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seaster404
The Comfort of Heaven
Text:
Revelation 7:9-17
Date: The Fourth Sunday of Easter
5/2/04 anemia cell essay sickle
We
are celebrating the resurrection of our Lord, the great fifty days
of Easter, by listening to the series of Epistles this year from
the Book of Revelation. As the last Word of the holy scriptures,
Revelation is meant by God for the comfort of Christians as they
live out the life of faith on earth in the time between our Lord's
ascension and his final return on the Last Day as victorious Lord
of all. This book conveys that comfort in a series of visions given
the Apostle John. In the few Sundays we have during Easter we, of
course, cannot get the whole picture of this Book but we do have
certain sections for our consideration.
This,
the Fourth Sunday of Easter, is Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year
we hear from a section of the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John
where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” In this third year of
the three-year lectionary, however, we do not hear him say those
words, but, rather, the comforting promise, “My sheep hear my voice…I
give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will
snatch them out of my hand” [John 10:27-28 (ESV)]. I think it is
instructive to notice how differently these words sound from various
points of view. If we put ourselves into the story as it unfolded
we would be fearfully aware of the threat that surrounded our Lord.
When John tells us “the Jews gathered around [Jesus] and said to
him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ,
tell us plainly,'” they weren't just innocently looking for religious
information or instruction. They literally surrounded Jesus so that
he could not pass and they wanted him to say that he was the Christ
so that they could stone him for blasphemy or have him arrested.
But
we are hearing these words, now, on this side of Easter, from a
different point of view, the point of view of the whole story as
St. Paul told it in the synagogue that day of our first reading:
that, though they found in Jesus “no guilt worthy of death, they
asked Pilate to have him executed. And when they had carried out
all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and
laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead, and for many
days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee
to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people” [Acts 13:28-31
(ESV)]. From the point of view of the resurrection we can now take
even greater comfort in his words because we know them to be the
words of him whom not even death can silence or undo. “My sheep
hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them
eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch
them out of my hand.”
Now,
where the Gospels take us to view the earthly ministry of our Lord
from the perspective of the eye witnesses that were there, and as
Easter invites us to review everything in the Bible from the perspective
of the victory of the resurrection, so now the Book of Revelation
lifts us to view the entire history of the Church on earth—from
Jesus' ascension to his return on the Last Day—not from our day-to-day,
fearful point of view, but from God's heavenly point of view. And
if the Easter, resurrection point of view is comforting and encouraging,
this heavenly point of view is even so.
Revelation
chapter 7, verses 9-17, is actually a break in the action, a sort
of intermission, a moment of relief from the otherwise troubling
things John was seeing concerning the suffering and struggle and
persecution of the Church. For here he sees heaven as “a great multitude
that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and
peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the
Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands”
[Rev. 7:9]. The Church will be, as God said to Abraham, a multitude
as countless as the sand which is on the sea shore or as the stars
in the heavens. The Church will consist of those blessed from all
nations of the earth. Their robes are the white of purity because
their sin if forgiven, taken away, gone as they have been washed
in the blood of the Lamb. They are standing before the throne of
God and of the Lamb because they now add a stanza to the great Te
Deum, crying out in a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God
who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” The true praise of God
always has been, is, and always will be proclaiming the mighty deeds
he has done in saving his creation and restoring it to its original
righteousness.
“These
are the ones coming out of the great tribulation,” says the elder
standing next to John. This is the great comfort and hope we have:
that no matter how intense our suffering for the name of Christ,
no matter how close we come to completely losing faith and losing
it all, no matter how impossible it may seem to us that God could
ever love, much less continue to love such sinners as ourselves,
“these are they coming out of the great tribulation who have washed
their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” We have
been washed in the waters of Holy Baptism where, St. Paul said,
we were buried with Christ by baptism into death in order that,
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