Sermon — May 8, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and
honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”
Once upon a time, a group of friends were trapped in an escape room together. It was one of those birthday parties, where you’re given a set of clues and try to figure out how to escape the room. But this room came with a twist: there were no windows, and no lights, and they were plunged into a darkness so absolute that they could not see anything.
Each one felt around for clues. Soon, one felt his hand press up against a solid, rough expanse. “It’s a rock-climbing wall!” he said. “We have to climb our way out!” His friends were unconvinced. “I’ve got a spear,” one said, “or a sword. Something sharp! Maybe we need to drill a hole.” “I’ve got some rope,” said the third. “It’s kind of swinging back and forth.” Another felt something like the solid trunk of a tree. Maybe a battering ram to smash their way out?
Each friend was clear about exactly what they needed to do, but none of them agreed. They knew, in theory, that there must be some way out. But as their bickering continued, one of them panicked, thinking they would never escape, and cried out, “Help! Help! We give up!”
And when the escape-room lights turned on, their fears dissipated… only to be replaced, very quickly, by a deeper and more reasonable fear. For the things they were still holding onto and had been brandishing throughout their argument were not the tools intended for their escape. When the lights came on, it became clear that these disparate tools of escape were in fact a full-grown Asian elephant, and it was not altogether pleased.
You may have heard this story in another form, but the point is the same. One patted the vast flank of the elephant and mistook it for a rock-climbing wall. One grabbed hold of a sharp tusk and imagined it to be a spear. One felt the sinuous rope of the elephant’s trunk, one the thick legs that supported its weight. And while each one was partially correct, none of them had the whole picture.
I sometimes think the Bible is like this. Take, for example, Jesus. Mark’s Jesus is a wandering holy man, a healer and demon fighter. Matthew’s is a well-read sage, expounding on God’s holy law in well-structured speeches, with ample citations from the Bible. Luke’s Jesus is a prophet of social justice, driven by the Holy Spirit to proclaim good news to the poor and create a multicultural movement from all the nations of the world. John’s is a man of mystery, performing signs and giving circuitous discourses that bear witness to the glory of God. And like the parts of the elephant, each one of these versions is true, but incomplete, so we layer them on top of each other, and each one enriches the others, like a really good sandwich; bacon, lettuce, tomato, and bread: meet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And then along comes the Book of Revelation, which is not so much a carefully layered sandwich as it is the bowl full of leftovers you throw into the microwave the day after Thanksgiving, so many different things thrown together that it’s almost overwhelming. Revelation operates on the great principle of literary prose that “more is more.” Why say in one word what you could say in four? So there’s a great and uncountable multitude from every nation and tribe and people and language, (7:9) and the angels and the elders and the four living creatures fall on their faces and worship God, and say, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.” (7:12) (And it’s like the flavor of that leftover meal: Turkey and stuffing and gravy and cranberry and potatoes and yams…Amen!)
And it works. It creates a kind of hyper-saturated atmosphere You literally could not pump any more incense or chanting or prostration or prayer into John’s vision of this celestial worship. It can’t absorb any more. It’s full of symbolism. The Book of Revelation gets a bad rap, and part of that comes from the strange way in which fundamentalist interpretations try to flatten this overladen symbolism down, to squeeze it out into a straightforward prediction of future events. But the Book of Revelation is actually doing exactly what the gospels do: not predicting the future, primarily, but telling us about Jesus: who he was, and who he is, and who he will be on Judgment Day.
This scene, with the waving of palm branches and the blood of the Lamb, is a Holy Week scene. It may be strange. It may be different from the passion and resurrection stories of the gospels. But it tells the same story. Every Sunday, we say, “Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us!” And these early Christian authors agreed. Jesus is like the Passover lamb, sacrificed for us to drive away the angel of death. When the gospels want to make this point, they make it part of the plot of the story. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story of the Last Supper as a Passover meal. John creates endless chronological problems by telling it a slightly different way: he puts the crucifixion at the very moment that the Passover lambs are being sacrificed, which unfortunately makes it a different day and, as a result, a different year. Which is awkward, if you’re really invested in the inerrant truth of every single detail and word of the Bible. The Book of Revelation, though, is an apocalyptic vision; it doesn’t have to make sense in the same way, so Jesus just appears as a Lamb, and the Passover image is understood. And as surreal as the Book of Revelation may seem, this surreal symbolism allows it to show the cosmic truths that are sometimes hidden behind the earthly need for consistency and plot.
