Preaching, and the "Quartet for the End of Time"

Our church has hosted a Chamber Music Festival this weekend: three days, three concerts. I wish I could write at length about them, but (for once) I am speechless.

The best I can do is one tangential thought, stemming from their performance of the Quartet for the End of Time (O. Messiaen). It is based on a passage from the Revelation of St. John the Divine:

And I saw another mighty angel, come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was at it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heave, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer... (10:1-6)

The Quartet is about an hour's music on this vision, with movement titles such as “Liturgy of crystal,” and “Abyss of birds,” and “Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets,” and “Praise to the immortality of Jesus.”

Those who preach tend to avoid the Revelation of St. John. Many in the liberal denominations such as my own seem embarrassed by it. At best, they dismiss it, as one liberal preacher did in my hearing, as a text that used the medium of apocalypse to give hope to communities oppressed by persecution, with the subtext that it has no meaning whatsoever for us, two thousand years later. The judgmental aspects are, of course, to be ignored, for “God is love” and would never pour out his wrath on the world in the manner described at length in the book.

Preaching fails with this book because it is, at its heart, mystical vision. Words, other than the direct and plain words of the text itself, fail to convey what is of significance. It may be that Music is the best form for exegesis of this great and wonderful document. Three examples come to mind, beginning with the Messiaen Quartet:

-- The final choruses of Messiah, from “Worthy is the Lamb” through the Amen (G. F. Handel: Revelation 5:12-14)
-- Quartet for the End of Time (Revelation 10:1-6)
-- “And I saw a new heaven” (Edgar Bainton: Revelation 21:1-4)

What better exegesis of these passages could there be?