At my local church here in Minneapolis, Mill City Church, we’ve been reading through and preaching through the New Testament, and the plan was always to preach through Revelation for Advent. This was planned long before 2020 became the “apocalyptic” year that we all think of it as. At present, one of the particularly relevant aspects of Revelation for our cultural moment is the notion among some concerned Christians that maybe the COVID-19 vaccine might be, or might transmit, the Mark of the Beast. In my sermon for our Advent series, which was the first of five sermons on Revelation, and was intended to demystify the text and help guide our church through our readings and the final sermons, I address this concern head on. To be very clear, the Mark of the Beast has nothing to do with the COVID-19 vaccine, and I try to emphasize in this sermon that if we’re not understanding Revelation in the light of its unique genre of apocalyptic literature, as it would have been understood by the oppressed Christians to whom it was written in the first century, then our interpretations are baseless. Given that, I explain that the Mark of the Beast is best understood as being rooted in political symbolism about the Roman Empire in the first century, and particularly the Emperor Nero. Although the Mark of the Beast is only the focus for a portion of the sermon, taken as a whole, I hope the sermon will be helpful in dispelling a lot of the concerns that Revelation anticipated our experience in 2020, the global pandemic, and the vaccine that’s now being administered.
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