Revelation 6:1-8
April 28, 2019
I.
The Lamb at last begins actually opening the seals on this scroll. First of all, it is important always to remember that the Lamb is the One who is doing this. The Lamb is the embodiment of God’s love who has already given his life for the life of the world. The Lamb, from whose pierced side issues the water and blood representing the two sacraments by which new life is even now infiltrating and percolating through creation, who breathes as well the Holy Spirit upon his gathered community, he is the One who reveals the world’s destiny and the consequences of its wanton injustice.
We may therefore trust the Lamb. In the same way we hope to trust parents and doctors and other professionals when they prescribe and administer difficult and painful medicine, if we are convinced they have our best interests at heart. We trust the Lamb because the Lamb has been there, literally to hell and back. The Lamb has endured and absorbed the absolute worst that human depravity can throw at us: a slow, torturous, humiliating death accompanied by rejection and abandonment of most of his friends.
The Lamb has demonstrated that the Way of redemption is not one of escape or avoidance, it is not a detour around difficulty, and it is certainly not to be magically lifted over and out of it (as some apparently mistakenly believe about a “rapture”). The Way to life is through death. Both of our sacraments witness to this truth because they are means of participating in Jesus’ death and thereby sharing in his life on the other side. Christ defeats and neutralizes death by death, opening the way for us to life.
That’s why we know we can hold his hand and walk with him through the valley of the shadow, through the dark night, through the devastating consequences of our own blindness and violence. He has the power to carry us through.
The second thing we have to hold onto here is that, as each seal is broken, one of the four “living creatures” next to God’s throne calls out, “Come!” Those four creatures represent the strength and fullness of animal life on the earth. They have the faces of a lion and a bull (that is, a wild and a domesticated animal), an eagle, and a human. They stand for the goodness and power of earthly life as created by God. Therefore they also may be trusted to be doing what is best for creation in the coming reckoning.
From all this we have to hold on to our belief that whatever the Lamb and these four living creatures do will be for the best because they are the ones doing it. They are constitutionally incapable of doing evil. Rather they are, like angels, emissaries of God’s will, and God’s will is always, by definition, good. God is always bringing life out of death, light into darkness, and goodness out of evil.
And the collision between life and death, light and darkness, goodness and evil, always leaves death, darkness, and evil destroyed. This is very good news! God always wins in the end.
II.
Another really important thing to remember as we embark upon this part of the book of Revelation is that nowhere is the church or any believer called upon to inflict any violence whatsoever on anyone else. The destruction we will see is solely the prerogative of God and God alone.
Systems that base themselves on nothingness, idolatry, and injustice, have their destruction embedded in their very nature. They cannot withstand any contact with truth and love, so they spectacularly collapse. It is their own violence that attracts violence and their own evil that brings evil down on them.
There are a couple of lines in Psalm 18 that describe this. Addressing God it says: “With the loyal you show yourself loyal; with the blameless you show yourself blameless; with the pure you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you show yourself perverse. For you deliver a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down.”
God appears to us according to the quality of our obedience and our approach to life. If we follow and do God’s love, we will know and experience God’s love. But if we choose to live according to our fear and practice violence and retribution, we will get the same back from God. We get back from God the energy we put into the world.
Every time people have taken it upon themselves to purify the world of evil it has not worked out very well. That was what every empire told itself about itself. And it has always ended badly, in a reign of terror, a holocaust, a Gulag, or a genocide. We have enough to do to let go of our own agendas and let God purify us and to simply love people and creation as disciples of the Lord Jesus in simplicity, humility, and peace.
What we see with the opening of the first four seals is the release of the infamous “four horsemen of the apocalypse.” With each seal opened by the Lamb, one of the living creatures proclaims “Come!” and a horse emerges. Each horse and rider has the task of feeding back to the Roman Empire its own foul medicine. Each horse and rider delivers upon the Empire what the Empire has been so effective and efficient in inflicting upon the world. Each horse and rider makes Rome taste what it is like to experience the business end of Rome’s glorious “civilization.”
The first rider comes on a white horse, wielding a bow, the preferred weapon of Rome’s arch enemy to the east, the Parthians. It means that the conquerors will themselves be conquered. The second horse is red, and its rider brings the devastation of war home to the Roman Empire that brought war to much of the known world. The third horse is black, and its rider brings economic injustice, inflation, inequality, and depression to the Empire which was used to exploiting others and extracting their resources. And finally, plagues of famine, pestilence, more war, and even wild animals come with the last rider, who rides a horse of a sickly, pale green color. If you make yourself the enemy of nature, then nature will bite you back.
III.
What John sees about Rome we may extend to every empire and even to ourselves as individuals. We all choose the consequences of our actions. We eventually get back the quality of energy we projected into the world. We get back what we actually did to others. Jesus says that if we live by the sword we will perish by the sword. We reap what we sow.
Perhaps we imagine we are doing all kinds of good in the world. We tell ourselves we are bringing progress, enlightenment, development, and freedom to people. And perhaps we are. That’s what the people at the privileged top of Roman society also told themselves. They were all doing very nicely and could eloquently philosophize about the importance of enjoying life and being free.
The problem is that it is easy to enjoy life and be free… if you’ve got a whole underclass full of people forced by your world-class army to do the work. That part, the part about who pays for the prosperity of the elite, was generally not part of their refined philosophy. They didn’t even see it. They imagined that their prosperity was purely the result of their personal hard work, ingenuity, sacrifice, gumption, divine blessing, and other splendid virtues. They didn’t realize that their whole culture was basically looted from other nations, and their wealth was produced by many, many wildly under-compensated laborers.
But these are the people who come to resonate so profoundly with the message of Christianity about someone whom the Romans crucified, but who still lives! These are the people who realize that, unlike Greek and Roman literature composed by members or clients of the aristocracy, the Hebrew Bible is written from the perspective of a bunch of slaves liberated from Egypt. These are the people who begin to understand that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that another better world is not only possible, but real and accessible now. It’s called the Kingdom of God, where Jesus is Lord.
And, since they already have little to lose, they are willing to endure the catastrophes John predicts, if it means that in the end the good God really will reign, and the peace, justice, compassion, healing, and forgiveness that they are beginning to know in their church gathering will shine into the whole world.
IV.
Therefore, our job is to stand by each other and witness to the love of God. We do this by living according to values exactly the opposite of what each of those four horses and riders delivers.
We stand with the victims of conquest and colonialism, refusing to take by force or even benefit from what is not ours. We stand with the victims of war and terrorism, choosing non-violence and compassion as our path. We stand with the poor victims of economic predation, and witness to God’s economy of sharing and generosity. And finally we stand with the victims of ecological devastation, seeking only to bring healing and wholeness to the Earth and people.
For the energy we want to send into the world is precisely the energy of the Lamb, Jesus Christ: His simplicity, his humility, his empathy, his welcome, acceptance, inclusion, and embrace of all people, his justice manifested in forgiveness, his healing, feeding, and empowerment, and his unconditional love.
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