Revelation 14.14-20
September 8, 2019
I.
The two scenes in this part of John’s vision are united by the figure of a sickle. A sickle, of course, is a sharp, curved, metal knife used in harvesting. A farm worker would use a sickle to cut the stalks of grain in the field. The same tool may be used to cut bunches of mature grapes from vines. A sickle symbolizes the need to cut our ties to our old existence in order to come to new life.
Both kinds of produce are also subjected to a further degree of violence in processing. Harvested grain would be threshed to separate the good grain from the useless chaff. The grain was gathered and ground into flour to make bread; the chaff burned. People would literally stomp on the collected grapes. The resulting juice would then be allowed to ferment into wine.
People understood these processes as analogous to God’s transforming, redeeming activity. The grain harvest was seen as a metaphor for the way God saves people and brings them home into the heavenly barn, while sending the chaff, which is to say the unsaved, bad people, to the fires of perdition. Jesus talks about this, and we still sing hymns with this kind of imagery.
Grape juice looks like blood, so grape harvesting and processing sometimes gets related to sacrifice and violence. Wine, of course, can also cause inebriation and addiction.
But wine is also a good thing. Jesus begins his career by making a large quantity of wine out of water prepared for a Jewish wedding ceremony. He refers to his gospel as potent “new wine” that would explode the “old wineskins” of traditional religion. And finally he lifts up a cup of wine at his last supper and declares it to represent — to be — his blood, and that his disciples should all drink it to receive his life.
These two harvests — of grain and of grapes — also remind me of the two elements of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper: bread and wine. In the holy meal we are put in touch with both the death of Jesus, who gives his life for the life of the world, and his giving his life to us as we are fed by his Body and Blood.
The sacrament is the sign of God’s abundance, generosity, liberation, forgiveness, healing, and deliverance. The apostle Paul says that this sacrament’s efficacy for us depends on our attitude and expectations. He says that we have to be “discerning the Body.”
I wonder if we don’t need to listen to passages like this from Revelation sacramentally. For the Word of God is indeed a two-edged sword depending on how we hear it. It works on the one hand for redemption, and salvation. But it also exposes the pervasive influence of judgment, condemnation, separation, violence, and destruction among us. How we experience it is going to depend on whether and how we “discern the body.”
II.
Discerning the body means asking how we see ourselves in relation to Jesus Christ. Is he just an ancient historical figure? Or are we somehow individually members of him? Are we related to each other in and through him as members of his Body, the church? Do we see ourselves as having been clothed with him, and that therefore now all divisions between people have been dissolved? Do we see ourselves in him united to everyone and all creation, and that his Body extends to include all that God breathed into being at the beginning through him, the Word? Do we see all people as neighbors? Do we treat all of life as a divine gift to be cherished? To “discern the body” really means realizing in Jesus Christ our connection and integration into all things. That is what we discern when we take the bread and wine of the sacrament.
When hearing this passage, we have first of all to recognize that the One who is assigned to do the grain harvesting in verse 14 is the “Son of Man,” Jesus Christ, the Lamb. If he is the reaper, then the harvest is about his setting us free from the bondage of the world, liberating us to rise into God’s heavenly household where we see everything from the highest, broadest, widest, and most inclusive perspective. This reaping then is our healing, forgiveness, and release from whatever stems from our mortal, egocentric condition. We are being called home, not to some other world, but to the true world as God created it which is always here.
His reaping symbolizes our emergence from an existence limited in time and space, to a new eternal, timeless, inclusive life of sharing, generosity, delight, and love. Jesus is not a dark, hooded “grim reaper,” cutting us off from life and sending us to the grave of decay and dissolution. Rather he is a joyful liberator who releases our tether to our invented, egocentric, imaginary world of pain and fear, anger, shame, and failure, releasing us to “fly away” to our true home in God. This home is not another world so much as it is the hidden essence and real nature of this one.