Imagine this scene as the whole “Paschal mystery,” the whole reality of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, happening in one particular place and time but transforming all of space and time. Revelation is weird, so it doesn’t need to tell a story over three days and leave us to understand what it means for us: it can symbolically drag us into the story, and who cares about consistency? So the crowd standing “with palm branches in their hands,” (7:9) are not just a small procession of Jesus’ followers on their way into Jerusalem. They’re “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (7:9) a congregation spanning the breadth of space and time. And here’s Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb, not abandoned by the disciples, even by Peter, but surrounded by worshipers earthly and heavenly; enthroned in the center of the throne of God, even on the Cross.
Revelation’s verbosity drives home the point: Jesus is never just one thing. Yes, Jesus is a teacher, and Jesus is a healer, and Jesus is a social prophet and a learned sage and the incarnate Word of God. Jesus is the Lamb who was slain, and Jesus is the Good Shepherd, “for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,” and he will guide us to “springs of living water,” and God “will wipe away every tear from our eyes.” (7:17)
I love that: only the Book of Revelation could tell us that the shepherd is a sheep, and then move on as if that made any sense at all. And yet it does! In fact, it’s probably the best summary of the Church’s understanding of who Jesus is: Jesus is both sheep and Shepherd, both human and God. Jesus is King and friend, teacher and healer and demon-fighter. Jesus is all these things and more, and it’s part of his appeal: we trust his ethical teachings more because we know the depth of his compassion. He is a truly Good Shepherd because he truly knows what it is to be a sheep.
It’s a wonderful thing to be many things at once. It’s often true of the Episcopal Church. In fact, there’s a line in one of our prayers that perfectly encapsulates the diversity of thought in our Episcopal or Anglican tradition, which we sometimes call a “middle way” between other Christian traditions: “Grant,” it prays, “that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth.”
That’s what an elephant is. Not a compromise between its parts, but a comprehension of its parts. And that’s who Jesus is. The Bible gives us so many different pictures of Jesus. We could choose our favorite. We could try to create a least-common-denominator compromise Jesus. Or we could embrace the comprehensive richness of Christ: a trunk from Matthew, a tusk from Mark, a flank from Luke, and from Revelation: a couple of legs and a whole bunch of other weird stuff, and together, they begin to introduce us to the fullness of Christ.
We are elephants too. We are also many things at the same time. We’re among the disciples denying Jesus in the courtyard and abandoning him on the Cross, and we’re among the great multitude praising him on the throne. We are here living through “the great ordeal” of life, our faces sometimes drenched in tears, (Rev. 7:14) and we’re already in heaven, worshiping the God who wipes away every tear from our eyes. We are imperfect, fragile sheep, who sometimes go astray; we are God’s sheep who hear our Shepherd’s voice and follow. (John 10:27) And to recognize that we are both good and imperfect, that we are loved and yet flawed, is not a “compromise for the sake of peace,” but a “comprehension for the sake of truth.”
Revelation can be a scary or offensive book. Jesus stands in judgment over the world, holding court from the very center of the throne of God, and yes, several people are thrown into a lake of fire. We fear judgment, whether God’s or one another’s, and in fact we tend to reject the idea that anyone has a right to judge us, whether God or one another. But what a gift that Jesus stands in judgment over the world, and no one else, that only he can condemn us, and no one else, because Jesus is not just the sharp tusk of Divine Judgment. He’s the whole elephant. The Shepherd who leads and guides the sheep is himself a Lamb. The one who judges our eternal worth is the one who wipes away every tear from our eyes. (Rev. 7:17) The one who has the power of creation and destruction chooses to gather a great multitude of sheep, from every tribe and people and language and nation, (7:9) and give them the gift of eternal life, and no one will snatch them from his hand. (John 10:28) And there is absolutely no one on this earth who can tell you what you’re worth except the God who loves you so deeply that he would sacrifice himself to save you from the power of evil and death in this world.
So “blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!… for the Lamb at the center of the throne [is our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” Amen.