Living Words

The Kingdom of Our Lord

Revelation 10-11

by William Klock

This morning we return to our study of the book of Revelation.  You’ll remember—or I hope you do—that the book is a letter from God to the churches of Asia Minor, given through Jesus to John.  It began with a vision of Jesus himself in all his glory and continued on to a series of seven letters to the churches.  In those letters, Jesus praises the churches where they have been faithful, rebukes them where they have not, and exhorts them to stand firm in the face of coming tribulation.  Revelation is about tribulation, about perseverance, and about kingdom.  It’s a reminder that Jesus is Lord, that his kingdom has come, that he judges sin and that he will, with absolute certainty, vindicate his people.

The rest of the book is a vision meant to show those churches what was coming and so far what John has seen has been a fleshing out of the prophecies that Jesus told against Jerusalem and unbelieving Israel.  These—at least so far—have been past events for us, but events about to or just beginning to unfold when John wrote about them to the churches.  These, so far, are the things that Jesus warned would take place in the lifetime of those who were alive during his ministry.  And in the vision these events began in the heavenly throne room with the delivery of a sealed scroll, given to Jesus.  Its seven seals have been broken and, with the last seal a sequence of seven trumpet blasts has begun.  With each, unbelieving Israel’s judgement and doom have been revealed.  Just as there was an interlude before the seventh and final seal was broken, there’s now an interlude between the blowing of the sixth and seventh trumpets.  Look at 10:1-4.

Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire.  He had a little scroll open in his hand.  And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and called out with a loud voice, like a lion roaring.  When he called out, the seven thunders sounded.  And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.”

 

The description of the mighty angel is similar enough to the description of Jesus at the beginning of the book, that I think it’s safe to conclude that this is Jesus.  He is clothed in symbols of glory here and he stands with one foot on land and one on sea—an image of his lordship over all of creation.  And his voice roars out.  Meredith Kline describes it vividly: “It is the noise of war, the trumpeting of signal horns and the din of battle.  It is the thunder of the storm-chariot of the warrior-Lord, coming in judgements that convulse creation and confound the kings of the nations.”[1]  And in response to his voice sevenfold thunder echoes back.  This is the voice of Psalm 29, the voice that breaks cedars, shakes the wilderness, and strips everything before it bare.  John stood in awe, both of the thundering voice and of what it said, but when he went to write it all down another voice from heaven stopped him.  Something even more important was about to take place.  The most important thing here is the scroll carried by the mighty angel—presumably the scroll that had been handed to Jesus, the seals of which he has broken.  He now holds the opened scroll.  Continuing at verse 5:

And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there would be no more delay, but that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets. (Revelation 10:5-7)

Jesus raises his hand and swears by his Father, he gives a pledge and the pledge is that there will be no further delay.  The seventh trumpet is to be sounded and with it the “mystery of God would be fulfilled”.  What mystery?  The one “he announced to his servants the prophets”.  And what’s that?  Well, this is exactly how St. Paul describes God’s calling forth a new people for himself—a people neither Jewish nor gentilic, but both—one people, drawn from the nations, and unified in Jesus the Messiah.  Paul uses this language particularly in Ephesians and Colossians.  This is how Paul puts it in Colossians 3:3-6.

How the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly.  When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.  This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

 

The mystery, revealed to the prophets and made clear in the ministry of Jesus, that the Gentiles will be fellow heirs with the faithful of Israel, is about to be fulfilled.  But what’s that got to do with the seventh trumpet?  Well, so long as the temple stood in Jerusalem, the life and systems of the old covenant remained, the temptation to look for hope in the temple and in the land, the temptation to find one’s identity in torah—in circumcision, in diet, in sabbath—the temptation to require Gentiles to come to Jesus, to become part of the people of God, through torah, would remain.  The Lord had to send a clear and unmistakable message to everyone that the old covenant was finished and a new one had been established.  The seventh trumpet would signal that the days of Jerusalem and the temple were over.  The Lord’s promise to Israel have been finally and once-and-for-all fulfilled in Jesus.

And remember the opened scroll held by the mighty angel, held by Jesus.  Look at verses 8-11:

Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, “Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.”  So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll. And he said to me, “Take and eat it; it will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.”  And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.  And I was told, “You must again prophesy about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.”

 

John draws this imagery of the scroll from Daniel and Ezekiel.  Daniel is told to seal his scroll, because the events it relates are not for his own day, but relate to what will “happen to your people in the latter days” (Daniel 10:14).  This doesn’t mean John’s scroll is the same one.  It could be.  But the key point of the imagery is that the Lord is now fulfilling his promise given through the prophets.  But what is that promise?  That’s where the Ezekiel imagery comes in.  Here's what Ezekiel writes:

And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.”  So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat.  And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.  (Ezekiel 3:1-3)

Sound familiar?  John, too, is told to eat the scroll.  And like Ezekiel’s scroll, it is sweet to taste, but bitter, hard to stomach.  Ezekiel writes a few verses later:

The Spirit lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness in the heat of my spirit, the hand of the Lord being strong upon me.  (Ezekiel 3:14)

This bitter-sweetness is the nature of the Lord’s judgement.  Ezekiel was addressing the capture and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.  And now the Lord is about to bring about something very similar.  Judgement will once again fall on faithless Israel.  And it’s bitter-sweet.  It is sweet in that the faithful will be vindicated.  Those martyrs we saw earlier, the ones under the altar, will finally have an answer to their prayers.  Those who persecuted them will be judged, they will finally get their comeuppance, and the righteous will rejoice.  But the judgement and destruction of the wicked is bitter and the Lord takes no pleasure in it.  To quote from Ezekiel again:

As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11)

And so, as Jesus had promised, the Lord gave Israel forty years to repent, to turn from their unbelief and to embrace his Messiah.  He is merciful and slow to anger, but the Lord must deal with the stubborn rebellion of his people.  If Creation is to be set to rights, the wicked who perpetuate its corruption must be removed.  And so John not only sees the Lord’s judgement on Israel, but he tastes it, he experiences the full reality of both its sweetness and its bitterness, so that like Ezekiel, he can prophesy from the heart.  This is the culmination of Israel’s story—the old Israel at any rate.  John is told that this is about many people, nations, languages, and kings.  This is how the nations will see the works of the Lord, how the nations will know his faithfulness, how the nations will come to the new Israel, hear the good news about Jesus the Messiah, believe, and become a part of it themselves.

But first, remember that this happens in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets sounding.  This is the second interlude.  The first was between the opening of the sixth and seventh seals.  In that first interlude the 144,000 were counted and sealed by the Lord—they were marked out that they might be spared from the coming judgement, much like the Hebrew homes marked with the blood of lamb and spared by the angel of death as judgement fell on Egypt.  This second interlude serves a similar purpose.  Look at 11:1-2.

Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, “Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months.

 

Again, this is an echo of Ezekiel and Daniel.  The periods of time that John writes about in the coming chapters are drawn from Daniel’s imagery: forty-two months, 1260 days, and three-and-a-half days.  The forty-two months and 1260 days are the same period of time equaling three-and-a-half years.  This was the duration of the war against Jerusalem that brought about the fall of the city and the destruction of the temple.  Daniel wrote about the time of the “shattering of the power of the holy people” (12:7).  The sanctuary would “be trampled underfoot”.  In other words, judgement is coming on Jerusalem and the temple.

The imagery of measuring the temple is drawn from Ezekiel.  In Ezekiel’s vision, he was given a measuring reed and given the task of measuring an idealised temple.  For seven chapters we read in detail every measurement and at the end of Ezekiel’s task, the glory of the Lord fills the temple and he promises, “I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever” (43:2-7).  For Ezekiel—and for the people of his day—this meant that the Lord would restore the temple and the priesthood and that his presence would remain with his people.  For John this imagery means that despite the coming crisis and disaster, despite the gentiles trampling the city and the temple for three-and-a-half years, despite the end of faithless and unbelieving Israel, the Lord has established a new temple and will remain with his people—with this new Israel.  The more immediate promise, as with the sealing of the 144,000, is that the Lord will spare the faithful amidst the coming destruction.  The long-term promise is that this people, the Church, is the new temple, this one not made with hands and with Jesus its cornerstone.

John goes on in 11:3:

And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.”

 

Scripture requires two witnesses before anyone is condemned.  Here they are and they will witness against the city, its temple, and its people for the full three-and-a-half years.  Who are they?  John goes on in verse 4:

 

  These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth.  And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes.  If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed.  They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.  And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified.  For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth.  But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them.  Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies watched them.  And at that hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell.  Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the rest were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven.

 

So who, again, are the witnesses?  The imagery and the powers ascribed to them call back to the two great prophets of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah—who also happen to represent the law and the prophets—the totality of Israel’s life and ministry.  And so what we see here is the ministry of the old Israel taken up by the new, by the Church in Jerusalem.  The city, the city where their Lord was crucified—which tells us that these witnesses represent the Church—is condemned like Sodom and Egypt—condemned and marked for judgement and destruction.  As the Romans trample the city for three-and-a-half years, these witnesses will testify against it.  John draws on Jeremiah in describing them:

Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of hosts:

“Because you have spoken this word,

behold, I am making my words in your mouth a fire,

         and this people wood, and the fire shall consume them.

 

Those words, too, were spoken by the prophet in the lead-up to Jerusalem’s capture by Babylon.  The imagery recalls Elijah, calling down a famine on the land for three-and-a-half years and of Moses calling down plagues on Egypt—and points to the fledging Church being led out of Egypt to escape in the wilderness as Israel did.

The witnesses, John writes, will be killed by the beast who ascends from the bottomless pit.  John’s language of the beast making war on them is straight from Daniel and helps to identify the beast, otherwise we might be tempted to think that the beast represents the unbelieving Jews of Jerusalem.  In Daniel the beast that makes war on the saints is Antiochus Epiphanes.  The beast here represents another pagan gentile empire making war against the saints—this time Rome—and as when Jesus was crucified, the Jews and Rome once again combine forces against Jesus’ people.  The witnesses are killed and their bodies are left in the street.  That expression “dead bodies” is here three times, but in the first two it’s singular: “their dead body”—which suggests that the number “two” is symbolic and that it’s a larger group that makes up the witnesses—maybe even the whole church.  Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets rejoices over the dead witnesses and in doing so only confirms the truth of their witness against her.

And yet the Lord is faithful to his people.  The witnesses are raised three-and-a-half days later.  “A breath of life from God entered them,” and as the city watched they were carried into heaven.  Whether this is literal or symbolic isn’t clear.  It may well be that the Lord resurrected two or more Christians in those days in Jerusalem and carried them up to heaven.  But whatever the case, the language John uses parallels the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  It is language of vindication.  If this book is about tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom, here are all three.  Not only are the saints vindicated before their watching enemies, but at the same time the Lord gives the city a precursor of the judgement to come—an earthquake that kills a tenth of the city—a tithe for the Lord, marking the remainder out for destruction.  But notice the result.  Those who saw and hear of these events were terrified and gave glory to God.  We don’t have time to get into the details this morning, but I think there’s good reason to interpret this as an act of belief, not of rebellious Israel, but of the nations.  Rome has finally been brought into the story, to take part in the persecution of Jesus’ people, and that gets the attention of the pagan nations finally.  And through these witnesses we see God’s promises and Israel’s calling to the nations finally fulfilled.  What Elijah and Moses, what the old Israel was never able to do, to bring the nations to faith in the Lord, this new Israel by the power of God finally accomplishes.[2]  And with that, as I said, the story now begins to shift.

Let’s quickly finish Chapter 11.  John continues in verse 14:

The second woe has passed; behold, the third woe is soon to come.

  Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”  And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying,

“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,

         who is and who was,

for you have taken your great power

         and begun to reign.

The nations raged,

         but your wrath came,

         and the time for the dead to be judged,

and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints,

         and those who fear your name,

         both small and great,

and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”

  Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail.

 

The seventh trumpet is finally blown—remember, no more delays—and with it heaven rejoices: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”  Remember the little scroll at the beginning?  The one that contained “the mystery of God…just as he announced to his servants the prophets”?  John’s language of the kingdom of “our Lord and his Christ” is reminiscent of the language of Psalm 2, where the rulers of the earth take counsel “against the Lord and against his anointed”.  Psalm 2 is a psalm about the rule of Israel’s king over the nations:

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,

         and the ends of the earth your possession.

You shall break them with a rod of iron

         and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2:8-9)

The judgement against unbelieving Israel and on Jerusalem has happened.  The prophets and saints have faithfully witnessed Jesus and their witness has won the victory.  The flag of Jesus’ kingdom has been firmly planted.  Even as the nations rage, the Lord has made them Jesus’ heritage and is preparing to break them with a rod of iron.  The focus of John’s vision now shifts from Jerusalem to the nations.

Brothers and Sisters, the Church that Jesus has established and filled with his Spirit will accomplish its mission.  He has placed us here to witness the faithfulness of God and to proclaim the good news about Jesus: that he has died, that he has risen, that he is Lord, and he is making all things new.  We, ourselves, are a testament to the power of God to forgive and to renew.  As Jerusalem did and as the nations did in John’s vision, the world around us will rage, but the Lord will prevail.  This week, south of the border, we’ve seen the ungodly raging over the prospect that there may be restrictions on their ability to murder their own children.  The barbarians are at the gate.  In their raging, Jesus and his people have been called out as Public Enemy No. 1.  As it did came for the saints of old, tribulation will sure come to us.  We will face pressure to conform, to give up, to bow to the gods of this wicked age, to give up hope in the promises of our Lord and to forget all that he has done in the past to confirm his faithfulness.  Brothers and Sisters, let St. John’s vision of the triumph of the Lamb be your encouragement.  And hear St. Paul’s exhortation to the people of that First Century church who stood against the tide of that tribulation:

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.  (1 Corinthians 16:13)

Those are no empty words, my Friends.  Our Lord himself stands behind them, for Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, you show to those who are in error the light of your truth, that they may return to the way of righteousness: Grant to all those who are admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion, that they may reject those things that are contrary to their profession, and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same; through our Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

[1] Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 101.

[2] For the details, see Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 273-283.

A Sermon for the Feast of St. Philip and St. James

St. John 14:1-9

by William Klock

Today the Church remembers the Apostles Philip and James.  As she was planning our song and hymn selection for today, Kathy asked what I’d be preaching on, would I continue with Revelation or would it be the lessons for Saints Philip and James?  I said it would be Saints Philip and James, because in all my years preaching, I haven’t had the chance.  May 1st has fallen on Sunday several times, but the feast day has always been bumped to a weekday by the First Sunday after Easter or by Rogation Sunday, which both take precedence.  And the more I’ve pondered the day’s lessons, the more it occurs to me that it really is providential that this is the year these two saints finally get their due on a Sunday.  Let me explain.

First, Philip and James.  Who were these men who get such short shrift in the calendar?  Well, both were amongst the Twelve, both were apostles.  That’s really all we know for certain.  We know pretty much nothing about them.  It doesn’t help that they’ve often been confused with other Philips and Jameses.  Unlike today, when everyone wants to give their children unique names, Jews, like everyone else in the First Century and down through history until today, were deliberately unimaginative.  They valued naming their sons and daughters after parents and grandparents and heroes and heroines of the Scriptures.  But that also means there weren’t a lot of names in use.  There were lots of Philips and Jameses, Johns and Josephs, a lot of Marys, and even Jesuses.  There are several Philips and several Jameses in the New Testament and it’s not always easy sorting out which is which and even if some of them are the same or different people.

There was a Philip in the book of Acts who became the Church’s first deacon, probably the same man who met and baptised the Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza.  But that’s a different man.  Philip the Apostle, our Philip here, is mentioned by Mathew, Mark, and Luke only as a member of the Twelve.  John mentions him a few times.  He tells us that Philip brought Nathanael to Jesus, another of the Twelve.  In John 6 (our Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, you might remember), where a great (and hungry!) crowd had gathered to listen to Jesus, Jesus turned to Philip and asked where he thought they might buy bread to feed the crowd.  Philip had no idea.  “Jesus, two hundred times a day’s wage wouldn’t buy bread for all these people,” he protested.  At another point John tells us that Philip brought a group of Greek-speakers to Jesus.  He was probably their translator.  Then there’s John 14, which we’ll get to shortly.  This selection for the Gospel goes back to the ancient church—one of this handful of passages where Philip has any role at all and one that fits with the themes of Eastertide, since that’s usually when this feast day falls.  Tradition—which may or may not be reliable and may have the two Philips confused—says that he travelled to Phrygia as a missionary where he was either crucified upside-down or beheaded.

