Nehemiah Blake
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Unravelling the mystery of Laodicea
In the dedication of Apocalypse of Jude, Richard Wasserfall writes:
[Apocalypse of Jude] contains the mystery of the seventh star that John the Revelator saw, the mystery of the seventh golden lampstand that stands before the throne. The star is the angel and the lampstand is the church of Laodicea.
More simply put, Apocalypse of Jude contains the mystery of the church of Laodicea. It is worth quoting the entire passage dedicated to Laodicea in Revelation before seeking to get a grip on what Richard Wasserfall believes that mystery might mean:
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev 3:14-22; NIV)
The church at Laodicea is most famous for its lukewarm character, which in the parlance of a more modern age might be construed as “cool”: too hip for its own hop. It is a characteristic that Richard Wasserfall believes is symptomatic in the broader English church as it has sought to make itself relevant to a consumer society on the one hand, and to an increasingly pluralist society on the other. However, too often verse 15 – “So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth” – has been (ab)used by old-school evangelism to force an inflexible, fundamentalist version of the Jesus story down the throats of believers who have been seeking out a new relevance for Jesus in the UK. Richard Wasserfall has admitted to Nehemiah & Blake that he was similarly blindsided by this narrow exegesis when setting out to write Apocalypse of Jude. But through writing, he has come to believe that how this passage on Laodicea relates to the church in England lies not in its being used to berate those who seek a fresh relevancy, but in its ability to critique how these believers have gone about seeking relevancy.
Wasserfall believes that over the past 40 years or so, UK believers have sought to justify their increasingly “old-fashioned” faith through becoming more materially “alike” to the people around them. In so doing, they have become just like them: enriched through property, goods and equity. What has been dropped in the process of becoming relevant has been the Jesus hard-sell. The shedding of this sales technique is what the old-schoolers like to drive home as being central to the failure of the modern church in England. But this is not what is being said when the whole passage on Laodicea is taken under consideration, as Richard Wasserfall described to Nehemiah & Blake:
When you read the whole passage, and ask yourself, what does Jesus want from Laodicea, you find out that he wants to eat! “Here I am!” Jesus says. “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Suddenly, you’re asking yourself, whose door is Jesus knocking on? Who does he want to eat with? And again the text gives you the answer. He wants to eat with the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
Realising that sent me back to the gospels, because there’s a parable where Jesus talks of a great banquet in which a man invites many guests. But their RSVPs all come back with excuses about why they can’t make it. So the man becomes angry and tells his servant to go out and find “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” and bring them in. Now the man is God, and Jesus is the servant who goes out looking for the outcasts to eat with his master. And here Jesus is in Laodicea knocking on the doors of the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” who in material terms are loaded.
So what’s the mystery? The mystery is that the “cool” gospel of material relevance is extreme poverty. You don’t see it, because you are blind to the fact that the extreme poverty you see in the mediated image of the “global south” “other” is actually an image of your soul. You are numb to this fact because you have deferred its material consequences onto this “other”. This is what has happened to the people of Laodicea in my book Apocalypse of Jude.
The town in which Apocalypse of Jude is set has become a type of Laodicea: a haven of properties for the wealthy in a beautiful landscape ruled over by two real-estate “warlords”. Yet on its outskirts lies a sprawling slum of poverty, and within its boundaries, the characters experience not its material charms, but its spiritual death and decay. Paul seeks to engineer the downfall of this system in which the town’s people have their spiritual poverty exposed to the material horrors of such a poverty. Yet Paul is someone motivated, not out of love, but out of rage and envy. The church in this Laodicea has all but disappeared under the veneer of material wealth. For Jude it exists now only as an institution awaiting its antichrist to finally demolish it.
Both these story tangents offer depressing outcomes for the mystery of Laodicea. The Biblical text, however, offers hope in the form of a promise to those who overcome the trap that Laodicea springs. And this hope is best encapsulated in the story by Caul and Audrey who are found by a group of believers who themselves are beginning to give up the quest for material relevance and beginning to experience the apocalypse of spiritual poverty going on in themselves.
This reading of the Laodicean mystery by Richard Wasserfall makes his offering up of Apocalypse of Jude as a blessing to “the churches of Albion” all the more pertinent as the church in the UK becomes increasingly aware of its own spiritual poverty. But its pertinence goes further as the UK enters a period in which its economic prosperity, built on the back of a property boom, is entering a fallout that is threatening the lives of many with the impact of material poverty. In this sense, Nehemiah & Blake believes Apocalypse of Jude is a prophetic utterance of both warning and hope for the English church to speed up its transformation into a body that can feed, clothe and heal “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” so that as a body itself it will no longer be “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” and thus not spat out.
