Bowls of Wrath.

Revelation 15

September 15, 2019

I.

The primal, seminal, source event of the Scriptures and of the whole Hebrew and Christian tradition is the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt.  That experience echoes through and in everything else.  It is encoded and embedded deeply within our faith.  Jesus himself fulfills and universalizes that fundamental act and revelation of God, which is why he chose to die and be raised at Passover.  So we would not miss this essential connection. 

It is therefore not an accident that John’s visions repeatedly recall the Exodus story.  So when we hear of “those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands” we specifically remember the Israelites standing on the east bank of the Red Sea as the waters return and destroy the Egyptian army.  John even sees them singing “the song of Moses,” a reference to the song that Miriam led the people in singing at that time.

This is the moment of triumph and salvation, of redemption, liberation, and release, that epitomizes the living present, the eternal now, of God.  In seminary we learned that this hymn, Exodus 15:21, is the first verse, the seed, out of which the whole rest of the Bible grows.

And here John gives us a reimagined version of it which he calls “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.”  It is the victory song of the people of God.  It is the end of the story that keeps getting proclaimed, even though at the same time there is a lot more to come.  We are able to stand firm throughout what is going to happen even as we understand what is necessary for us to go through in order to arrive at this place of miracle, triumph, joy, thanksgiving, and promise.  

John repeatedly reminds us of the Lamb’s ultimate victory, and of how everything else that happens needs to be framed and interpreted in terms of this deliverance.  And he continues to describe the violent and horrible implosion and collapse of a world dominated by the Pharaohs and Romes, the Beasts of human Empire, subservient to the Dragon who is Satan, the Adversary, the Accuser, the Evil One who intends and works for the annihilation of God’s good creation.

For immediately after this beautiful song, John sees seven angels emerging from the “temple of the tent of witness in heaven.”  And each one is carrying a golden bowl.  And each bowl contains plagues representing the implementation of God’s wrath.  And the temple is filled with so much smoke that people can’t even enter it.

The last time we see these bowls is back in chapter 5 when they are filled with incense representing the prayers of the saints.  No doubt the smoke is from that incense, and the bowls now contain God’s answer to those prayers, to be distributed on the earth.  The people, suffering under persecution, pray for liberation and deliverance.  God, here as in Exodus, responds with destructive contagions and disasters designed to break the Empire, so that it relents in its systematic oppression, bondage, exploitation, and murder.

II.

Talking about God’s “wrath” is a problem for many of us these days.  It can feed into the nasty image that some have of God as an oppressive despot with an anger-management problem.  Or some treat God like their own pet monster that they can sic on people they don’t like.  Or still others think that attention to God’s wrath seems so far from what we see in Jesus that they just dismiss it.  God is love; how can God be vindictive and wrathful?  But the New Testament does talk about God’s wrath and we need to understand what that means.  

In Psalm 18 we read that to the loyal God appears loyal; to the blameless God appears blameless; to the pure God appears pure; and to the crooked God appears perverse.  In other words, how we see God depends on our own attitude and actions.  Violent, hateful, vindictive, nasty people perceive a violent, hateful, vindictive, nasty God.  The apostle Paul writes much the same thing when he says that God appears differently according to the direction in which we are headed.

These and other passages indicate that life, the world, and reality look different to us depending on who we are and what we are doing with our lives.  It’s like how we only experience forgiveness to the degree that we are ourselves forgiving of others.  

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who suggests that heaven and hell are the same place, experienced radically differently by people according to the way they lived.  Those who were in tune with God’s love, know a heaven of joy and peace.  But some people are so distorted and twisted, that God’s love feels to them like a hell of fire, wrath, and punishment.  If that’s what they have put into the world; that’s what they will get out of it.  If you did judgment, exclusion, condemnation, retribution, bigotry, resentment, fear, and hatred in your mortal existence, that’s what eternity is going to feel like to you.  That is what you have trained and equipped and shaped yourself to know and experience, forever. 

The point of the Christian life is to get ourselves in tune with God’s Kingdom now, in our thinking and behavior as followers of Jesus in this life, so that in the end, when the Truth is made apparent to us, it feels like a joyful homecoming, a merging into the infinite, a glorious reunion.  If we live in love now according to Jesus’ example of humility, compassion, gentleness, and generosity, we will know God’s Presence now as endless love and delight.    

But if we have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of self-interest and personal gain, doing violence to others in the process, if we have been about theft, greed, taking, and punishing, then when we encounter the Truth, it will reflect those destructive qualities back on us.  If we tether ourselves to the Beast and the Dragon, that is, if we give ourselves over to the paranoid narcissistic nihilism that lays waste to the world in the name of private profit, we will know God’s love as consuming, destroying, annihilating, burning wrath.

III.

John sees these angels emerge from the heavenly temple in his vision. The 4 guardians of life around the throne have given them golden bowls brimming with the smoking wrath of God.  These constitute the answers to the prayers of those who had "conquered the Beast and its image and the number of its name” by standing fast and giving their lives.  For God hears such prayers.  

God hears the prayers of the enslaved Israelites, and calls Moses to lead them through the sea to liberation.  And so God hears in every age the prayers, the cries, the lamentations, of the weak and the poor, the broken and the outcast, the displaced and persecuted, the tortured and the murdered with whom the Lamb identifies in sharing their death on a Roman cross, whose faithfulness and hope are expressed in times of extremity by steadfast prayer to the God of life.

And those golden bowls of wrath that the angels bear are a way of assuring the faithful that the Beast/Empire’s reign of terror is exhausting itself.  It is attracting its own destruction.  It is imploding.  Its days are numbered.  Those who seem to be winning, who perpetrated and prosecuted and gained from the suffering of others, are doomed.  They have, knowingly or not, ordered these bowls of wrath for themselves by their own complacency, ignorance, vindictiveness, injustice, and self-righteous rage. 

God’s triumph is certain.  Life and love always win in the end.  Truth and goodness prevail.  The Lamb rules.

In order to avoid the wrath of God in our existence and destiny, it has to start within us.  We have to get the fear, anger, lies, and hatred out of our souls.  We have to lose our addiction to resentment, and get over our allergy to forgiveness.  We have to identify with the losers and the victims, as God does in Jesus.  We have to acquire the mind of Christ, the Lamb who was slaughtered but who now lives.  Having his mind means seeing from a higher  perspective, perceiving that not only are we all one and dependent on each other, but not even the death of our mortal bodies can separate us from God’s life.  We have to trust in the Lamb, Jesus, and give our lives over to him in humility and compassion, gentleness and generosity, non-violence and joy.  

And this transformation within us, away from the pull of our ego and towards the Light of Christ our essence, also only happens among us.  It is something we do together, with each other, as the beloved community, gathered around the Word, hand in hand.  Here we pray for and with each other.  Here we share our stories.  Here we find acceptance and forgiveness.  Here we come to dwell in God’s Presence as God’s people, fed by God’s Body and Blood, witnesses to God’s love.

IV.

For we have passed through the waters.  And we have seen the armies of evil washed away.  We follow the Lamb who has neutralized and absorbed and negated the power of hatred and fear.  And we have turned to the rising sun and begun our walk together to the Land of God’s Promise, singing the song of triumph to the One whose judgments have been revealed: life for ever! 

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