Day Two: A Great Sign in Heaven
A Dozen Days of Dragons
Begin reading Day One: An Apocalyptic Christmas Story
This story begins the way so many of the visions in Revelation do, with thunder and lightning, earthquake, and hail. Then,
A great sign appeared in heaven …
Revelation 12:1
A woman appears in the sky, a great sign. Clothed in blazing light, wearing a gown woven from the rays of the sun, each thread glowing and flashing. A dozen pulsating stars form a crown around her head. She stands over the moon. And she is pregnant. So very pregnant.
We recognize this woman, don’t we?
Seven centuries before Jesus was born, the Lord spoke through the prophet Isaiah, to King Ahaz of Judah, and invited him to ask for a sign that God would deliver the beleaguered nation from its enemies.
Let the sign, invited Isaiah, “be as deep as the grave or as high as the heavens.”
Hmmm … a sign in the heavens … but King Ahaz, putting his faith in a corrupting foreign alliance with the mighty Assyrian Empire instead of trusting God for deliverance, refused to ask for a sign. Feigning piety, the king insisted he didn’t want to put the Lord to the test. So Isaiah replies to stubborn King Ahaz:
“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7:14
That sounds familiar. A sign, a young woman, a virgin who bears a son — Immanuel, which means “God with us.” This woman in Revelation is “with child,” the very words used in Matthew’s Christmas story to describe the Virgin Mary.
Oh, but not so fast.
Because there are layers of meaning in John’s symbols. John didn’t just make this stuff up from his own imagination, after all. John draws heavily from the Hebrew scripture. The book of Revelation is crammed full of images and references and allusions and even direct quotations from what Christians call the Old Testament. Which is why most of us have so much trouble understanding these signs and visions, because we don’t really know the Old Testament very well.
Remember Joseph’s dream? Back in the earliest pages of the Bible, Joseph, the youngest son, the favorite son, with the coat of many colors, had a prophetic dream. In Joseph’s dream, his father and mother and brothers were symbolized by the sun, the moon, and twelve stars. Now John the Seer shows us a picture of the nation of Israel, whose long history of suffering finds meaning at last as birth pangs … pain finding purpose as Israel labors to bring forth the messiah.
On one level, the woman in the sky represents Mary the mother of Jesus. On another level, the woman in the sky is a symbol for Israel, from whom was born the messiah.
As we watch, the woman in the sky collapses into the travail of childbirth. The joyful hymn sung by the twenty-four elders around God’s throne in heaven is drowned out by the piercing cries of the woman in labor.
This is Christmas. Cries of pain amidst carols of hope. Blood and sweat and the stench of livestock in the manger, beneath a canopy of angels and glory shining. Waiting for God to do a miracle in the dead of night.
Sometimes the miracle doesn’t come, or doesn’t come in the way we expect. Neither King Ahaz nor the prophet Isaiah could have foreseen the ultimate fulfillment of the Immanuel prophecy, not in the way Matthew and John interpreted the birth of Jesus. Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in the short term when the enemies of King Ahaz were defeated, but the worst king in the history of Israel continued to wreak havoc upon the nation. And that changed Isaiah’s prayers and prophecies.
Some of us, for whom hope is hard to come by, end up praying desperately along with Isaiah:
“Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near her time, so were we because of you, O LORD; we were with child, we writhed, but gave birth only to wind. We have won no victories on earth, and no one is born to inhabit the world.”
Isaiah 26:17–18
What do you do, when there are birth pangs but no birth? When the time comes to deliver, and you receive only empty wind? When no infant is born and there are no victories on earth? What do you do with such crushing disappointment?
Sometimes, for some of us, Christmas feels like that, a promise cruelly snatched away. An empty chair at Christmas dinner. A family gathering interrupted by pandemic. Christmas is especially hard, our grief and sadness made worse by the knowledge that this is supposed to be a joyful season. We feel alone and guilty for our suffering amidst a sea of holiday cheer. At times like that, we need John’s apocalyptic Christmas story to give us hope.
Hope is often born surreptitiously. Hope isn’t as noisy as grief, as attention-grabbing as conflict, as obvious as trauma. But hope is persistent.
This is the Christmas story John tells in Revelation.
Just as you draw in your breath to sing that carol, just as you hold out your hands to catch the infant being birthed …
Just then, a dragon intrudes upon the vision … ugly and menacing, crowding into the night sky. The fiery reptile is an angry red wound torn against the starry host, with seven heads all coiled to strike, seven mouths agape. Fangs glistening with venom. Ravenous to devour the infant as he emerges from the womb. How can a vulnerable new mother defend herself and her child against such a fearsome creature?
Christmas isn’t necessarily a happy story, in the beginning. Like life, it is more complicated than that. There is a dragon in John’s Christmas story.