And James.  There are several Jameses in the New Testament, too.  There’s James the son of Zebedee, the brother of John.  He’s often called “James the Greater”.  We know a fair bit about him, because he was part of Jesus’ inner circle: Peter, James, and John.  And then, in Acts, we meet James the brother of Jesus.  He was one of those to whom the risen Jesus appeared.  That made a believer of him.  He ended up becoming the leader, or bishop if you will, of the Jerusalem Church.  He’s likely the author of the Epistle of James.  We know quite a bit about him.  But neither of those men is the James we remember today.  Today we remember James the son of Alphaeus.  Sometimes he’s called “James the Lesser”—although even there, that may be yet another, fourth James.  Of James, we know nothing but his name and the name of his father, Alphaeus, at least so far as the Bible goes.  Tradition says that he was stoned while preaching outside the temple in Jerusalem, but again, tradition often had our James confused with James the brother of Jesus, who is said to have died the same way.

Even the origin of their feast day is kind of an accident.  James and Philip are never paired together in the Gospels.  It’s always Philip and Bartholomew who are paired together.  But in the 6th Century the Basilica of the Holy Apostles was dedicated in Rome and the relics of James and Philip placed there—on May 1st—and ever since then they’ve been linked together in the Calendar of the Western Church.  Both men laboured for the Gospel in obscurity.  They were Apostles, and yet all we really know of them is their names.  And because their names were so common, they’ve often been confused with other men down through the ages.  Even their commemoration on the calendar is an accident of history.  And yet we have no reason to doubt their faithfulness to Jesus, to the Church, and to the gospel.  When I think of them I can’t help thinking of that famous line of Nicolaus von Zinendorf, one of the Seventeenth Century bishops of the Moravian Church.  He wrote, “Peach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.”  How’s that for some perspective?  Again, “Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.”

And I think it’s some perspective we need today.  Last week I sat with a brother pastor from another faithful, local church that has been decimated by current trends and events.  First it was sheep-stealing by other churches, drawing people away, not by the gospel, but by gimmicks and excitement.  Then the pandemic hit and some people just sort of evaporated.  They just never came back and disappeared from the radar.  And just when everyone thought we were through that, churches were hit with pandemic politics raised by some to the level of gospel.  And it blew things apart.  More people gone.  And it’s not just my friend.  It’s happening everywhere.  We’ve been fortunate that none of these things has hit us as badly as they’ve hit a lot of other churches, but it’s a real source of discouragement for pastors and others who have been seriously drained these last couple of years.

Rob and I met this week and had a similar conversation.  So-and-so gone.  And So-and-so gone.  If only that family would come back.  If only such-and-such sort of people would come.  And I had to check myself.  Church growth is good, but not if it comes with a loss to another gospel-preaching church.  Yes, there are times when receiving believers from another church that’s gone off the rails is a legitimate rescue operation, but generally speaking, that’s not growing the church; it’s just playing musical chairs.  Church growth is what happens when you preach the gospel and people it hear it, believe, are baptised, and become disciples.  But it’s easy to forget this, because today everything everywhere is about numbers.  We’ve turned the gospel into a business and the church into a product to be marketed.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s not about numbers and the gospel is not a commodity.  We are not salesman.  We are preachers.  But Christians today have become obsessed with numbers.  We’ve been influenced by the consumerist culture that surrounds us.  And so no one wants to preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.  Everyone wants to make a name for themselves—a name they make by using the gospel as a ladder—as if we can make ourselves known to the world and to posterity as we stand on the shoulders of Jesus.  No one wants to be a Philip or a James, lifting high the cross and proclaiming the gospel no matter the cost, no matter how small their following—even as it leads to martyrdom.  Because they knew that it wasn’t about them; it was all about Jesus.  Because their hope was not in this age, but in the age to come—the age they saw inaugurated in the risen, resurrected Jesus.  They had had a glimpse of God’s new creation.  They put their faith in him, their lives and their futures in his hands, and they became faithful stewards of his gospel and his sheep.

Our Gospel today begins with Jesus saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled.”  This is in the middle of what’s often called his Upper Room Discourse.  Jesus has washed his friends’ feet and they’ve shared that last Passover supper together, then Jesus tells them what’s to come: betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter.  He tells them, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  And he promises them the gift of the Holy Spirit who will make that possible.  He’ll speak of the opposition and hatred they will face on his account, but he’ll also give them those assuring words, “Take heart, I have overcome the world.” And this is where he announces that very soon he will be leaving them.  None of this was easy for them to hear.  But first, here, he says these words to them.  Look at John 14:1-6.

“Let not your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God; believe also in me.  In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.  And you know the way to where I am going.”  Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”  Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.  If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

 

“Fear not!” he says to them.  “Trust in God—and trust in me, too.”  Their trust in God was a given, but in light of the events that would happen soon, it’s natural for Jesus to urge them to trust him too.  He’s the Messiah—the one sent by God.  He knows that they’ve struggled to understand just what that means.  Most people had a messed up idea of who the Messiah would be and what he would do—and even the disciples hadn’t sorted it out yet.  Things were about to happen that would cause them to question whether Jesus was the Messiah.  He was crucified as a false Messiah, after all.  But Jesus urges them to trust him, just as he knows they’ve always trusted God.  Dying and being absent from them for a time is part of his messianic ministry.

And in verse 2 he says those words that are always so popular at funerals.  “In my Father’s house are many rooms.”  These words are a source of comfort, but because we’ve lost the context in which Jesus spoke them, we tend misunderstand just what he’s getting at.  We tend to think of him going to prepare a place in heaven where the faithful dead escape the world and go to live in God’s presence.  The living in God’s presence part of that is right on the money.  But what does Jesus mean when he talks about his Father’s house?  We just kind of think about a house in heaven or, thanks to the King James, we think of a heaven full of golden mansions.  But when Jesus talks about this Father’s house he’s talking about the temple.  The temple in Jerusalem was the one place where heaven and earth—sundered by our sin—it wa the one place where they still overlapped, where human beings could go to be in the presence of God.

What Jesus is getting at here, what he’s hinting at is new creation.  He’s just told them to trust in God—the one who has a plan to set this fallen world to rights—and this is exactly why he’s got to go away.  It’s part of the plan.  His death will forgive sins and heal the breach between God and man.  His resurrection will set the renewal of all things in motion and eventually bring heaven and earth back together.  So these words aren’t really about making a place for us to live in heaven when we die.  It’s about Jesus doing the work to bring heaven and earth, God and humanity back together.  But we can still see why they’re such popular words at funerals.  At a time when everything seems dark.  When we’re feeling hopeless.  When loss overwhelms us.  When we feel the weight of sin and death at their worst.  Jesus assures us that he’s already there.  We may not understand.  We may feel lost.  But he’s there already.  While we do the work of the Church here on earth, he’s at his Father’s side doing the heavenly part of this business of renewal.  And one day he'll bring it all back together: heaven and earth, God and man, new creation, the world set to rights, every tear dried, and human beings living once again in the presence of God.  Not “up there”, but in this new temple that will encompass all of creation.  That’s where Jesus was going when Judas betrayed him, when the authorities crucified him, when they laid him in the tomb.  And it’s also where he was going after his resurrection from the dead when he ascended to his throne to send us the Holy Spirit.

And then Thomas.  He blurts out, “But how?  We don’t know the way!  We don’t even know where you’re going!  We don’t know the way there!”  Brothers and Sisters, the words that really strike me there is that bit, “How can we know the way?”  Thomas really had no idea what Jesus was talking about.  We live on this side of the cross and empty tomb, this side of the ascension and we’ve got a better idea.  We understand—or I hope we do!—that Jesus was going to his death and we understand why.  Maybe we still struggle with the ascension.  But we’ve got a much better grasp on these things than Thomas did in the Upper Room.  But so often we still don’t know the way.  Or we once knew it, but we took that path and it didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere, so we’re trying another one.  Once we knew it, but we’ve been distracted along the way.  Once we knew it, but that path led to hardship or opposition so we’ve decided to try a different route.

Brothers and Sisters, think again of the two men we commemorate today.  Philip and James were surely just as lost as Thomas as they sat around that Passover table listening to Jesus.  But when they met the risen Jesus, just like the other disciples, they understood.  And they set out on the path laid before them and they walked it faithfully, even though it led to their own deaths.  They trusted in God and they trusted in Jesus, too.

I’ve been thinking of the conversations I’ve had this last week or so.  How does the church navigate these difficult times?  My pastor friend talked about the people who had left his church to go to another.  Why did they go?  Almost always it’s because they’re looking for a program or for something new and exciting.  That church has a program that our church doesn’t have.  Or that church has better musicians, better singers, better mood lighting, better coffee.  Again, it’s the consumerist minds of our culture creeping in to how we think about church.  No one seems to ask the really important question: Is that other church really centred on Jesus and the good news?  And am I leaving a Jesus- and gospel-centred church for one that isn’t?  Am I being driven by a consumerist mindset instead of a gospel one?  We talked about other folks we know leaving churches because they were afraid of getting sick during the pandemic or others who left over political issues surrounding masks and vaccines—some for and some opposed.  And all we can see is people losing sight of Jesus—putting other things and other issues ahead of him and ahead of the gospel.  Neither fear nor politics will lead us where Jesus has gone, to that place he’s preparing for us.

And, as churches, it’s often tempting to forsake the path that Jesus has called us to walk.  Maybe it’s that we Christians were, for almost two thousand years, the driving force in our culture, and now that’s all gone.  Increasingly it’s not even a neutral thing to be a Christian anymore.  Now we’re haters and bigots on the wrong side of history.  No one wants to be in that position.  And so whole swaths of the Church have begun to cave to cultural pressure—especially on issues of identity, whether that’s sex or race, on issues of sex and sexuality, or the uniqueness of Jesus and the gospel to save.  Don’t get me wrong.  As Jesus’ people, we need to be squeaky clean.  If we’re guilty of sin.  If we’ve harboured sinful ideas.  If we haven’t acted out of love.  We need to repent of those sins.  But the standard for right and wrong has to be the Scriptures, not the winds of culture—and especially not a culture that has forsaken the gospel and God’s word.  In our post-Christian culture, trying to gain the world’s approval will never lead us to Jesus—it will inevitably lead us down a different path.  And if we go down that path, we’ll never bring the culture to Jesus either.  The same goes for politics.  I don’t care which political side or party it is, if we make politics our agenda, it may attract people, but will not lead us—or them—to Jesus.

And it’s tempting to lose our focus on faithfulness and to get carried away with numbers.  People will come if we add this program or that activity.  What can we do to make things more exciting and to attract more people—nevermind the people we’re attracting are coming from other churches.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s not church growth; that’s just sheep stealing.

What do we do?  We don’t know the way?  Look again at what Jesus says in verses 6 and 7:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.  If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

 

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.  Our lives as his people and our life as his Church need to be centred on him.  That’s how we get where he’s gone.  That’s how we will one day find ourselves in the age to come—and how we will, with the help of the Word and the Spirit, get the world to that day.  This is the truth that must have hold on us.  This is the truth that has to shape everything we do.  Everything is about Jesus and everything we do centred in him.  And knowing that, we must be utterly devoted to that, remembering that he is the one who gave his life for our sake.  He is our life.  He is the driving force and motivation for everything.  We love him because he first loved us.  And now we preach him, proclaim him, live him because we can do nothing else.  That’s the path.

It's at this point that Philips blurts out that question in verse 8:

  Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”  Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

 

I’ll close with this.  Philip had Jesus.  He had the way the truth and the life, but he didn’t fully understand.  He still wanted the Father.  Wanting the Father was good.  But he still wasn’t grasping that Jesus was the way to the Father—that he and the Father were one.  And I think as the Christians and as the Church we can find ourselves in a similar place.  We want the Father.  But we forget that the way lies with Jesus.  We forget that Jesus is the one who reconciles us to God by the cross.  We forget that it is he, the word of God who reveals the Father to us.  We forget that it is his gift of the Spirit that empowers us to live for him and to go out in the world in his name.  We forget and we start turning to all sorts of other things.  Again, we think a program will bring people to Jesus.  We think more exciting worship will bring people to Jesus.  We think that bowing to the pressure of culture and being nicer than Jesus will bring people.  Brothers and Sisters, it won’t.  Jesus leads people to Jesus.  Our faithfulness to him and to his word and to his calling, coupled with the work of the Spirit in their hearts is what will bring people to Jesus and grow his church.

We’re like Philip asking for Jesus to show us the Father.  “Jesus,” show us the way!”  And Jesus has been saying all along, “I am the way.  Just commit yourselves to me.  Plodding along in faithfulness beats cool and exciting.  Earning the hatred of the world beats earning its praise.  Jesus calls us to forsake the wide and easy way.  That way leads to destruction.  Instead, he calls us to walk the narrow way, the hard way, that even though it may lead to death, will ultimately lead us—and the world—to him and to life on the other side.  Like Philip and James: Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten.  And if we are remembered, may it be only for faithfulness to Jesus and his gospel.

Let’s pray: Almighty God, to truly know you is eternal life: Grant us perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life;  that, following in the steps of your holy apostles Saint Philip and Saint James, we may steadfastly walk in the way that leads to eternal life, through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter

1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23

by William Klock

Last Sunday we read St. John’s account of how he, Mary, and Peter discovered the empty tomb that first Easter morning and we saw how John frames the story as an act of re-creation.  His whole Gospel, in fact, is shaped by the account of creation in Genesis, in the first book of the Bible.  John knew the big story—the story of Israel and of Israel’s God and of the place the story of his own people had within the bigger story of God and humanity, of Creation and Fall, of life lost to death, and now how Jesus had by death defeated death and set in motion an act of re-creation.  Just as God had begun to bring order to chaos on the first day of week by calling light into existence, he now calls forth his son from the tomb, bursting forth with light and life, to set to rights what human sin and rebellion have corrupted.  But this morning’s Gospel also shows us that our place, the place of the people of God, in that story.  In the ancient church this was the Sunday the men and women baptised on Easter would set aside their baptismal robes after a long week of baptismal rites.  Now they were ready to go from the Church out into the world to be the people Jesus had made them.  At Rome, in ancient times, they would do this at the basilica of St. Pancras, a church named after a young martyr who had become the patron of oaths and vows.  It was a fitting place to remind the newly baptised of the commitment they had made.  Now they were to go out into the world to live it.

Our Gospel today picks up a few verses after last Sunday’s and continues in John 20.  And our Epistle takes us to John’s first general epistle.  Both passages drive at the same point, which is that in rising from death, Jesus had not only set new creation in motion, but that he has also created a new people, a new Israel, centred in himself to enact this new creation and carry it to the world.  The big story reminds us that this was always God’s plan.  It was the reason he called and made himself known to Abraham, through him creating and commissioning a people to make him know to a world lost in darkness.  And while this Easter people created by Jesus is a new people, it’s also in a sense the same people.  Jesus himself was an Israelite, his ministry was to Israel, even in his death he died the very death on a cross that so many of his people would die a generation later as they doubled-down on their rejection of him.  And those who followed him first, those who first became this new people, were all of the old.  It was both a re-creation and a renewal.  The children of Abraham called to make God known—and as they did so, making a people no longer bound or defined by nationality or ethnicity, by circumcision or sabbath or diet—not by law—but by gospel—by faith in the good news about Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord.

But John doesn’t leave it there with the calling of this new people.  He doesn’t leave it with a mere commissioning—with Jesus imparting this task to take the good news to the whole world.  Because that wouldn’t really get us much beyond where the old Israel stood—the old Israel that failed in her mission.  The key here is that as the new Israel, Jesus’ people aren’t just called and sent, we’re also transformed and equipped.  And that’s really the theme of this Sunday after Easter.  As we stand overwhelmed by the task in front of us, John assures us that if we are in Jesus by faith, there are two vitally important new realities for us.  The first is that we have been made part of his new creation.  We have a share in Jesus’ resurrection from death.  Yes, there’s more to come.  We haven’t been resurrected yet.  That will come some day at the end of the age when the gospel, through the Church, has accomplished its purpose and brought the world to Jesus. But in the meantime, Jesus’ resurrection has freed us from our bondage to sin and death and given us new life.  And, second, that if we are in Jesus, he has given us God’s own Spirit.  He’s made us his temple, the place where he dwells.  The Spirit’s not something to be earned when we’ve become holy enough.  He’s not some later experience or second blessing, as if we can be in Jesus, but not have a share in the Spirit.  Jesus’ gift of the Spirit is the very thing that fulfils God’s promise through the prophets and that defines us as his new covenant people.  And as Jesus forgives and frees us by his death and resurrection, the indwelling Spirit empowers and equips us to live the new life Jesus has given.  The Spirit’s life in us is a foretaste and a down payment on the resurrection and the life of the age to come—and most importantly in light of today’s theme, the indwelling Spirit is the one who makes the task set before us by Jesus possible.  He’s the one who equips us to fulfil the vows we made in our baptism.

