Christ Pantocrator of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai (6th Century)
Easter 5 2025
Rev. Doug Floyd
Revelation 19
Kelly and I were talking the other night about her job. She’s worked with the same company for many years. During that time, she’s come in contact and befriended people throughout the organization. She told she’s seen many people who once were passionate about their work have grown weary. They’ve lost their joy.
I kept thinking of a B.B. King song about the joy being gone. Then I found it. The song is actually, “The Thrill is Gone.” It’s about a love relationship gone sour. The woman has cheated on the man. Now the thrill of this relationship is gone, and he faces a life of loneliness. I told Kelly, “Well, you just gave me my sermon for Sunday on Revelation 19.”
B.B. King’s song “The Thrill is Gone” reminds me of a B.B. King collaboration with U2, “When Love Comes to Town.” And this is Revelation 19 all the way. It makes me think about the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. But more on that later.
Let me back up a bit and look at our text. Revelation 19 is a completion of the narrative from Revelation 17-18. Last week, we read from Revelation 7. Our lectionary jumps from chapter 7 to chapter 19. We miss all the weird stuff: peals of thunder, flashes of lightning, earthquake, hail, fire, blood, a star falling from heaven, locusts with the power of scorpions coming out of the smoke from a bottomless pit, two witnesses, a beast that kills the witnesses, a pregnant woman clothed with the sun, and a dragon waiting to devour the baby when he is born. We’re just getting started on the weird stuff.
Now if you are interested in the details of these strange stories, we will be exploring them in our study of Eugune Peterson’s book, “Reversed Thunder.”
We’ll jump past most of that to one last strange image. In chapter 17, we see a prostitute or the Great Whore riding a beast with many blasphemous names. The beast has seven heads and ten horns. This woman is named Babylon, and she has a perverse chalice where she drinks the blood of saints. A mockery of our communion.
The ten horns and ten kings join with the beast to devour the Great Whore. We hear the refrain,
Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
She has become a dwelling place for demons,
a haunt for every unclean spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.
3 For all nations have drunk
the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,
and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.” [1]
The kings and merchants and sailors and people of the earth cry out in agony at her destruction, but the saints rejoice. The Great Whore, Babylon is judged and the Bride of Christ has made herself ready for the marriage Supper of the Lamb. This gets us to today’s text in chapter 19,
“Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,
2 for his judgments are true and just;
for he has judged the great prostitute
who corrupted the earth with her immorality,
and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.” [2]
Now before we go forward, we need to go backwards. After this, hopefully you’ll see why Kelly’s story about work connects with Revelation 19.
The Great Whore is named Babylon. We recognize the name Babylon for the nation that destroyed Jerusalem and took the people captive to Babylon. The little nation of Judah is taken captive by a great and powerful war machine. Babylon makes its wealth through destruction of smaller, weaker tribal groups.
The sheer size of the city and its monuments would have been overwhelming and intimidating to the Jews. The leaders of Judah turned away from the true worship of the Lord and were seduced away by the gods of other nations. The judgment for their idolatry is captivity in a land of idolatry: Babylon. In Babylon, the captives cry out,
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
3 For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
6 Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock! [3]
The prophets connect idolatry with adultery. Judah turns from the Creator to created things and commits spiritual adultery. The act of adultery also includes sexual deviance and abuse of the poorer citizens. Idolatry is always oppressive. In this place of darkness and death, some of the Jews come face to face with the implications of their unfaithfulness to God. Idolatry always results in oppression and destruction. All this gives us images of what the Great Whore encompasses.
We can go further back to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. King Ahab marries Jezebel. She is the daughter of the King of Tyre, a culture of Baal worshippers. She establishes Baal worship throughout the land and seduces the people away from the true God. Jezebel is presented to us as a great and evil seductress.
She is also an image of the great whore. She is a seducer, an idolator, and she kills the prophets of God. Idolatry oppresses. The people of God suffer under the hand of idolatry.
We go further back to the grand story of the ancient Hebrews: Egypt. The Children of Israel have lived in the land of Egypt for 400 years. At first, this place was a place of refuge where Jacob’s son Joseph served the Pharoah and saved the people and the kingdom from utter collapse due to famine.
The Hebrews find a home in this place, and they prosper. But over time they become enslaved under the hand of Pharoah. These Children of Israel suffer under the weight and almost forget who they are. The culture of Egyptian idolatry oppresses and shapes them. Even as they are enslaved by Pharoah, they are enslaved by false worship. They learn a pattern of living that is alien to the ways of God.
