The Lamb at the Center

THE BOOK OF REVELATION is one of our companions this Eastertide. We are invited to contemplate its central image, the axis around which everything revolves: “the Lamb at the center of the throne” (7:17).

Is this an image that can engage the imaginations of our contemporaries, especially those unfamiliar with the scriptural symbolism? In 2016, I had my tattooist in New Zealand inscribe on the inside of my right forearm a striking copy of a medieval sculpture, one of the few that survive from the great Abbey of Cluny in France. It depicts the Lamb of God, bearing a cross. The Latin inscription surrounding it means, “As carved here the Lamb of God is small, but how great he is in heaven!”

I hadn’t anticipated that bearing this image on my body would lead to all sorts of intriguing conversations. Curious strangers stop me in checkout lines, bars, the beach, the street, asking, “What does that mean?” I talk about the vulnerability of God’s noncoercive love, and its ultimate power. Nothing can take away the sins of the world except the love that is revealed on the cross and vindicated in the resurrection. “Here is the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world!” (John 1:29).

Are these conversations sowing seeds of change? Only God knows. As for ourselves, we are still learning from the scripture’s insistence that the ultimate meaning of the Lamb is only accessible through adoration.

[ May 5 ]

Belonging to the Way

Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

THE ACCOUNT IN Acts 9 of the radiant appearance of the risen Lord to Saul on the Damascus road has bequeathed us a proverbial expression for sudden insight that shatters one’s worldview: “And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored” (9:18). Saul gets up and is baptized because he now knows for himself what the men and women he was rounding up as criminals had been claiming: The crucified felon Jesus is the Messiah of God and is gloriously alive. This was no sacrilegious oxymoron, a vulnerable and persecuted savior! Now Christ is wholly identified with his intimates, in their vulnerability and defenselessness, and had posed that life-changing question in person: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Through baptism Saul becomes one of them, and Christ becomes his new identity. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Revelation also presents the mystery of divine vulnerability incarnate through the imagery of the glorified “Lamb that was slaughtered” (5:12). The symbolism of sacrifice is utterly revolutionized. Sacrifice is not something demanded from us but the pivotal self-offering of God given to us and for us!

In the fourth gospel, John recounts the impulsive decision of Peter to return to Galilee to relaunch the boat he had abandoned a few years earlier, trying his hand once more at fishing. Peter would not be the first to rely on something deeply familiar to help in the process of recovering from shock. The genial stranger who calls from the shore has a practical suggestion about where to catch that elusive shoal of fish, and he seems to have breakfast going already on a little fire. Later when it comes to a one-on-one conversation with the Lord, the overwhelming shame that Peter feels over his threefold denial (see John 18:13-27) is tenderly healed. Expressing his love for Jesus is all that matters, and the opportunity to take the responsibility for nurturing and caring for the ones whom Christ calls his own: “Feed my sheep” (21:17).

[ May 12 ]

Living into Heaven

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

OUR EASTERTIDE meditation on being caught up into the risen life takes us to John 10, where Jesus’ baffled opponents are again subjecting him to interrogation. The scene is winter, during the celebration of Hanukkah. Jesus is walking in the temple portico, which offers shelter from the bitter winds blowing from the east. Bleak weather suggests the real question hovering over any claim to religious revelation: How does it stand up to the inevitability of death, which threatens to cut down all achievements, silence every voice, take everything with it into the lifeless dark? Jesus offers eternal life to all whom Abba God gives him. “The Father and I are one” (10:30). No metaphysical theories about souls and their immortality bear any weight here. Intimate belonging to God alone is what death is powerless to dissolve. “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (10:28).

We who are committed to action for social justice do well to explore this understanding of the good news of resurrection as deeply as we can. Our critique of politically reactionary versions of Christianity that focus entirely on getting souls to a heaven carries certain risks. A prophetic understanding of the reign of God that calls for transforming social institutions can trap us in indifference to the promise of eternal life in union with God. It takes maturity to realize the more we embrace the revelation that each and every single human being is intrinsically eligible for eternal union with God in the communion of saints, then the more passionately we feel that all deserve living conditions here and now that support and enhance their God-endowed dignity and freedom.

The vision in Revelation 7 proclaims a God who will ultimately restore and heal all whose lives have been blighted by deprivation, injustice, persecution, and scorn: “The One who is on the throne will shelter them” (verse 15).

[ May 19 ]

Sacred Epiphanies

Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

I OFTEN WONDER whether those who practice the ministry of spiritual direction in the church, listening for hundreds of hours to firsthand accounts of religious experience, are in a better position to understand the scriptures than many academic experts on the texts. In Acts we read Luke’s account of a vision that comes to Peter—a whole variety of animals offered to him as food, shockingly including all those strictly banned by the dietary rules of Torah. Spiritual guides well know that the phenomenon of the “dream that changes everything” is not as rare as some might think. A few years ago, I had an artist inscribe my left shoulder with a splendid tattoo that paid tribute to a life-changing dream I had as a young man, a dream that was mysteriously resumed and completed in a second experience in middle age. Peter’s consciousness was inscribed by his intense experience in Joppa, so vivid and compelling that it burst his religious system to pieces, a system based on scrupulously dividing the clean from the unclean, us from them, ours from theirs, sacred from profane. In Peter’s dream, the voice from heaven drives home the revolutionary implications of the gospel: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” But we know it took Peter time to bring his day-to-day actions in line with his changed consciousness.

Then again, the best interpreters of this scripture for today are those who are in the throes of claiming for themselves, in the power of the Spirit, their God-given cleanness in a world (and, for many, in a church) that has pronounced them profane: profane for what is speciously called race, profane for sexual orientation, profane for caste, profane for all manner of “otherness.” All other exegetical expertise must cede authority to the controversial firsthand testimony of those who are experiencing the risen Christ de-profaning them here and now, creating epiphanies of their sacredness.

[ May 26 ]

Troubled Waters Heal

Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 5:1-9

WHO CAN EXPLAIN the unexpected force by which a work of art surprises us, even rocks our world? Why did a single watercolor in an exhibition of paintings by the 19th century visionary artist J.M.W. Turner move me to tears? It was a scene of wild weather in the Alps, but the title is “The Angel Troubling the Pool.” There’s the tiny figure of the angel, getting into a pool of standing water to stir it up as people wait nearby for healing. Strange that Turner transposed the scene of this week’s gospel, the pool of Bethzatha (the name according to some early manuscripts), to the Swiss Alps! But I cried and seemed to hear a voice repeating, “only the troubled waters heal.” The story of Jesus healing the paralytic seems to have had a profound effect on the imagination from the earliest days. Certain scribes couldn’t resist adding some details: Older translations included a fourth verse, “for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had” (John 5:4).

Jesus is depicted here as simultaneously troubler and healer. Jesus troubles the paralyzed man by confronting his rationalized inertia; he endangers the man by setting him up as a troublemaker in the eyes of the Judean authorities; he stirs up trouble for himself, as the healing incident inflames the authorities’ determination to hound him down as a sabbath-breaker who called “God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God” (John 5:18).

John has profound insight into the inevitably controversial nature of God’s embodied action in the world. It challenges the entire piety linked with that verse in Psalm 23: “He leads me beside still waters.” Not so. The healing action of God in the world takes place in troubled waters, and the healed reveal their health by their readiness to make trouble for the powers that be, the powers that stultify and repress.

“Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.