In our Gospel, again John 20 beginning at verse 19, John tells us:

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

 

We shouldn’t pass over these words too quickly.  It’s the first day of the week.  It’s still the same day that Mary went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and found it empty.  It’s the same day she went running to tell Peter and John.  The same day they went running to the tomb to see for themselves.  The same day when John says none of them—except, it seems, for him—understood what had happed.  John says he “believed” and I think that means he believed Jesus had risen, but that was crazy and he was still working it through so he hadn’t said anything to the others yet.  This is that same day.  Now it’s evening.  And the disciples have locked themselves into someone’s house.  The doors are locked.  I expect the windows tightly shuttered.  There was no cooking fire.  Nothing that might make the house look occupied—nothing to give them away.  Maybe one little lamp, just so they could barely see each other in the darkness.  They were afraid.  Four days before, the Jewish authorities had arrested Jesus.  Three days before he’s been crucified as a dangerous revolutionary.  Soon, they figured, the authorities would come for the rest of them.  Best to lay low until things blew over.  Maybe in a few days they could sneak out of the city.  And so they sat there in the darkness, some silently pondering what all this meant, some still weeping for their dead friend, maybe a couple of them arguing in low tones about what had happened to Jesus’ body and what they’d do next.  But whatever they were doing, a palpable sense of fear filled that dark room.  Again, John echoes the beginning of the story: “Darkness was over the face of the deep.”

And then Jesus is suddenly there.  John wrote about the Incarnation back in his prologue saying that in Jesus the light had come into the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it.  That was an echo of Genesis.  The first day of the week God called light into being, driving away the darkness.  And now the Light Incarnate appears in that dark, fear-filled house and I have to think that somehow and in some way it was filled with light—a light that drove away every last vestige of darkness.  And to these frightened men, Jesus announces, “Peace be with you!”

Imagine their surprise.  And there must have been some disbelief or some doubts.  Or maybe, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they simply didn’t recognise him.  Something about his resurrection had brought a transformation.  Same Jesus, same body, but in some way just different enough in appearance that they didn’t recognise him.  Of course, it wouldn’t have helped that they simply didn’t expect to see him again either.  So Jesus holds out his hands for them to see.  One at a time he lifts a foot out so that they can see.  There were the marks left by the nails.  And he lifted his tunic to show them the wound left by the spear that had been plunged into his side, the wound that had gushed forth blood and water, evidence to the soldiers that he was genuinely dead.  And here he stood alive.  They were shocked.  How could it be?  I’ve said before, the reason resurrection wasn’t on anyone’s mind was because this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.  This wasn’t a story Jews would have made up, because all the Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead knew how it would work—and it wasn’t supposed to work this way.  At the end of the age the Lord would raise all the faithful at once.  There was plenty of disagreement about some of the specifics, but they all knew one thing for sure: It would be everybody all at once, not just one person, even if that one person was the Messiah.  This just wasn’t on their radar.  Not at all.  But now it is and they’re confused and, it seems, even though John says they were glad, they were still more than a little afraid.  And so Jesus says to them again, “Peace be with you!”

And Jesus doesn’t waste any time as John tells it.  “Peace be with you,” he says, calming their fears.  Jesus is alive.  And immediately he gets down to the very practical aspects, the real-world implications of his resurrection.  Jesus doesn’t waste any time.  He says in verse 21:

“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

 

Here they are, hunkered down for fear of being rounded up and executed themselves.  Here they are, afraid to even show their faces in Jerusalem.  Here they are, giving it a few days before they try to sneak out of town without being noticed.  And Jesus says to them, “I’m sending you.  As the Father sent me to you, I’m now sending you: to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria…to the ends of the earth.”  In other words, “You’re not going to go slinking out of the city under cover of darkness.  No, you’re going out in Jerusalem with boldness—the same way I went out into Galilee, through Judea, and eventually to Jerusalem at the head of a parade, hailed by the people.  You’re going to go with the same boldness out into this city and you are going to declare what God has done.  Everyone is going to know who you are.  You’re going to declare to Jerusalem that this Jesus who they crucified died and has been raised from the dead, that he really is the Messiah, God’s King, and that his kingdom, God’s new creation has come.”

Think again of John, just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that Jesus had been raised from death—but still hunkered down with the others, afraid.  John couldn’t even tell his friends what he thought had happened.  The last thing on his mind was telling it to Jerusalem—and Jesus isn’t talking about mere “telling”—you know, whispering it to a few people who might be safe to tell.  No, he’s talking about proclaiming this news—to everybody.  Brothers and Sisters, think about that for a minute.  Think about how most of us are so afraid or at least hesitant to proclaim the good news about Jesus.  We have no reason to fear for our lives like Jesus’ disciples did.  The worst thing that happens to us is we offend someone, make them think we’re weird.  They faced martyrdom—and all but John were, indeed, martyred for their proclamation.  We have so little to fear, but we’re afraid anyway.  We’ve even stopped speaking in terms of proclamation—the Bible’s way of speaking about evangelism.  Instead we talk about “sharing” our faith—watering it down, as if it’s just another option on the religious smorgasbord that someone might want to try out for themselves.  We’ve lost our confidence in the good news and in the God who raised Jesus from the dead who stands behind it.  No, Jesus calls us to declare the good news like royal heralds, sent out into the world to declare the mighty deeds of God, that he has raised Jesus from the dead, and made him Lord of all.

But, again, consider John.  Confused, afraid, just beginning to understand.  And then consider the confidence of his words, written decades later in our Epistle:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God…. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  (1 St. John 5:1, 4-5)

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ—that he is the Messiah—has been reborn as part of the people of God.  And that belief changes everything.  That belief transforms the fearful John hesitant to even tell his friends about the dawning realization that Jesus had been raised from death, it turns him into the courageous apostle, exiled for his proclamation of that truth, and writing boldly to the churches to stand firm in that same faith even though great tribulation was about to hit them like a storm.  There is everything to be feared out in the world: rejection, mockery, persecution, even martyrdom, but by faith the people of God overcome and stand firm in our witness.  It’s not because faith changes reality.  It’s because this faith recognizes the new reality born that first Easter when Jesus rose from the grave, the new reality that he is victor over sin and death, the new reality that new creation has begun in him, and the new reality that he is Lord of that creation.  By faith we are united with him.  By faith we share in his inheritance.  And by faith we share in his calling and ministry—his Church, taking up the mantle of prophet, priest, and king.

Like John, we are called to boldly testify about Jesus:

This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus the Messiah; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.  If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son.

 

John points back to Jesus’ ministry.  He came by water.  That was the start of it.  He went to John and was baptised in the Jordan and as he walked up out of the river, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and his Father spoke, “This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased.”  That was Jesus’ initiation into his messianic ministry.  And that ministry—at least in its earthly phase—ended in blood, at the cross, where he died to conquer death and to provide forgiveness of sins.  Jesus’ baptism testifies to his being the Messiah.  Jesus’ blood, shed on the cross, testifies to his being the Messiah.  And, too, John writes, so does the Spirit.  And, he says, consider all the things we believe, in which we trust, based on the testimony of mere men.  How much more, Brothers and Sisters, ought we to trust this testimony about Jesus backed up by God himself?  And not so much just receiving and believing ourselves, but in light of the fact that this is the truth, this is the good news that literally changes the world, is changing the world, oughtn’t we to be proclaiming it to that world?  Through Jesus and the Spirit God has given us the light.  The light that will transform the darkness that sin and death have cast on the world.  The light that the darkness cannot and will not ever overcome.  Dear Friends, don’t hide it under a basket.  Hold it high.  Proclaim it.  Show it to everyone.  Don’t be afraid.

Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself.  (1 St. John 5:10)

But that’s not where John leaves us in the Gospel.  Jesus doesn’t just send his disciples out into the world.  That would be an impossible task.  I met with another pastor this week to talk, to pray, and to encourage each other and one of the things that came up in our conversation was the all-too-common failure in preaching to tell people what to do without telling them why—the problem of preaching good works, without preaching Jesus as the source and reason and motivation for them.  Preaching good works without Jesus is just setting people up for failure and discouragement.  It’s law, not gospel.  And so in our Gospel, Jesus doesn’t just send his friends out to do the impossible.  He also equips them.  Look at verses 22-23 of John 20:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

 

As the Lord breathed life into Adam in the original creation, Jesus now breathes on his disciples.  “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says.  I don’t know that it was literally by his breath that the Spirit was imparted.  Luke tells this part differently in his Gospel and in Acts—that whole event with the dramatic coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as they gathered at the temple to hear Peter preach and to be baptised.  But notice there, too, that the Spirit comes with a wind—in both Hebrew and Greek, wind, breath, and spirit are all the same word.  Jesus was good at acted-out prophecy and I think that’s what he's doing in this case in John’s Gospel.  He is—or he soon will be—imparting God’s Spirit to this new people of God, to those who believe, and he illustrates just what this gift is by an act that they couldn’t help but connect to God’s giving life to Adam.  But this is new life.  And this is what will equip them to go out, despite the threat of death, to proclaim with boldness the good news.  Brothers and Sisters, the Spirit does a lot for us, but here Jesus makes sure we know what his primary purpose is.  It’s not to give us radical experiences, although that certainly might happen.  It’s not to make us holy, although he certainly does that as he turns our hearts and our affections away from self and sin and points them towards God.  No, the primary purpose of the Spirit is to equip us to do the impossible: to do for the world, what Jesus did for Israel.  To go out in the world in his name and to proclaim what God has done through him.  “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

And then those words that have so often been misunderstood and abused: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”  Remember I said that by faith we have a share in Jesus’ inheritance and ministry.  By faith the Father adopts us and makes us his sons and daughters, so we share in what belongs to Jesus.  And that means that as he is King and Prophet and Priest, so are we as his Church, his people.  And Jesus gets here at two of those things.  Here he reminds his friends and he reminds us that when we go out into the world to proclaim his Lordship, to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, to proclaim that new creation has come, we do so as both prophets and as priests.

Our message is two-fold.  I think the priestly role comes most naturally to us.  This is the part of our proclamation where we announce the forgiveness of sins.  Think of the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices.  That was one of their primary duties: to facilitate and to mediate God’s forgiveness to the people.  Think of Jesus.  He is both priest and sacrificial lamb.  He offers and presents himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins.  And, as priests, we proclaim to the world the forgiveness he offers through that sacrifice.  But that is not our only role.  We also share in Jesus’ prophetic office—and that’s the part that doesn’t come as naturally to us, at least not as things currently are.  But consider what the prophets did.  Consider what Jesus did in his role as a prophet.  He called out the sins of his people, he summoned them to repentance, and he announced the judgement to come on those who remained unrepentant in their sin, unbelief, and faithlessness.  In contrast, much of the Church today is afraid to take on this prophetic role, to name sin, to even use the word.  Some parts of the Church have given up altogether and have embraced sin and called it virtue—leaving folks nothing to repent of and with nothing for which they need forgiveness.  They’ve gutted the gospel.  But these two things, the priestly and the prophetic go hand in hand.  Our prophetic office, announcing judgement, is without hope if we do not also fulfil our priestly role of announcing forgiveness.  But our priestly office, our message of forgiveness lacks any real meaning if it is not also accompanied by the prophetic announcement that sin is sin and that God will judge it.  Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: that we are sinners, that our holy God judges sin and that the penalty is death, but also that Jesus has died as a perfect sacrifice for sins, and has risen, victor over death, inaugurating God’s new creation and giving a sure and certain hope that what he has begun he will finish.  One day all things will be made new, every bit of sin and evil will be swept from creation, and all will be set to rights.  And by faith in Jesus we have a share in that new world.

Brothers and Sisters, do we believe that?  I trust that we do.  We affirm this belief every week as we come to the Lord’s Table.  We recall the story.  We confess our sins in repentance.  And we come to the Table in renewed faith to participate again in those events that set us free from sin and death, in the death and resurrection of Jesus.  But maybe we’ve forgotten the real power behind what we confess here at the Table.  Friends, think this morning on what the cross and the empty tomb mean.  Think on what the blood of Jesus means.  Think on what his gift of the Spirit to you means.  And then take seriously those words of dismissal we’ll hear later: “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  Consider that in those words Jesus is saying to us, to you and to me, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

Let’s pray: Almighty Father, you gave your only Son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification: Grant that we may put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, and always serve you in purity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Easter Day

Colossians 3:1-4 & St. John 20:1-10

by William Klock

St. John writes in today’s Gospel:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark…

John is a brilliant story-teller and he’s a brilliant story-teller because he knew the story so well.  Not just the story he tells of his time with Jesus, but the whole story, the big story of God and Israel—a story that leads straight to Jesus.  But, even more, John knew that the story of God and Israel was even bigger.  It was part of a story that involves the whole human race and all of creation.  And so there are echoes here in his Gospel—deliberate echoes—that recall that big story, of Israel and Israel’s God, of his beloved creation that our fallen race has corrupted, and the story of his love, his mercy, and his grace that are at work to set it to rights.

Mary went to the tomb while it was still dark.  Jesus had been crucified.  He was dead.  End of story.  Jerusalem was ready to carry on with life as usual.  If they’d had water coolers in the First Century, the events of that Passover might have been the topic of discussion that first day back to work.  But it was over.  Or so everyone thought.  But while Jerusalem slept, Mary went to the tomb.  John writes specifically that it was the first day of the week.  He didn’t need to tell us that.  Jesus’ body wasn’t placed in the tomb until late on Friday.  Saturday, well, that was the sabbath.  No one would go to the tomb on the sabbath.  So we’d know it was the first day of the week, Sunday.  But John tells us anyway and he tells us in such a way to remind us of the opening words of his Gospel: “In the beginning…”  You know those words.  “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”

But when John wrote those words, he chose them carefully, because in introducing Jesus, he wanted to remind us of another beginning.  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.  He tells us that Mary came to the tomb while it was still dark.  Again, remember the first words of Genesis, the very beginning of the story: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”  As John opened his Gospel with words suggesting that the story of Jesus is going to be a story of new creation, so even as he tells us about Jesus’ resurrection, he again frames it in terms of new creation, filling his story with echoes of Genesis.  John writes that the word became flesh and dwelt among us.  On the sixth day, Pilate presented Jesus to the people and announced, “Behold the man!”  Hanging on the cross, Jesus used his last gasp of breath to declare, “It is finished.”  Again, an echo of Genesis.  Any normal person who counted himself a friend of Jesus would have considered that first Good Friday a very, very bad day, but that echo from Genesis reverberates through John’s account.  When God had finished the work of creation he declared that it was all very good.  Jesus was laid to rest in the tomb for the sabbath—another echo of Genesis.  Death is not the end, but the beginning of new creation.  As Mary went to the tomb that first Easter morning, the first day of the week, the word of God was poised to burst forth in an act of new creation.

At the time no one understood any of this.  Mary went to the tomb expecting that, like every other person in history who has died, Jesus would still be there, stone cold and lifeless.  She went to mourn and to meet her friends to finish the work of anointing Jesus’ body.  She found the tomb was open, the great stone door rolled away.  It was dark, so there was no point poking inside for a look.  But that didn’t matter.  The open tomb meant only one thing: Jesus’ body was gone.  John doesn’t reveal Mary’s thoughts, but resurrection would have been the last thing on her mind.  No, the open tomb meant someone had taken the body, maybe grave robbers, maybe Roman soldiers playing a joke on some silly Jews, adding insult to injury.  So she ran.  She ran to Peter’s hiding place in the city and beat on the door.  Peter went running with John to the tomb.  John’s the one who describes himself as the one whom Jesus loved.

