"Under the Altar."

Revelation 6:9-17

May 5, 2019

I.

In the cataclysmic collision between Truth and lies, goodness and evil, life and death, and the Kingdom of God and the empires of this world, people die.  It’s a problem because sometimes it looks like God can’t protect the faithful who trust in God.  It looks like their trusting in God was in vain, if they end up dying anyway.  Their faith, we might imagine, didn’t save them at all.

John wants to comfort and encourage a church that is faced with a choice about which way to follow.  It is not always clear to us which is the Way of life, and which is the way of death.  To us, with our minds and hearts clouded and our thinking distorted by egocentric self-interest, the Kingdom of God and the empires of the world can look strangely similar.  

In our self-serving delusion, we often follow the world’s empires and tell ourselves that we are following the Kingdom of God and doing the Lord’s work.  Too often in history we have descended to killing, stealing from, and oppressing others supposedly in Christ’s Name, when in reality it was in the name of our own fearful agenda and we just slapped Christ’s Name onto it.  

We cannot with integrity do in Christ’s Name something that the Jesus we know from the gospels would never do.  If supposedly Christian leaders are suggesting that Jesus approves of bigotry, war, injustice, and environmental degradation, I suspect they may be following someone other than Jesus.  

John says pretty unequivocally that the Way of the slaughtered Lamb is necessarily a Way of suffering and death.  It absolutely never involves killing.  But it is necessarily a Way of loss and, well, pain.  I am frequently reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement that when Jesus calls someone he bids them “come and die.”  It’s not the kind of thing churches are likely to put out on their message boards, but it is absolutely true. 

There is no away around this crucial fact for us.  Spiritual growth has to do with death.  No one gets out of here alive.  Jesus’ Way is through the cross, and that is true for all who follow him.  

One of the mottos of Christian monasticism is, “If you die before you die then you won’t die when you die.”  This means that if we let go of our egocentricity and let our old selves die while we are in this mortal existence — which is what our baptism and participation in the Lord’s Supper are about — then when our physical, mortal existence finally does come to an end, as it must, we who have already in a sense died continue to live.  But if we try to hold on to the people we think we are, we will perish when our biological bodies with which we have identified die.   

Christianity’s approach to death is a matter of letting our false self go, or die, so we may realize our True Self in Jesus Christ in whom we do not and cannot die in the sense of cease to be.

The good news in all this — and the Way of the Lamb is essentially and finally about good news and great joy — is that we emerge on the other side of death in a new and unimaginably good life of resurrection. 

II. 

The difficulty is that in the meantime, in this existence we know, all we see is the cost.  We don’t necessarily see the destination.  That we understand only by faith.  And it is compounded by historical situations of intense and horrific persecution in which following Jesus often means dying, not just figuratively in baptism and spiritual practices, but by having Roman soldiers take, torture, and slaughter your physical body by ruthless violence.

When the Lamb opens the fifth seal of the scroll — and always remember it is the Lamb, whose life is given for the life of the world, who is doing this — what we see are the souls of those who had, like the Lamb himself, been slaughtered because of their faithfulness to God’s Word.  These are the people who paid the full cost of discipleship… with their lives.  

But they are still alive.  They live “under the altar” in John’s vision, and they still ask the question that Christians have always asked, which is, “How much longer is this going to go on?”  How much longer before the promised final victory of truth, love, life, and light?  How much longer before we reach the promised destination?  Or, like children in the car on a family trip, “When are we going to get there?”  They’re not doubting that we’re going to get there; they are just asking about the timing.  

The souls under the altar are not asking for themselves.  They’re already on the other side; they already know that death is not the end.  They ask this question on our behalf.  We’re the ones who remain caught in time and its uncertainties; we’re the ones who need reassurance about how this is all going to end up.  But if we can keep our hope and conviction, we can maintain our patience, endurance, resistance, and faithfulness in the meantime, as long as the meantime seems to drag out.

The souls of the faithful witnesses are given white robes symbolizing purity and light, “and told to rest a little longer,” which is to say that the answer to their question about how long is “Not long!”  For God is giving more people the chance to join their number, safe “under the altar.”  

This altar was a large stone table in front of the Temple on which animals were sacrificed.  The blood of the animals would run down the sides into the ground beneath.  

Wallowing in bloody mud under a pile of rocks doesn’t sound like a very nice place to hang out, when we think of it literally.  But to be “under the altar” means being covered by the saving shield of the blood of the Lamb, which is to say the Lamb’s life.  It is like the Israelites on the first Passover who paint lamb’s blood over their doors to protect them from the angel of death, or the blood of the Lord’s goat which the High Priest sprinkles around the whole interior of the Temple on the Day of Atonement.

Blood is life, and to be covered by God’s blood or life is to enjoy God’s  protection and preservation, and to receive God’s power.  The souls of the witnesses have passed into a safe space of blessing and peace together, in which they relax in a kind of vacation.

III.

What John sees happening when the sixth seal is broken begins with a massive earthquake followed by a bunch of other mainly ecological disasters which he calls “the wrath of the Lamb.”  

For the fact is that if we have invested our time on the earth in violence, selfishness, and injustice; if our existence has been one long reaction in fear and anger to what we perceive as a hostile world; if instead of relying on the protection of God’s life shed over us, we have decided to take whatever steps we deem necessary to protect ourselves… then we will bring down upon ourselves the consequences.  The harm we do by thinking and acting this way will come back on us.  

“The wrath of the Lamb” is a way of talking about the fact that if we are not busy letting go of our own agenda and our old, false self, we are busy doing violence to others of the sort that Jesus himself endures on the cross.  Jesus forgives those who crucify him.  But his offer of forgiveness does not exempt us from the consequences of our own actions.  That’s why he weeps over Jerusalem; he realizes that they will not not accept his offer and live lives of forgiveness and peace.    

We cannot avoid the consequences. But if we change our ways of thinking and acting we can bear those consequences and emerge intact on the other side.  We can graduate to a secure place “under the altar” with others who make a good and faithful testimony to the Word of God by following Jesus in lives of compassion, service, humility, and non-violence.  We can emerge through this into a better place.    

The main recipients of those consequences are those who perpetrated and benefitted from the from the violence and injustice that brought them on. John sees first of all “the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful.”  These are the ones who have obviously done the evil that attracts the disasters.  These are the leaders who set the agenda and organized the violence, who made both money and war, who wielded the power.  So we definitely don’t want to be them or be associated with them.      

But then he goes on also to include “everyone, slave and free” as suffering under these catastrophes.  Unfortunately, in a fallen world everyone suffers, even those the system relegates to the bottom, like slaves, even those who bore no personal responsibility for the situation, even those who witnessed to the redeeming love of God revealed in Jesus.

The only question is whether we let our challenges consume and defeat us, or whether we stay faithful to the Lamb, protected by his life, and let him carry us through.  Sometimes people say that God never gives us anything we can’t handle.  I suggest that God never gives us anything that God cannot handle.  The answer is not relying on ourselves but on God’s power, revealed in the Lamb.

IV.

The point is how we witness, empowered by God’s Spirit, by our words and actions, in the midst of a world falling apart, to God’s new world of peace, justice, and love.  We are called to live together in the power of God’s Truth, even while falsehood and lies blare and echo around us.  We are called to live in the power of God’s inclusive love and forgiveness, even when fear, hatred, and bigotry still rage.  We are called to live as witnesses to God’s triumphant life, cherishing everything that has the breath of life, and everything that God breathed into being, even when people have sown the sour seeds of extinction across God’s blessed creation.  

And we are called to proclaim and inhabit God’s Kingdom, where Jesus alone, the Lamb of God, is Lord.  

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