Chris Blumhofer—Year C Easter 4

Anthony: Alright, let’s transition to our next text. It is Revelation 7:9–17. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for the fourth Sunday in Easter, which is May 11. Chris, would you read it for us please?

Chris: Yes. Happy to do it.

After this, I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb.” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from? I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason, they are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more. The sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat, for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. And he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Anthony: There’s a lot going on in this text, and so we would really appreciate your exegetical overview of what you’re seeing in this text.

Chris: Sure. Whenever a passage starts with the words after this, my reflex is to scroll up the page a little bit.

Anthony: Sure.

Chris: So, we have to see its context as always. And again, this can be intimidating in Revelation because you get this kind of nice, clear, encouraging scenes, and you get worried that if you go one paragraph up or down, you’re just going to be in the deep end all of a sudden. But it is worth it.

So, where we are is in chapter 7. We’re in this interlude. We’re still in the opening of the seals, but we’re in this interlude with the seals. And history is unfolding as the seals are broken, and as each seal is broken, the suffering on the earth has increased across chapter 6. And here at chapter 7, we are on the cusp of the seventh seal being opened now.

In fact, chapter 6 ends with the most powerful people on earth crying out to the rocks and saying, “Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the One seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?” So, this is the expectation coming into chapter 7, and we might justly expect that we’re about to hear about the worst suffering of all.

But what we get at the beginning of chapter 7 is this pause in the action while the angel puts a seal on the forehead of the servants of God, and in the paragraph right before this, 144,000 people are sealed from Israel. That’s symbolic of the fullness of the people of God. And then our vision begins.

And the question, who can stand in the face of God’s judgment, is answered here. That was a question at the end of chapter 6. Who can stand? There’s a great multitude that no one could count, from all these tribes, peoples, languages, and nations standing before the throne. That’s the answer to the question.

Who can stand? This multitude is able to stand before the throne in worship. The God who judges is also the God who heals. And in this scene, we’re seeing that the nations are indeed coming to him and can stand in his presence. It’s interesting that this is something that the most powerful people on earth — it’s unintelligible to them. They’re unaware of it. But John can see it because he can recognize something else with those glasses on. They cry out with this verse that has become a great praise song, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and unto the Lamb.” And everyone sings back in response to them.

And then John asks about the identity of these people. So, I want to ask a couple of questions about the details here. I always think that texts get more interesting when we ask about their details, so they’ve all come out of this great ordeal. That’s an interesting phrase. We actually hear about the great ordeal or a great tribulation in the book of Daniel.

We hear about it also at the little apocalypse in the Gospel of Matthew 24. And the idea is that there will be a period of great upheaval, of war, of scarcity, a great increase in immorality and injustice right at the time where the age is about to be redeemed by God. That’s what John hears, that the people who stand before him are those who have come through the great tribulation.

Actually, that’s a very similar phrase to how Jesus speaks about it in Matthew 24. You’re looking at the people who have come through this tribulation and they’ve come through the ordeal by washing their clothes white in the blood of the Lamb. There’s so much here.

First, this is an image of faithful witness and identification with Jesus. These are the ones who have washed their life in the blood of Jesus. And that could mean that they’re the ones who have come through the tribulation, because they’ve been killed for their faithful witness — kind of dying in faithfulness and in continuity with Jesus’ own faithful life. Or that they have identified with him, not necessarily dying, but they have managed to persevere because of their faith and the example of Jesus.

Either way, these are Jesus’ people. They belong to him completely. In Genesis 49, we get this great picture of the lion of the tribe of Judah, or Judah as a lion, and it says that he will wash his robe in the blood of grapes. And John takes that image from Genesis here. He twists it a little bit, and here the people of the Lamb wash in his blood, but instead of being stained, they’re purified by that blood.

Blood is a purifying agent in the book of Revelation here, which is really a fascinating rethinking of that imagery here. And as John continues to tell us about these people, we see, he sums up for us their life before God. Because they’ve identified themselves with Jesus, they live fearlessly in the presence of God and before the throne of God.

It’s not a throne of judgment for them. It’s a comforting place. They have that seal on their forehead. Now, later in Revelation, the beast will put a seal on the foreheads of the people who serve him. It’ll be a kind of condition for membership to have the seal of the beast. But here God gives his own seal, and it is not one that is exclusive or punishing but is one that is protective.

They live in this existence defined by God’s mercy — endless light, no hunger or thirst, no deprivation here. And where God is wiping away the tears from their eyes. Beautifully, strangely, the Lamb is their shepherd here. John is pulling on all these images to renew our imaginations about the fullness and the peacefulness of their life before him.

So, I’d want to open up a lot of these things. Maybe I’d also add the whole thing is suffused with a sense of victory. It’s celebration.

Anthony: Yes.

Chris: They’re dressed in white. They’re holding palm branches, which were pretty common symbol of victory in the ancient world, in both in Judaism and also in the broader Greco-Roman world. And they’re not hailing Caesar as their victor here. They’re hailing the Lamb, but there’s this sense of celebration. It’s like Palm Sunday, part two, where everyone has gone through the tribulation and has been brought to this celebration.

Anthony: You mentioned it earlier that John brings us to a few twists in Revelation. He helps us to reimagine what is. And I find verse 17 interesting because of the inversion that we see that the Lamb is actually the shepherd, and it’s usually the other way around. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

Chris: It’s an amazing picture, that the One who has gone before us and come out the other side, the One who has conquered death and overcome judgment, he’s now our leader. And it’s so fitting. It actually fits with a great deal of New Testament imagery for Jesus as the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. He’s the leader of this new family. He’s the Son of God, but we are brothers and sisters of him. Our elder brother goes before us.

John takes that and in a way that highlights the martyrdom of Jesus and the martyrdom of his people in this book. The Lamb, the slain Lamb, shepherds the people of God, the people of God who are under duress, who are persecuted. And know that, firsthand, these people whose lives are so awful right now, John sees them in peace, having come through the tribulation with the One who has gone through it before them on their behalf.

Anthony: As I’m thinking about Jesus and the inauguration of eschatology, the end, we need to know that there is something to look forward to in the midst of suffering. And I think John has given us such a vivid picture of what will be the eschaton that God is caring well for his people.

Chris: Yeah.

Anthony: Hallelujah. Praise him that we have this vision of what will be as we try to live into that in the here and now, right? So, thank you for that.