4th Sunday of Easter
Rev 7: 9, 14-17
April 21, 2013
Scouts, Putnam Valley,
N.Y.
St. Timothy, Greenwich,
Conn.
“A great multitude … stood before the throne and
before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands”
(Rev 7: 9).
John’s
vision of the heavenly liturgy, partially described from ch. 5 last week,
continues. The angels, the living
creatures, and the elders who were included in the vision last week, as we read
from ch. 5, are joined now (in ch. 7) by “a great multitude which no one could
count” (7:9). and that multitude joins in the everlasting worship of God “day
and nite in his temple” (7:15).
In
the book of Genesis, God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as
numerous as the stars of the sky or the sands of the seashore, and in him all
the nations of the earth would be blessed (22:17). John’s vision shows those promises
fulfilled. Here in God’s heavenly temple
is this countless multitude “from every nation, race, people, and tongue”
(7:9). Every nation receives the
blessing of salvation; all these are God’s people because, like Abraham, they
have been faithful: “these are the ones
who have survived the time of great distress” (7:14).
The
great crowd are all wearing white robes and holding palm branches. The white robes are liturgical garments. Their worship of God and the Lamb is priestly
service. More than that, they symbolize
purity and innocence. Where do the
purity and innocence of these worshipers come from? One of the elders explains: “they have washed their robes and made them
white in the blood of the Lamb”; their robes will reflect the glory of the Lamb
himself—the glory that we note when Jesus was transfigured and “his clothes
became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them” (Mark
9:3). The Lamb’s blood that saves
Christians, as we noted last week, saves us not by marking our doorjambs but by
washing us. When the water of Baptism is
poured over us, when the Lord’s body and blood enter our bodies and our hearts,
we are washed clean, we are transformed, we are made new, we are made holy, we
are made worthy of joining the imperial court of heaven and taking part in the
divine liturgy. All of the baptized do
priestly service in their public worship of God and the Lamb.
The
palm branches have a double significance.
In the 1st place, they remind us of the crowds who hailed Jesus as the
Son of David, the Messiah, when he entered Jerusalem. So the countless multitude salutes Jesus, the
Lamb, in this heavenly liturgy, recognizing him as Messiah. In the 2d place, the palms are a sign of
victory, particularly of the martyrs’ victory over their persecutors. Traditional art of the martyrs often pictures
them holding a palm branch.
The
vast multitude, joyful, purified, and victorious, now enjoys what Ps 23, “The
Lord is my shepherd,” promises: “The one
sits on the throne will shelter them.
They will not hunger or thirst anymore” (7:15-16), and in an ironic
twist, the Lamb becomes a shepherd: “For
the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to
springs of life-giving water” (7:17).
The
victory of eternal life, eternal shelter, eternal salvation, comes at a price—not
the price only of the Lamb’s blood, as precious as that is, but also the price
of Christians’ fidelity, of their “surviving the time of great distress.” As we’ve noted previously, Revelation was
written in a time of terrible persecution.
For
sure there are Christians persecuted still today, made to pay a price in blood,
in terror, in exile, for being faithful to Jesus: Christians in China, in Vietnam, in India, in
Pakistan, in Iraq, in Syria, for instance.
They face death, prison, and harassment, and some flee to avoid such
fates. In this country, too, faithful
Christians are under pressure to keep their religion private—believe whatever
you want and you can worship as you please inside your church building; but
don’t bring your faith out publicly, and don’t object to the secularization of
our culture and our laws, don’t object to what academic elites, the mass media,
and politicians tell you is “correct” behavior and acceptable public policy.
The
new movie 42 about Jackie Robinson
celebrates his great courage and the contribution that he and Branch Rickey
made to American society by integrating the major leagues. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal observed that Robinson’s religious faith is
“often overlooked.” He was a devout
Methodist who prayed daily and who practiced his faith. When he began to play professional baseball
in the Negro Leagues, he “openly scorned his whiskey-drinking and promiscuous
teammates, once tossing a glass of scotch into a lighted fireplace to
demonstrate how lethal liquor is. He
also stunned his teammates by declaring that he was waiting until he was
married to have sex.”[1]
Our
young people—and a lot of older ones—face those same temptations
regularly: the culture of drinking, of
drugs, of self-centered sex; and the temptations to cheat, to lie, to take
advantage of others, to bully others, even to kill when someone gets in our way
(such as an unborn child). It takes the
courage of the martyrs, of truly convinced disciples of the Lord Jesus, to
resist those kinds of temptations so as to “survive the time of great distress”
in which we live—not that our age is any more challenging to Christians than the
1st century or any other age has been. But
this is the time and the distress
that we have to deal with. It takes
courage to practice the virtues that Jesus teaches: fidelity to God above all; obedience; sexual
purity; responsibility to our obligations; saying “yes” when we mean yes and
“no” when we mean no; humility; kindness; generosity; etc.
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