Hearing a familiar voice
Commentary
Object:
One of the greatest marketing trademarks of all time was built on Francis Barraud's 1899 painting of his brother's fox terrier Nipper listening intently to the sounds emerging from the bell of a gramophone. After Mark Barraud died that year, Francis often played cylindrical recordings of Mark's voice, trying to keep memories of his brother alive. What surprised him was the intensity with which Nipper sat in front of the gramophone trumpet, whimpering and whining for his master. Barraud called his touching portrait His Master's Voice.
The newly formed Gramophone Company quickly bought the rights to Barraud's work and transformed it into their advertising symbol for the United Kingdom and Europe. But it was the Victor Talking Machine Company of the United States that turned the picture into mass marketing. Securing the branding monopoly in 1902, Victor simplified Barraud's painting until only the dog and the gramophone were left. Then, blitzing the magazines of the day, readers were urged to "look for the dog."
A syndicate of record shops around the world took the name HMV for "his master's voice," and in the U.S. "Victor" transitioned into "RCA" and eventually "EMI." Through all of these permutations, Nipper kept whining for his master's voice from the bell of the gramophone, becoming one of the most widely recognized symbols of music and nostalgia and hopeful winsomeness ever created.
Today we feel kinship with Nipper. We long for those of our families and friends who have died, wishing to hear their voices again, and aching for a touch or a hug or a night of conversation and more. And the desires of our hearts blossom religiously as we seek company with the saints who have gone before. We read their solemn words. We recall their heroic deeds. We raise our own lives to new standards of moral behavior based upon their examples.
So we read words of scripture today. The Wisdom of Solomon testifies to God's good care for we humans who are loved in both time and eternity. The final scenes of Revelation welcome us into the new heaven and new earth where our wretched existence is transformed into grace and glory. And John recalls for us the great anticipations of these things on that scandalous occasion when Jesus snatched triumph out of tragedy for his dear friends in Bethany.
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
"A grave is a sobering object," said Wordsworth. We try to mark each with snippets of meaning that will defuse the scandalous superficiality of life that Emily bemoaned in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. "If I was so quickly done for," asks the wee voice etched on a child's grave memorial, "what on earth was I begun for?"
Ancient Romans tossed away the scandal of our brief and meaningless lives. When archaeologists first sifted through graveyards of the early centuries of the great empire, they were caught up short by a plethora of burial plot stones inscribed with the same seven letters: N F F N S N C. These certainly spelled no known Latin word, and other connections escaped would-be interpreters. Until, that is, they uncovered older quadrants of cemeteries where many grave markers carried seven-word inscriptions beginning with these otherwise meaningless letters: Non Fui. Fui. Non Sum. Non Curo. Suddenly the intent was clear. So many Romans had found this phrase as the best representation of life and death that even poor people with small stones could abbreviate it down to just seven letters and all would understand: "I was not. I was. I am not. I don't care."
Tragic. Cynical. Hopeless.
I have officiated at hundreds of funerals over the past 35 years and never met a family who would have dared place that testimony over the grave of a loved one. We cry. We weep. We wail. One young man even jumped on top of the casket as it was being lowered into the cold earth, pounding in horrible grief on the unforgiving final home of his brother's body.
Even when death is "good," and an elderly grandmother slips willingly from time into eternity, tears of loss trace our cheeks. We were born to live, not to die.
So we cling to the hopes of faith expressed so well in this Wisdom reading. While the details of that "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns," as Shakespeare put it, are hidden from us, we trust the God of goodness and creation to finish what was begun and care for our departed loved ones with honor and dignity and hope. We believe that those who have left us did so because they "heard their Master's voice" and are journeying well with him in the heightened awareness of eternity.
Revelation 21:1-6a
The book of Revelation is non-historical in that it does not, for the most part, try to identify specific, recordable experiences of persons or cultures either past, present, or future. Instead, it is a type of allegory that powerfully pictures the perennial and ongoing combat between God and the Devil, between the church and the world, and between good and evil in general. Instead of trying to find contemporary or past events linked to certain scenes in the book, we should interpret every situation of human history in light of the overarching themes of the book:
* Jesus is the powerful, resurrected, and ascended Savior.
