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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running to obtain thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 21)
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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Revelation 5:1-14
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Revelation 5:1-14
✛
Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain
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In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Today at Saint Thomas we are celebrating St. Michael and All Angels, in anticipation of its feast day on Tuesday, the appointed date in the Church calendar. Saint Michael himself has pride of place on this day, as the leader of God’s angels, but this is also the feast of all the angels, the heavenly host who are messengers for God and singers of God’s praise in heaven, as we sing God’s praise on earth. These are the “ten thousand thousand” angels that we sang of in our hymn; the ten thousand thousand that “bless the sacred name” of Jesus.
The sacred name of Jesus. While we give due honor to Saint Michael and his angels today, as with everything the Church does this praise of angels has as its real subject Jesus Christ and his saving power. The grace of God in Christ is what we are really celebrating today.
To discuss angels is difficult, pressing against the capacities of our possibilities for knowledge. Scripture and tradition have given us some clues to guide us, however, and this can be seen in our reading from Revelation today, even while its fantastical imagery and disorienting language illustrate these very difficulties. Nonetheless, it is the book of Revelation that contains the majority of the mentions of angels in the New Testament, so it is appropriate that we read it this evening.
The “revelation” to which its name refers is the revelation given to Saint John the Divine; it is the vision he was given when he was brought up into the heavenly realm. In our reading tonight, from the fifth chapter, we hear that one of the things that he sees there is someone sitting on a throne, holding a book. The book is tightly shut, with sevens seals keeping it from being opened. It has been suggested that this book symbolizes all of history, every action, every person, every anything—all of it is written in the book. To be able to read this sealed book, then, and to be able to interpret the book, is to be able to identify the meaning in everything that has happened in the history of the world: the significant things and the insignificant, those obviously meaningful and even what seemed meaningless at the time. But who can read this book? Who can find meaning in the world, which seems to be just one darn thing after another? In his vision, John looks everywhere, but finds no one. The answer is that nobody can do it: no person on earth, or under the earth, no person in heaven, no person anywhere. And if nobody can read the book of history, then no one is able to say what it all means. These millennia of human history are left without some proper end.
But then John sees him: the Lamb of God. Not just any kind of lamb, but a lamb “as it had been slain.” A lamb that had been killed, but was nonetheless up and about.
This odd-looking lamb goes to the figure on the throne and takes the book out of his hand. The Lamb is worthy. When he takes the book, the four creatures and twenty-four elders fall down and worship, singing a song of praise: “Thou art worthy to take the book,” they sing, because “thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.”
That is when the angels chime in. Once the Lamb has the book, the angels join the citizens of heaven in singing praises to God. “Many angels,” John says, very many: “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.” Michael was there, we can assume, along with Gabriel who had visited Mary, and Raphael, as well as all of the unnamed angels in Scripture, and “thousands of thousands” more. They may be messengers of God on earth, but in heaven this seems to be their function: to sing praises of God.
One of the reasons they sing praises of God is because of his loving-kindness towards his creatures, and the greatest concrete expression of that loving-kindness in human history is this Lamb of God in front of them: the Lamb who had been slain by human hands, but was raised on the third day. He now approaches his Father’s throne to read and interpret the book of history. The song is for him: he who intercedes with the Father for the sake of his children.
And this, this is where we part ways with the angels. With humility and without malice, I should say, but we part ways nonetheless. That’s because Scripture suggests that it is human beings, and not angels, whom God looks upon with special favor. This is not only because humans, and not angels, were created in God’s image, but because human beings, and not angels, can be saved through Jesus Christ. Ironically, because the heavenly angels don’t need to be saved, then they don’t have the great benefits that come from being saved. And those benefits are the greatest benefits there are, greater even than being created as an angel.
The grace of God in Christ – which is, as I said before, what we are really celebrating today – means that our worthiness to be with God the Father is judged by Christ’s worthiness to be with the God the Father. We can speak of such heavenly things only imperfectly, but we might take as our guide here this passage from Revelation, when it is the Lamb, and no one else – no one in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth – who approaches directly the throne of the Father. If we become one with Christ, then we are also brought to that throne, sharing the Sonship that Jesus himself has. If we are washed in the blood of the Lamb, then we come right up to the throne of God – a throne that the angels look upon from a distance. Because of the intercession of Christ, the redeemed share a kind of relationship with God that the angels cannot. It is a redeemed relationship that the angels may praise in song, but do not share in fact.
Again, to speak of angels at all is to press hard against any of our presumptions of religious knowledge; it is to realize that what we don’t know about God and his creation amounts to far more than what we do know. But in thinking through angels and their relationship to God in this particular way, we are brought again face to face with the all-importance of Christ’s sacrifice, because the salvation that comes through him means that the redeemed are higher even than the angels, even if today that is not the case. Saint Paul says as much in his first epistle to the Corinthians (6:3), when he writes that in the fullness of time it will be human beings who will judge the angels, presumably after they themselves have been judged on the merits of Christ.
The divine revelation of John gives us a glimpse into the heavenly reality, where everything created sings hymns of praise to God. At the center of that heaven is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Lamb who was slain. Angels are there, too. But pride of place goes to Jesus, who bears the divine Name and shares in the divine being, bringing his chosen people into an eternal life of love with the Triune God.
In the Name of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
