Revelation 7:9-17 Commentary

I will always remember the first time I preached on Revelation 9:9-17 in Washington DC’s King Emmanuel Baptist Church. Most of the members of that church were Christians who are African American. My dear friend Pastor Harold Hunter invited me to preach the word to a group of Jesus’ followers comprised of, on that Sunday, members of both the King Emmanuel Church that he pastored and the Silver Spring Christian Reformed Church that I pastored.

Since I grew up in, attended and pastored churches that were largely composed of Christians who were white, I wasn’t accustomed to the call-and-response pattern of many African American churches. So I remember how as King Emmanuel’s elders said, “Preach,” I preached – faster and faster. I’m grateful that I never heard the “Help him, Lord” that would have signaled a need for me to stick more closely to the Scriptures.

But more than anything, I’ll never forget looking out from the pulpit and glimpsing a glorious mosaic of God’s adopted sons and daughters. People who were elderly and black sat next to children who were young and white. Christians who’d been Baptists all their lives stood to sing with Christians who’d been lifelong members of the Christian Reformed Church. My six-foot tall self towered over my barely five-and-a-half-feet tall friend, brother in Christ and colleague.

When the inspired John looks out in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, he glimpses something even more glorious. So I sometimes envision him perhaps writing about what he witnesses faster and faster, so caught up by the Spirit that he can scarcely record the utter glory of what he’s seeing and hearing.

Verse 9’s “After this [Meta tauta*] …” links this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson to what immediately precedes it. In Revelation 7:1-6 the Spirit shows John 144,000 followers of Jesus. The number symbolizes some of kind of completeness, perhaps of the number of Jesus’ friends when the Spirit revealed God’s plans and purposes to John,

As John looks at God’s dearly beloved people arrayed before him, he describes “a great multitude [ochlos polys] that no one could count [arithemesai]” (9). The apostle’s hearers and readers are accustomed to enormous numbers. Last Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson described a choir whose members included every last creature in heaven and on earth. But Revelation 7’s choir has so many members that John actually insists no one can count them. It’s a reminder that whether God’s dearly beloved people worship the Lord with three or 33,000 fellow believers, we’re always joined by a heavenly crowd of worshipers that’s too huge to even count.

However, that crowd isn’t just enormous. According to verse 9b, it’s also composed of Jesus’ friends “from every nation [ethnous], tribe [phylon], people [laon] and language [glosson].” John employs superlatives again, emphasizing how the choir members come from pantos (“every”) imaginable background. They come from all the nations to which the risen and ascending Lord sends his disciples (cf. Matthew 28:19).

Members of this choir are, what’s more, “wearing [peribeblemenous] white [leukas] robes [stolas] and “holding palm branches [phoinikes] in their hands [chersin]” (9c). Christians can hardly read this without recalling scenes of Jesus’ welcome into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. John 12:13 reports that the “crowd took palm branches and went out …” However, while that crowd seemed to misunderstand what Jesus entered Jerusalem to do, the Spirit has convinced Revelation 7’s crowd of the nature of Jesus’ work.

After all, in verse 10 John goes on to report, “They cried out [krazousin] in a loud voice [phone megale], ‘Salvation [soteria] belongs to our God, who sits [kathemeno] on the throne [throno], and to the Lamb [Arnio].” Much like Jesus’ welcoming crowds shouted their welcome, this Sunday’s Lectionary Lesson’s heavenly chorus shouts its praise. But the Spirit has convinced members of Revelation 7’s chorus that the enthroned One they praise is not some political or military hero who saved them from some human oppressor. He is, instead, the Lamb who gave his life in order to rescue his adopted siblings from captivity to sin, Satan and death.

On top of all that, members of this heavenly chorus wear “special” robes. They have, reports John in verse 14, “come out of [erchomenoi ek] the great tribulation [megales thlipseos]; they have washed [eplynan] their robes white [eleukanan] in the blood [haimati] of the Lamb [Arniou].” Few biblical images are more striking than the idea of robes somehow scrubbed clean by blood. Generally, after all, blood is a stain that’s very difficult to remove from clothing. The blood of the Lamb, however, is the cleansing agent that whitens the saints’ “clothing” that they’ve soiled with their sins. Jesus’ saving death, in other words, renders his friends acceptable to God and righteous in God’s sight.

