Readings: Acts 9:36-43, Revelation
7:9-17
Before the sermon proper, I invite you, for
the span of four hundred words and a few aesthetic observations, to step into
the strange world on the front of your order of service. It’s the most famous panel of a twelve-panel
altarpiece by the Flemish artist van Eyck.
Called “The Adoration of the Lamb”, it’s a fifteenth century take on the
scene from Revelation 7. Centre of the
scene, the focus of every character’s line of sight, is the Lamb – standing proudly
on a platform directly under the sharp shafts of light from above. At ten o’clock and two o’clock respectively you
have batteries of elegantly dressed clerics and colourful posh people arriving. They’re painted with movement in the hems of
their garments – they’re only just arriving on the scene. The established crowd, those who have been
there a while - and who have the best view of the Lamb - are in the
foreground. In the very front row (five
o’clock, separated from the Lamb only by the angels) are a row of people in
white robes. They lack the pomp and
ceremonial colour of the latecomers.
They’re barefoot, quite plain and kneeling – very humble, but really well
positioned.
Who are they?
That’s the big question posed in Revelation
chapter seven: who are they? The
question comes out of the blue to poor old John – who’s suffering this series
of vivid visions. It comes from someone
“in the heavenly know”, and it goes like this: Who are the people in white robes?
In the narrative, John doesn’t even try to answer. He merely says to the questioner “Sir, you
are the one who knows”. Whereupon, as if
eager to share a secret, the elder speaks: “Who are they? These are those who have come out of the
great ordeal.”
For John, and for his audience, the great
ordeal was the persecution of ordinary Christian people by the Roman
Empire. Ordinary men and women – my
aunt, your brother, our parents, the woman at the Post Shop. Barefoot, non-colourful, ordinary people whose
attention had been caught by something in the new and fragile faith – and who
because of it were run over by the great big crushing machine of Empire which
demands exclusive loyalty. These are
people to whom the Empire said “who do you think you are”, before using
execution to tell them that they were nothing.
Losers, victims, the powerless, the dead.
But now, in this scene from Revelation, who
are they? They are those who have come through
the great ordeal. Alive; front row;
beholding the Lamb. That is who they
are.
-ooOoo-
Peter is called to the seaside town of
Joppa to attend to religious duties at the house of someone who has died. Who does he think he is? In Israel, religious functions were the
preserve of qualified people - the rabbis. Rabbis had received training in theology, in community
ritual, in pastoral care. Peter was a
fisherman. Not that there’s anything
wrong with being a fisherman – certainly, if you like eating fish. But it wasn’t his role to be tending to the
dead. Every society, every community,
every family exists within certain settled, fixed arrangements of who’s meant
to do what. Teachers teach, judges
judge, cleaners clean, doctors heal.
Things work because people do what they’re trained for, what the
community trusts them to do. Peter’s
stepping outside his proper role of fisherman and intruding in the work of the
professional religious practitioners.
Who does he think he is?
Here, though, is an even more dramatic transgression. Suddenly Peter has put the people out of the
room with the body in it. Now he’s
talking to the body and telling it to get up. If society has a whole lot of conventions
about proper order, how much more ordered is nature! In the natural order you don’t expect to be
able to walk on water. You don’t expect
small amounts of bread to feed large groups of people. You most certainly don’t order corpses to get
up and walk around. Does Peter think
he’s bigger than the natural order? Who
does he think he is?
(Who were the people in white robes? They were people who overcame the ordeal and
behold the Lamb.) Peter is someone who knows
society, and who knows the natural order, but has seen the Lamb – who three
years before had said to him “come and follow me, I’ll make you fish for
people”. Peter will never again merely
be what the world, what the machine says he has to be. Now he is someone who has been through the
ordeal of being asked “who do you think you are”, but who knows who he is from
the perspective of God’s love. In this
post-Easter dispensation people don’t stay put in the roles that society and
nature require. They become the free
Easter creatures prefigured by the Lamb who died but lives again. Essentially, first and foremost, Peter is
someone who has seen the Lamb.