John tells us that he outran Peter and got to the tomb first.  The sun was rising and as he peered into the tomb he saw the linen strips that had wrapped Jesus’ body.  That was an odd thing.  Mary, John, and Peter could think of a few reasons why someone might have taken Jesus’ body, but that anyone would first unwrap him was inexplicable.  Peter arrived and headed straight into the tomb.  If Jesus’ tomb was like others that have been found, his body was likely placed on a shelf to one side of the small, low entrance.  If his head had been oriented towards the door, it would have been difficult to see without at least putting head and shoulders into the tomb as Peter did.  And what a curious thing Peter found.  Not only was the body gone with the wrappings left behind, but the wrappings appeared to be undisturbed, as if Jesus had simply passed right through them.  And the cloth that had been on his head, probably a piece of linen tied around the head to keep the jaw closed, it had been moved and neatly placed nearby.

For comparison, it hadn’t been that long before that Jesus had raised Lazarus from death.  The disciples had watched as Lazarus stumbled out of his tomb.  He was still tightly wrapped in linen, probably not unlike a Hollywood mummy.  His friends scrambled to tear the linen cloths away, making a mess in the process.  Lazarus was all sticky and oily from the various liquids used to anoint his dead body.  In contrast, everything about Jesus’ tomb spoke of calm and order, even the face covering was neatly set aside.

John tells us that at this point he squeezed into the tomb beside Peter.  He saw and believed, he writes.  But believed what?  John goes on to tell us in the next verse that “as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”  They did not yet understand, but he believed.  Some argue that John merely believed Mary’s report of the missing body, but this seems like a pretty trite detail in amongst everything else John has told us here.  Peter and Mary believed Jesus’ body was really gone, too.  What would seem to make the best sense of this passage is to understand that John is saying that this was the moment when he realised that Jesus had been raised from death.  He said nothing to Peter or to Mary.  He and Peter returned home.  Mary remained at the tomb weeping.  They, the others, didn’t know what to make of the missing body, because they did not yet understand the implication of either Jesus’ claims or of the scriptures.  But John was beginning to put two and two together—and he believed.

You can’t really blame John for not saying anything.  He, himself, must have been struggling to understand and to make sense of it all.  But there it was.  The tomb was empty.  I expect John ran through the handful of reasons that the body might be gone and realised that none of them really made that much sense.  The Romans had no reason to take it.  Neither did the Jewish authorities—especially after they’d released Jesus’ body to his friends for burial.  Grave robbers?  What would they want with a poor man’s grave?  And the empty, but undisturbed linens?  Who in their right mind would unwrap the body?  Suddenly all the things Jesus had said, things like his statement that he would tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days, it started to come together and to make sense.  John’s brain started reaching back into the scriptures that he thought he knew so well, and new connections started to form.  He started hearing those old words afresh in light of Jesus—and especially the empty tomb.  And he began to understand.

I think that, again, the contrast with Lazarus must have stood out.  John had seen a sort of resurrection before, but Lazarus was resurrected to a life still subject to death and decay and emerged from the tomb still wrapped in his graveclothes.  Something different had happened to Jesus.  The undisturbed graveclothes spoke of something greater.  Resurrection—something God’s people longed for—had happened, but not as expected.  Resurrection was supposed to happen to everyone all at once at the end of the age, but—what if, John started to think—Jesus was raised first—raised to inaugurate and to lead the way into the age to come.  And that meant that Jesus really was the Messiah and that somehow this meant that God really was going to set everything to rights.  New creation had begun that morning, but it would take some time—and a meeting with the risen Jesus—before John would be able to sort out for himself what it all meant.

But if new creation was born that morning, it also had to have implications not only for Jesus, but for his people too.  John doesn’t elaborate at this point.  The wheels in his head, after all, were just starting to turn.  But that’s where St. Paul and our Epistle pick up, written decades later after he and so many other had had the time to think it through and work it out—rethinking everything they’d ever known in light of the risen Jesus.  Let me read those four verses from Colossians again.  Colossians 3:1-4.

 

  If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

 

What are the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for his people?  St. Paul wrote Colossians, at least in part, to address what seems to have been a common problem in the New Testament churches: legalism.  Jewish Christians struggled with the place of the law in the new covenant and many gentile believers were told that they needed first to embrace a form of Judaism before they could really be followers of Jesus.  In Colossians 2:20-23 Paul asks such people why they continue to live as if they were still enslaved by that old way of life.  Sure, the law has “an appearance of wisdom” in helping a person to attain an outward appearance of piety, but that’s just it: it’s an outward appearance, an outward conformity to holiness.  It’s not that this is necessarily a bad thing in itself, but that true holiness is something that wells up out of the heart—or, at least, it should.  It’s not hard to hear Paul’s frustration in these words.  Jewish converts should know better.  This had been Israel’s struggle since the beginning and Jesus, in his death and resurrection, had finally fixed it.  Jesus gives his people new life by giving us new hearts—turning them away from sin and self and rebellion and back to God.  But it’s easy to talk about the new life Jesus gives.  It’s often a struggle to atually live it.  New life is the starting point when it comes to defeating sin, but all too often we forget and start thinking that new life is the result of first having tackled sin ourselves.  Paul knew all too well that’s not how the gospel works.

Jesus has led us in an exodus from sin and death.  In his resurrection he has given us new life.  We are no longer slaves.  This is the basic truth of the Christian life and if we don’t get this right, we’ll get everything else wrong.  As the Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt through the sea and freed them from their bondage to Pharaoh, Jesus sets us free from sin’s bondage when we pass through the waters of baptism.  It’s a truth.  A fact.  A done deal.  We have been redeemed.  Even if we don’t feel it, Jesus and the Spirit have transformed us: we were slaves to sin and death and now we are free; we were in bondage to the world and are now citizens of the kingdom of heaven.  This is what we mean when we speak of “regeneration”.  This is what Paul gets at in our Epistle.  He writes in 2:20 that we have died with the Messiah and now he writes in 3:1 that we have also been raised with the Messiah.  Again, we may not feel it, but if we have truly taken hold of Jesus in faith, he has carried us through death and out the other side into a new kind of life.  What he did for the Israelites when he delivered them from their Egyptian slavery through the waters of the Red Sea he has just as surely done for us in delivering us from sin and death through the waters of baptism.  It’s a done deal.  It’s a sure thing.

And yet, there’s more to come.  What we have today in the Spirit is the down payment of the life that awaits us the other side of resurrection.  What Paul is saying here is one of those “already-but-no-yet” truths.  Jesus has been raised to the sort of real life and true humanity that we lost through our sin.  We look forward in faith and hope to the day when we will be raised as he was, but in the meantime we have God’s own Spirit living in us as an earnest on that day.  We await the resurrection, but even today the Spirit makes that future resurrection a reality for us.  Maybe this is what makes life in Jesus a struggle.  If we could appear in locked rooms and never know sickness or decay again—as is true of Jesus—it would be easier to remember who and what we are.  Instead, we are called today to live by faith, not by sight.  One day the promise will be fulfilled.  One day the things of the present age will be gone for good and God’s new age will come in all its fulness, heaven will descend to earth and man will live with God.  But until then we have God’s promise and we have his Spirit and we have the empty tomb to remind us that our hope is sure and certain.

And so we begin with first principles: If we have died with the Messiah, we have been raised with the Messiah.  We need to get this truth into our heads and when we do, we’ll remember that our life and everything about it that matters, is in the heavenlies where Jesus sits at the right hand of God.  Our true lives are hidden there with Jesus, Paul says.  It’s a kind of mystery, this “already-but-not-yet” life we have in the Messiah.  But even though it’s stored away in the heavenlies along with the rest of the age to come and God’s new world, Paul wants us to understand that it’s still very much who and what we are right now.  The new age dawned that first Easter morning when Jesus rose triumphant over death and if we are in him by faith, we really are part of that new age.  It may be hidden from the world around us, but it’s not hidden from us, because Jesus and the Spirit have made it our reality.  We live today in faith-filled hope and in hope-filled anticipation of the day when Jesus returns to rejoin heaven and earth, God and humanity, and to bring the new age in all its fullness.  And as difficult as it may be some days to live this reality, Paul urges us to do so in faith-filled hope, knowing that Jesus, who is our life, will return to finish what he has started.  On that day we will know glory in all its fullness.  Our hope is not merely that Jesus will return, but also that when he returns he will reveal who we really are in him.  Resurrection will vindicate and reveal the faithfulness of God’s people, just as Jesus was vindicated and glorified in his resurrection.  As we struggle against sin and as we labour for God’s kingdom we may feel inadequate or insignificant, but the resurrection of Jesus ought to be a source of encouragement to live the truth of who we are in Jesus even as some aspects of it are still hidden with him.  Now, back to our Gospel: St. John reminds us of those words “In the beginning…”  The story has begun.  Now we wait for the end.  But we await the ending in hopeful anticipation, because what our God has begun, what our God has so invested with his love and with the sacrifice of his own Son, our God will surely finish.  Brothers and Sisters, glory awaits.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Good Friday

Hebrews 10:1-25 & St. John 19:1-37

by William Klock

Last night we remembered Jesus and his disciples in the Upper Room.  We were there with them as Jesus washed their feet and showed them what it means to be a servant.  They were bickering over who would have to lower himself to washing all their feet.  And as they argued and were overcome by pride, Jesus—who was unquestionably the one man there who deserved to have his feet washed by someone else—Jesus stripped down to a towel, knelt on the floor, and washed their dirty feet.  He even knelt in front of Judas and washed the dust and mud from his feet—the dirt accumulated from his trip to the high priests to betray his master and friend. We saw St. Peter draw back from Jesus—“No Lord!  You can’t wash my feet!  If anything, I should be washing yours.”  And yet Jesus insisted.  If he couldn’t be a servant, he couldn’t redeem these men at the cross.

Jesus turned everything upside-down.  After washing the disciples’ feet—something totally inappropriate for a teacher to do to his disciples—he took the bread and the wine of the Passover meal and started referring to them as a new sacrifice.  These men knew all about sacrifices. They knew all about bulls and goats and lambs sacrificed for sin, their bodies broken and their blood poured out before the altar.  And yet Jesus took the bread and wine and said that it was his Body broken and his blood poured out—that it was him making a sacrifice for sin.  From what the Gospels tell us, the disciples didn’t understand.  They really did want to follow Jesus, they wanted what he had to offer, but they didn’t understand yet what it was he was offering.  When Jesus had tried to wash Peter’s feet, Peter had indignantly refused, but Jesus explained that he needed it—that if we wanted any part in his master, this washing was essential—then Peter wanted it—even wanted more of it (“Wash my whole body, not just my feet, Lord!”)—but he still didn’t understand what it meant.  He just trusted Jesus and wanted what he was offering.

After supper Jesus took his friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.  Even after the foot washing and that last supper and all Jesus’ talk about servants and sacrifices, they still didn’t understand.  They had no idea what was going to happen.  They knelt among the olive trees as Jesus went off a little way away to pray by himself.  And as Jesus prayed like he’d never prayed before, the disciples drifted off to sleep.  They had no idea what was happening.  Jesus woke them up in time for Judas to return, leading a pack of Jewish soldiers who had come to take him away.  Peter drew out his sword, ready for the attack, and cut off the ear of one of the soldiers.  Maybe he thought that now was the time Jesus, the conquering Messiah, was going to throw off his clever disguise of humility and start the revolution that all the Jews expected.  Now was his chance!  But it didn’t happen.  In fact, Jesus actually healed the soldier and told Peter: “I can appeal to my Father and he’ll send twelve legions of angels.  But if I did that, how would the Scriptures be fulfilled?”

The disciples ran away as the chief priest’s soldiers took Jesus away in chains.  They figured it was over.  Chalk Jesus up as yet another failed Messiah.  But Peter wasn’t ready to give up on his friend, so he followed along to the high priest’s house to see what would happen.  He watched the sham trial they put Jesus through.  They condemned Jesus, and as the priests and soldiers spit on him and struck him, Peter gave up just like the other disciples had done a few hours before.  Three bystanders noticed Peter in the crowd and recognised him: “Hey, you!  You were with him.  You’re one of his friends.  You’re one of his followers.” And each time Peter denied knowing Jesus: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!  You must be blind!  I’ve never seen this man before!”  Jesus was betrayed by even his closest friends.

When it was morning, the Jews dragged Jesus to the court of the Roman governor.  The Jews weren’t allowed to execute anyone; the Romans had to do it.  And so Jesus went through another sham trial before Pilate who caved in to pressure from the Jews.  He didn’t want a riot on his hands and the Jews were crying for blood—and not just blood—they were crying out for a Roman crucifixion.  Pilate asked them, “But this man is King of the Jews?”  And they shouted back, “No he’s not!  We have no king but Caesar!”  The crowds who had hailed their Messiah on Sunday, turned against him on Friday.  They wanted a conquering Messiah who would raise an army and drive out the Romans, but instead this wanna-be Messiah was talking about the Kingdom of God in men’s hearts.  He even talked about becoming a sacrifice himself.  On Sunday they had thought that his humility was a clever disguise to put the Romans off their guard.  Today they realise that it isn’t a disguise—Jesus really is a humble servant, ready to die.  The crowds weren’t ready to accept someone like that as Messiah.

The Roman soldiers, the whole battalion, took Jesus to be scourged.  They spit on him, they put a reed in his hand and a crown plaited of thorns on his head and mocked him as king, and then they beat him senseless.  They led him away with two violent thugs to a nearby hill.  They held him down on a cross while they nailed him to it with big spikes through his wrists and through his feet, then they raised the cross up and dropped it heavily into the ground. His mother and his friends watched as the blood poured from his hands, his feet, and his head.  For three hours he hung there.  Roman crucifixion was known for its agony.  The shoulders were dislocated.  Hanging, you couldn’t breath.  So you pushed yourself up, putting all your weight on the spike through your feet to gasp for air—alternating between the agony of asphyxiation and the agony of being nailed to a piece of timbre.  After three hours Jesus cried out in anguish to his Father, “It is finished.”  And just to make sure he was dead the soldiers pierced his side with a spear to see the blood run out followed by a gush of water.

The clouds darkened the sky.  The earth shook.  The curtain in the temple that closed off the holy of holies, the place of the Lord’s presence, was violently torn in two.  The graves gave up their dead, who went walking through the streets of Jerusalem.  Something remarkable had happened and everyone noticed, but no one understood—except maybe that centurion who confessed, “Surely this man is the son of God!”  The city was shorty back to its business.  Jesus’ friends wept in sadness or in anger, and they went home to lay low lest the authorities come after them next.

That evening Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to claim the body of Jesus.  They took it down from the cross, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a tomb, and sealed it up.

Maybe now the disciples started to ponder what Jesus was talking about last night when he had talked about his body and blood being given as a new—as a perfect—sacrifice.  In our epistle lesson from the tenth chapter of Hebrews, we read some more about the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice.  The Law and the old sacrifices were but a shadow of the good things to come.  “It can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.  Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins?  But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year.  For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1-4).

The blood of bulls and goats, sacrificed over and over, could only convict the people of sin as it pointed to the perfect sacrifice of Christ that had not yet been made.  And so Hebrews 10 says that Jesus came to do “away with the first in order to establish the second.  And by that…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”(Hebrews 10:9-10).  The writer of Hebrews goes on to give us a vivid picture contrasting the old and the new: “Every priest [and he’s talking about the priests of the old covenant] stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sin.  But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:11-14).

Jeremiah wrote, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds…I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”  And Hebrews reminds us, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16-18).

When Jesus breathed his last and cried out, “It is finished,” it was finished.  Whereas in the old covenant the priest laid the sins of the people on the bulls and goats sacrificed repeatedly on the altar, Jesus, our great High Priest, took our sins upon himself and died the death that we deserved.  The old sacrifices were imperfect.  They were just dumb animals, but consider too that those animals didn’t offer their lives willingly.  That’s the difference between the old sacrifices and the once-for-all new sacrifice made by Jesus.  In the shed blood of Christ we find perfection—God Incarnate shed his own blood and he did so of his own free will.  For that reason, there’s no longer any need for more sacrifices.  Again, Jesus did it once and for all.  The old covenant called for the sinner to humbly lay his sins on that animal sacrifice, but that bull or that goat on the altar of the Temple was a sign given by the Lord—it was his finger pointing to Jesus Christ—pointing to the Cross. Brothers and Sisters, because God has been faithful to his promises, no more do we bring an annual sacrifice to the Temple.  Now the humble sinner need only trust in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.

When Jesus breathed his last and gave himself up to his Father, the Temple served its last function in redemptive history.  Under the old covenant the Holy of Holies—the Most Holy Place—was where the presence of the Lord resided visibly for the people, resting on the Ark of the Covenant.  And yet the people weren’t allowed into that place—into the direct presence of the Lord.  Only the High Priest was allowed there and then only once a year.  No sinful human being could enter the presence of the Lord and the priest only did it to make an annual sacrifice for sins—and he did so only after a series of purification rituals for himself.  Nobody went there, because sinners can never enter the presence of a holy, just, and righteous God.

