Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation

by Michael J. Gorman

Furthermore, although Scripture is a living word from God that can bring a fresh message to people in changing contexts, with respect to Revelation it must be clearly stated that some readings are not only inferior to others, they are in fact unchristian and unhealthy.

“The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.”2

But prophecy, in the biblical tradition, is not exclusively or even primarily about making pronouncements and predictions concerning the future. Rather, prophecy is speaking words of comfort and/or challenge, on behalf of God, to the people of God in their concrete historical situation.

[I]n worship, the community of faith realizes its new identity under the lordship of the Lamb and under the conscious, intentional rejection of the claims to lordship made by Babylon/Rome. As the place where the new being is repeatedly practiced, worship is also a locus of resistance against the anti-God powers,

Revelation is therefore a theopolitical text. It makes claims about who is truly God and about right and wrong connections between God and the socio-political order; it challenges the political theology of empire and the religious ideology that underwrites it; and it reveals God and the Lamb alone as the true Sovereign One, source of all blessings, and proper object of worship. Moreover, Revelation tells us not only who is really sovereign but also what kind of sovereignty the true God exercises, namely what many have called nonviolent and non-coercive “Lamb power”—to which we will return in later chapters.

That 2nd part is huge. What sort of “sovereignty” are we talking about here?

It is difficult for many—myself included—to resist the conclusion that the United States has had, and continues to have, an imperial character.

The attribution of sacred status to secular power (normally the state and/or its head) as the source of divine blessing, requiring devotion and allegiance of heart, mind, and body to the sacred-secular power and its values, all expressed in various narratives, other texts, rituals, and media that reinforce both the secular power’s sacred status and the beneficiaries’ sacred duty of devotion and allegiance, even to the point of death.42

Human beings seem to have a need to attribute a sacred, or at least quasi-sacred, character to their political bodies, their rulers, and the actions of those entities.

The “myth of redemptive violence undergirds American popular culture, civil religion, nationalism, and foreign policy,” argues Walter Wink.48 It underwrites the belief that killing and/or dying for the national interest is a sacred duty and even privilege.

The early church had a natural suspicion of Roman civil religion because it was so blatantly pagan and idolatrous—though even it could be appealing. Contemporary Christians can much more easily assume that Christian, or quasi-Christian, ideas, language, and practices are benign and even divinely sanctioned. This makes American civil religion all the more attractive—that is, all the more seductive and dangerous. Its fundamentally pagan character is masked by its Christian veneer.

What makes American civil religion particularly seductive is that it borrows so heavily from Christianity; its reinterpretation of the dominant religious tradition(s) does not produce the syncretism of polytheistic paganism but the syncretism of Christianized Americanism or Americanized Christianism.

Revelation is a sustained stripping of the sacred from secular power—military, political, economic—and a parallel sustained recognition of God and the Lamb as the rightful bearers of sacred claims, the only worthy recipients of divine accolades.

I would contend, in fact, that the most alluring and dangerous deity in the United States is the omnipresent, syncretistic god of nationalism mixed with Christianity lite: religious beliefs, language, and practices that are superficially Christian but infused with national myths and habits.

God is inseparable from the Lamb, and vice versa.

Recognize that the central and centering image of Revelation is the Lamb that was slaughtered.

The worship of God is the heartbeat of the cosmos, even when we humans on earth do not see it, participate in it, or value it.

It is the vision of a slaughtered Lamb, not a ferocious Lion. “The shock of this reversal,” writes Richard Hays, “discloses the central mystery of the Apocalypse: God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, ‘the faithful witness [martys] (1:5).’”11

It is the central and centering image, the governing metaphor, the focal point of Revelation: a slaughtered Lamb, a crucified Lord.13 As Richard Bauckham puts it, it is crucial that we recognize the contrast between what he [John] hears (5:5) and what he sees (5:6). He hears that ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, had conquered’. The two messianic titles evoke a strong militaristic and nationalistic image of the Messiah of David as conqueror of the nations, destroying the enemies of God’s people . . . . But this image is reinterpreted by what John sees: the Lamb whose sacrificial death (5:6) has redeemed people from all nations (5:9–10). By juxtaposing the two contrasting images, John has forged a new symbol of conquest by sacrificial death.14

Thus the Lamb of God is clearly Jesus, even though his name does not appear in this chapter, and as redeemer he is both worthy of the kind of praise due to God and worthy to inaugurate God’s powerful eschatological judgment and salvation. Why? Because in his death he has already manifested the true meaning of power, judgment, and salvation. The work of Christ is the work of God, and vice versa, for Christ, Revelation proclaims, shares in the very identity of God.

