The Great High Priest.

Revelation 1:9-20

January 20, 2019

I.

Either in exile or in hiding on the Aegean island of Patmos, John is meditating on the Lord’s Day, which is to say, Sunday, the day of worship for the followers of Jesus.  And he sees a vision of Jesus Christ that is somewhat different from how we normally see him depicted in the gospels.  In the gospels, we usually see Jesus as a simple, poor, humble preacher, leading and teaching his disciples, healing and liberating people from forces of interior and external bondage, accepting and welcoming all kinds of people, especially sinners, into his gathering.  Jesus in all he does proclaims and enacts the nearness of the Kingdom of God.

Here, it’s almost like John’s altered state of consciousness has given him a special lens, like we sometimes see in science fiction movies, which reveals the true inner nature of someone.  He sees Jesus, the living Voice of God, as the Great High Priest in the heavenly Temple.  The Voice instructs him to write what he sees and send it to seven churches of the Roman province of Asia, which represent the whole church.  In this vision, John peers into and finds himself within the awesome, spectacular, mysterious, dreamlike Kingdom of God itself.

He says he is “in the spirit.”  Lately I have been wondering about the way we talk about the spirit.  The word literally means “breath” or “wind”.  I wonder if there isn’t a component of meditative breathing he isn’t referencing here, as if the Holy Spirit is a practice as well as a personal presence of God.

Whatever he means by the spirit, he starts to see and hear things not normally visible or audible in our normal state of consciousness.

In the vision, he turns around and sees the Voice, speaking from the midst of “seven golden lampstands.”  This is how we know it is a vision of the interior of the  Temple, which features a great menorah, which has seven arms holding seven lamps.  (We generally only know hanukah menorahs these days, which have nine lights; the actual menorah in the Temple has seven.)

One of the things we have to get used to in reading this book is that, like in a dream, there is a certain fluidity.  Things don’t have one single, clear, definite meaning.  There is a lot of imagery which don’t make any sense if taken literally.  And there are multiple, overlapping references to verses from the Old Testament, all over the place.  

John clearly thinks in images and stories from the Bible.  The book of Revelation is utterly incomprehensible without deep knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures.  For instance what he sees here could be a menorah; it could be a disassembled menorah; it could be seven separate lamps; it could be seven menorahs.  But the vision of seven lights places us firmly in the Temple, which is something we wouldn’t know if we didn’t know the descriptions of the Temple in Exodus 25 and Numbers 8.

II.

The Voice speaking to John is actually a figure, whom he describes as a “Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest,” which are what the High Priest wears.  “Son of Man” is a title from the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, perhaps referring to true humanity, or a messianic figure.  It is of course also a title Jesus frequently uses of himself.  

“His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow.”  Jesus is usually depicted with straight hair; the hair on this figure is more wooly like that of an African.  White hair has nothing to do with age, but usually means wisdom; it can also mean purity.

“His eyes were like a flame of fire,” meaning a penetrating, intense gaze.  “His feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace.”  The High Priests work in the Temple barefoot.  Bronze is a shiny alloy of copper and tin, perhaps indicating that this figure has two natures.  “And his voice was like the sound of many waters,” which is to say, a deafening roar.  

“In his right hand he held seven stars,” which we soon learn represent the angels or messengers of the seven churches to whom the Voice is going to speak.  “And from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword,” meaning that his words cut both ways.  “And his face was like the sun shining with full force.”  The figure gives off a blinding, revelatory light.

Through the sort of x-ray-specs of his altered consciousness, John sees Jesus as the Great High Priest.  One of the images of Jesus in the early church says he fulfills in himself the ritual described in Leviticus 16, where High Priest takes the blood of a sacrificed goat dedicated to the Lord, and sprinkles it all around the interior of the Temple, sanctifying it.  Blood in the Hebrew Scriptures is life; the blood of this goat represents God’s life.  

So the early church recognizes how Jesus, after his sacrificial death, takes his own blood into the heavenly Temple, which represents the whole creation, and sanctifies it.  Because this happens in heaven, his body and blood thus now appear on the communion table to feed his people with his life.  The “second coming” of Jesus, then, is when he reemerges from the Holy of Holies into a world made new by the power of his life-blood.  This is what the church is waiting for.  This is what John sees in his vision.

This is who Jesus knows himself to be; this is what he is intending to do when he gets to Jerusalem.  This is why his death is indeed a necessary and essential element in his accomplishing what he is sent into the world to accomplish.  

The early church, from the very beginning, does not view Jesus as just a great moral teacher and prophet, community organizer and religious reformer, who annoys Rome and the establishment, making it inevitable that they would do away with him.  They know that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus constitutes a tectonic shift in the whole cosmos; it reveals the ultimate destiny and truth of everything and everyone; it gives us a foundation on which to build our lives in trust of him.  That’s what they are trying to communicate by using all this imagery, story, symbol, and metaphor.

III.

John’s reaction to this supernatural vision is to collapse in terror on the ground.  The Voice responds by placing his right hand on John, and saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one.  I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.”

This is the One “who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood.”  This is the One who made the church “to be a kingdom, priests serving God.”  This is the One who gives his life — God’s life — for the life of the world.  Through him we share in eternal life and even in the divine nature.  He is the ultimate and complete revelation of God as overflowing love. 

The first thing he says is to banish John’s fear.  Because fear is the toxic knot at the core of our egocentricity.  It is the root of all sin because it is based on the unconscious assumption that the creation is a dangerous place, and therefore the Creator is not good.  There will be a lot of things liable to inspire fear in the coming pages.  The Voice is saying that there is no room for fear in love, and he is the fullest expression and revelation of God’s love.

The force that spawns the most corrosive and destructive forms of fear, of course, is death.  We are afraid that if we’re not vigilant and violent, if we don’t build up strong defenses, and if we don’t develop strategies to get what we need and want, that we will starve, lose, die, and be forgotten. 

But here the Lord indicates that he has conquered that.  Death is not an issue anymore.  “Whoever lives and trusts in me will never die,” he has promised.  Nothing has the power to separate us from God’s love.  We don’t always know or understand what that means or how that works.  But it is the basis of our trust, that God will never forsake us or lose us.  We are always held and cherished, nurtured and saved in God’s life.

For the One who was executed by the Romans is nevertheless now alive forever and ever.  Not even the greatest and most terrible power of the empire can permanently snuff us.  Because Christ lives, we live.  He is the One who carries the keys to death and even to hell… and he is love.  He is forgiveness.  He is acceptance and forbearance.  He is healing and liberation.  He is life.

What we are going to see in graphic detail in this book is what happens when we are not connected to him, when we separate ourselves from God’s love, when we build a world based on our own self-interest, when we choose to exist controlled and conditioned by our fear.  Such a world is built on shifting, unstable sand; it gets washed away when it encounters what is real.  And if we have identified ourselves with that perishing world, its institutions and values, its philosophies and relationships, we perish with it.

IV.

But John is given a glimpse into reality.  He sees the truth behind and beneath what is visible to our limited egocentric vision.  He perceives something solid and real onto which he may hold and on which he may stand.

He sees and hears that the love of God, revealed and given to the world in Jesus, who has offered his own life-blood for the life of the world, thereby instituting forgiveness, justice, and peace, wins.  God triumphs.  God is our future and therefore must become the present for all who want to live.

His sacrifice ends all sacrifices, terminates all inequality and injustice, and neutralizes all violence.  In giving his life for us, he at the same time gives his life to us, in the way we share in his body and blood and so become his Body, his living Presence, in the world, here and now, and forever.

+++++++