Towards defining an archetext, part II
The Old English word “arche” is derived from Old French, and means ark (as in Noah’s ark) in modern usage. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the following examples
c1205 LAY. 26 Noe & Sem, Japhet & Cham and heore four wiues
e mid heom weren on archen.c1230 Ancr. R. 334 Eihte i
an noe was in to
e arche cumen. a1300 Cursor M. 1843 On
The OED also cites this same usage for the Jewish ark of the covenant which held the law of God, Israel’s most sacred text. An archetext then is, additional to its previous meanings, a form of textual ark which holds a crucial legacy in terms of knowledge for those that come after a devastation, as well as being a receptacle for sacred texts that hold a community together.
At the same time, an archetext can be considered as a form of arche-writing suggested by Jacques Derrida in his seminal work, Of Grammatology. This arche-writing can be understood as writing which
“refers to a more generalised notion of writing that insists that the breach that the written introduces between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actually conveyed, is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct, including the notion of self-presence.”¹
More plainly put, one might consider that “originary breach” as “original sin” in which everything that Adam and Eve might have wished to keep sacrosanct – Eden and a self-present God – underwent a spacial differing – exit from Eden – and a temporal deferral – having to commune with God through sacrifice.
Because of this differing and deferral, Derrida considers meaning never to be present in a text, not even present to the author themselves. It is always deferred into the future and subject to that future’s whims.
“[B]ut when that so-called future is itself ‘present’ [...] its meaning is equally not realised, but subject to yet another future that can also never be present.”
This brings us into the realm and nature of the prophetic. Those who would have the Bible fixed in meaning for perpetuity must fail to remember that concerning the salvation of Jesus Christ, “the prophets [...] searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing,” (1 Peter 1:10-11). Here we have the meaning of prophecy not available in full to the prophets themselves. Nevertheless, the messiah they prophesied, in falling under the whims of a post-exilic Israel, was re-prophesied as coming as a mighty slayer of Israel’s enemies. Yet when Jesus Christ came, he was recognised as the messiah by a small group of disciples who in turn radically reinterpreted the prophets to create a new future of a coming kingdom. This process of reinterpreting and re-prophesying into a future has continued throughout Christianity’s history and continues today, as the Biblical text allows itself as ark (arche), archetype, archeological specimen, architectural construction and corpus of writing that accounts for its “presence” through the arche-writing breach, to be so practiced upon.
The Bible then is a form of ideal archetext in the same way as the Internet might be considered as a form of idea arch-e-text, always allowing its treasure stores to cross over the flood of human history into a future present to be sent again on its path over the flood.
Notes:
1. Quotes come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Reclaiming the Apocalypse
This Saturday’s Guardian Review published an essay by Ian McEwan on end-time prophecy in which McEwan defines apocalyptic stories as those which
“predict the date and manner of our wholescale destruction, often rendered meaningful by ideas of divine punishment and ultimate redemption; the end of life on earth, the end or last days, end time, the apocalypse.” (italics added)
Nehemiah & Blake italicises ‘predict the date’ because this is all too true of so many apocalyptic movements throughout history. However, the book upon which Christian garden-variety apocalypses are based is of course the closing book of the Bible, Revelation, a book which interestingly enough contains no date for the end at all, but only a cipher of numerological and symbolical images. McEwan quite correctly sums up this text as a work of “boundless adaptability.”
Nehemiah & Blake make this distinction between prediction based on Revelation and the prophecy of Revelation precisely because it is in this prophecy’s undated vision of the future that it retains its boundless adaptability to be reinvented anew for each age. Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude, in remixing Revelation with T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Dante’s Purgatory demonstrates just how flexible the biblical prophecy can be when its “lurid” images, as McEwan calls them – Babylon, the beast, the whore, the four horsemen and the anti-christ – are interpreted not as barcodes, the Pope or the U.N., but as ciphers to how power and injustice work in this world to create misery and oppression. Moreover, in Apocalypse of Jude, this oppression and misery is experienced in the characters, not as a climactic world ending, but as deep personal spiritual anguish as they become exposed to or act as propagators of these symbols of power and injustice. What the characters of Apocalypse of Jude experience in varying degrees is nothing less than the personal apocalypse of the soul.
The purpose of making the above distinction is to rescue apocalyptic thinking from the human failing of ascribing to ourselves a godlike messianic status that likes to confer fixed meaning upon texts and then to date the day of the end of the world. Such a failing is politically dangerous as McEwan points out. But the political danger he is talking about is the one which apocalyptic messiahs wish to bring upon us – nuclear vaporisation for all who are unchosen. The apocalyptic thinking at work in Apocalyse of Jude is also politically dangerous, for it suggests that an apocalypse of the soul is just the beginning of a way of thinking that is determined to demand justice in the face of the beast.
