All Saints’, Dorval
May 11, 2025
Illumination from an Armenian Apocalypse manuscript, 1368.
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God …
The Revelation to John is a very strange book. It’s full of blood and thunder, it’s been used by Christians on all too many occasions to justify terrible behaviour, and reading it two thousand years later, we’re almost certainly missing a lot of the layers of meaning in it. And yet it’s also both compelling and essential. Compelling because as long as you take it for what it is – a vision, not a blueprint – it speaks to us on a deep level, almost beyond words; and essential, because it provides the ending to the biblical story, and every story needs an ending.
In order to be able to interpret Revelation today, we need to be very clear on its context when it was written. Revelation is a document of struggle. It was written by and for a community that was in danger, under an empire that was both uncomprehending and hostile. The violent and gory imagery makes sense, and is understandable, in that context; it is inexcusable, however, to use it as an excuse to turn around and act like the empire that the writer of Revelation was afraid of.
If you don’t know what I mean about the violent and gory imagery, I do highly recommend sitting down and reading Revelation from beginning to end – we only get bits and pieces of it in the lectionary, and most of those bits and pieces are the nicer-sounding portions, like today’s.
And the nicer-sounding portions are some of the most glorious passages in the whole Bible. They will hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
These and similar portions of Revelation are often read at funerals, and you can see why.
But these passages are more than just words of comfort for those who mourn. They also shape how we approach our lives right here and now.
The powers that rule our world seem to have decided to take the worst excesses and cruelties of the Roman Empire as their guide for how to behave. The prospect of being thrown to the lions by a capricious tyrant no longer seems like something safely in the realm of history – if it ever did. And so this text, coming to us as it does from people who lived in daily anticipation of that fate, speaks to us with new relevance.
And what it says – if you look at the whole message rather than the admittedly bizarre details – is that things may be terrifying, but God is in charge; that authority seems unassailable but it will be overthrown; that ordeals are inevitable, but life will triumph.
The contrast in size and power between the early Church and the Empire within which it existed was almost laughable. No sensible person would have bet that two millennia later, the Church would not only have survived, but have outlasted the Empire by somewhere between 200 and 1500 years, depending on how you define it. But the writer of Revelation – let’s call him the traditional name of John, just for convenience’s sake – dared to imagine the world as a place where Babylon – his transparent symbol for Rome – was cast down and the saints rejoiced in their deliverance from oppression and danger.
“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages” – in a world experiencing a backlash against “DEI” and multiculturalism, here is a reminder that the triumph of our God is witnessed by a crowd that is explicitly diverse, multicultural, and multilingual. When our communities reflect that diversity, they are stronger, more joyful, and more in tune with God’s will.
The elder asks John, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” In an echo of Ezekiel’s question in the prophecy of the Dry Bones, John replies, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” And the elder explains, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
I remember writing a poster that said “Blessed are those who wash their robes” and posting it in the choir room at my childhood church, back when the “great ordeal” I was focused on surviving was high school. And for many of us, getting out of high school with our sanity and self-esteem intact is no joke!
But in a time like the present, when the whole world is going through multiple overlapping ordeals and many of our so-called leaders seem to be determined to make things worse as quickly and comprehensively as possible, it is enormously comforting for these voices to speak out of the past, to remind us that this is not some kind of unique punishment, but an abiding part of the human condition, and that if they had the courage and commitment to confront and survive it, we probably do too.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that not every individual does physically survive an ordeal. A good deal of what animates the Revelation to John is the writer’s fury and trauma at having witnessed persecution unto death. And so we have to hold these two truths in tension: both that we should fight like hell to protect people in danger from the principalities of this world, and also that Christ has destroyed death, and that physical death, for a believer, is first and foremost the entry into a new life unimaginably greater than what we currently experience – that it is, in fact, our passage into the company of those who stand around the throne of the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands (and the palms in this context are explicitly symbols of victory through martyrdom).
And that, finally, is the principal message of Revelation, in all its weirdness, messiness, and glory: that life wins. That God in Christ has defeated empire for all time, and that any triumph that the powers of evil may seem to have, are temporary and illusive.
That doesn’t mean that we can just sit back and wait for God to sort everything out. God calls us to love in word and action. But it does mean that however bleak things look, however incomplete the battle appears to be at the end of our personal and particular time of service, the ultimate outcome is assured.
One day, we will all stand around the Throne; we will all worship the One who is both Lamb and Shepherd; we will hunger no more, and thirst no more; we will drink eternally from the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
Amen.
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