But when Jesus made his perfect sacrifice on the cross that day—as he breathed his last and pronounced, “It is finished”—the heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the people was torn in two.  By his death, Jesus opened the way into the presence of the Father.  Through Jesus sinners now find perfect forgiveness and are welcomed into the presence of his Father.

On the cross Jesus stretched out his hands; he stretched out one hand to all those who had trusted in him, seeing the future and coming Messiah as they made their sacrifices at the Temple.  And with his other hand Jesus reached out to us, reaches out to the Gentiles, to the nations who had never heard of the Messiah.  On the Cross he reaches out with both hands, uniting both peoples to himself, establishing his body by giving new life to dead and paralysed limbs through his shed body and blood.  Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).  That’s exactly what he did.  In fact, it’s exactly what he still does.  He stretches out his hands to draw us in, to unite us to himself.  Through his perfect sacrifice he offers perfect forgiveness of sin.  Through his body and his blood he offers new and eternal life.  Through his Holy Spirit he renews and regenerates hearts and minds and leads us on the path of holiness.  And through his cross, he leads us through the torn veil and into the Holy of Holies—into the very presence of God.

A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

St. John 13

by William Klock

In our Gospel this evening we read about Jesus and his disciples in the Upper Room at Passover.  John picks up the story after they had eaten, but our Epistle from First Corinthians reminds us of that strange Passover meal Jesus shared with his friends.  He took the Passover bread and told them that it was his body, broken for them.  He took the Passover wine and told them that it represented a new covenant that would be established in the pouring out of his own blood.  The disciples knew that something holy and profound was happening, but they wouldn’t understand what it was until a few days later.  But Jesus illustrated what it was all about after dinner, as we read in the Gospel, when he humbly washed his disciples’ feet.  Washing feet was a normal, everyday thing, but it wasn’t a normal, everyday thing for the master, the rabbi to wash the feet of his students and disciples.  Washing feet was a job for servants, or if there weren’t any servants, it was the job for the person of lowest status in the group.  But Jesus humbled himself to the embarrassment of his friends.  Peter tried to stop him, but Jesus insisted: If you won’t let me wash you, you can’t share in me—in my life, in my kingdom, in my mercy.

What’s interesting is that even Judas had his feet washed by Jesus.  At the beginning of the chapter John sets up Judas’ betrayal of Jesus.  The devil had entered him, John says, and had put it in his heart to betray Jesus.  The amazing thing is that Jesus knew.  Jesus declared to Peter, “If I’ve washed you, you are clean through and through—but not all of you.”  And John says that Jesus was referring to Judas.  Jesus had washed his feet too, but Judas wasn’t clean.  Again, Jesus knew.  As John continues later in the chapter, Jesus tells them outright: One of you will betray me.  One of his friends with whom he had shared this last supper, one of his friends whose feet he had humbly washed.

Bothers and Sisters, that says something about the nature of the Cross.  It says something about the nature of Jesus’ love.  It says something profound about the way in which God’s strength is made perfect in weakness.  At the Cross, sin and death rose up to do their worst, human evil was concentrated in one place.  As Lord of Creation, legions of angels were at his command.  But Jesus let human wickedness fall on him with its full weight.  For the sake of love—love for his enemies, love for those who rejected and reviled him, for those who scourged him, for those who drove the nails into his hands.  Jesus took our sin and gave back love.  Jesus washed the Betrayer’s feet.  And then, after giving such a dramatic illustration of this love, Jesus goes on to tell his disciples—and if we are Jesus’ disciples, he’s saying this to us too: As I have loved you, you are to love each other.  This, he says, is how people will know you are my disciples.  It’s interesting that of all the things that we think of that mark us out as Jesus’ disciples—going to church, praying, reading the Bible—the most important thing Jesus highlights here is our love for each other.  Without that all those other things are meaningless.

But, again, think of Judas.  Jesus washed Judas’ feet.  Jesus loved Judas.  Brothers and Sisters, love is vulnerable.  Love can be abused.  Love can be betrayed.  And—here’s the thing—if our love can’t be vulnerable, abused, or betrayed, then it’s not really love.  Think of the Cross and think of how Jesus got there.  The crowds hailed him as King on Palm Sunday, but by Friday they were shouting, “Crucify him!”  And it was one of Jesus’ closest friends who betrayed him to the authorities.  But everything in this last supper, including Jesus washing his friends’ feet, points to the Cross.  Jesus spent his ministry teaching and telling stories so that people would understand the kingdom of God, but here, when it comes to his very last day, in these last moments when Jesus knew he had to drive home the meaning of the Cross and the meaning of his death so that his disciples would understand what he was doing and why it was important, Jesus didn’t give them a theology lesson or an atonement theory.  No.  He gave them a meal and he washed their feet.  We so often turn that around.  We think of it all in terms of atonement theories and theology and then we tack on the meal.  One of the things I love about the liturgy is that the Lord’s Supper isn’t just tacked onto a service once a month or once a quarter.  It is the service.  And it’s integrated into our hearing of the word, our prayers and confessions, our praises.  It’s the lens through which everything else is seen and understood.  Jesus gave us a meal so that we would understand what he was about to do.

Think about the meaning of a meal.  We can celebrate friendship with a simple meal and we can throw great banquets to celebrate important events—something like a wedding.  And so it’s for good reason that the Jewish people looked forward to the Lord’s kingdom and his deliverance in terms of a great banquet.  The world was a mess because of sin and rebellion and idolatry, but the Lord’s Messiah would come and would set it all to rights.  This is where that idea of “on earth as it is in heaven” comes from.  The Messiah would restore Creation to the way the Lord had made it in the first place and that meant no more pain, no more sorrow, no more fighting thorns and thistles to grow food.  It meant a return to the Garden.  As the prophets said, grapes would be so plentiful you could tie your donkey to a vine and not worry that he’d eat the grapes.  Wine would be so plentiful that people could wash their clothes in it.  When the King finally came, his kingdom would be like a great banquet—everyone would celebrate and everyone would have their fill.  And so as Jesus prepared to go to the Cross, as Jesus prepared to let evil and sin and death do their worst so that he could defeat them on Easter morning, he shared a meal, a banquet with his disciples—a meal that we still share today as his disciples, as we look forward to his kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven, as we look forward to the Lord setting everything to rights.

But this wasn’t just any meal.  It was the Passover.  It was the great festival where, each year, the Jewish people sacrificed lambs and ate unleavened bread as a way of remembering who they were as God’s people and how he had rescued them and made them his own.  In the Passover they remembered that they had once been slaves and how they had cried out to the Lord and he had delivered them.  They remembered the blood on the doorposts, they remembered the Red Sea.  They remembered being set free to serve the living God.  And now here in this last Passover meal Jesus points his friends to the Cross.  This is a new exodus.  But this time God isn’t just bringing physical deliverance from Egypt; he’s bringing deliverance from bondage to sin and death.

And then the foot-washing.  We might think that we can just sort of show up at the meal—slipping in anonymously and then leaving, not really having a personal interaction with the bride or the groom.  Some friends and I did that once when we were living in the dorm at Vancouver School of Theology during the summer.  There were lots of weddings in the chapel and sometimes there would be a reception in the lounge.  One of my friends suggested we crash the reception and see if anyone would say anything.  No one did.  The bride’s friends and family assumed we were with the groom and the groom’s friends and family assumed we were with the bride—and we managed to avoid the bride and groom.  Some people think they can come to Jesus and to the kingdom that way, but in washing the disciples’ feet Jesus reminds us that he didn’t humble himself, he wasn’t beaten, he didn’t die in some big, general sense for all humanity.  He did.  But he also died very specifically each of us—for you and for me.  The disciples were embarrassed.  The master isn’t supposed to wash his disciples’ feet.  God isn’t supposed to humble himself and die.  But that’s how it has to work, because that’s the nature of love.  And if we will let Jesus wash us he will wash every part of us clean: the proud parts, the angry parts, the rebellious parts; and the sad parts, the lonely parts, the confused parts, the sick parts and all the parts we wish with all our hearts could somehow be made right.  They can be.  And so Jesus invites us: Eat this bread.  Drink this wine.  My body and my blood given for you.  Let me wash you clean.

And there was Judas.  Jesus didn’t just offer himself to the eleven friends he knew wouldn’t betray him.  Judas was there too.  And Jesus washed even his feet, not grudgingly, not any less thoroughly than the feet of the others, but with the same humble love with which he washed the feet of John, his best friend.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s love.  Again, love isn’t love unless it is vulnerable, unless it’s open to abuse and betrayal.  The world doesn’t understand this kind of love.  The world tells us to love the people who will love us in return.  The world tells us that if someone doesn’t appreciate us, we should write them out of our lives.  The world tells us not to give ourselves to people who will only take advantage of us.  A while ago I came across a whole Facebook page devoted to memes expressing this sort of thing.  “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm,” said a banner across the top of the page.  But Jesus gives us a very different model of love.  Jesus shows us real love at the Cross as he gives his very life for the people who cried out, “Crucify him!”  St. John says that Judas went out.  He went out betray Jesus.  He went out and Jesus knew that the wheels were in motion.  Nothing would stop his death at that point.  And John says he started to speak.  And he didn’t speak about what a jerk Judas was.  He didn’t complain about how this friend whose feet he had washed had gone out to stab him in the back.  He didn’t warn his disciples not to make the same mistake he had in befriending Judas.  No.  Judas went out and Jesus began to speak, saying, “Now the Son of Man is glorified.  Now God is glorified in him.”  Now the world will see what real love looks like and in that love God is revealed.  In the Cross, as sin and death do their worst to Jesus, we see the most profound example ever of “on earth as it is in heaven”.  This is love.

And then Jesus says to his disciples—to them and to us: I’m giving you a new commandment.  Love one another.  Just as I have loved you, so you must love each other.  Don’t love the way the world says to love.  Love the way I have taught you to love.  And by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, because you love each other as I have loved you.

Let us pray: Gracious and merciful Father, your Son Jesus Christ girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples’ feet; grant us the hearts to be servants to one another as he was a servant of all, who gave his life and died for us, yet lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.  Amen.

A Sermon for Palm Sunday

Philippians 2:5-11 & St. Matthew 21:1-17

by William Klock

Two Gospels in one service!  We began this morning reading St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  It wouldn’t be Palm Sunday without that Gospel, without waving our own palms as we sing “All glory, laud, and honour”.  This is the Sunday we hail the King.  And then St. Matthew’s Passion narrative.  That long reading that we all join in.  The one time of the year when we literally put ourselves in the biblical story.  (Did you know that tradition goes back to the Middle Ages?  Choristers would sing the various parts that today we hand out to members of the congregation.  That tradition was carried on in the Lutheran churches of the Reformation and gave us the great Passion oratorios by the likes of Bach.)  Today’s Gospels powerfully show us Jesus and, even if we miss the other services and lessons of Holy Week, they lead us right to Easter.  But they do not stand alone.  As powerful as the readings from St. Matthew are, our Epistle today, the lesson from the second chapter of Philippians, is the lens through which we read the Gospel.  St. Paul tells the same story, but in a very different way.  What’s remarkable to me is that what took Matthew two long chapters to tell—we only read the second of those two chapters this morning—what took Matthew two long chapters to tell, St. Paul summarises in a mere thirty-six Greek words as he tells us about the servant-king.  Most scholars think that verses 6-11 of our Epistle were actually an early Christian hymn, maybe even written by St. Paul himself.  Whatever the case, this poem brilliantly and succinctly sums up who Jesus is as it draws on both Israel’s story and the story of the whole fallen human race.  It opens the Passion narrative of the Gospel-writers and shows us the theological cogs and gears inside—and, I think most importantly, it tells us what to do with it.

In today’s Gospel Matthew shows us the King.  For most of us Christians, we know the story, we know that Jesus is a different kind of king than earthly kings, but Palm Sunday comes around every year and makes sure we don’t take that for granted.  The lessons ought to prompt us to think about what a king is, because, as St. Paul reminds us today, who Jesus is says something powerful about who we are as his people and what sort of life and character ought to be manifest in us.

So what is a king?  What’s a king like?  Today we might think of some of the modern kings of the world—or queens.  Today they’re mostly figureheads and public servants.  Five years ago, when our own Queen turned ninety, the Bible Society published a commemorative book titled “The Servant Queen and the King She Serves”.  In it the Queen spoke of her faith and how it shapes her role as monarch.  But the title highlights the role we expect of modern monarchs.  Today’s kings—or their viceroys—may open Parliament, but they make no decisions.  That’s for the legislators.  When there’s a war modern kings stay home and work to bolster the morale of their people.  Politicians make declarations of war, generals plan strategy, and soldiers go off to fight.  But ancient kings—kings in Paul’s day were very different.  Alexander went off at the head of an army and conquered most of the known world.  The Emperor Augustus headed an army that ended the Roman civil war and brought peace to the empire.  Alexander and Augustus did great things—and because of what they’d accomplished, both believed they had a right to divinity.  They didn’t serve God; they were gods.  They claimed that right because they had taken charge, destroyed their enemies, and wrestled whole empires into peace with the threat of further violence.  Why was Rome at peace under Augustus?  Because he’d destroyed his enemies once and any would-be future enemies knew he could probably do it again.  Kings and emperors grasped at divinity, men like Pharaoh and Alexander and Caesar.  Even many of Israel’s own leaders in the Old Testament, in Jesus’ day, and in Paul’s grasped for power—even for divnity in all but name.  Jewish leaders knew better than to claim divinity like the pagan rulers did, but they grasped at the same power that Caesar held and they sought to control the reigns of empire in the hopes of one day climbing to the top of the heap.

And yet this was not just the problem of kings or would-be kings.  Brothers and Sisters, this is the problem of the whole human race.  Ever since Adam believed the serpent’s lie and grasped at divinity for himself, we humans have been doing the same in one way or another.  We fight, we kill, we steal, we cheat, we do whatever we can get away with to look out for ourselves, to get what we want, to climb to the top of the heap.

Look at the book of Genesis.  Adam rebels and in a single generation brother is murdering brother.  Noah comes along in Chapter 6 and his story is introduced by the announcement that the earth was filled with violence.  Noah was the only righteous man left.  And so the Lord destroyed all but Noah and started over.  But even the righteous bear the seed of humanity’s fall.  Only a single chapter separates the story of Noah from story of the Tower of Babel.  Once again the human race lost all knowledge of God and sank into pride, idolatry, and sin.  And yet this time the Lord did something different.  Out of the darkness the Lord called Abraham.  The Lord’s solution to humanity’s problem was to call forth a people for himself, a people who lived in his presence for the life of the whole world, a nation of servants.  Long before Isaiah’s song of the Suffering Servant was claimed by Jesus, Israel understood this to be her unique role.

But, of course, like Noah in his day, Israel suffered from the same problem as the rest of humanity and so Paul uses this hymn in our Epistle, in Philippians 2, to show us the solution.  Look at Philippians 2:6-8 where Paul writes these words about Jesus.

Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Philippians 2:6-8)

God humbled himself.  Jesus, who the hymn says was in the form of God, who was in some way God himself, emptied himself to take on Adam’s flesh and Israel’s servant role.  Paul is clear that this doesn’t mean that Jesus ceased to be God or that he gave up his divinity in some way.  Just the opposite.  Jesus actually shows us what true divinity looks like.  It doesn’t look at all like Adam’s grasping or Pharaoh’s grasping or Alexander’s grasping or Caesar’s grasping at power, authority, or divine prerogative.  Instead, true divinity is revealed as God humbles himself for the sake of his rebellious people and offers himself as a sacrifice for their sins.  It’s utterly backwards to anything humanity ever expected.  Humans are supposed to offer sacrifices to the gods to placate their anger, but this God—the one, true God—instead offers himself as a sacrifice on our behalf and he does so out of love.

Think of today’s Gospel.  Jesus was rejected.  At the time, almost no one could accept that this is what divinity looks like, that this is what God would do.  When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the people may have thought it weird that he rode a humble donkey, but they expected him to finally start an uprising—to bash some Roman and Herodian heads and to set things right.  When later that day he flipped the tables in the temple and drove out the merchants, people were sure that this was it.  Jesus was ready to clean house.  But then it didn’t happen.  He got the people’s hopes up.  Here, finally was the Messiah.  But—apparently—not.  At least that’s how most of Jerusalem took it.  Jesus’ own people, in anger, cried out for his crucifixion.  As far as they were concerned, he was a blasphemous impostor.  He rode into the city as the Messiah, but then he let everyone down.  Even the servant people themselves could not understand the serving God.