Richard Bauckham rightly comments, “When the slaughtered Lamb is seen ‘in the midst of’ the divine throne in heaven (5:6; 7:17), the meaning is that Christ’s sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules the world.

In his exaltation Jesus remains the Lamb, the crucified one. He participates in God’s identity and reign, making him worthy of worship, as the slaughtered Lamb, and only as such. This is the consistent witness of the New Testament: that the exalted Lord remains the crucified Jesus.20 And this one is “the true face of God.”21

Jesus doesn’t move “beyond” that. This is essential. If/when the words “He will return as a king” are spoken, the King IS the lamb.

Human beings, even apparently faithful Christians, too often want an almighty deity who will rule the universe with power, preferably on their terms, and with force when necessary. Such a concept of God and of sovereignty induces its adherents to side with this kind of God in the execution of (allegedly) divine might in the quest for (allegedly) divine justice. Understanding the reality of the Lamb as Lord—and thus of Lamb power—terminates, or should terminate, all such misperceptions of divine power and justice, and of their erroneous human corollaries.

“What Christ does, God does”9 and vice versa. But also—and this is critical— how Christ does is how God does. We see in the slaughtered Lamb of God both that God is ultimately victorious over sin and death and how God is victorious over sin and death.

As we move into the rest of Revelation, the image of Christ as divine warrior will emerge. This image must not, however, be allowed to stand on its own, separated from Christ the Lamb and Faithful Witness.

This truth that the language of judgment in Revelation symbolizes God’s effectively speaking evil into non-existence is perhaps most sharply represented by the vision of Jesus’ victorious appearance as the Word of God on the white horse, with a sword in his mouth (19:11–16, 21).29

Yes, the slaughtered Lamb fights for God and will act on behalf of God to rid the world of evil, but he does so with only his own blood and a sword in his mouth (19:15), not with a sword in his hand to literally shed the blood of his enemies. The integrity and witness of the church depend, in part, on realizing this truth. The war of the Lamb is not what humans have been fighting all these centuries.

The vision of a “new heaven and new earth” does not mean the destruction and replacement of the material world but its transformation, especially the transformation of human existence within that material world.9 The culture of the beast has been replaced by the culture of the Lamb; a culture of death by a culture of life; a culture of insecurity and fear by a culture of peace and trust.

God’s eschatological reality is ultimately about reconciliation among peoples—the “healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2)—and not just individual salvation.

The hope of a beautiful city here on earth is not an opiate for the poor, or an irresponsible middle-class reduction of the gospel to a ticket to heaven. Rather, it is the legitimate hope for liberation from poverty and oppression, and for the fullness of life as God intended it to be.

The question becomes, rather, what exactly salvation is, and the book of Revelation, like the rest of the New Testament, makes it clear that salvation consists in a faithful covenantal relationship with God and others made possible by the death of Christ, the activity of the Spirit, and the encouragement of other faithful witnesses, living and dead.

But because civil religion in the West borrows heavily from the symbols and texts of Christian faith, it is nearly impossible for many Christians and churches to recognize the problem before us.

Just as it was the speech-act of faithful resistance to evil incarnate—the cross—that began the process of destroying evil, so also will the Word of God, the eternal gospel, kill death and de-create evil when the same Christ returns. Once again, the word of the Lord will not return to God void (Isa 55:11); it will accomplish its mission, but in God’s way, the way of the Lamb.

This combination of a cry for justice and a commitment to nonviolence may be the most significant feature of Revelation’s liturgical theology and spirituality.

However, as we saw in our study of Revelation 21–22, “come out” is not a summons to escape, and the spirituality of Revelation is not an escapist spirituality. The withdrawal is not so much a physical exodus as a theopolitical one, an escape from civil religion and the idolatry of power-worship, as we have argued throughout the book. It is a creative, self-imposed but Spirit-enabled departure from certain values and practices.10 This is the necessary prerequisite to faithful living in the very Babylon from which one has escaped. That is, the church cannot be the church in Babylon until it is the church out of Babylon.