* Evil is constantly trying to usurp God's authority and destroy God's creation and God's people.
* We are living on a battlefield in which all people are affected by the scars and wounds of war and few signs of victory are ever seen.
* All human beings must choose to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior and stand firm to that testimony no matter what the cost, or they will slip into an alliance with evil that will eventually destroy them.
* Jesus is returning to make all things new, but before that happens, this world will undergo even more powerful and threatening advances of evil.
* One day the faith of the faithful will be rewarded, and the dead and living together will enjoy the perfections of the new creation in which all evidence of parasitic evil will have been removed.
One theme that continually emerges is that God calls his own to him, and they hear his voice. Moreover, when we call to God, God hears our voices and is moved to bring eternity into time, and hope into helplessness, and triumph out of tragedy. We need to listen for our Master's voice, because our Master still listens to us.
John 11:32-44
Our Easter Sunrise worship services in Southern Alberta were held in a cemetery. It was difficult to gather in the dark, since neither mountains nor forests hid the spring-time sun, and the high desert plains lay open to almost ceaselessly unclouded skies. Still, we mumbled in hushed whispers as we acknowledged one another and saved our booming tones for the final rousing chorus of "Up from the grave he arose!"
Archaeologists of ancient Roman artifacts were surprised by some of the memorials found next to the burial niches in the catacombs where Christians laid their dead. There were inscribed verses of scripture, to be sure, but also symbols and pictures. The one, however, that most mystified showed the upper body of a man holding a harp. It seemed to represent Jesus but standard mythological representations usually tied this one to Orpheus.
Orpheus was the darling of Greek love, music, and tragedy. Orpheus was the master musician of his time, and well could have had 39 out of the top 40 tunes on the charts at once. When Orpheus sang, the birds swooped in just to flit on his lilting melodies. When Orpheus sang, the clouds rolled back from the skies and the sun shone more brightly and the beasts crept out of the shadows to dance their fancy footwork. When Orpheus came to town, people floated out of homes and shops to jig in the streets and fall in love.
Of course, when Orpheus himself fell in love, passion intensified. It was Eurydice who caught his eye and heart and before long they were fawning and fainting after one another. When Orpheus and Eurydice wed, the world shimmered with significance, and couples everywhere twitterpated.
But a week later all meaning was lost. While Eurydice romped with her friends through a field, a snake slithered through the grass and struck her heel. Almost instantly Eurydice was gone, robbed of her nascent marriage and life itself.
Deep in grief, the song died in Orpheus' heart. Now he only moaned and groaned, and the world hung heavy with pain. Willows drooped their branches in empathy, and the wild beasts slunk back into the shadows. Dark clouds covered the sun's smile, and birds roosted, unable to take flight in the oppressive air.
Orpheus moped and wallowed. Consolation fled. Lament took the orchestra's podium. Reaching for nerves that rejected grief's cancerous alloy, Orpheus set out on a mission to the undiscovered country. He found the door to the underworld and slid down, down, down, down, down, down into the kingdom of death. Confronting elusive Hades, Orpheus demanded back the woman he had loved too shortly. Hades, of course, would have none of it. His contracts were lethally binding.
So Orpheus did what only he could do. He sang a love song. Strumming his harp, Orpheus put his heart to music in a way that sent shivers through the shifting shades and shadows. As his voice reverberated against the wailing walls, one ghost began to thicken and color. A few more stanzas of amour and Eurydice stood solid before him once again. They kissed and hugged and held hands all the way to earth's surface, gripped by smiles of incredulous ardor.
The legend of Orpheus grew over time, so that even the most skeptical linked his name to true love. But why would early Christians reconfigure Jesus in the guise of Orpheus? How could they profane the sacred so scandalously?
Obviously they did not believe in Orpheus. They were martyrs of Christ and traded all trite tales of the marketplace to buy the pearl of great price. But some metaphors command instant understanding, and when these groaning souls recalled the words and deeds of Jesus, it was precisely in the cemetery that conflating Orpheus and Christ made perfect sense.