Tabitha.
Who does she think she is? She’s
introduced in the Book of Acts as a disciple.
It’s the only time in the whole New Testament where the word “disciple”
is used of a woman. In the gospels it’s
always the “disciples and the women”. But here we find Tabitha, a disciple in her
own right, being the central person in what appears to be a lively social
welfare system for widows. This the kind
of role which traditional societies of that time would have restricted to the
men – but here she seems to be in charge of it.
Who does she think she is? I’m
reminded of the young nun, Mary McKillop, arguing with Bishop Lawrence Shiel
and winning the argument until Shiel excommunicated her for
insubordination. (Why won’t you play the
role assigned you? Who do you think you
are?) I’m reminded of fourteen year old
Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai, arguing with the Taliban that girls ought to
be allowed to go to school – and getting shot in the head. (Why don’t you play the role assigned you? Who do you think you are?) Like Paul the fisherman, Tabitha the welfare
officer isn’t staying put where the machine tells her she should. Who does she think she is?
(Who were the people in white robes? They were people who overcame the ordeal and
behold the Lamb.) Tabitha is someone who
has seen the Lamb – the Lamb who has called her by her community to care for
the poor – regardless of what the machine says about her sex. Tabitha will never again merely be what the
world says she has to be. Now she’s
someone who has been through the ordeal of being asked “who do you think you
are”, and who knows anew who she is - from the perspective of God’s life. In this post-Easter dispensation, she’s
become the free Easter creature prefigured by the Lamb who died but lives
again. First and foremost, who is
she? She is someone who has seen the
Lamb.
I guess, in his time too, they said to Jesus
“who do you think you are?” That’s the
question behind Pontius Pilate’s questions during the sham trial: “are you a
king”, “then you are a king”, “who are you?”
When you’re asked these questions in a counterfeit trial, when the
machine is programmed towards your condemnation, it’s the same as saying “who
do you think you are”. And you would
have to confess that this whole business of calling him the “Lamb of
God”, naming him after a sacrificial animal, isn’t helping. Maybe if he had an army or called fire and
brimstone down, then he’d be someone in the eyes of the world. (Please some show of power!!!) What’s he doing, in a world of Kim Jong Un
and Boston bombers, trying to woo the world with parables, with non-violence,
and with letting himself win by losing? The
political laws of power and influence say he should stay in Galilee and be a carpenter. What’s he doing, stepping into the role of
Messiah? Who does he think he is?
(Who were those people in white robes? They were people who overcame the ordeal and
beheld the Lamb.) Jesus has come through
the ordeal of the machine telling him that God is in the sky, and the earth belongs
to unfriendly religious experts and the corrupt. Jesus has come through the accusations that
he is not loved by God, not called to live for others. And having come through the ordeal, he has
prevailed. He is someone who, in
understanding that he is to live for others, that he is not to kill for others,
but to die for others, has seen the vocation of the Lamb – and become it. In the Jesus universe, nobody stays in lifeless
roles – they move away from death and into life. First and foremost, Jesus has become the Lamb
who welcomes those who’ve come through the ordeal.
It’s almost time for this sermon to
end. Just one last question. Who do you think you are? The world might tell you that you are skinny
or fat. It might tell you that you are
ordinary, and won’t be able to do much with your life. The world may tell you that any hope or faith
you feel is silly. (The world might tell
you that you are deviant, strange and unlovable.) Please stay, (it will say) for the sake of
mechanistic order, in the shackled role that the world has assigned.
That’s what it will say. But who are you - really?
You are someone who has seen the Lamb –
seen that God is on the side of faith and life.
So don’t let the world crush you.
Don’t let it force you to be a smaller version of what you are called to
be. In seeing the Lamb, you have seen
what is “small and sacrificed” become the living One to
whom all people look – and receive life.
Who are you? You are alive, in the front row, beholding
the Lamb.
Amen.
Rev Dr Matthew Jack
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