God sends Moses to bring his children home. He calls His children back to true worship. For this is truly what it means to be human: we were made for worship, and our worship will shape every aspect of our lives. False worship will ultimately swallow our true humanity and reduce us to slavery and beastly behavior: think Gollum.
When the Lord rescues His people, He sends a series of plagues on Egypt. Pharoah refuses to release God’s people for worship. Ther Lord exposes the corruption and false power of Egypt. After the death of his first born, Pharoah submits and releases the Children of Israel. Through God’s power, they walk through the Red Sea to freedom. When Pharoah and his army try to follow them, they are destroyed. They are swallowed by the Red Sea. In Revelation, the evil powers that have conspired against God’s children are thrown into a lake of fire. Revelation details a series of plagues and eventually we see a multitude of saints worshipping of God. Now we see all these stories of deliverance from enslavement and idolatry fulfilled in Christ. Let’s think about this pattern.
In Romans, Paul interprets this pattern of idolatry, adultery, oppression and enslavement as turning from the Creator to the creation, then humanity becomes enslaved by sin and death. When Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world,”[4] he is talking about a world that is at odds with the Creator; a world infected by sin and death; where humanity suffers under this weight; where true God-shaped love is abandoned for false love, manipulation, and oppression.
We are born into a world of sin and death. There is still beauty. God’s creation is not totally diminished, but humans can easily corrupt this beauty in the business world, the school system, the government, and sadly even the church and the home. In one way or another, we have all been wounded, damaged in a world where sin has so infected life. But we are not forsaken.
Paul sees the cross of Christ in light of this enslavement. By his death, Christ breaks the bonds of death and slavery. We are buried with Christ in the baptism of His death, and we are raised to newness of life. This is when love comes to town. This is what we read in Revelation 19. Our Redeemer comes and defeats the powers that would crush our soul. The Great Whore is cast down. Babylon is fallen.
When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train
When love comes to town I’m gonna catch that flame.
In the song, “When Love Comes to Town,” Bono sings of being enslaved by sin and death. He and B.B. King sings,
“I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide”
Bono acknowledges his own and our own complicity in sin and death. We have been oppressed and sadly we have also oppressed others. Here we see the condition of the Hebrews in Egypt, the captives in Babylon, and those oppressed across history, they become part of culture of sin and death even as they rail against it.
The Great Whore, Babylon is not simply a city or a government or a structure. It is the way of the world the infects humanity. Without the grace of God, our world would strip us of our humanity and reduce us to a beastly behavior: remember the great Beast that the Great Whore rides upon. Sin is the undoing of the human person, the undoing of creation.
Thus, in this life and even in our beloved vocations and relationships, we may suffer because of our own mistakes and the mistakes of others. As Bob Dylan sings, “Everything is Broken.”
Everywhere you turn, you will see weary people burdened by jobs and families and illnesses and struggles and loss. You will meet people who have lost their joy.
And yet, Christ Himself is snatching people from the kingdom of darkness. His love is conquering the great divide. Yes, we all bear wounds caused by others and by our treatment of others. But He does not leave us to the Great Whore and the Beast.
In Revelation 18, we hear a voice from heaven saying to God’s beloved children,
“Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues;” [5]
He is rescuing His people from sin and death. In Revelation 19, this prophetic book suddenly explodes with Hallelujahs! Joy is bursting forth everywhere. True Worship is restored to the captives, those formerly enslaved by sin and death. They are singing. We are singing.
For the first time in Revelations, all things culminate in shouts of joy.
We are shouting. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
We have been washed clean by the blood of the Lamb. We are wearing pure and spotless linens. In contrast to the Great Whore, the people of God from across the ages have become a pure and spotless bride welcomed to a feast: the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.
In the opening words of The Revelation, we read, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.”[6] In one sense, this defeat of evil was accomplished on the cross: in the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. We experience it here and now. But not fully. We are still waiting for the Victory of Christ to be completely unveiled.
This is a reality now and to come. As Amy Grant sang in 1984, “I’m caught in between the now and the not yet;” then she sings, “When He appears He’ll draw us near, And we’ll be changed by His glory, Wrapped up in His glory.”
As we worship our Lord, we draw near to this glorious appearing. He refreshes our soul in the bread and wine, His body and blood.
As worshippers of the Great Lover of our Souls, we go out into this world of struggle and reveal His love, His joy, and the great hope He gives us. Babylon has fallen and God’s glory will be fully unveiled. And all things culminate in song,
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. [7]
[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Re 18:2–3.
[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Re 19:1–2.
[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ps 137:1–9.
[4] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ro 12:2.
[5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Re 18:4.
[6] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Re 1:1.
[7] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Re 19:6.