Christians remembered the day when Jesus traveled to Bethany to mourn his friend Lazarus' death. Jesus should have been there earlier to heal Lazarus of his illness and stay death's untimely call, and everybody knew it. Lazarus' sister Martha came blazing out of the town when she heard that Jesus was approaching. She had sent word of Lazarus' illness to Jesus while there was still time for the great one to make a difference like he did with so many others throughout Palestine. But Jesus had dithered and dallied, and now Martha was angry.
"If you had been here my brother wouldn't have had to die!" she shouted at Jesus. He knew she was right and did not try to defend himself. In great grief they lumbered slowly to the family home. Professional wailers at the door assaulted their ears, accusing Jesus with fiery eyes. Stooping to enter, Jesus found the other sibling, Mary, covered with torn rags and ashes. "If you had been here my brother wouldn't have had to die!" she simpered, cutting Jesus deeper than her sister's diatribe.
Jesus cared without self-defense and brought his entourage out to the cemetery. Only a week before he had inspired the Galilee crowds with his delightful homily about shepherds, getting knowing nods about the nasty hirelings who lead sheep astray and bring them into the fold of death, the baddest shepherd of all. Leaning on the best of Israelite heritage, Jesus mounted the shoulders of shepherd boy/king David and reclaimed the dignity of the office Ezekiel celebrated in chapter 34 of his prophecy. Jesus said his sheep knew his voice and would follow him anywhere. He also mentioned, cryptically, that he had other sheep, not of the flock in front of him, and that he had to go and call them.
The disciples must have thought about these things as they now stood with Jesus in the local cemetery. He challenged the keepers of the place, demanding that they roll back the stone covering the carved cavern where Lazarus' body had been laid, allowing the maggots to do their work. The cemetery tenders shook their heads. "You don't want to do that," they replied. "He stinks!"
Jesus repeated his request with demanding authority and the workers shrugged. When the grave yawned, it burped death's stench. Only Jesus did not cringe and retreat. Standing resolutely in the land of the living, he cried out with the voice of the Good Shepherd to his friend now taken captive in death's dark fold: "Lazarus!" And down, down, down, down, down, down, down in the depths of the netherworld, owned by that baddest of the bad shepherds, death itself, Lazarus heard his master's voice, and came through the dark window of the grave to stand once again in the sun next to his shepherd.
This is why the Christians in Rome conflated the myth of Orpheus with the reality of Jesus. They did not trust in human legends. But they did hang their hopes on the one who said to Martha and Mary, "I am the resurrection and the life!" and then proved it that day in Bethany. In fact, the Roman Christians knew that Jesus had confirmed all of this a short while after the incidents of John 10-11 when he himself went down, down, down, down, down, down, down into the depth of death and came up again on Easter morning as the Lord of life.
And now, as wives bade farewell to husbands who had been torn apart by the beasts in the Colosseum, as children wrapped the bodies of parents in burial clothes, as friends mourned the deaths of their kindred spirits, the great metaphor of Jesus as the true Orpheus told the most magnificent promise of all. For even in these dark days of deathly haunts, followers of Jesus knew that one time soon the good and great shepherd would shout the names of their loved ones down to Hades itself, and even though captured in shepherd Death's lockdown fold, their family and friends would hear their master's voice, and they would rise to life and follow him into the eternal kingdom.
Application
We all try to evade and fool death, stymieing him with tummy tucks and fleeing him through our exercise routines and vitamins. But come death shall, with fateful inclusiveness, whispering our names at night or noon, and, against our wheedling and pleading, will march us into his awful gloom. Then the hope of our faith will endure its final test. For if the gospel is true, our good and great and chief shepherd will not forget us but will march down, down, down, down, down, down, down to Sheol and sing us his song of love. And we, who know the voice of our master, will rise into the dawn of eternity and follow the one who calls us by name.
