that it was Christianity’s vision of the deep rationality of the universe that made modern science possible. No one would launch on the scientific quest unless they had some belief that things were orderly and open to rational analysis. That belief, for our culture at least, Christianity provided.
Second, the rationality of science is not the whole of human rationality; it does not extend to everything that human beings want to reason about. Scientific reason is very good at telling us how things are and how they came to be that way. From that it can often tell us how things are going to be. So it can tell us that ice is water in a particular form; that this form appears when the temperature of water drops below zero; and that since the temperature will be five degrees below zero tomorrow morning, we can expect ice on the roads.
But can scientific reason say whether it is reasonable for me to love my enemies? It can say that there may be some evolutionary usefulness in coming to terms with enemies and cooperating with them for the common good; but is that really the question I’m asking? If I’m worried about how I should treat an enemy, I’m only partly asking about what is useful: I’m also asking about what is right, about the action that would make sense of my life and the lives of others. I’m asking a question (trying to reason) about the meaning of my existence. Scientific analysis of causes and consequences probably isn’t going to help me very far.
It is in this area that Christ introduces his followers to a deep and inclusive rationality, a frame of reasonableness that does indeed embrace all being. Suppose I have the impulse to love my enemy, to return good for evil. It feels somehow right, but I don’t know why I’m doing it. I may even suspect that I’m acting irrationally, because most people would see such an act, good given in return for evil, as unreasonable or even foolish. Jesus places that act within a new frame, so that it is no longer just an impulse but something that makes sense. He tells us that the ground of such an action is the being of God, a being in which love and goodness flow forth endlessly in the face of whatever evil is thrown against them. He shows us that behind the rationality of human calculation—can I be expected to do this, will it help me?—there is a deeper rationality, and within the logic of that rationality my action makes complete sense.
Against the partial reason of science, a reason that often seems to reduce or exclude aspects of our humanity, the Christian faith sets a fuller rationality; not in order to deny the first, but to complete it. The writer of the Book of Revelation had seen in Christ how the reason of God opens itself to the reason of man, embraces it, and gives it an eternal validity. As Christmas approaches, we should remember that, just as the Incarnation reveals the love of God, so it also, through that same love, reveals the rationality of God, the orderliness of being, and the possibility for our reason to enter into that greater reason which comes before and after all that is. As John has Jesus say, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
