Reflections on God and Money: Babylon and the Beast (3)

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations’. And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marvelled greatly.

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his glory. And he called out with a mighty voice, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast. For all nations have drunk the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality, and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.’

Revelation 17:1-6 & 18:1-3

This weekend, I would like to consider three features of the Babylon that is portrayed in Revelation 17:1-19:10 and then pose a difficult question.

First, Babylon is drunk! We can leave for another time what she is drunk on and just wonder about the implications for us. The global financial crisis, the consequences of which we still live with, was a consequence of persistent recklessness and irrationality by people working in the world’s great financial organisations. With the benefit of hindsight, some have observed that the financial wizards might have been drunk! They so believed in their own magic, they thought to change the laws of economics; the experienced people, whose warnings should have been respected, were derided as ‘fools in the corner’. The crisis was the result of the ‘drunks’ getting their own way for too long.

Second, Babylon is a prostitute! She is ‘the great prostitute…with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality’. Unfortunately, that translation does not do full justice to what St John wrote because the prostitution is not only sexual! In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for adultery and fornication is used about 100 times but in over half the passages it refers to spiritual, not sexual, sin. When Jesus of Nazareth challenged the Pharisees’ love of money, he illustrated it by a man who divorces his wife to marry his mistress. In the New Testament, James calls his readers an ‘adulterous people’ but his letter addresses the disloyalty, divisions and discord caused by financial sin.

Why is such a strong metaphor as prostitution used for financial and well as sexual sin?

I will explain the third feature tomorrow.

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Friday, 7 June 2013

Babylon and the Beast (3)