An Alternative Application
Revelation 21:1-6a. John has three visions of Jesus in the book of Revelation. In chapter 1 he sees his resurrected Lord as overseer of the church. In chapter 5 he marvels at the lion/lamb who redeems humanity and takes hold of its destiny. Finally comes this third vision of Jesus, who now appears both as conquering king and ravishing bridegroom (Revelation 19:1-10). Before the celebration can begin, a mopping-up operation takes place in which seven aspects of judgment and restoration are sorted out (mostly introduced by "then I saw"):
* The king appears to fulfill his destiny (Revelation 19:11-16).
* The last battle is fought in which all the evil in the human arena is focused and repelled (Revelation 19:17-21).
* Satan is bound for a certain period of time (Revelation 20:1-3).
* The dead are raised to life for good or for ill (Revelation 20:4-6).
* Evil is destroyed (Revelation 20:7-10).
* The final judgment, determining the eternal destiny of all humankind (Revelation 10:11-15).
* Earth is recreated and restored in its relationship with the Creator (Revelation 21:1--22:5).
Revelation ends where it began, with a call to faithfulness in the face of mounting opposition. While its details provide endless fodder for teachers, preachers, and theological speculators, a core and consistent message emerges: during times of crisis, when evil seems to dominate the human scene, don't lose heart, because God is still in control of all things and Jesus is returning soon to annihilate evil and transform creation into all that God intended it to be.
Obviously this was a necessary message late in the first century, when first Nero's and then Domitian's persecutions of the church killed many and caused thousands of others to huddle in fear. Since the language and cosmological perspectives in the book are very similar to those in the gospel of John and the letters of John, there is every reason to suppose that they, along with this book, were written by the disciple of Jesus who pastored the congregation in Ephesus late in the first century and was exiled to Patmos by Domitian as a way of undermining the courage of the Christian church, which he despised. Since Domitian ruled from September of 81 through September of 96 AD, the revelation of Jesus to John was probably penned and sent sometime in the mid to late 80s.
Its message is timeless:
* To be a Christian is to be in conflict in this world.
* If one tries to opt out of this conflict, one automatically joins the other side and has been trapped by the powers of evil.
* Faithfulness to Jesus almost invariably leads to martyrdom, because this conflict is all or nothing.
* But those who trust in God will find the strength to remain faithful through suffering, die in hope, and have their confidence rewarded by Jesus' ultimate victory and the renewal of creation, which includes the resurrection and glorification of all God's people.
The newly formed Gramophone Company quickly bought the rights to Barraud's work and transformed it into their advertising symbol for the United Kingdom and Europe. But it was the Victor Talking Machine Company of the United States that turned the picture into mass marketing. Securing the branding monopoly in 1902, Victor simplified Barraud's painting until only the dog and the gramophone were left. Then, blitzing the magazines of the day, readers were urged to "look for the dog."
A syndicate of record shops around the world took the name HMV for "his master's voice," and in the U.S. "Victor" transitioned into "RCA" and eventually "EMI." Through all of these permutations, Nipper kept whining for his master's voice from the bell of the gramophone, becoming one of the most widely recognized symbols of music and nostalgia and hopeful winsomeness ever created.
Today we feel kinship with Nipper. We long for those of our families and friends who have died, wishing to hear their voices again, and aching for a touch or a hug or a night of conversation and more. And the desires of our hearts blossom religiously as we seek company with the saints who have gone before. We read their solemn words. We recall their heroic deeds. We raise our own lives to new standards of moral behavior based upon their examples.
So we read words of scripture today. The Wisdom of Solomon testifies to God's good care for we humans who are loved in both time and eternity. The final scenes of Revelation welcome us into the new heaven and new earth where our wretched existence is transformed into grace and glory. And John recalls for us the great anticipations of these things on that scandalous occasion when Jesus snatched triumph out of tragedy for his dear friends in Bethany.
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
"A grave is a sobering object," said Wordsworth. We try to mark each with snippets of meaning that will defuse the scandalous superficiality of life that Emily bemoaned in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. "If I was so quickly done for," asks the wee voice etched on a child's grave memorial, "what on earth was I begun for?"
