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What?!
The Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year C, RCL)
April 29, 2007
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
Whenever I read the Book of Revelation, I almost always have an immediate one-word reaction: What?! It’s not because Revelation’s symbols are
beyond the grasp of my comprehension or the reach of my imagination. Yes, some are. For example, it is, at first glance, hard for me to conceive how
a robe bathed in blood can come out white.[1] But not all of the images are strange. Indeed, the primary image of today’s
passage – a great and numberless throng caught up in a moment of worship and adoration[2] – does not surpass the realm of
our human, very worldly experience. It is, I think, quite familiar…
The National Mall has been the site of countless gatherings of countless people from countless cultures, races, and creeds engaged in countless
expressions of reverence – giving some issue or cause its due whether in praise or protest or showing someone respect, even love whether in this life
or posthumously…
The RFK and FedEx stadiums have been and continue to be – and the new Nationals ballpark will be – coliseums, verily cathedrals for the gathering of
multitudes of people across the social spectrum of humankind engaged in the religion of sport – the cheers of the crowds being a contemporary
approximation of Revelation’s angelic chorus of praise…
A less secular and more spiritual illustration – thus, more akin to the metaphysical context and content of the Book of Revelation – is the growth
of Christianity in Africa. I think of the South African leg of my sabbatical journey and the vast crowds of Christians gathering on Sunday mornings
to worship God in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit – their songs of praise reaching, verily lifting the rafters.
So, again, the symbolic imagery of Revelation is distinctive, but not all of it is strange. Nevertheless, I still often respond to Revelation with
puzzlement, for whenever I read a passage not in its parts, but in toto, it surpasses anything in my experience and, hence, defies my search for meaning.
Given this, I suppose I could refuse to read it. But search for meaning I must, for Revelation, as a book of the Bible is, for some, sacred text,
but at the very least it is literature. And as literature, it is meant to be read and interpreted: What did it mean, what does it mean, and what
does it mean to me? It is not enough as an old Eastern Orthodox priest lecturing on Revelation years ago at my seminary and responding to
my confusion said, “It is a holy mystery!” That didn’t work for me then and it doesn’t now. So, search for meaning I must!
However, it also doesn’t help much if I take the text at face value, accepting it for what it seems to portray. A biblical vision of existence after
the end of time, following the calamitous culmination of human history. When the eternal “not yet” is now. When the prophetic word, promising life
imperishable in the unbreakable embrace of Jesus, the Shepherd,[3] is fulfilled. When all who have hungered and thirsted
for righteousness, that is, right relationship with God – in the words of the Beatitudes – are satisfied,[4] for they hunger
and thirst no more.[5] When the eschatological gift of white-robed salvation through the blood of the death and resurrection
of Jesus is realized.
No. It doesn’t help me much, for this is an experience I neither know nor can imagine. Hence, for me, there is and can be no applicable meaning. I am
left bewildered, perhaps even bereft of the comfort that I intuit the passage originally intended and perhaps eternally intends to offer. Somehow I must
find a connection with my experience, my knowing if I am to interpret and make meaning of Revelation at all.
Fortuitously, I found a key to understanding Revelation through another book – Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In this 1937
classic piece of African American literature, the protagonist, Janie Crawford tells her story of being and becoming. Through poverty, dependence, abuse,
tribulation at the hands of misogynistic men and the brutal force of nature, and tragically having a hand in the death of the love of her life. Through
it all, reaching the fulfillment of a sense of her self that is wise and strong, whole and true. A sense of her self with which she can enter each of
the days of the rest of her life. For Hurston, Janie embraces the belief that “the dream is the truth” – one’s hopes, once named and claimed,
form and frame one’s quest for what is real, for what matters – and embodies that truth that the “oldest human longing (is) self
revelation.”[6] Revelation, then, is less about discovering something outside of us and more about discerning something
within us.
Janie’s journey, for me, reflects or rather is the reality depicted in Revelation. She is one “who came out of (her) great ordeal”
having “washed her robe,” her psyche, her soul “in the blood” of the experience of her own death and resurrection. Janie, in terms of our
St. Mark’s functional education discipline, has arrived at the Unit V stage of existence called anticipation. That blessedly repeatably attainable state
of being in which one experiences a heightened consciousness of all that one is and by which one can step out on faith – saying, “amen,” “so be it”
– anticipating, accepting all that life has to offer. Therefore at the end of the novel, Janie, having found a self with whom she truly can live, living
with, in the truth of who she is, can say:
You got tuh go there tuh know there…nobody else (can) tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theysleves. They got
tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ for theyselves.[7]
The Book of Revelation often puzzles me. Janie’s journey, I understand.
[1] Revelation 7.14
[2] Revelation 7.9-17
[3] John 10.28-29. The gospel text appointed for the day is John 10.22-30.
[4] Matthew 5.6
[5] Revelation 7.16
[6] The quotes are taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: New York 2006), pages 1 and 7.
[7] Ibid., page 192
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