Ted Grimsrud—March 28, 2024
The book of Revelation has a pretty bad reputation among many people—not least because it is easily interpreted as portraying quite a bloodthirsty God. And many Christians have affirmed that interpretation. I first decided to study Revelation after hearing a teacher argue against pacifism by claiming that Revelation teaches that divinely initiated violence is part of Revelation’s End-Times scenario. This teacher coupled Revelation’s violence with the violence of the Old Testament stories such as Joshua to argue that sometimes God does want war.
I knew in my heart (though not yet my mind) that the Bible should not be read in such a pro-violence way. So, I decided to look closely at Revelation for myself. I discovered that indeed Revelation may be read in a very pro-peace way. My recent book, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022), articulates my latest understandings about Revelation’s peace message. In this post and one to follow I will share some of the key ideas in that peaceable reading.
The key step for me was my starting point in reading Revelation. I took very seriously the opening words of the book, “the revelation of Jesus Christ” and read the book expecting it to complement the story of Jesus in the gospels. I was open to be proven wrong about Revelation’s Jesus-linked orientation, but I first wanted to see if indeed Revelation did further Jesus’s own message. That is, I read Revelation asking, “What (if anything) does Revelation teach us about peace?” rather than “What does Revelation teach us about the future?” or “What does Revelation teach us about a violent, pro-war God?” Along with the opening words that refer to Jesus, I also quickly recognized that the key image (in a book full of images, symbols, and metaphors) in the entire book was the image of the Lamb. Clearly, this Lamb image was meant to evoke Jesus and, as I came to recognize, to keep the various visions and imagery anchored in Jesus’s message.
I will develop two aspects of the Lamb image in what follows. In this post I will discuss “the peace of the Lamb.” With the Lamb’s peaceable orientation in mind, I will then turn to “the war of the Lamb” in the next post and show that Revelation’s “war” is actually a struggle for peace on earth that uses thoroughly peaceable methods.
An urgent and peaceable message
The first three chapters of Revelation set the stage for the book’s key vision that comes in chapters four and five. This is a “revelation of Jesus Christ” that conveys a message to Christians in “the seven churches that are in Asia” (1:1, 4). This message is needed, chapter two and three tell us in the form of individualized letters to each of the seven churches, because Christians are being severely tested as they seek to remain faithful to the way of Jesus in the midst of the Roman Empire. The severe testing takes two major forms. The first kind of test is that when Christians seek to live as Jesus lived and resist the Empire’s call to give it loyalty, they face severe persecution. The second kind of test is facing the temptation actually to give loyalty to the Empire and compromise the core message of Jesus with acceptance of Rome’s violence and social injustice. John, the author of Revelation, believes that this choice of loyalty is the central issue of faith. He understands the Empire to be God’s chief rival in the world.
The beginning of Revelation describes Jesus with a concise, powerful three-part picture (1:5): He is (1) “the faithful witness” (referring to Jesus’s life of truth telling, resistance to human structures of injustice, and pervasive love and welcome to the vulnerable), (2) “the firstborn of the dead” (referring to the collusion between the Empire and the religious leaders to execute Jesus—and to when God raised Jesus from the dead, an act that vindicated Jesus’s way of life as truthful, and rebuked those Powers that put him to death for their rebellion against God), and (3) “the ruler of the kings of the earth” (referring to Jesus’s messianic [i.e., “kingly”] role as the revelation of God’s will for all of humanity, including all the nations and tribes [7:9] of the earth). We discover as we read on that this third element of the picture of Jesus seems a bit paradoxical, as the “kings of the earth” in Revelation signify the human leaders of the rebellious nations. As it turns out, Revelation may be appropriately read as a meditation on Jesus’s role as this “ruler,” a role directly linked to “the Lamb’s war” I will consider in the next post.
The first vision of Revelation begins at 1:9 when John hears a voice calling him to write to the seven churches. He then sees one walking among those churches who is described in ways that make it clear that it is Jesus. So, this “revelation of Jesus” both reveals insights about Jesus and reveals what Jesus’s message to his current followers is. The first vision continues with letters to each of the seven churches that make clear the book’s sense of urgency about the choices its readers must make about following Jesus’s way. We also learn of the encouragement Jesus offers to those who face suffering due to their faithful living and of the confrontation Jesus offers to those who are too at home in the Empire.
Revelation’s most important vision
After the seventh letter, John is transported at 4:1 to a worship service where he will behold the ruling vision for the entire book—and the ruling vision for John’s own faith. There is One seated on a throne—obviously a supreme being. This is where contemporaries of John might have expected to find the emperor or his affiliated gods. John will make it clear that the One on the throne he sees is the opposite of the Romans gods. This One is exalted and worshiped by representatives of all living creatures.