He is the bread of life, and in reaping us he gathers us as well for the same purpose. By eating the sacramental bread we become him, the true bread, ourselves, and we are now to feed all people with the knowledge of the truth of God’s love for the world. As the gathered disciples of Jesus we are his Body, and the world will know we are Christians by the way we share his love with each other and with all.
All creation bears the imprint of the One who speaks it into being at the beginning. This Word of God by which the universe is created also becomes flesh to dwell among us in Jesus Christ, whose blood is poured out for us on the cross.
III.
Which brings us to the second reaping in the vision, that of grapes. This harvest is done not by Christ, but by two angels from the heavenly Temple. One has authority over fire, who orders the other to gather the grapes. The collected grapes are then thrown “into the great winepress of the wrath of God,” from which flows a huge river of blood.
If we are still perceiving things through the distorted lens of our own egocentricity, our own selfishness, aided and encouraged by the forces of evil who show up in the story as the Red Dragon, the Empire/Beast, and the False Prophet, then all this talk of reaping and harvesting and blood sounds truly frightening and nasty. It usually inspires in people only more fear, more anger, and more doubling down on the need to control and dominate others.
But the key thing to note about this winepress is that it is located “outside the city.” John’s hearers may have understood this as code, pointing to the cross of Jesus, who was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem. There, Jesus, the Lamb, was slaughtered by those principalities and powers, agents of the Red Dragon and the Beast — Rome — people who only knew God’s love as wrath, retribution, and punishment, which they administered with heartless brutality.
That is what the Bible really means when it talks about the wrath of God. For we know that God is love. But when we place ourselves outside of that love by our self-centered, self-righteous, ignorant violence, we experience God’s love as something that it is not, which is wrath. In other words, to the wrathful — the pathologically fearful, angry, hateful, resentful, lying, and deluded — God’s love is known and felt as what they themselves project by their actions: wrath, judgment, and condemnation.
The reason that the Son is not the reaper of the grapes like he is of the grain is that he is himself the One cut down and trodden upon like grapes by the rampant forces of evil. He is the One whose blood is poured out for the life of the world. He is the One who identifies with all those whose blood has been spilled by the Red Dragon and the Beast and their agents. He is the One who lifts up the cup of salvation, the wine of Passover, and says, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for all people for the forgiveness of sins.”
He is the One who, after dying on the cross, has his side pierced by the thrusted spear of a Roman soldier, and out of whose body blood and water flow out onto the earth. Here in John’s vision that blood becomes an overwhelming river, sweeping away all demonic forces. Thus his blood, which is his life, restores, renews, infuses, and permeates the whole creation, redeeming and restoring it.
The winepress of God’s wrath, the meat-grinder, the roller-coaster, the rat-race of human culture and economy, any place where anger, resentment, bitterness, fear, and violence reign, that is all washed away. The blood of the sacrificed which was shed with the intention of terrorizing people and forcing compliance, is transformed into the vast deluge of God’s own life, given for all.
IV.
Remember that in Scripture blood usually represents life. If the blood of a sacrificed goat could sanctify the Temple, how much more, then, is the blood of the sacrificed Creator sufficient to sanctify the entire creation?
God saves by taking on the wrath of the wrathful in Jesus, absorbing its violence and hatred, and then offering his own blood which is his life, to all. It’s like he transforms and redeems all the blood of all the innocent victims of Empire’s terror throughout history. And he turns it into an ocean of blessing and peace.
This is the blood we drink in the sacrament. This is the life we ingest and the love we receive. In this sacrament we participate in, we in a sense become, this flood as it washes over the whole world. God’s life is spread by us when we proceed to share that life with others in terms of healing, forgiveness, compassion, generosity, and love.
As the grains of wheat are harvested and gathered into the one loaf of bread we share together, and as the juice of many grapes is collected into the one cup, so we who are God’s people also witness to how we are gathered, collected, harvested out of our separate, individual existence into one Body of Christ the Lord. Out of many we realize oneness: in the elements, in the church, in the world, and in the entire creation. We are one.
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