And yet, it was there all along in Israel’s Scriptures.  Matthew tells us that Jesus’ entry into the city on a donkey fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah and Zechariah.  He cites Zechariah 9:9, but what’s interesting is that it’s the next verse, Zechariah 9:10 that points to the significance of the donkey.  Matthew’s first readers would have known this.  Not knowing the Old Testamant like they did, we probably don’t.  Here’s what Zechariah writes:

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim

         and the war horse from Jerusalem;

and the battle bow shall be cut off,

         and he shall speak peace to the nations;

his rule shall be from sea to sea,

         and from the River to the ends of the earth.

The Lord’s King would not come in might, but in humility.  He would not come with the cavalry or an army of chariots.  He would not come with a bow, ready to do violence.  Just the opposite—and just as we see in the Gospels.  By humbling himself he would take his throne and bring peace to the nations.  His rejection and death would qualify him for the role and by his resurrection alone would he defeat his enemies and take is throne.  It’s right there, but almost no one could see it.

But, of course, God knew this and so the hymn turns on verse 9.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Philippians 2:9-11)

The people crucified Jesus as a false messiah and God overturned their verdict against him.  Precisely because Jesus had humbled himself and taken on the role of the suffering servant for the sake of his people, God raised him from the grave and exalted him to his right hand—God declared Jesus to be the world’s true King so that in time every knee will bow and every tongue confess—that one day everyone will acknowledge that Jesus is creation’s Lord—and that in this God will be supremely glorified.  This is how God sets creation to rights, this is how God sets fallen humanity to rights: Not by charging in with a sword, but by submitting himself to the cross—by allowing evil and death to do their worst, by dying himself, so that he can pass through to the other side and leave them powerless over him—and then powerless over all those with him.  This is the new exodus that leads, not through the Red Sea, but through death itself to the life of God.

Now, back to verse 5.  Paul doesn’t simply tell us this so that we better understand who Jesus is and what he’s done.  That’s important, but Paul has a very practical reason for writing this to the Philippian Christians.  Remember that who Jesus is, what kind of King he is, tells us what sort of people we are or should be as his subjects.  He writes:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…

“Have this mind among yourselves.”  Jesus’ people are to “have this mind among yourselves”.  That’s why he’s done what he’s done, to solve the problem that began when Adam grasped at divinity for himself.  As we identify with Jesus, we become a part of the renewed servant people of God.  We are forgiven our past grasping, our past selfishness, and are filled with God’s own Spirit.  As the Spirit turns our hearts and minds to the self-giving God, we become a people whose chief characteristic is self-giving humility.  As we pass through death to ourselves we come out the other side alive to God.  The Spirit works a miracle in our hearts, he purges us of selfishness, of that powerful desire to grasp at whatever we can for our own benefit, and places in us a desire for God, a desire to please God, a desire to do the things that please God.  In Jesus and the Spirit we finally become that servant people.

What does that look like?  Well, it looks like the fruit of the Spirit.  We’re the people who should be characterised by love, by joy, by peace, by patience, by kindness, by goodness, by gentleness, and by self-control.  There are all sorts of things that ought to mark out the people of God, but first and foremost, it’s these seven fruits of the Spirit by which we should be known.  They don’t grow all at once.  The Spirit plants them, but they require cultivation by the means of grace—by the sacraments, by immersion in the word, by prayer, and by fellowship with each other.  They grow.  And the more we put them into practise the more they grow and multiply in us and in our brothers and sisters.  It starts here in the Church.  Brothers and Sisters, Paul wrote these words as an exhortation to the Philippians to be that servant people God has created for the life of the world.  We can’t be that people for the world when we aren’t first the people for each other in the Church.

Here’s how he put it to the Ephesians:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  (Ephesians 4:1-3)

Even in the Church it’s easy to forget who we are in Jesus.  It’s easy to act out of selfishness or anger or fear.  It’s easy to be impatient with each other.  So, Friends, remember the Servant King.  When you’re tempted to act out of anger or fear, when you’re tempted by impatience with a brother or a sister, when you’ve been wronged and all you can think about is righting the injustice, think of our King riding on the donkey, our King mocked and scourged, our King on the cross—for our sake.  There we see humility and gentleness and patience as he bore with his sinful people out of love, eager to reconcile us to himself, eager to establish a new people united in the Spirit.  And it’s in that that we see God glorified as never before or since.

Let’s pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility:  Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Nor Did They Repent

Revelation 9

by William Klock

As Israel was about to enter the promised land, the Lord summoned his people to a covenant ceremony.  Moses divided the people, six tribes on Mount Gerizim, a symbol of blessing, and six on Mount Ebal, a symbol of cursing.  The Levites recited the curses of the covenant and the people responded, “Amen”.  At the end of the ceremony, Moses was clear that when the people swore their oath that day, they were swearing not only for themselves, but for the generations of Israel to come.  The heart of the ceremony is in Deuteronomy 28.  Verses 1-14 list the blessings of obedience.  Versus 15-68 list the curses for disobedience.  The events of the Jewish War, which lasted three-and-a-half years between a.d. 66 and a.d. 70 work through the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 almost verse by verse—the war, the great tribulation, the fall of Jerusalem, and the scattering of the Jewish people fulfilling the curses of the covenant.  When the Good Friday mob cried out “Crucify him!” to Pontius Pilate and answered him, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25), they invoked the curses of Deuteronomy 28.  Moses warned that if Israel was unfaithful she would become like Sodom and Gomorrah—that she would become a monument to the Lord’s judgement.  That monument would be a testament to the nations of the faithfulness of God.  Here’s what Deuteronomy 29:24-28 says:

All the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger?’  Then people will say, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, and went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them.  Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book, and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as they are this day.’

 

I think we’re happy to think of the Lord’s faithfulness in terms of the covenant blessings, in terms of Jesus and the cross, the forgiveness of sins, and the creation of a new Israel.  But we forget—or choose to ignore—the flip-side of that.  We don’t like to think about God also revealing his faithfulness in unleashing the covenant curses on those who broke it.  In both cases the Lord’s faithfulness if revealed to his people and to the nations.

So John’s vision announces this judgement on Israel once and for all for her breaking of the covenant and for the idolatry at the root of it.  It comes after Israel’s God has sent his Messiah, after Israel’s God has created a new people, after Israel’s God has poured out his Spirit and sent apostles and prophets to declare what he has, in his love, mercy, and grace done for his people, after Israel’s God has given the nation forty years to repent of their idolatry, their unfaithfulness, their rejection of him.  Now John hears the trumpets blowing for Jerusalem as they once blew for Jericho.  At the end of Chapter 8 he wrote of the eagle, crying out, “Woe, woe, woe.”  And now in Chapter 9 the fifth and sixth trumpets are sounded.  Look at 9:1-2.

And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit.  He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.

 

During Jesus’ ministry the devil was defeated.  Jesus speaks of him falling from heaven and here he’s given the key to the bottomless pit.  In Greek it’s the “abyss”, that place in the Old Testament symbolic of chaos and distant from both the Lord and his heavenly realm.  The abyss was the source of the waters of the great flood.  It was a metaphor for the place of the dead.  It was where devils were held prisoner.  And the Devil is given the key.  Note: he does not take it; it is given to him.  He was defeated at the cross.  No matter how bad, how awful, how destructive things get, everything that John sees here happens under the Lord’s sovereign hand.  So the abyss is unlocked, smoke rises, and an army is unleashed.  John goes on:

 

Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth.  They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.  They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings someone.  And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.

 

Again, a bunch of images from the Old Testament converge here.  The plague of locusts means that Israel, because of her idolatry is now in the position of Egypt and under divine judgement.  But John reports this vision in precise language drawn from the prophet Joel.  The blowing of the trumpet, the air darkened, the locusts having the appearance of horses prepared for battle, their teeth like lion’s teeth, these all parallel Joel’s prophecy of judgement to come on Israel.

The five months here refers to the period between May and September when locusts normally made their appearance.  What’s unusual in this case is that these locusts stay the whole five months.  This may be a reference to the beginning of the Jewish War, which began in May of a.d. 66 when Gessius Florus slaughtered 3,600 of Jerusalem’s citizens.  His reign of terror lasted five months, until September.  But this had probably already happened by the time John wrote this, so I’m inclined to think that this is probably a reference to the final months of the siege of Jerusalem, which ran from April to August of a.d. 70.  Either way, the point here is that Jesus had spent three years casting demons out of the house of Israel.  Jesus had spent three years cleaning house, preparing his people to receive him.  But instead they crucified him.  Think back to the parable Jesus told about the house swept clean—we read Luke’s version as our Gospel this morning, now let me read Matthew’s, from 12:41-45.

The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.  The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.

  “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none.  Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order.  Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.”

 

Jesus had swept the house of Israel clean, but in rejecting him they brought on themselves the curses of the covenant and became a generation possessed by devils.  John goes on in verses 7-11:

 

  In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle: on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle.  They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails.  They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.

 

Josephus’ description of the violent and murderous Zealots who rampaged through Jerusalem is remarkable for its similarity to John’s description of these demons.  Josephus says that the Zealots terrorized the people more than the Romans did.

“With an insatiable lust for loot, they ransacked the houses of the wealthy; the murder of men and the violation of women were their sport; they caroused on their spoils, with blood to wash them down, and from mere satiety unscrupulously indulged in effeminate practices, plaiting their hair and attiring themselves in women’s apparel, drenching themselves with perfumes and painting their eyelids to enhance their beauty.  And not only did they imitate the dress, but also the passions of women, devising in their excess of lasciviousness unlawful pleasures and wallowing in a brothel in the city, which they polluted from end to end with their foul deeds.  Yet, while they wore women’s faces, their hands were murderous, and approaching with mincing steps they would suddenly become warriors and whipping out their swords from under their dyed mantles transfix whomever they met.”[1]

For good reason does John describe the king of these devils as “Abaddon” and “Apollyon”—the Hebrew and Greek words for destruction.  But John is clear that despite the authority given to them to wreak havoc, their destruction was limited to the apostate nation.  Both the earth and those who had been sealed by the Lord as his own, those who bore the mark of baptism, were spared.  Hell was unleashed on unbelieving Israel, but John writes in verse 12:

The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.

 

The sixth angel steps forward.  Look at verses 13-19:

Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.”  So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind.  The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number.  And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths.  By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths.  For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents with heads, and by means of them they wound.

 

A voice speaks from the horns of the altar before God.  With these words John encourages the faithful caught up in the midst of this time of tribulation.  We’ve seen them worshiping and praying.  The Lord hears them.  The horns of the altar were projections at the four corners.  Under the old covenant, when the nation—not just a person, but the nation—was guilty of sin, that sin was atoned for with a sacrifice made on the altar.  The blood of that sacrifice was then then smeared on the horns of the altar of incense—the place here in the heavenly temple, where the prayers of the saints are received.  The point here is that, first, the prayers of the faithful for both deliverance and for judgement on the wicked have been heard and, second, that their sins have been atoned for.  The Lord will answer their prayers.

The voice cries out for the release of four angels, until now held back.  They cross the Euphrates, the symbolic northeastern border of the promised land.  The fifth trumpet unleashed the forces of hell on Jerusalem.  Now the Roman armies—the 10th Legion and maybe others—are let loose on Judaea.  The Greek literally says they number myriads of myriads, an idiomatic way of saying “many thousands”.  And yet, again, we’re reminded that all of this is happening under the Lord’s sovereign hand.  As I said last Sunday, it may have been the General Titus who defeated Jerusalem and pulled down the temple, but he did so as the Lord’s agent and in answer to the prayers of the saints for justice and vindication.  John says that this army had been prepare down to the year, month, day, and hour.  The description of the army is terrifying, drawing on various images from the prophets.  David Chilton, I think, sums up the passage very aptly:

“An innumerable army is advancing upon Jerusalem from the Euphrates, the origin of Israel’s traditional enemies; it is a fierce, hostile, demonic force sent by God in answer to His people’s prayers for vengeance.  In short, this army is the fulfillment of all the warnings in the law and the prophets of an avenging horde sent to punish the Covenant-breakers.  The horrors described in Deuteronomy 28 were to be visited upon this evil generation.  Moses had declared: You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see (Deut. 28:34).”[2]

And maybe that’s just it.  We like to think that the damned, when confronted by the reality of the Lord’s judgement and given the chance, would fall on their faces before him in repentance.  We might think that, but we would be wrong.  As Moses says, the terror of the covenant curses brings not repentance but deeper madness.  Theologians have a term for this: reprobation.  Rebellion to deep that repentance is no longer possible.  Without the grace of God, the wicked who reject him dig in their heels, doubling down on their idolatry, rebellion, and wickedness.  The people of Jerusalem and Judaea in those days witnessed horrors we can only imagine: famine, mass murder, cannibalism, crucifixions of their fellow Jews at the rate of five-hundred a day, and instead of turning to the Lord, they devote themselves to the demonic pronouncements of false prophets and false messiahs who promised them victory.  Josephus writes:

“Thus it was that the wretched people were deluded at that time by charlatans and pretended messengers of deity; while they neither heeded nor believed in the manifest portents that foretold the coming desolation, but, as if thunderstruck and bereft of eyes and mind, disregarded the plain warnings of God.”[3]

The invading army killed a third of the people.  The ESV translates the Greek incorrectly as “a third of mankind”, but it’s just “a third of the men”.  This is a judgement on Israel.  The Lord must discipline his own children before he judges the nations.  John goes on in verses 20-21, writing:

The rest of [the men—not “mankind”], who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.

 

Jesus warned that before the day of judgment came on Jerusalem, “there will be terrors and great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:11).  Josephus writes of multiple signs that took place at the beginning of the war.  First, there was a blinding light that enveloped the altar on the Feast of Unleavened Bread in 66.  What should have been a sign of warning was, instead, taken as a good omen.  At the same feast the gates of the temple, despite being secured by iron bolts, were opened of their own accord—a sign of the temple’s coming doom, but one the people again chose to take as a good omen, despite several warnings.  At the close of the Passover that year, at sunset, a host of chariots was seen in the sky, armed battalions in the clouds, circling the city.  Fifty days later, at Pentecost, when the priests entered the temple, a great voice like a host cried out, “We are departing hence!”  And later that year, a star hung over the city like a sword for an entire year.  Josephus says that those who were wise interpreted the signs and concluded that Jerusalem was no longer the dwelling place of God.[4]  In a long denouncement of his fellow Jews for their idolatry, sins, and general unfaithfulness to the Lord, he said, “My belief…is that the Deity has fled the holy places and taken His stand on the side of those with whom you are now at war.  Nay, an honourable man will fly from a wanton house and abhor its inmates, and can you persuade yourselves that God still remains with his household in their iniquity—God who sees every secret thing and hears what is buried in silence?”[5]  Josephus failed to grasp the significance of Jesus, but he understood very well the covenant Israel had with the Lord and the judgement she stood under for breaking it.

The Psalmist sums up the problem of idolatry.  This is what Psalm 115:4-8 says:

Their idols are silver and gold,

         the work of human hands.

They have mouths, but do not speak;

         eyes, but do not see.

They have ears, but do not hear;

         noses, but do not smell.

They have hands, but do not feel;

         feet, but do not walk;

         and they do not make a sound in their throat.

 

But then the terrifying thing about idolatry comes in verse 8:

 

Those who make them become like them;

         so do all who trust in them.

 

“When a civilization turns idolatrous, its people are profoundly changed by that experience.  In a kind of reverse sanctification, the idolater is transformed into the likeness of the object of his worship.  Israel ‘went after worthlessness, and became worthless’ (Jer. 2:5).”[6]  Hosea gives the grim warning: Israel’s idolaters “became detestable like the thing they loved.” (Hosea 9:10).