Interestingly, the One holds a scroll that appears to signify the transformation and healing of creation—the hopes of all human generations. However, we first are told that this scroll must be opened for the hopes to be fulfilled and that no one can be found to open it. John begins to weep bitterly (5:4). Then, he is told to relax, one has been found who will open the scroll. This moment underscores that Revelation is concerned with the big issues of human history and the fulfillment of hopes for healing. In an extremely short and subtle description, we then read of a powerful drama at the heart of our existence. There is a great scroll, but it can’t be opened. Then one is found to open it—described to John as a mighty warrior-king, as David of old. However, the actual victor is seen as he truly is: “A Lamb standing as if it had been slain” (5:6). What John sees turns what he hears on its head.
The Lamb here obviously is a picture of the executed and resurrected Jesus—the “ruler of the kings of the earth.” As the opening description in 1:6 had said, he “loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood.” That is to say, Jesus’s faithful witness of nonviolent resistance to the Powers, including the Roman Empire, that led to his bloody execution actually is the means of victory that makes him the one who may open the scroll of ultimate healing. The power of Jesus’s embodied love is indeed the power of the mighty “Lion of the tribe of Judah” (5:5). This victorious witness provides the basis for the remarkable conclusion to chapter five’s vision where the Lamb is worshiped for his witness that brings healing for “saints from every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9). This liberated multitude is made into “a kingdom and priests serving our God [who] will reign on earth” (5:10). Such an astounding outcome is confirmed by the praise of “every creature in heaven and on earth and in the sea” (5:13).
The “peace of the Lamb” is none other than the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s “faithful witness.” Clearly from the beginning of Revelation, when John writes “blessed are those hear and who keep” the words of this book (1:3), and when John writes we are “freed from our sins” and “made to be a kingdom” (1:5-6), the story of the peace of the Lamb in Revelation is also the story of the calling of the book’s readers. This calling is to follow the Lamb, to share in his witness, and to embody his victory in helping to heal the world. The task of navigating life in Empire is simply the task of sharing in Jesus’s faithful witness.
The Lamb’s healing blood
To confirm these points, John reports another dramatic vision in chapter seven. We have another “hear one thing, see another thing” dynamic. In chapter five, John had heard mighty warrior-king and had seen a slain Lamb that stands. These two pictures together define the image—the Lamb, in its self-sacrifice, is the mighty king. Then, in chapter seven we are given a vision of people “sealed” as the people of God. What John hears is a list of the twelve tribes of Israel, twelve thousand in each, for a total of 144,000. But then, what he sees is “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (7:9). These two pictures, as with the earlier vision of the Lamb, together define the image. The 144,000 is not a literal number but it is a way of referring to the universal spread of God’s healing work—anchored in the particularity of the Old Testament people of God.
This uncounted multitude stands before the throne and before the Lamb (7:9). This alludes back to chapter five where the One on the throne and the Lamb are both worshiped for their powerful, healing love—also by those healed from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9). In both cases, the means of the liberation of the multitude is the Lamb’s “blood.” The “blood” here refers not simply to Jesus’s crucifixion but to the entirety of his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. The key element of this image is the reality that Jesus’s life of nonviolent resistance to the Powers-that-be, political and religious, led to his execution. God’s vindication of that life proved that Jesus’s life was truthful, and it exposed the political and religious structures as rebels against God and unworthy of the kind of loyalty they demand. These Powers are God’s rivals, not God’s agents.
When Revelation seven describes the multitude, they are said to be robed in white, which is a symbol that affirms that they shared in Jesus’s faithful witness. “Where have they come from?” (7:13), an elder asks. “They have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:14). The “great ordeal” simply refers to life in the complicated and often traumatic everyday history of human existence. In this history, followers of the Lamb are asked continually to follow his path of nonviolent resistance to the Powers and of faithful witness to the Lamb’s self-sacrificial love—even in the face of continual hostility from the Powers.
The image of washing the robes and making them white in the Lamb’s blood refers to discipleship, following the Lamb’s path in life. The “peace of the Lamb” is, in the simplest terms, embodying the compassion and care of Jesus. And this connects directly with another image in Revelation, “the war of the Lamb.” This war has to do with nonviolent resistance where love replaces domination even when such love is rejected.
Revelation makes it clear that the embodied love of Jesus and his followers are precisely the very weapons that defeat the Powers of evil—the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. So, in my next post I will reflect more on this “war.” The key verse that in some sense signals a transition in the book from clarifying the Lamb’s identity as the embodiment of peace to sketching the nature of the Lamb’s war is found in 12:11: The comrades of the Lamb have conquered the Dragon “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” As we will see, chapters 13 through 19 elaborate in various ways the dynamics of this victory.