Ancient Romans tossed away the scandal of our brief and meaningless lives. When archaeologists first sifted through graveyards of the early centuries of the great empire, they were caught up short by a plethora of burial plot stones inscribed with the same seven letters: N F F N S N C. These certainly spelled no known Latin word, and other connections escaped would-be interpreters. Until, that is, they uncovered older quadrants of cemeteries where many grave markers carried seven-word inscriptions beginning with these otherwise meaningless letters: Non Fui. Fui. Non Sum. Non Curo. Suddenly the intent was clear. So many Romans had found this phrase as the best representation of life and death that even poor people with small stones could abbreviate it down to just seven letters and all would understand: "I was not. I was. I am not. I don't care."
Tragic. Cynical. Hopeless.
I have officiated at hundreds of funerals over the past 35 years and never met a family who would have dared place that testimony over the grave of a loved one. We cry. We weep. We wail. One young man even jumped on top of the casket as it was being lowered into the cold earth, pounding in horrible grief on the unforgiving final home of his brother's body.
Even when death is "good," and an elderly grandmother slips willingly from time into eternity, tears of loss trace our cheeks. We were born to live, not to die.
So we cling to the hopes of faith expressed so well in this Wisdom reading. While the details of that "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns," as Shakespeare put it, are hidden from us, we trust the God of goodness and creation to finish what was begun and care for our departed loved ones with honor and dignity and hope. We believe that those who have left us did so because they "heard their Master's voice" and are journeying well with him in the heightened awareness of eternity.
Revelation 21:1-6a
The book of Revelation is non-historical in that it does not, for the most part, try to identify specific, recordable experiences of persons or cultures either past, present, or future. Instead, it is a type of allegory that powerfully pictures the perennial and ongoing combat between God and the Devil, between the church and the world, and between good and evil in general. Instead of trying to find contemporary or past events linked to certain scenes in the book, we should interpret every situation of human history in light of the overarching themes of the book:
* Jesus is the powerful, resurrected, and ascended Savior.
* Evil is constantly trying to usurp God's authority and destroy God's creation and God's people.
* We are living on a battlefield in which all people are affected by the scars and wounds of war and few signs of victory are ever seen.
* All human beings must choose to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior and stand firm to that testimony no matter what the cost, or they will slip into an alliance with evil that will eventually destroy them.
* Jesus is returning to make all things new, but before that happens, this world will undergo even more powerful and threatening advances of evil.
* One day the faith of the faithful will be rewarded, and the dead and living together will enjoy the perfections of the new creation in which all evidence of parasitic evil will have been removed.
One theme that continually emerges is that God calls his own to him, and they hear his voice. Moreover, when we call to God, God hears our voices and is moved to bring eternity into time, and hope into helplessness, and triumph out of tragedy. We need to listen for our Master's voice, because our Master still listens to us.
John 11:32-44
Our Easter Sunrise worship services in Southern Alberta were held in a cemetery. It was difficult to gather in the dark, since neither mountains nor forests hid the spring-time sun, and the high desert plains lay open to almost ceaselessly unclouded skies. Still, we mumbled in hushed whispers as we acknowledged one another and saved our booming tones for the final rousing chorus of "Up from the grave he arose!"
Archaeologists of ancient Roman artifacts were surprised by some of the memorials found next to the burial niches in the catacombs where Christians laid their dead. There were inscribed verses of scripture, to be sure, but also symbols and pictures. The one, however, that most mystified showed the upper body of a man holding a harp. It seemed to represent Jesus but standard mythological representations usually tied this one to Orpheus.
Orpheus was the darling of Greek love, music, and tragedy. Orpheus was the master musician of his time, and well could have had 39 out of the top 40 tunes on the charts at once. When Orpheus sang, the birds swooped in just to flit on his lilting melodies. When Orpheus sang, the clouds rolled back from the skies and the sun shone more brightly and the beasts crept out of the shadows to dance their fancy footwork. When Orpheus came to town, people floated out of homes and shops to jig in the streets and fall in love.
Of course, when Orpheus himself fell in love, passion intensified. It was Eurydice who caught his eye and heart and before long they were fawning and fainting after one another. When Orpheus and Eurydice wed, the world shimmered with significance, and couples everywhere twitterpated.