Our own world is following the same path.  We think we’re sophisticated because we no longer believe in gods like Mars and Venus, but we still make idols of the things they represented.  And with our idolatry we’ve become increasingly decadent, foolish, and mad.  The faith of Jesus, which for almost two millennia shaped out society is laughed at and rejected.  Christians face, albeit to a lesser extent, the same rejects and pressures to conform that the people of those churches in Asia faced.  Will it get worse for us?  I think that’s inevitable, even if it doesn’t get as bad as it was for them.  But whatever happens, Brothers and Sisters, we must remain faithful.  We must reject idolatry wherever it turns up, and keep hold of Jesus with both hands.  Revelation is about tribulation and perseverance and kingdom.  It’s a call to faithfulness in light of faith and hope—faith and hope in his victory at the cross and ascension to his throne, faith and hope in the knowledge that he is King and always will be.  As he has always cared for his people, he will care for us and one day we will know the age to come, the world finally set to rights, and the presence of the Lord in all his glory.  Friends, love the Lord.  We were his enemies, but he so loved us that he gave his own Son for our sake.  In our baptism he has united us with Jesus, forgiven our sins, plunged us into his Spirit, and made us a people—a new people, freed from sin and death, a holy nation and a royal priesthood—a people for himself.  Set aside every idolatry and every sin and embrace him.  And go from here into the world as priests, mediating his kingdom and it’s blessings, and as prophets, proclaiming the good news that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and that Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, it is fitting that in your providence you have brought us to these passages of judgement during Lent.  I pray that as we think on our baptismal vow to reject the sinful and idolatrous influences of the world, the flesh, and the devil, John’s words of warning and encouragement, his announcement of the judgement of the wicked and the vindication of the righteous, will prompt us to set aside everything else and to trust in you and you alone, knowing that you are our only source of hope and life and that you have called us to proclaim that hope and life to the nations.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] The Jewish War IV.ix.10 (Loeb ed.)

[2] The Days of Vengeance (Fort Worth: Dominion, 1987), 251-252.

[3] The Jewish War VI.v.3 (Loeb ed.)

[4] Ibid V.i.3

[5] Ibid V.ix.4

[6] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 295.

The Prayers of the Saints

Revelation 8

by William Klock

Silence is a powerful thing and especially so in liturgy.  Maybe it’s the influence of our culture which is constantly on the go that in contemporary worship we feel that we’ve always got to be building.  Even when we’re given a pause to reflect and to pray in our worship and liturgy, the piano or the organ or the band still plays quietly, either to set the mood or because real silence is just something we find uncomfortable.  That makes silence, when we do experience it, all the more powerful.  Sometimes we need times of silence so that we can take stock and reflect on what’s happening and come out the other side of it more conscious of God’s glory or of our own sinfulness and of his great mercy.  Sometimes we come out of the silence more conscious of the need for our prayers.

John has been given a vision of the heavenly court, he’s been invited into the Lord’s throne room, to be let in on the deliberations of his council, so that he can take back a message of hope to a church on the verge of great tribulation.  The redeeming lamb has taken his place, the angelic hosts and the earth-bound church have joined their voices in his thunderous praise.  And the lamb has broken the seals on the scroll containing God’s plans.  And judgement has been announced on Jerusalem.  Four terrifying horsemen ride out and the winds are poised to blow, all bringing destruction on apostate Israel for her rejection of the Messiah and her persecution of his church.  At the same time, John sees an angel sent out to seal the faithful—to mark them out as belonging to God and to the lamb.  They will be swept up in this great tribulation as well, but God will preserve them and see them through to the other side.  The old Israel will be judged.  The new Israel will be vindicated.  And the nations will stand in awe to see the mighty deeds of the God of Israel who is faithful to his promises.  And as John wrote, these events were already unfolding in Judaea.  Within about a year, they would reach their climax.  John’s vision is building.  And now, suddenly, the action stops, the thunderous praises of heaven cease, and a dramatic silence falls.  We’ll pick up with Revelation 8:1-6.

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.  Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.  And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.  Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.  Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them.

 

When they were opened, the first six seals on the scroll announced judgement on Israel and Jerusalem and so, now that the faithful have been sealed and marked out as Gods’ own, we might have expected hell to break lose with the seventh seal, but instead silence falls over heaven.  Probably not what we expected.  I think there are two things in view here, two bits imagery of the Old Testament that are being drawn on, and I don’t think it has to be one or the other.  Revelation is packed full of imagery drawn from throughout the Old Testament and especially the prophets, and it’s often the case that one bit of imagery calls back to multiple passages or events in the Old Testament, creating a composite or multi-faceted image here.

First, that this silence is kept as an angel ministers this offering of incense takes us back to the tabernacle and the temple.  Think of Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father.  Luke describes him going into the temple to make the daily incense offering at the altar.  And while he’s in the temple making this offering, Luke writes that “the whole multitude of the people were praying outside” (Luke 1:10).  The 19th Century Jewish scholar, Alfred Edersheim describes the incense offering this way and saw that our passage here was shaped by that action in the tabernacle and temple:

“Slowly the incensing priest and his assistants ascended the steps to the Holy Place, preceded by the two priests who had formerly dressed the altar and the candlestick, and who now removed the vessels they had left behind, and, worshipping, withdrew. Next, one of the assistants reverently spread the coals on the golden altar; the other arranged the incense; and then the chief officiating priest was left alone within the Holy Place, to await the signal of the president before burning the incense. It was probably while thus expectant that the angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias. As the president gave the word of command, which marked that ‘the time of incense had come,’ ‘the whole multitude of the people without’ withdrew from the inner court, and fell down before the Lord, spreading their hands in silent prayer.

It is this most solemn period, when throughout the vast Temple buildings deep silence rested on the worshipping multitude, while within the sanctuary itself the priest laid the incense on the golden altar, and the cloud of ‘odours’ rose up before the Lord, which serves as the image of heavenly things in this description.”[1]

We’ve seen already the prayers of the saints ascending.  In the midst of tribulation, the Lord hears the prayers of his people.  And he not only hears.  The church, as she worships is united with the heavenly courts.  Seven angels stand before the Lord and are given seven trumpets and it’s difficult not to draw a connection between the seven angels John has shown us already, the angels that represent the seven churches to which he wrote, and those here.  Exactly how that connection works I can’t say, but part of what John reveals is that there really is something to our prayer, “on earth as in haven”.  Our worship is the thin space where heaven and earth overlap and we, filled with the Spirit and united to Jesus, are drawn up into the heavenlies.  Our prayers rise as incense and the Lord responds, but first the churches blow the trumps that herald the judgement to come.  Brothers and Sisters, there’s amazing consolation in this.  In those times when it feels our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling, in those times when it can feel as though the Lord doesn’t hear us, in those times when we gather with each other to worship and just aren’t “feeling it”, John reminds us that our prayers really do rise as incense—not just any incense, but an incense that is immensely pleasing to the Lord.  He hears.  He will act, even if it’s not as we expect.  And his people, his church, have a share, we have a hand in bringing heaven to earth through our prayers and worship.

The other inescapable imagery here is Israel’s siege of Jericho.  I expect we all remember the story.  On the seventh day of the siege, Israel marched around the city with the Lord’s ark leading the way.  They marched those circles all day in silence, and after the seventh time round, they sounded their trumpets and judgement fell on the city.  The walls came crashing down and the army of Israel, the host of the Lord, swept over the city putting everyone to the sword.

So the prayers of the church in the midst of tribulation arise to the Lord and become the offering of incense on his altar, but the angel then pours his censer out on Jerusalem—the prayers of the saints mixed with the fire of God.  “Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.”  John’s description of the thunder and earthquake should sound familiar.  This is the glory cloud that manifests the Lord’s presence.  Think of the Lord descending onto Mount Sinai:

On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled…Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. (Exodus 19:16, 18)

Now, consider that when the people made their burnt offerings on the Lord’s altar, it was he who provided the flame.  They laid out the sacrifice, but the fire that consumed it would descend from heaven.  To kindle any other fire in the tabernacle, what Leviticus calls “strange fire”, meant death, as Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, discovered.  But the Lord’s fire was kept kindled by the priests and was used wherever flame was needed for some holy purpose.  This is important here, because the Lord commanded that when the Israelites destroyed a city, it was to be burned with fire.  In Deuteronomy 13:16 Moses instructs the people, “[B]urn the city and all its spoil with fire, as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God.”  If a defeated city was to be made a burnt offering to the Lord, it would have been burnt with that divine fire from the altar.  And just so here, but this time it’s not Jericho or some pagan Canaanite city, but Jerusalem itself, judged and cast down for her idolatry and wickedness.  The Lord returns to his people, his glory cloud descending on Jerusalem, but this time in judgement to pour out the fire from his altar.

Brothers and Sisters, the saints cried out and their prayers—just as our prayers do today—they rose to the Lord’s throne.  He hears.  And from his altar he pours out judgement on the wicked and vindicates his own.  Let me read from Psalm 18.  Hear the prayer of David and pay attention to the Lord’s response.  This part of Revelation follows the pattern of the psalm.

In my distress I called upon the Lord;

         to my God I cried for help.

From his temple he heard my voice,

         and my cry to him reached his ears.

Then the earth reeled and rocked;

         the foundations also of the mountains trembled

         and quaked, because he was angry.

Smoke went up from his nostrils,

         and devouring fire from his mouth;

         glowing coals flamed forth from him.

He bowed the heavens and came down;

         thick darkness was under his feet.

He rode on a cherub and flew;

         he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.

He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him,

         thick clouds dark with water.

Out of the brightness before him

         hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.

The Lord also thundered in the heavens,

         and the Most High uttered his voice,

         hailstones and coals of fire.

And he sent out his arrows and scattered them;

         he flashed forth lightnings and routed them.

Then the channels of the sea were seen,

         and the foundations of the world were laid bare

at your rebuke, O Lord,

         at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.  (Psalm 18:6-15)

Now the trumpets sound and the Lord’s judgement is unleashed.  The trumpets follow a pattern similar to the seals on the scroll, with the first four separated from the final three by an interlude.  And these images of judgement connected with the seals and trumpets aren’t necessarily in any kind of chronological order, one following the other.  They’re meant, all together, to give us a sense of just how cataclysmic the Lord’s judgement on Jerusalem is going to be.  Jesus wasn’t exaggerating when he said to his disciples, “[L]et those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” and, “[T]here will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be” (Matthew 24:16, 21).  The remarkable thing is that we have the historical witness of Flavius Josephus, which not only shows us that events unfolded just as Jesus and John said they would, but also that neither was exaggerating just how horrible those days would be.

If the image of the trumpets and their heralding of doom puts Israel in the place of pagan Jericho, the announcements that come with the first four trumpets put her in the place of Egypt and Babylon.  Look at 8:7.

The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.

 

The Lord had visited Egypt with plagues to deliver his people and now those plagues are visited on Jerusalem.  Unbelieving and apostate Israel has become like Egypt, an unrepentant, hard-hearted enemy of God and his people.  Josephus describes the aftermath of the Roman’s scorched earth policy:

“Pitiful was the aspect of the country, sites formerly beautified with trees and parks now reduced to an utter desert and stripped bare of timber; and no stranger who had seen the old Judaea and the entrancingly beautiful suburbs of her capital, and now beheld her present desolation could have refrained from tears or suppressed a sigh at the greatness of the change.  For the war had ruined all the marks of beauty, and no one who knew it of old, coming suddenly upon it, would have recognized the place, but, though beside it, he would have looked for the city.”[2]

John goes on in verses 8-9:

The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood.  A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.

 

Not being as steeped in the Old Testament and its imagery as John’s hearers were, we probably find this confusing at first glance—right along with Jesus’ saying, “Even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen” (Matthew 21:21).  What we need to recognise is that in biblical imagery kingdoms are often described as “mountains”.  Ps 46:2, for example expresses faith in time of such trouble, “Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea.”  Or consider the words of Jeremiah speaking judgment on Babylon:

Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain,

         declares the Lord,

         which destroys the whole earth;

I will stretch out my hand against you,

         and roll you down from the crags,

         and make you a burnt mountain. (Jeremiah 51:25)

For years I found that saying of Jesus about casting a mountain into the sea confusing.  Sure, with faith all things—at least so long as they’re in accord with Gods will—are possible.  But why would casting a mountain into the sea be God’s will?  Well, in ordinary terms it wouldn’t be.  But then you read the Old Testament and you draw the connection with this announcement of judgement in Revelation and it makes sense.  When Jesus said that he was still talking about the judgement to come on Israel and his words make perfect sense in light of this vision of the prayers of the saints in the midst of persecution rising to the heavenly courts, crying out for deliverance and for judgement on her persecutors.  The prayers of the saints are offered to the Lord in faith, and he hears—and, most importantly, he now acts.  The “mountain”, apostate Israel, is cast down.  Brothers and Sisters, consider again the power of prayer.  It was the Roman General Titus who defeated and destroyed Jerusalem, but ultimately Jerusalem was brought down by the saints, because they cried out in faith for deliverance and the Lord heard and acted.

So the image isn’t literal, as if Mount Zion itself were scooped out of the earth and cast into the Mediterranean or something like that.  In biblical imagery the sea often represents the nations.  Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, torn down stone from stone, and the people scattered—forced into exile amongst the nations.  But, again, the imagery is that of the plagues that fell on Egypt: the water turning to blood and the creatures living in them dying as a result.  Because of unfaithfulness, Israel has become like pagan Egypt.  And, importantly, the prayers of Jesus’ people were an integral part of it.  How often do we think of our prayers in that light?

Now verses 10-11:

The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water.  The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.

 

Now the reversal of Israel’s position before the Lord becomes even clearer.  The image of the star falling from heaven comes from Isaiah’s prophecy against Babylon (Isaiah 14:12-15), but the name of the star, wormwood, takes us again back to the Exodus from Egypt.  When Moses led Israel from the Red Sea into the wilderness, they came to a place called Marah, which means “bitter”.  The water there was bitter and undrinkable.  But the Lord showed Moses a piece of wood.  When Moses threw the wood into the water, the water became sweet.  Now, here, it’s all reversed.  This star named wormwood, which means “bitter”, makes the sweet water bitter, leading to the death of many.

The Lord used that episode during the Exodus to make a point to his soon-to-be covenant people.  He says to them in Exodus 15:26:

“If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer.”

 

The Lord’s promise to Israel was that if she kept his commandments, he would heal them, but the flip side of that was that should they not keep his commandments, he would deal with them as he had just dealt with the Egyptians.  The Lord was patient with his people.  When they followed after Baal rather than the Lord, rather than rain down plagues, he gave them wormwood to drink as a reminder and a call to repentance.  Jeremiah warned the people and their false prophets repeatedly, using this image of bitter wormwood.  So did Amos, warning Israel, saying: “O you who turn justice to wormwood” (Amos 5:7).  Consider that’s just what the leaders of Israel did in crucifying Jesus.  Think of the sponge dipped in vinegar held to his lips.  Justice turned to wormwood.

Now the fourth trumpet, which is as far as we’ll go today.

The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light might be darkened, and a third of the day might be kept from shining, and likewise a third of the night.

  Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew directly overhead, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!” (Revelation 8:12-13)

Again, this imagery is symbolic.  We see this imagery of heavenly bodies going dark, being eclipsed, or falling from the sky throughout the Prophets and it’s used to depict the fall of nations and kings.  Frederic Farrar in his book on the early Church sums up the fulfilment of what John sees in his vision: “[R]uler after ruler, chieftain after chieftain of the Roman Empire and the Jewish nation was assassinated and ruined.  Gaius, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, all died by murder or suicide; Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Herod Agrippa, and most of the Herodian Princes, together with not a few of the leading High Priests of Jerusalem, perished in disgrace, or in exile, or by violent hands.”[3]  But, again, the cataclysmic imagery here also calls back to the penultimate plague the Lord visited on Egypt: the darkening of the sun.

And then John sees an eagle overhead and as it flies, it cries out “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blast of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!”  This is a transition from the first four trumpets to the final three, each of which announces a “woe” that will come upon Jerusalem, but it’s also another image drawn from the Prophets to remind us that this is all about the judgement of unbelieving Israel.  Hosea 8:1 reads:

Set the trumpet to your lips!

         One like an eagle[4] is over the house of the Lord,

because they have transgressed my covenant

         and rebelled against my law.

 

Hosea’s concern was Israel’s faithlessness and idolatry.  The Lord’s bride had prostituted herself to foreign gods and stood condemned.  Judgement was coming.  And John now here sees First Century Israel standing under the same judgement.  She not only rejected the Lord’s Messiah and put him to death, but she has also rejected, persecuted, and even killed his people.  As Jesus promised, she had a generation to hear the preaching of the apostles and of the early church, she had a generation to repent and to embrace Jesus the Messiah.  And while many did, the nation and her leaders refused and continued to follow the same policies, the same philosophies, the same politics that Jesus had condemned forty years before.  Israel had broken the covenant.  The Lord was patient.  But finally the sanctions of the law were visited on the a nation of covenant breakers.  The kingdom was being taken from the old Israel so that it could be handed over to Jesus the Messiah and to his new Israel.  The old temple, long apostate, had to be cast down so that the nations could be brought to Jesus’ new temple, his church, so that the everyone, Jew and gentile alike, would see that the promises of the covenant are fulfilled in Jesus himself.

