The Apocalypse Lamb

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s no great secret that our Bible ends with perhaps its wildest book. The Revelation, or Apocalypse, of John proved controversial right from the very beginning. It was written to a persecuted Church, likely during the reign of Domitian, that most anti-Christ of Emperors. And it’s trying to come to terms with horrors.

In the wake of Jesus’ Resurrection, things had gone relatively well for just under a generation. Certainly there were hardships, persecutions, even death. But the Gospel went out to the nations; the Church grew in leaps and bounds. James, “the Brother of the Lord,” took over leadership of the mother-church in Jerusalem, while the Apostles spread the Word throughout the Empire and beyond. Peter and Paul especially established the Church at Rome.

But then in the seventh decade of the common era, our leadership got decapitated. We lost James, Peter, and Paul all in rapid succession. The state cracked down on the Church. This is when we committed the Gospels to parchment, to record the eyewitness accounts. At roughly the same time, the First Romano-Jewish War broke out, resulting in the utter destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a single biblical generation after the Crucifixion. For Jews and Jewish Christians alike, it seemed as though the world were ending.

How could one make any sense of this? Where was God in all of the chaos, all of this loss?

Thankfully there is a genre just for such occasions, a genre of literature for the end of the world. And that genre of course is apocalypse. When our world is ending, when chaos seems to reign, when everything looks lost, that’s when people write apocalypses. Daniel did it. Enoch did it. Even Jesus dabbled with it in His teachings. An apocalypse reveals to us where God is in our suffering. It lets us look through Heaven’s eyes. In so doing, it utilizes prophetic symbolism and shocking, jarring imagery.

Just like Jesus’ parables, apocalypses are not literalistic. They must be read with spiritual discernment. Let those who have ears to hear, listen.

John’s Revelation seeks to make sense of the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecution of the Church. We don’t know who John is. Some traditions identify him as St John the Apostle, author of John’s Gospel and the three Epistles of John. Others say no, that this is a different Jewish-Christian visionary. His Apocalypse records a series of visions, written for seven congregations in Asia Minor, to fortify and comfort them.

Such visions are not for the faint of heart, nor for lazy literalists. Because of that, Revelation almost didn’t make it into our Bibles. It was the last and most uncertain of the Christian Scriptures. Some eastern churches still do not include it in their canons. The Great Reformers—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli—by and large avoided it.

When the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, commissioned 50 new Bibles for the 50 new church buildings he would erect in Constantinople, it fell to the historian Eusebius to come up with a definitive list of which books would or would not be included. Four were considered debatable, recognized as Scripture by some congregations but not by others. These were the Epistle of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypses of Peter and of John. Of these four, only John squeaked by, in part because it was considered to be a manual on the liturgy.

That’s right. A dominant interpretation of John’s Revelation was to read it as a worship book. It speaks to the spiritual realities behind everything we do here: Confession, readings, prayers, Holy Communion, the works. Try that sometime. Have your bulletin in one hand and Revelation in the other and see how much they share. All those beasts and angels and floods of blood, that’s our regular Sunday morning. That’s the miracle of God made present here in Jesus Christ.

Central to the message of the Book of Revelation is the Lamb of God. When John sees the heavenly reality behind our earthly worship—how our liturgy here below reflects the eternal truth of God—the Lamb is the key. In Chapter 5, God the Father on His throne in Heaven holds aloft a scroll with seven royal seals. And a mighty angel asks, “Who is worthy to open the scroll, and to break its seals?” Alas, lo and behold, no-one and nothing can. Nothing on Earth, or below it, or above it.

No-one, in other words, can understand the Father. No-one can open His mysteries, breaking the seals upon His Word, upon His self-revelation, not even the highest of angels. And so John weeps. For what chance have finite creatures to know our infinite Creator? But then one of the elders, one of the priests of Heaven, says, “Do not weep. The Lion of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that He may open the scroll.” But then when John looks up, John sees no lion. He sees only a Lamb, who stands as though slain.

This, of course, is Jesus Christ, our Passover Lamb, who takes away the sins of the world. He stands as though slain for He had died and now is risen! The Lamb has seven eyes and seven horns, which represent the fullness of the Holy Spirit, the omniscience and the power of God sent out into our world, sent out into us. Only Christ makes sense of Scripture, only Christ reveals God, for He and the Father are one.

Do you understand? This is what we do here. In the reading of the Scriptures, in the preaching of the Word, in the breaking of the Bread, we know God only in and through and for the Christ. Jesus opens God unto us. Jesus is His Word. The central Christian conviction is that God is made known, God is revealed, in Jesus Christ our Lord. And Christ is made known, Christ is revealed, in His Resurrection. Everything else in our life together derives from and returns to this singular confession: that Jesus Christ is Lord and Jesus Christ is Risen.

There’s your Apocalypse. There’s our Revelation! Where is God when life is hard, when empires fall, when stars topple from the heavens? He’s right here, with us, in us, in Jesus Christ giving us to God and giving God to us. He still has His scars; He stands as though slain; He yet suffers with His people, and He will see us through. Jesus calls us and we hear Him, in Word and in Sacrament, in the sainted sinners who make up His Body, continuing His work in His beloved and broken world.

It’s all Christ. It’s only Christ. It only ever was. He gathers us from every nation, a multitude too great to count. He cleanses us from every sin through His holy Blood; by His wounds we are healed. For the Lamb at the center of the throne is our Shepherd, is our God. And He will guide us to springs of the water of life and wipe every tear from our eyes. John’s Apocalypse ends with the Wedding Feast of Lamb, when Christ shall claim His Bride the Church, when death and Hell shall be no more, that God at the last shall be all in all.

This world of ours is full of sin, and injustice, and suffering. But God has not abandoned us; He has joined us in it, joined us in life and death and resurrection. Our victory is assured; these are but the birth-pangs. From the perspective of eternity, Christ has already won. So now He sends us out, in order to be Him for the world: to share the Good News of Jesus Christ in word and in deed, in liturgy and in life. Jesus becomes salvation for us, that we may become it for others—become Him for others—and for everyone in need.

The Apocalypse of Peter—which almost made it in, mind you, but which we now have only in part—appears to have ended with the martyrs in Heaven, those white-robed saints who have come out of the great ordeal, forgiving and praying for their murderers in Hell. And once the saints forgive them, by the grace of Jesus Christ, then all of the damned are saved. Everyone and everything is reconciled to God, by being reconciled to one another.

Imagine if that had been the last verse of our Bible. What a Revelation that would be.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA

Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987

Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026