Revelation 7:9-17

Resources

1. James Alison, Raising Abel. On p. 99-100 Alison is opening his discussion regarding the universality implied in the Christian view of judgment. He cites Rev. 7:9 for the picture of the crowd in the open heaven: "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages." This quartet -- every nation (Gr: ethnos), tribe (phylos), peoples (laos), and languages (glossos) -- appears in three other places in Revelation: 5:9, 13:7, 14:6. This inclusive group gathers around the slaughtered lamb, the innocent victim, who reveals that the human reality of differences are a human linguistic construct made to service the scapegoating mechanism. He anchors this discussion around the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10-11.

2. Ibid., p. 194-95. Alison concludes the book with a citation of Rev. 7:14-17, connecting the fountain of living waters with Jesus' words in John 4:14. The image of living waters that quench our thirst speaks to the issue of mimetic desire. Salvation in Christ brings satisfaction of our desires by re-creating in us a "pacific" (opposite of "rivalrous") desire. The other image in Revelation of fulfilled desire is being nourished at the wedding banquet of the lamb.

3. René Girard, Things Hidden, Book II, Ch. 2, contains some reflections on the notion of Apocalypse, especially at pp. 202ff.

4. Gil Bailie, taped sermons on Revelation called "The Mystery of History."

Reflections and Questions

1. This beautiful liturgy of the heavenly worship flows from what I think is one of the most dramatic and revealing passages in scripture: Rev. 5:1-10. The scroll of life is paraded out. But who can open it? One of the elders says not to worry, the Lion of Judah will be able to open it. The Seer looks up and beholds instead "a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." This is the mystery and scandal of the cross in a nutshell: we expect God's power of salvation to come as a lion and instead get a slaughtered lamb. Yet the author of Revelation does not back down from the fact that this slaughtered lamb somehow does bear the true power of God. The lamb is truly worthy of our praise and worship.

2. The greatest stroke of inspiration in our latest Lutheran hymnal (1978) was to add a new Hymn of Praise to the Eucharistic liturgy based on these passages in Revelation. Much of the book of Revelation is essentially liturgy. The challenge for the preacher comes in how to preach a liturgy. Strictly speaking, it's not possible. But perhaps the preacher can at least play a role akin to the art museum guide, giving some background and insight into the experience of the brilliant pictures set before the patron, or in this case worshiper.

3. I believe that Revelation addresses the mystery and difficulties of maintaining a nonviolent God. A common challenge to nonviolent activists goes something like this: "What if someone broke into your house to kill your spouse and children? Would you stand by and let him without using force?" Most people, even those thoroughly committed to nonviolence, have a difficult time answering 'yes.' Yet the mystery of the cross is that God appears to have done just that with the Son -- stood by and let him be killed. What kind of parent is God? And the mystery continues with those who continue to suffer violence, particularly innocent children.

My most difficult times as pastor are when grown victims of severe child abuse appear in my office to recount their lives of terrible suffering. A nonviolent God can seem more of a problem to them than a comfort. How could a loving God stand by and let such things happen? I cannot listen to their stories and try to reason with them. Their suffering is beyond a discursive reasoning.

But perhaps a liturgy can help. The Book of Revelation was written for those who continue to suffer. It's vivid pictures of a slaughtered lamb who nevertheless invites us to a feast of victory is beyond discursive reasoning, too. Yet I think it gives the most appropriate answer to the experience of suffering. This is not to say that it is impossible to give a different kind of reasoned answer to the question posed by suffering, but I don't think that kind of answer can satisfy the sufferer, the one in the midst of suffering. (One might go on to comment at this point about the spiritual poverty of much Protestant worship which focuses so much on the well-reasoned sermon almost to the exclusion of any other liturgy. Yet I am one of those Protestants who no doubt spends much more time and care on sermons than on liturgy.)

1 John 3:1-13

Resources

1. James Alison, Raising Abel. On p. 90 Alison cites this passage in speaking to the theme of our new identities which are forged by Christ. The world is looking for a different kind of prestige and identity, so until the story which Jesus inaugurated is unveiled in its fullness, the prestige and identity of his followers remains hidden to the world.

2. Ibid., pp. 171-173. Alison puts forward this "root question":

does God simply accept us in our scandal, giving us the confidence to live in the midst of our scandalized state? Or, could it be that the very same desire which forms us in the scandal of mimetic complicity is capable of being transformed into another sort of desire, a pacific desire, neither envious nor scandalized?