But a week later all meaning was lost. While Eurydice romped with her friends through a field, a snake slithered through the grass and struck her heel. Almost instantly Eurydice was gone, robbed of her nascent marriage and life itself.
Deep in grief, the song died in Orpheus' heart. Now he only moaned and groaned, and the world hung heavy with pain. Willows drooped their branches in empathy, and the wild beasts slunk back into the shadows. Dark clouds covered the sun's smile, and birds roosted, unable to take flight in the oppressive air.
Orpheus moped and wallowed. Consolation fled. Lament took the orchestra's podium. Reaching for nerves that rejected grief's cancerous alloy, Orpheus set out on a mission to the undiscovered country. He found the door to the underworld and slid down, down, down, down, down, down into the kingdom of death. Confronting elusive Hades, Orpheus demanded back the woman he had loved too shortly. Hades, of course, would have none of it. His contracts were lethally binding.
So Orpheus did what only he could do. He sang a love song. Strumming his harp, Orpheus put his heart to music in a way that sent shivers through the shifting shades and shadows. As his voice reverberated against the wailing walls, one ghost began to thicken and color. A few more stanzas of amour and Eurydice stood solid before him once again. They kissed and hugged and held hands all the way to earth's surface, gripped by smiles of incredulous ardor.
The legend of Orpheus grew over time, so that even the most skeptical linked his name to true love. But why would early Christians reconfigure Jesus in the guise of Orpheus? How could they profane the sacred so scandalously?
Obviously they did not believe in Orpheus. They were martyrs of Christ and traded all trite tales of the marketplace to buy the pearl of great price. But some metaphors command instant understanding, and when these groaning souls recalled the words and deeds of Jesus, it was precisely in the cemetery that conflating Orpheus and Christ made perfect sense.
Christians remembered the day when Jesus traveled to Bethany to mourn his friend Lazarus' death. Jesus should have been there earlier to heal Lazarus of his illness and stay death's untimely call, and everybody knew it. Lazarus' sister Martha came blazing out of the town when she heard that Jesus was approaching. She had sent word of Lazarus' illness to Jesus while there was still time for the great one to make a difference like he did with so many others throughout Palestine. But Jesus had dithered and dallied, and now Martha was angry.
"If you had been here my brother wouldn't have had to die!" she shouted at Jesus. He knew she was right and did not try to defend himself. In great grief they lumbered slowly to the family home. Professional wailers at the door assaulted their ears, accusing Jesus with fiery eyes. Stooping to enter, Jesus found the other sibling, Mary, covered with torn rags and ashes. "If you had been here my brother wouldn't have had to die!" she simpered, cutting Jesus deeper than her sister's diatribe.
Jesus cared without self-defense and brought his entourage out to the cemetery. Only a week before he had inspired the Galilee crowds with his delightful homily about shepherds, getting knowing nods about the nasty hirelings who lead sheep astray and bring them into the fold of death, the baddest shepherd of all. Leaning on the best of Israelite heritage, Jesus mounted the shoulders of shepherd boy/king David and reclaimed the dignity of the office Ezekiel celebrated in chapter 34 of his prophecy. Jesus said his sheep knew his voice and would follow him anywhere. He also mentioned, cryptically, that he had other sheep, not of the flock in front of him, and that he had to go and call them.
The disciples must have thought about these things as they now stood with Jesus in the local cemetery. He challenged the keepers of the place, demanding that they roll back the stone covering the carved cavern where Lazarus' body had been laid, allowing the maggots to do their work. The cemetery tenders shook their heads. "You don't want to do that," they replied. "He stinks!"
Jesus repeated his request with demanding authority and the workers shrugged. When the grave yawned, it burped death's stench. Only Jesus did not cringe and retreat. Standing resolutely in the land of the living, he cried out with the voice of the Good Shepherd to his friend now taken captive in death's dark fold: "Lazarus!" And down, down, down, down, down, down, down in the depths of the netherworld, owned by that baddest of the bad shepherds, death itself, Lazarus heard his master's voice, and came through the dark window of the grave to stand once again in the sun next to his shepherd.