That’s as far as we’ll go in Revelation today, but what does it all mean for us?  How does something that took place in the First Century shape our faith and practice today?  Brothers and Sisters, I think the most significant take-away from Chapter 8 is what it shows us of the position of the saints and their prayers before the Lord.  In particular, think of what Jesus tells us to pray in light of what we read here.  Jesus tells us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” and I can find no better illustration of what that looks like than what we see in Revelation.  The Church in tribulation cries out to the Lord.  She cries out as a suffering and persecuted people, pleading for the Lord’s deliverance—and notably pleading for the Lord’s judgment on her enemies.  There’s an imprecatory element to the prayers of the Church in Revelation and that’s something that contemporary Christians struggle with, but those imprecatory prayers calling for judgement on the unrepentant wicked are there throughout Scripture, especially in the Psalms.  But the Church doesn’t cry out in desperation alone; she cries out in faith and in hope, because she knows the faithfulness of God.  This is where those imprecatory prayers calling for judgement fit in.  God’s people know that even as he redeems and makes new, he also judges evil.  To pray, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” is a call for both deliverance and judgement.  The two go hand in hand.  But most of all, consider how we see here our prayers rising to the throne of God.  Sometimes it may feel like our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling.  Sometimes we may feel unheard.  But John shows us that our prayers do, indeed, ascend to God’s throne and that they are the offering made on the heavenly altar of incense.  Brothers and Sisters, as we who have been united with Jesus and filled with God’s Spirit pray, our prayers cannot but be heard, for it is Jesus himself, our high priest, who brings them before his Father.  So pray, Friends, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven,” and do so in faith knowing that Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again and that he now stands in the heavenlies to present our offerings to God.

[1] The Temple (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 127-128.

[2] The Jewish War, vi.i.1 (Loeb Ed.)

[3] The Early Days of Christianity (New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1882), 453.

[4] LXX ἀετός

Out of the Great Tribulation

Revelation 6-7

by William Klock

Tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom.  These are the key themes of Revelation.  John, himself living in exile for the sake of the gospel, was given seven messages for the nearby churches of Asia.  Those messages rebuke and exhort, they call the churches to repent where they have failed, but most of all, through these letters, Jesus calls his church to persevere.  The days were already difficult for them.  They struggled to be faithful to Jesus as Christians always have, but they were also facing persecution by the Jews and the Romans and, Jesus warns, it was going to get worse.  And so most of all his message to those churches was to persevere—to stand firm on the gospel in faith, to conquer—and he assured them that on the other side of his victory over these dark forces, they would be vindicated and share in his dominion.

And now John’s been swept up to the heavenly courts so that he can be privy to the counsels of the Lord.  The divine plans are contained in a scroll and John, longing for the fulfilment of Jesus’ promises, wept when no one could be found worthy to open it and to set God’s plans in motion.  But then, in Chapter 5, the Lion of Judah entered the court, the King who is also the lamb who gave his life for the sake of his people, he is worthy, and first the heavenly court, and then all creation thundered out his praises.  He is creation’s hope and the hope of his people.  He will set the world to rights.  We’ll pick up with Chapter 6 and, moving fairly quickly, working through to the end of Chapter 7.  John continues:

Now I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, “Come!”  And I looked, and behold, a white horse! And its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer.

  When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!”  And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

  When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand.  And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!”

  When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!”  And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.  (Revelation 6:1-8)

Jesus breaks the first four seals on the scroll and one of the four living creatures, each time, thunders a summons: “Come!”  And four horsemen ride forth.  Remember that I said last week, everything about the scroll’s description links it with the scrolls described in the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—scrolls concerning the judgement of faithless and apostate Israel.  The Day of the Lord is finally coming to Jerusalem.  The first, on a white horse, rides out “conquering and to conquer”.  He wields a bow and has been given a crown, which mean he represents the empire about to fall on Jerusalem like a ton of bricks.  The second rider on a red horse represents the unleashing of war.  The third, on a black horse and bearing a scale, announces the economic disruption and famine that accompanies war.  His announcement, “a quart of wheat for a denarius,” represents something like 1000% inflation on basic and essential foodstuffs people needed to survive.  An entire day’s wage for quart of grain.  And with war and famine come death and hades on the fourth horse.  Hades, in Greek mythology was the abode of the dead and was borrowed by Greek-speaking Jews to use in place of the Hebrew “sheol”, the grave.  A time of great tribulation was about to come on Jerusalem and Judaea: strife and war, famine and disease, and death on a scale never before seen.

The imagery of the horsemen comes from Zechariah, where four similar horsemen ride out in judgement on Israel, but the nature of what they bring is straight from Jeremiah 15 and Ezekiel 5.  Ezekiel writes:

A quarter of you shall be dispensed by death, and a quarter of you shall be finished off by famine in your midst, and a quarter of you, to every wind I will scatter them, and a quarter of you shall fall by the sword around you, and a dagger I will unsheathe after them. (Ezekiel 5:12 NETS)

The nation would be defeated and scattered.  Ezekiel was told to eat the scroll containing all this, and it was bitter.  Jeremiah asks:

Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem,

         or who will grieve for you? (Jeremiah 15:5)

But, more importantly, what John describes here is an obvious fulfilment of Jesus’ prophetic words in the Olivet Discourse recorded by Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  Jesus describes war, international strife, famine, pestilence, persecution, and expresses the great calamity of it all in the symbolic prophetic language of de-creation: the sun going dark, the moon turning red, the stars falling from heaven.  And Jesus was clear that these weren’t events of the far future, but that he was describing the judgement that would come on apostate, unbelieving Israel within the lifetime of the generation then alive.

The Jewish historian Josephus lived through those events and vividly describes them.  In his book, The Jewish War, he writes:

“It was then common to see cities filled with dead bodies, still lying unburied, and those of old men, mixed with infants, all dead, and scattered about together; women also lay amongst them…you might then see the whole province full of inexpressible calamities, while dread of still more barbarous practices which were threatened, was everywhere greater than what had been already perpetrated.”[1]

He writes, too, about the severity of the famine:

“As the famine grew worse, the frenzy of the insurgents kept pace with it, and every day both these horrors burned more fiercely.  For, since nowhere was grain to be seen, men would break into houses, and if they found some they mistreated the occupants for having denied their possession of it; if they found none, they tortured them as if they had concealed it….Many secretly bartered their possessions for a single measure of wheat if they happened to be rich…Then they shut themselves up in the darkest corners of their houses; in the extremity of their hunger some even ate their grain unground….Nowhere was a table laid—the food was snatched half-cooked from the fire and torn to pieces.”[2]

Jesus goes on to open the fifth seal on the scroll and reveals those vindicated by the Lord’s judgement.  Look at verses 9-11:

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne.  They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”  Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.

 

These martyrs dwell symbolically under the altar, like the blood of the sacrifices that poured out and pooled at its foot in the temple.  But who are they?  That they are given white robes, whereas others we’ll see in just a bit wash their robes in the blood of the lamb, points to these being martyrs of old covenant Israel.  They could not wash their robes in the blood of Jesus, but for their faithfulness they are given robes of white.  These are the men and women Jesus speaks about in his denunciation of the scribes and Pharisees.  Matthew records it for us this way:

Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.  Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

 

These are the Jews who were persecuted and even killed at the hands of sinful, unfaithful, apostate Israel down through the ages—all the way back to Abel, murdered by his brother Cain.  They have cried out through all those ages, looking for their vindication by the Lord and knowing that he is faithful to his promises.  Now that vindication finally comes as judgement falls on Jerusalem.

Jesus then breaks the sixth seal.  Look at verses 12-17:

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.  The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.  Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”

 

This is that symbolic language of de-creation, of cosmic catastrophe used by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus.  The idea is that greater than the catastrophe of war and famine and death, is that behind it lies the Lord’s judgement—as if he’s removed his sustaining hands from creation itself and brought it all crashing down on all those who bear his wrath.  This is the wrath of God and of the lamb.  The specific imagery here echoes the judgement announced by Hosea, Joel, and especially Isaiah on the house of Jacob:

And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled,

         and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low,

         and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day…

And people shall enter the caves of the rocks

         and the holes of the ground,

         from before the terror of the Lord… (Isaiah 2:17, 19)

It’s important, then, that what so frightens the kings and generals, the rich and powerful, and everyone slave and free, isn’t so much judgement falling on them.  They stand in awe of the catastrophe brought down on Israel by the Lord.  The people who worship impotent gods of wood and stone see the one, true God not only in action, but fulfilling his promises as he judges his unfaithful people—and they stand both awed and terrified.  “Who can stand before the wrath of God and of the lamb,” they ask.  They stand as witness to the mighty deeds of the Lord.

And now as we get to Chapter 7, there’s an interlude.  “Who can stand?”  We’ve seen the catastrophe unleashed on unbelieving Israel, but what of the faithful?  The martyrs of the old covenant are safe, symbolically under the altar, but what about the Church in the middle of all this.  What about Jesus’ promises that those who overcome will conquer and share in his dominion?  Look at 7:1-4.

After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree.  Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.”  And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel…

 

John goes on to list 12,000 from every tribe, which I’ll skip since our time is short.  In Daniel, the beasts of empire arose from the sea.  Something similar is about to happen again, the winds poised to unleash their violence and destruction, but another angel bearing the seal of the living God, holds them back.  Ezekiel 9 describes something similar.  The Lord sends executioners to destroy the people of Jerusalem, but he first commands a scribe to pass through the city and to place a mark on the foreheads of all “who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed”.  With the seal the Lord marks out the faithful who belong to him so that they will be spared in the coming judgement.  One old commentator puts it this way, “The purpose of the sealing was to preserve the true Israel of God as a holy seed.  It was not designed to save them from tribulation, but to preserve them in the midst of the great tribulation about to come and to glorify them thereby.  Though the Old Israel be cast off, a new and holy Israel is to be chosen and sealed with the Spirit of the living God.”[3]

Specifically, here, the angel seals the Jerusalem church, the Jewish believers in Jesus.  The number 144,000 is symbolic, but still not necessarily far off the mark.  We’re told that at this time there were tens of thousands of believers in Jerusalem.  But the point of the symbolism, 12,000 from each tribe, shows an idealized Israel, now manifest in the church and organized for battle.  A thousand represented a basic military division and here there’s one from each tribe.  The angel seals the Jewish believers and musters them as an army—those appalled by the abominations of their nation, those prepared to stand for Jesus and the gospel.

But once again John hears one thing and sees something different.  He heard the lion, but saw the lamb.  Here he hears the 144,000, but in verse 9 he turns to see a multitude.  He hears the number of those seals from Israel, but he turns to see a multitude from every nation, tribe, and people.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”  And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

  Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”  I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. (Revelation 7:9-14)

Who are these people?  What’s their relationship with the 144,000?  Again, we go back to the prophets.  Remember Daniel’s scroll?  He was told to seal it up until a time of “great tribulation”, specifically, “a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time” (Daniel 12:1).  Jesus uses almost exactly the same phrase to describe the coming time of great affliction.  And I think this tells us what’s going on here.  Daniel writes in Chapter 11 of his book, that the wise amongst the people—amongst Israel—will suffer sword, flame, captivity, and plunder, but that through this persecution they will be “refined, purified, and made white, until the time of the end” (Daniel 11:33, 35).  But, Daniel says, they will “make many understand”.  In 12:3 Daniel writes, “[T]hose who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

I think this is the best explanation for what John sees here in these two groups.  Consider that Israel’s calling was always to be a witness to the nations—to bring them to the Lord.  And here we have the faithful remnant of Israel who follow Jesus in faith through this time of great tribulation, through this catastrophe of judgement that has fallen on the nation, and through them this great multitude is gathered from every nation, tribe, and tongue.  The multitude is made up of those who have been witness to awesome and terrifying judgement unleashed by the Lord, but also his preservation of the faithful—both testimonies of his faithfulness that have brought these gentiles to faith.  They aren’t martyrs.  There’s too many of them, but, too, history tells us that the Christians of Jerusalem—the symbolic 144,000—heeded Jesus warning and fled the city.  They survived the destruction of Jerusalem.  It’s important what the elder says to John: These are the ones who have come out—or made it through—the great tribulation.  In other words, these are the ones the Lord has preserved from judgement?  Why?  Because their robes have been washed in the blood of the lamb.  They have known the faithfulness of God and the saving power of his Messiah and so they praise him: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”  And the heavenly court, hearing their praises, follows with their own praises, giving glory to the God who both delivers his people and judges wickedness.

So this is the Church that John sees.  But is the church in heaven or on earth?  Let’s finally look at the elder’s song in verses 15-17:

“Therefore they are before the throne of God,

         and serve him day and night in his temple;

         and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;

         the sun shall not strike them,

         nor any scorching heat.

For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,

         and he will guide them to springs of living water,

         and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

 

The elder’s song draws on a passage from Ezekiel 37, which in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, uses similar language.  The elder says that God will “shelter them” and through Ezekiel the Lord says, “My dwelling place (my place of shelter) shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (37:27).  He goes on to say, “Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore” (37:28).  As Ezekiel holds up Israel as the Lord’s temple and witness to the nations, so John now holds up the church—the faithful remnant of Israel plus the multi-national multitude drawn to Jesus by that remnant—John holds up the church as the new temple of God in the midst of the nations—fulfilling what has always been the mission and calling of the people of God.

Verse 16 is a quotation of Isaiah 49:10, which tells how the servant of the Lord will restore Israel and become a light to the nations.  Those whom he sets free will neither hunger nor thirst, neither sun nor scorching heat will touch them, for he will guide them like a shepherd by springs of living water.  And it’s worth noting that it’s John who, in his gospel, tells us that this living water is the Holy Spirit.

All that tells us that both the 144,00 and the great multitude are not in heaven, but on earth.  This is the church shepherded by lamb, filled with God’s own Spirit, who have now become the Lord’s temple.  This is his promise to see them through the coming time of tribulation.  It’s also his promise that they will, indeed, make it through.  They will be the holy nation of priest and kings that he promised to make them.  Jesus assures them that tribulation—even though some would die for his sake—that tribulation is not death, but birth.  The catastrophic judgement to come would establish the kingdom and Jesus shows his people not only the victory to come, but the celebration that came with that victory.

Brothers and Sisters, what John describes is in our past, but in it we see the faithfulness of God revealed in Jesus and the Church.  What God has promised he always accomplishes and you and I stand here in this church today as proof.  We face our own time of trial as we enter a post-Christian age.  But we are now Daniel’s “wise”, called to shine the light of Jesus into the darkness of the world, and trusting that by our witness the Spirit will turn many to righteousness.  It’s now our turn to declare the mighty deeds of the Lord to the nations, that they might stand in awe and fear of the God who both judges and delivers, of the God who loves his enemies so much that he who is the lion become the lamb who gave himself as a sacrifice for their—for our—sins.

In a.d. 37 the Emperor Caligula erected an obelisk in the great circus in Rome.  It was dedicated to the Divine Augustus and the Divine Tiberius.  Standing at the centre of Nero’s circus, it stood witness to the martyrdom of many men and women who stood uncompromisingly for Jesus and paid for that testimony with their lives.  That witness brought an entire empire to submission to Jesus.  Today the Nero’s circus is gone, replaced by St. Peter’s, the largest church in the world.  The obelisk still stands, now in St. Peter’s Square.  But it has been inscribed with the words of the martyrs:

CHRISTUS VINCIT

CHRISTUS REGNAT

CHRISTUS IMPERAT

Brothers and Sisters, the Messiah conquers, the Messiah reigns, the Messiah rules over all.

Let’s pray: Almighty Father we praise you for your faithfulness, revealed first through St. John and then through your mighty deeds in history.  As you promised, you brought down the wicked and you have delivered and raised up your people.  You have redeemed us from sin and death, you have filled us with your Spirit, now give us grace to fulfil the calling you have given, cause our gospel light to shine brightly into the darkness of the world, drawing the nations and ever increasing this great multitude, until the knowledge of your glory fills the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Through Jesus our Lord we pray.  Amen.

[1] The Jewish War ii.xviii.2

[2] Ibid, v.x.2

[3] Milton Terry, Biblical Apocalyptics (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898), 336.