Reflections and Questions

1. The possibility of being transformed to have another kind of desire speaks to the issue of suffering as we raised above. Might we say that we are scandalized by the continued existence of suffering because we continue to be formed by the same desire that creates such suffering, namely, rivalrous desire? And would the transformation of that desire remove the scandal? That is definitely a challenge for me as a pastor. Those parishioners, who come to me burdened by past abuse in their lives, are usually still living within the scandal.

My conviction is that the invitation of the gospel is to unburden people from the scandal. ("Come to me all you that are heavy laden..."; Mt. 11:28-30) But I feel like we've somehow gotten sidetracked from being able to offer the power of the gospel to people. We use therapeutic models, or social science models, or rational arguments. Don't these come up short, keeping us within the confines of scandal? The therapeutic model, for instance, gives us a classic example of the choice that Alison lays out that,

none of us have access to what our story is; we cannot wield it, grasp it, make a presentation of it. Rather it means that, in the face of death, whether in its physical form, or in the form of its violent and expulsive dominion, we hope that we will receive an 'I' in whose formation we have begun to participate, once we have become un-hooked from our old story. We always receive ourselves from what is other than us, whether that other be violent, or loving; but, as we begin to receive ourselves from the loving Other, in the form of our empowerment to construct a counter-story in the face of death, it genuinely is ourselves that we receive, and the story really will be ours. (pp. 172-173)

2. I discovered another connection between the Revelation and 1 John texts in doing a study on the first appearance of the Lamb in Revelation 5:6: "a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." The Greek word for "slaughter" here, sphazo, occurs only in Revelation (8 times) and one other place: 1 John 3:12, a passage that follows after our assigned text. And for Girardians it is interesting that it is used in reference to Cain's murder of Abel:

For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. 12 We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered [esphaxen] his brother. And why did he murder [esphaxen] him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous. 13 Do not be astonished, brothers and sisters, that the world hates you. 14 We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. 15 All who hate a brother or sister are murderers [anthropoktonos], and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. 16 We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17 How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18 Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. (1 John 3:11-18)

You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Matthew 5:1-12

Resources

1. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, p. 81:

After the resurrection, then, Jesus' moral teaching and his teaching concerning discipleship were able to be understood not as extra features of his life, unrelated to his Passion, but structured by exactly the same intelligence of the victim that led to his Passion. Exactly the same is true of Jesus' understanding of the coming of the kingdom of God which he preached, which was also the foundation of the new Israel in his victimary death, which he prepared. So, for instance, the sermon on the mount paints a picture of blessedness as being related to the choosing of a life that is not part of the violence and power of the world, going so far as to show solidarity with those who are of no account in this world, even if this means suffering victimization because of the option taken. The parallel passage to the beatitudes, the parable of the sheep and goats, shows the same intelligence at work: divine judgement is recast entirely in terms of practical human relationship to victims, independent of formal creeds or group belongings. The only relationship that matters in the judgement is that with the victim.

2. René Girard, Things Hidden, pp. 196ff., provide commentary on the Sermon on the Mount which places the Beatitudes in context. Link to a full excerpt of Girard's reflections on "The Preaching of the Kingdom," pp. 196-202.

3. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, cites Luke's version of the beatitudes:

Jesus declared those blessed who are normally judged quite differently by humankind and considered unfortunate and battered creatures: "Blessed you poor, for to you belongs the kingdom of God. Blessed those who hunger now, for they will be satisfied. Blessed those who cry now, for they will laugh" (Luke 6:20ff.). Blessed are those unfortunate up until now, because the kingdom of God belongs to them and in it everything will be transformed. But this turnabout, as the beatitudes make clear, will happen only in the future. Besides the words and images that speak of the already present kingdom of God, there are countless others which point to the future. But how are the present and the future of the kingdom of God related to one another? (pp. 32-33)

4. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, sums up the point of his book in the epilogue:

