The prophet Amos shouts God’s judgment against society, saying “they use an ephah that is too small, and practice deceit with false measures, The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. I will turn the sky to darkness and your feasts to lamentations.”
By the time Nicodemus came to visit him, Jesus was the talk of the whole country. Nicodemus had heard Jesus was performing inexplicable wonders. But what’s more, Nicodemus had heard Jesus was traveling amidst the most downtrodden and disreputable people: notorious sinners and suspicious foreigners, poor uneducated laborers, and women, and the sick. Jesus was teaching them they were in the very presence of God, and Jesus was confronting the religious authorities and teaching them they had strayed far from the presence of God.
The passage that we’ve just heard from book of Revelation is a vision about the fate of the human soul after we die. As is true with any vision, this vision is meant to communicate something that is true but categorically different from what we know, and so it must rely on metaphor and symbol.