The Good News

The Good News

Not without reason the New Testament has been called the Good News for centuries.  Countless people have drawn infinite consolation from it.

You can’t say the same of the last book in the Bible.  In the Apocalypse we are confronted with evil, so overpowering that when reading it we risk losing courage.  It is as if all the consolation of the Gospel is washed away by death, destruction, and demons.  And not only is this true for all the evil that is spreading in the world; the same is true for each one of us.

“You have the name of a living being, yet you are dead.” (Revelation 3:1, the letter to the congregation in Sardis).  How come that in our time—for this letter speaks of our time—we are dead before the countenance of God, in the middle of our lives?

Imagine how we look in the eyes of the divine world when we have occupied ourselves all day only with eating, drinking, money, technology, and the countless distractions away from the ONE, which God needs.  When we then fall asleep in the evening, we not only appear with empty hands, but eventually what will happen is what the Offering in the Consecration of the Human Being calls burying our eternal being for the sake of our temporal.

And yet this shocking word of the Apocalypse gives us a gleam of hope when it is followed by the call: “Strive to awaken in your consciousness, and strengthen what is still living in your soul so that it die not.” (3:2)

Not all in us has to die, even though we are taken up day after day by a world that wants to turn us into willess slaves of technology, money, and power.

A single prayer by a righteous one can bring about miracles in silence.

A single deed of unselfishness strengthens what is left and otherwise threatens to die.

A single service at the altar is a beacon of light in a darkened world—not only for us human beings, but also for the divine world, which looks for traces of life in our mortal, dying earth existence.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, October 27, 2024