In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
This coming Sunday I will be leading worship in our very multicultural church here in Chicago. And it happens that we are making our way through the book of Revelation, and chapter 13 is our surreal text this coming week.
I confess that it has been quite a while since I’ve read through the whole book of Revelation. But chapter 13’s account of the dragon and the beasts made sense to me immediately as I reread it today.
When you are thinking and praying every day about a genocide involving bombing, sniping, and starvation of children, women, and men with your country’s tax dollars,
and the many people around the world who care have not been able to stop it,
putrid beasts with ten horns, seven heads, and seemingly boundless power seem appropriate as representations of such massive evil.
One of the beast’s heads has been killed but the wound has healed over? I picture it flopping on its neck as the beast lumbers along, one of its dead eyes open and staring.
I wonder whether some of the heads have one horn and others two. Horns in scripture are symbolic of power and strength. The power here is utterly malevolent, and it has multiple manifestations.
We already know from earlier chapters that evil is conquered only by the Lamb who was slain—that is, by Jesus, through whom God entered our suffering and went all the way into death and hell for the world’s salvation. In chapter 13 the writer warns us that the evil of our day (the time of the original audience, but also our own) will sometimes be so vile and entrenched as to seem invincible. But Jesus’ victory-through-suffering still stands, and we must stay centered in that Love.
Because our congregation includes a whole range of literacy and education levels as well as multiple languages, after Revelation 13:1-8, 10b is read, a couple of the pastors and I are going to read out the following explanation in English, Nepali, and Kinyarwanda:
In every culture there are stories of dragons and other beasts: powerful forces that are hard to understand and to oppose.
Revelation 13 uses the language of beasts to picture the powers of this world.
This beast has seven heads and ten horns. It is scary!
The writer of Revelation is showing us the powerful evil in the world system.
In our time, the beast is money, racism, and domination.
The way of the beast is not the way of Jesus.
We are surrounded by the beast and its power, but we choose the way of Jesus.
We choose peace and justice, endurance and faithfulness.
When we pray for Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and other places where people are suffering, we are praying against the beast.
It is a long, hard battle, but Jesus triumphs through his life, death, and resurrection.
Before the ruin when the sea was green breaking to white and children chased each other when the sun was life and they picnicked: olives, hummus, bread
After the ruin with my sister I walk among giants of rock on the south coast of Oregon Angels, old and black, chant their subduction the clash of volcanoes, islands and small continents shoved up against the continental plate
In Gaza the ruin has not ended With no thought of beaches hounded children crouch in tents Their parents seek just a little flour for bread
Dear angels of subduction we set our hands on your vast shoulders we ask for your strength we pray against ruin
Before we rose, in the daylight of Gaza bombs rained on the camps and demolished demolished one father, four children in a tent
One mother is left and she has no feet
What is this world What is this crashing What raided the house of our belonging left doors swinging on broken hinges What suffocates us all What ruin
Dear sentinels, dear Old Ones we are not strong like you we need our feet we need gentleness and food Dear God in heaven come to the beaches of Gaza and the tents, come now
Tell us how we live in this bombing or far away from it with helpless hands
I walk out to one of the giants lean against its ancient bulk A wave rolls in over my feet How do I live
Good Friday worship can awaken a whole raft of emotions: love, gratitude, sorrow—and sometimes rage. In the final weeks of his life, Bonhoeffer wrote, “Christians stand by God in God’s hour of grieving.” What does that mean for us now?
I walked home from church last night in a hot rage. Actually there was a mess of emotions—tender desire to stay awake with Jesus in his suffering; gratitude for the creative devotion of those who had crafted a series of sensory meditations to help us do that; distress over the loss of a beautiful Palestinian girl-child, which I had learned about on social media earlier that evening, and a beautiful Palestinian boy-child’s loss of limbs.
And fury at the broken promises of my country.
In eighth grade I was in the USA with my family, and in home room at Milburn Junior High School that year we were shown jerky films of skin-and-bones survivors of Nazi concentration camps. I will never forget those naked forms of human beings, beloved of God, starved to barely-aliveness. Barely able to walk, weighing barely enough for gravity to hold them to the earth. Those films came with solemn assurances that now we had the United Nations, we had an international system to make sure the Holocaust would never happen again.
Habiba and Mahmoud would beg to differ. The very country that claimed credit for stopping the Holocaust is now supplying the bombs raining down on the tents where their families are taking shelter. And that very country has been blocking the United Nations from putting an end to the genocide.
And it is my country. And many, many of us around the world are desperate to stop the violence, and thus far we have failed.
So I have no Easter platitudes to offer. I will go to church again on Sunday morning, and I’ll take joy in the resurrection story—I will cling to the hope it provides. But in my heart, until Israel’s crazed violence against the Palestinian people and land has been brought to an end, I will keep trying to stay awake with Jesus. Because Jesus is suffering with Mahmoud, and with Habiba’s bereft family, and with all of Palestine.
Habiba’s name means Love. She was killed on Good Friday.