Perhaps the anthropological role of the Christian Church in human history might be oversimplified as follows: To undermine the structures of sacred violence by making it impossible to forget how Jesus died, and to show the world how to live without such structures by making it impossible forget how Jesus lived. In both life and death, Jesus was opposed by the most respected institutions of his world. Not surprisingly, therefore, the prospects of institutionalizing either the Sermon on the Mount or the revelation of the Cross are not great. "The Church," wrote Karl Barth, "sets fire to a charge that blows up every sacred edifice which men ever erected or can erect in its vicinity." ⁽¹⁾ In every instance, the institution in closest proximity to the Gospel's explosive charge is the institution we call the Church. As Andrew McKenna puts it, "the breakdown of institutional Christianity is the legacy of the crucifixion narrative, which is one with the Hebrew Bible's denunciation of overtly sacrificial institutions, indeed, of all forms of victimization." ⁽²⁾ Fortunately, however, the breakdown of institutional Christianity is not the only legacy of the crucifixion narrative. Peter's Aramaic name should be a perpetual reminder of the lingering lure of sacrificial thinking in Christian history, but it should not obscure the fact that the name means "rock" and that, especially in a world as radically destabilized as the one in which we live, we should not casually dispense with the few forms of stability that survive. The Church, like Peter, is both a stumbling block and a cornerstone. It is the latter only when it is consciously contrite for being, and having been, the former. (pp. 274-275)

6. Andrew McKenna, "Uncanny Christianity," p. 90; he cites the above Alison excerpt in summarizing the Sermon on the Mount:

The Sermon on the Mount not only blesses or beatifies the poor and the meek, the oppressed and the persecuted; it also prescribes remedies to the violence that produces them (see Alison 1994, 42-44). When Jesus urges that we turn the other cheek, that we surrender our cloak to the man who solicits our coat, it is essential that we assess the rigorous structural coherence of such hyperbole: we are being summoned to withdraw from the cycle of violent reciprocity and defensiveness that only breeds more of its kind.

The character of that kingdom, however, is surprising. The Beatitudes (5:3-12) contravene common sense by declaring that God's blessing rests upon the mourners, the meek, the peacemakers, and (especially) those who are persecuted. (Note that vv. 11-12 reiterate and expand the blessing pronounced on the persecuted in v. 10.) Thus, the Beatitudes limn an upside-down reality, or -- more precisely -- they define reality in such a way that the usual order of things is seen to be upside down in the eyes of God. The community's vocation to be "salt" and "light" for the world (5:13-16) is to be fulfilled precisely as Jesus' followers embody God's alternative reality through the character qualities marked by the Beatitudes. The community of Jesus' followers is to be "a city built on a hill," a model polis that demonstrates the counterintuitive peaceful politics of God's new order. (p. 321)

Finally, the New Testament texts depict a symbolic world in which the real struggle is not against flesh and blood, in which the only weapons that the church wields are faith and the Word of God. The truth about reality is disclosed in the cross: God's power is disclosed in weakness. Thus, all who are granted to see the truth through Jesus Christ will perceive the world through the lenses of the Beatitudes and the strange narrative of the Apocalypse, in which the King of kings and Lord of lords is the slaughtered Lamb. The power of violence is the illusory power of the Beast, which is unmasked by the faithful testimony of the saints. In this symbolic world, wars and fightings are caused by divided and unholy desires within the individual (James), but those who are made whole in Christ become ambassadors of reconciliation and participate in the body of Christ, the community whose oneness signifies the ultimate reconciliation of the world to God. And the deepest truth about reality is rooted in the character of God, who loves enemies and seeks to reconcile them to himself through the death of Christ. (p. 340)

1. Matthew takes Mark's Jesus, who preaches and teaches that the Kingdom of God has come near, and inserts substantial portions of that preaching and teaching. The Sermon on the Mount kicks it all off, and the Beatitudes is the keynote of that sermon. Matthew's Jesus begins his preaching and teaching of the Kingdom by basically inverting the values of all conventional culture. For conventional culture the blessed are the well-to-do with large families and the accolades of neighbors. Jesus preaches God's kingdom by placing at the center those whom conventional culture marginalizes. (Later, for instance, he will act this out by taking a child and placing it in the midst of them.)

2. In 2005 our family adopted boys from Liberia, Hilton and Terry Baffo. The Bible passage that has become our mission statement through this extraordinary journey is the very beginning of salvation history, Genesis 12:1-3:

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

Notes

1. 1. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated by E. C. Hoskins, (Oxford, 1933), p. 375

2. 2. Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 110.