Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Third Sunday of Easter, 4^th of May, 2025

Revelation 5:11-14

Today I am going to do something that I have never done before. I am going to preach on the lection from Revelation.

The Revised Common Lectionary gives us only a few readings from Revelation, mostly limiting them to this season of Easter in the liturgical year of Luke, and mostly giving us descriptions of worship and praise. If we follow the lectionary readings we never hear about the plagues, wars, and famines that Revelation describes as occurring when angels blow trumpets and pour out bowls of God’s wrath, even though it is probably those plagues, wars, and famines that first spring to mind when thinking about this part of the Bible. Beyond the lectionary, we are most likely to use elements of Revelation in song. ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ (TIS 217), the Battle Hymn of the Republic (TIS 315), ‘Shall we gather at the river?’ and ‘When the saints go marching in’ all use images from the Book of Revelation. (If St Kilda ever wins an AFL Grand Final we will most definitely be singing ‘When the saints …’ even though the football theme song makes no mention of stars falling from the sky, the sun refusing to shine, or the moon turning red with blood.) But there is more to Revelation than us casting our crowns before God or the grapes of wrath being trampled.

The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse, a prophecy, and a letter. Apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις) simply means ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ and biblical apocalypses, like those in the Book of Daniel, are supernatural visions given by otherworldly beings. Apocalypses are revelations of both time and space; they show what will happen at the end of time, and what is happening now in heaven. Apocalypses were written to comfort people whose situations were so dire that the only way they could imagine a future was through divine intervention. Revelation is clearly an apocalypse; the author is shown a vision of heaven and what will happen on earth at the end of time.

Prophecy, on the other hand, shows concern for the present; it tells the truth about what is happening on earth right now. The people of ancient Judah, for instance, had thought that they were doing God’s will when they made their sacrifices and celebrated their festivals. The Prophet Isaiah told them that what God wanted of them was that they ‘cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow’. (Isaiah 1:17) Prophets sometimes prophesied future divine intervention, but primarily they called on human beings to change their ways in the here and now. The prophetic elements of the Book of Revelation are seen in its instructions to the seven churches named in the text, and in the reminder amid all the blowing of trumpets and pouring out of bowls of wrath that humanity still has time to repent and escape punishment. (Revelation 16:9-11)

Finally, Revelation is a letter, written in the late first century and sent to the churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea, all places in what was then Asia Minor and is now Türkiye. The author, John, never claims to be the beloved disciple of the Gospel according to John, or the Elder who wrote the Letters of John, but he does say that he is a brother of those who read and someone who shares in their sufferings. (Revelation 1:9) As he writes to these churches, the author of Revelation sounds very much like the Apostle Paul praising and criticizing Christian communities. (Revelation 2 and 3)

Despite the extravagance of its language, the revelation of this apocalypse, the interpretation of this prophecy, the situation that this letter addresses, was simple. John was writing to Christians living and working within the Roman Empire to tell them that as Christians they must resist the Roman imperial cult in which emperors were worshipped alongside other deities. It would have been obvious that Christians could not worship the Greco-Roman deities that they already knew did not exist. It may have been less obvious that Christians could not add a bit of Emperor-acknowledging alongside the worship of their God, as the other residents of the Empire did. Jesus had made Christians citizens of God’s kingdom and priests serving his God and Father. (Revelation 1:5-6) John writes that they could not also behave as citizens of the Roman Empire and priests serving the Emperor.

This simple message became more complicated in the fourth century when the Roman Empire became Christian. Christians who lived in a Christian Empire, and then in Christian nation states, began to read Revelation in new ways. ‘Babylon’ was no longer Rome and ‘the beast from the sea’ was no longer the Roman Emperor, so what and who were? The history of interpretations of Revelation is fascinating and I have no time to explore it today. All I want to say is that we twenty-first-century Christians, living on the other side of Christendom, knowing that no secular nation is ever conterminous with the kingdom of God, have a chance to read Revelation as its first readers did. Like them, we need to answer the question of how far we can accommodate ourselves to the non-Christian world around us. Like them, we need to work out when our faith demands that we resist the ways of the rest of the world. Like them, we may sometimes need to be reminded that God alone is to be worshipped.

Seven times in the Book of Revelation we are shown the heavenly beings worshipping, and those they are worshipping, those who alone are worthy of their worship and honour and praise, are neither human emperors nor Greco-Roman gods. Jews would have agreed with Christians that the Alpha and the Omega, the one who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty (Revelation 1:8), is worthy of all worship. Still, they would have been scandalised by the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is also to be greeted with praise and thanksgiving. In today’s reading the many angels, the ‘twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads’ (Revelation 4:4), and the four living creatures, one like a lion, one like an ox, one with a face like a human, and one like a flying eagle (Revelation 4:7), myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, are worshipping the one an angel described to John as ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,’ the long-awaited messiah. When this mighty warrior then appeared, it turned out to be ‘a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered’. (Revelation 5:5-6) It is ‘the Lamb that was slaughtered’ that is worthy ‘to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing’. The lectionary gives us these readings in the season of Easter because the heavenly worshippers are doing the same thing that we are doing; celebrating the risen crucified one who becomes king through self-sacrifice rather than military violence.

In today’s reading it is not merely the heavens that worship the Lamb, but ‘every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea’. As so often in the Scriptures, humans are joined in our worship by the non-human creation. Every single created being joins together in the song of praise; this is an image of absolute universalism. In a biblical book that has too often been used to divide people from one another, we are being given an image of complete community.

It may seem obvious that only the one seated on the throne and the Lamb are worthy of blessing and honour and glory. After all, we do not burn incense to emperors or worship other gods. But we are still presented with false objects of worship. We are encouraged to sacrifice our time, attention, and money to attain beauty and retain youth. Anyone who says, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ has turned that country into a god to be worshipped. People can quite happily say that they would do anything for their family, making the family their highest good. Some theologians have described the Free Market as a modern god whose activities can never be questioned or challenged. You can probably think of other examples. We are as surrounded by false godlings as the Christians of the first century were.

Too often, the Book of Revelation is read as a violently vindictive text. Certainly it calls on those who worship false gods to repent. But the core of its message is the worthiness of the Lamb, who conquered through self-sacrifice and rules through nonviolence. Christians who worship the Lamb can never inflict violence on others, and should Christians ever be ourselves the victims of violence, physical, verbal, economic, social, psychological, we are assured by this apokalypsis to John that the day will come when the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be our shepherd, and he will guide us to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. (Revelation 7:17) Amen.