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On the sad anniversary of Israel’s intensified attacks on Gaza, recognized around the world as a genocidal campaign but supported unconditionally by my own government, I have written a letter that I will be posting in the following online forms. If you feel moral injury as I do, you are welcome to copy and adapt this letter to share with your own electeds. Here are sites for my representatives, along with links you can use to communicate with yours:
Dear President Biden, Vice President Harris, Senator Durbin, Senator Duckworth, Representative Schakowsky:
The Earth has made a complete orbit around the Sun since October 2023, and thanks to all of you, the world has been witnessing the first genocide of the twenty-first century during these twelve months.
As Israel began carrying out its revenge and targeting the civilians of Gaza, you seized the opportunity to assist it with countless lethal weapons, including 2,000lb bombs, which it has used to incinerate refugee camps, killing whole families, and has dropped on other homes and on schools, universities, churches, mosques, markets, and farms. It has targeted water plants and left people drinking fetid water from puddles and ditches. It has committed one war crime after another. Its snipers have gleefully targeted older women like me, its snipers have shot children in the head. Its soldiers film themselves laughing while they humiliate prisoners. These videos have been posted on social media for the whole world to see.
You have wrinkled your faces in expressions of empathy and urged Israel to minimize civilian casualties and investigate a couple of the many reported incidents of human rights abuses. You know full well that Israel will not investigate its misdeeds honestly.
While supposedly waging this assault in the name of freeing the hostages held by Hamas, Israel has killed a number of those hostages, again with US weapons.
About a dozen employees of UNRWA were accused of participating in the October 7 raid or supporting it some way. UNRWA promptly fired those employees. But instead of lauding its quick response, you cut off support for UNRWA, the only source of food for thousands of Gazans, and you influenced other Western governments to do likewise. With trucks carrying aid blocked by Israeli soldiers and settlers at all the crossings, the people of Gaza who have not been killed are starving. They walk the streets like ghosts.
Rep. Schakowsky, months ago you justified voting for a bill that included another huge sale of weapons to Israel with a long statement arguing that it was the only way to get desperately needed food aid to Gaza. Do you not understand that dropping boxes of food is stupendously offensive when you have also provided Gaza’s enemy with massive weapons and artillery to kill those hungry people?
President Biden and Vice President Harris, you claim to be working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. Surely you are aware that Hamas is not the one putting up obstacles to a ceasefire agreement. It has agreed multiple times to US-backed proposals. Netanyahu’s government is the intransigent party every time. Indeed Israel sent assassins to kill Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Netanyahu knows that his administration will fall apart if he says yes to a cessation of hostilities. And he has absolutely no positive reason to say yes, given that the United States continues to blithely send weapons at the rate of two shipments every single day.
You are violating multiple US laws each time you send those weapons to Israel. We are under obligation to stop arming any country that commits human rights abuses in its conduct of war. But somehow you see yourselves as above this law.
Emboldened by your encouraging words (“we will never abandon Israel”), Israel has increased its violence in the West Bank. And now Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria . . .
I am deeply ashamed of you as representatives of the country where I vote and pay taxes. You seem blissfully unaware that as you enable the destruction of Gaza and its people, you are also inflicting profound moral injury on the people whom you were elected to serve and represent. Moral injury happens when great evil is done in our name and we are powerless to stop it. The people of the United States do not approve of your support of Israel’s carnage, and we have been letting you know in polls, petitions, phone messages, street protests. But you do not listen to us. In this election season you are probably glad to be running against Trump and all the Project 2025 people, because their plans are so horrific that when we shut our eyes to Gaza, you seem like the good guys. But we know. Even ardent Democrats know that you are injuring us as you wrap yourselves in the Israeli flag. You are injuring the whole world.
Do you remember Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force serviceman who immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy last February, crying out “Free Palestine”? Did you dismiss his agony because he wasn’t your constituent? Aaron saw your complicity in genocide—a complicity that we all share as taxpayers. You are using our money and you are killing our souls as you arm Israel so that it can starve, torture, and kill the people of Palestine.
I am seventy years old, a mother and grandmother, an artist and writer, a follower of Jesus. I live very modestly but have a rich and beautiful life. And on this anniversary I am contemplating Aaron Bushnell’s action. I am wounded by what you are doing in my name, and I’m wondering what desperate public step I could take to wake you up.
You probably wouldn’t care much because I don’t donate to your campaigns. And since you can see the images of Gazan babies killed by US bombs and you keep sending the bombs anyway, you wouldn’t be moved by any sacrifice I might make. You have political reasons that completely override public or personal ethics.
It is exhausting and heartbreaking to live in the world that you are destroying. But I believe that somewhere in your core, you, like me and like every human being, still have a soul that longs for God and reaches for the good. Will you begin to shut out the political pressures and listen to your own soul? Are you able to reverse course—to repent, to use an apt biblical term? You don’t have to stop being a politician: you could actually start listening to your constituents and help to assuage our moral injury. You could uphold US law and impose an arms embargo. You could save dollars that way and direct them toward reparations for the people of Gaza and meeting urgent needs for healthcare, education, and housing here in the USA.
You could. Will you?
In grief and necessary hope,
Ruth Goring
Chicago police gathered around me in June 2024 as I lay shrouded on Franklin Street in front of the building where AIPAC has its local office. Along with ten others, I chose arrest and jail in order to make vivid the deadly consequences for Gaza of our country’s unethical Middle East policies.
Ruth Goring 