York Minster

Easter 3: Revelation 2.1-11; A theology of Hate?

Date: 26th April 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

“Yet this is to your credit: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.”

The Book of Revelation is so obscure that you can make out of it pretty much anything you want. As I was preparing this sermon I spent a little bit of time exploring the group mentioned in the first part of our reading from Revelation this evening – the Nicolaitans. When you look at the commentaries or at the scholarly on-line encyclopaedias, the very first thing you are told is that nobody has the first clue as to who this group might be and what they might have stood for. We have no idea, and therefore no clues as to why God is supposed to hate them.

That, of course, leaves the field wide open, as it were, and the rest of the online Christian world has gone to extraordinary lengths to say exactly who these people were and why God hated them then and still hates them today. And as you look at something like trying to understand the Nicolaitans, you soon see why the Christian world is so full of hate when you look at these kinds of web sites, for when the Bible says that God hates something, and you are left to decide what that thing is for yourself, then you can legitimise all sorts of hate: I hate you because God hates you, and if God hates you then it is pretty much open season on you. It’s not very pretty.

One web site I looked at decided, after some very extensive – and how shall I say it, ‘imaginative’ –  work with the Greek text, that the Nicolaitans were people who wanted a ruling class in the church; that is to say, they wanted bishops, and that God hates this because Christ alone is ruler of the church. Therefore, since God hates bishops, God hates Catholics (they didn’t bother to say whether God hates Anglicans too, though I think we can assume He does…). Another web site decided that the Nicolaitans believed in universal salvation and that, therefore, God hates the idea (how could God, after all, want everyone to be saved? What a silly idea…). Well, instead of bishops or universal salvation, substitute ‘homosexuality’, or women bishops, or Muslims, or Al-Quaeda or whatever, and you can see where this kind of so-called biblical study leads you.

Different times and contexts can lead to a change in these hate figures; while yesterdays’ hate figure was a bishop, perhaps today’s is an investment banker; perhaps tomorrow it will be firms that emit large amounts of CO2, though I suspect the hate figures for the Christian right will remain the usual suspects: those who are least able to defend themselves or whose lives are seen as ‘alternative’.

Christian hate, and what almost appears to be a kind of theology of hate, does seem a contradictory kind of idea; though there is plenty of hate in the Bible, some of which I might like to applaud and some of which I might like to condemn.  There is the hate shown through the prophets for those who oppress the poor, or who ‘grind them into dust’ by their financial practices which is, perhaps, well-merited and timely; and there is what might be called ‘xenophobic’ hate, which is, perhaps, less so. But because Jesus based his whole understanding of God and the relationship we are to have with each other on love, it is difficult to understand how easily love in the Christian tradition can morph into hate.

The love that Jesus teaches and which others, like St Paul and St John, explore further in the NT, is not meant to be something that is merely emotional, merely a feeling we have to generate, or is an overwhelming passion like hate. Love in the Christian tradition is a discipline, a way of life, an attempt to live in a Christ-like way with everyone we meet. It is to remember that Christ came into the world to save it through love and not to condemn it through hate. So, there is not much room for hate in the economy of salvation and in the Christian way of life: whoever the Nicolaitans were and however loathsome their views.

Amen.