As a result, these white-robed refugees from intense persecution now stand praising God “before [enopion] the throne [thronou] of God and serve [latreuousin] him day and night [hemeras kai nyktos] in his temple [skenosei]” (15a). It is one of the images of the current heavenly realm and coming new creation that has, candidly, daunted some of Jesus’ friends. We find it hard to imagine taking any joy in spending all of eternity standing in front of Jesus’ throne praising and serving him.

Preachers can admit that the imagery may not seem especially inviting. Yet we can also remind hearers it is poetic and a reflection of that for which God created us in the first place. So we can invite God’s dearly beloved people to imagine that life in the new earth and heaven will be far more meaningful and joyful that what may seem to us like an eternal hymn sing and service project.

John goes on to celebrate how while the members of the heavenly chorus may bear the scars of their intense persecution for their faith, they’ll never again have to endure such suffering. “He who sits on the throne,” promises the apostle in verses 15b and following, “will shelter them with his presence [skenosei]. Never again will they hunger [peinasousin]; never again shall they thirst [dispsesousin]. The sun [helios] will not beat down [pese] on them, nor any scorching heat [kauma].” The Lamb that was slain, promises John, will literally “tabernacle” his friends from all that has threatened, hounded and even harmed them. He who suffered such deprivation at people’s hands will be his followers’ eternal protection from threats and dangers.

That Lamb will be, what’s more, “their shepherd [poimanei]; he will lead [hodegesei] them to springs [pegas] of living water [hydaton]. And God will wipe away [exaleipsei] every tear [dakyron] from their eyes [ophthalmon]” (17). It’s hard to ignore the echoes of Psalm 23’s imagery of shepherding care for God’s rescued people. The great shepherd turns out to be the slain, but risen and ascended Lamb. He is the “good” (cf. John 10:14), “great” (cf. Hebrews 13:20) and “chief” (cf. 1 Peter 5:4) Shepherd of the sheep that are God’s deeply and dearly beloved people.

Here is a hopeful word for God’s adopted but beleaguered children. While so much now so deeply divides us from our adopted siblings in Christ, some day God will fully unite us in worship around God’s heavenly throne in the new earth and heaven.  While so much besieges Jesus’ followers, one day God will completely redeem us from all those threats.

However, this prospect already shapes the post-Easter lives of people of the resurrection. We humbly and persistently work to display more and more of the unity among Christians for which Jesus prayed and toward which we are journeying. God’s dearly beloved people also work to relieve some of the suffering God’s image-bearers now experience, but God will someday fully eliminate.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

Flannery O’Connor tells the story of Mrs. Turpin in her short story, Revelation. Mrs. Turpin likes to compare herself to everyone around her. In fact, she nearly always falls asleep categorizing people. To her, people who are white and own land, like her husband Claude and her, are on top of society’s heap. Though she can’t figure out how to classify those who have just money or class, Mrs. Turpin can’t think of anyone who’s superior to her.  She agrees with one of her employees who tells others, “Jesus [is] satisfied with her.”

However, at the end of Revelation Mrs. Turpin catches a gracious glimpse of who she really is. While looking out over her husband’s hogs, she sees what she calls “a visionary light” in the middle of the grunting and rutting of those hogs. She glimpses a huge bridge swing from earth up to heaven.

On that bridge, writes O’Connor, “a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven [along with] battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” On that bridge Mrs. Turpin also sees what she calls “white trash” who are clean for the first time in their lives. There she even sees groups of black people dressed in white robes.

And at the end of the long procession Mrs. Turpin sees people much like her husband and herself. They’re the folks who’d always had “a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. Yet they’re also people, whose virtues are being burned away, leaving them with little but shocked and altered faces.”

However, as my colleague Will Willimon has written about that scene, even those people at the end of the line toward heaven have nothing but the love of God who has freed them from Satan’s dominion for service to God. They have nothing more than all those in that line whom Mrs. Turpin spent her life disparaging. And, yes, even self-righteous Ruby Turpin and her husband are in that line. They too, however, are stripped of their virtues. They dance toward heaven, at the end of the long procession, with figuratively nothing in their hands.