This is why the Christians in Rome conflated the myth of Orpheus with the reality of Jesus. They did not trust in human legends. But they did hang their hopes on the one who said to Martha and Mary, "I am the resurrection and the life!" and then proved it that day in Bethany. In fact, the Roman Christians knew that Jesus had confirmed all of this a short while after the incidents of John 10-11 when he himself went down, down, down, down, down, down, down into the depth of death and came up again on Easter morning as the Lord of life.
And now, as wives bade farewell to husbands who had been torn apart by the beasts in the Colosseum, as children wrapped the bodies of parents in burial clothes, as friends mourned the deaths of their kindred spirits, the great metaphor of Jesus as the true Orpheus told the most magnificent promise of all. For even in these dark days of deathly haunts, followers of Jesus knew that one time soon the good and great shepherd would shout the names of their loved ones down to Hades itself, and even though captured in shepherd Death's lockdown fold, their family and friends would hear their master's voice, and they would rise to life and follow him into the eternal kingdom.
Application
We all try to evade and fool death, stymieing him with tummy tucks and fleeing him through our exercise routines and vitamins. But come death shall, with fateful inclusiveness, whispering our names at night or noon, and, against our wheedling and pleading, will march us into his awful gloom. Then the hope of our faith will endure its final test. For if the gospel is true, our good and great and chief shepherd will not forget us but will march down, down, down, down, down, down, down to Sheol and sing us his song of love. And we, who know the voice of our master, will rise into the dawn of eternity and follow the one who calls us by name.
An Alternative Application
Revelation 21:1-6a. John has three visions of Jesus in the book of Revelation. In chapter 1 he sees his resurrected Lord as overseer of the church. In chapter 5 he marvels at the lion/lamb who redeems humanity and takes hold of its destiny. Finally comes this third vision of Jesus, who now appears both as conquering king and ravishing bridegroom (Revelation 19:1-10). Before the celebration can begin, a mopping-up operation takes place in which seven aspects of judgment and restoration are sorted out (mostly introduced by "then I saw"):
* The king appears to fulfill his destiny (Revelation 19:11-16).
* The last battle is fought in which all the evil in the human arena is focused and repelled (Revelation 19:17-21).
* Satan is bound for a certain period of time (Revelation 20:1-3).
* The dead are raised to life for good or for ill (Revelation 20:4-6).
* Evil is destroyed (Revelation 20:7-10).
* The final judgment, determining the eternal destiny of all humankind (Revelation 10:11-15).
* Earth is recreated and restored in its relationship with the Creator (Revelation 21:1--22:5).
Revelation ends where it began, with a call to faithfulness in the face of mounting opposition. While its details provide endless fodder for teachers, preachers, and theological speculators, a core and consistent message emerges: during times of crisis, when evil seems to dominate the human scene, don't lose heart, because God is still in control of all things and Jesus is returning soon to annihilate evil and transform creation into all that God intended it to be.
Obviously this was a necessary message late in the first century, when first Nero's and then Domitian's persecutions of the church killed many and caused thousands of others to huddle in fear. Since the language and cosmological perspectives in the book are very similar to those in the gospel of John and the letters of John, there is every reason to suppose that they, along with this book, were written by the disciple of Jesus who pastored the congregation in Ephesus late in the first century and was exiled to Patmos by Domitian as a way of undermining the courage of the Christian church, which he despised. Since Domitian ruled from September of 81 through September of 96 AD, the revelation of Jesus to John was probably penned and sent sometime in the mid to late 80s.
Its message is timeless:
* To be a Christian is to be in conflict in this world.
* If one tries to opt out of this conflict, one automatically joins the other side and has been trapped by the powers of evil.
* Faithfulness to Jesus almost invariably leads to martyrdom, because this conflict is all or nothing.
* But those who trust in God will find the strength to remain faithful through suffering, die in hope, and have their confidence rewarded by Jesus' ultimate victory and the renewal of creation, which includes the resurrection and glorification of all God's people.
