(TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY)
November 1, 1857
The passage: John sees a vision of a countless multitude, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing before God’s throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palm branches, crying out, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
The Gospel reading for All Saints’ Day proper begins with this verse. But the Church was wise not to separate this vision from the one before it. The two stand in direct contrast, and that contrast illuminates the meaning of each, as well as the purpose of the whole book.
I don’t think it matters whether Jerusalem and its temple had already fallen when John was exiled on Patmos. The vital question underneath was: what did these events, whether past or still to come, mean? Their meaning was so terrible to anyone who felt his nation had been called out from all nations to witness to the living, righteous God and His rule over the earth, that only Christ’s own words could have enabled His disciples—devout, faithful Jews—to accept Rome’s evident intention to destroy the capital and root out the people as a fulfillment of divine purpose rather than a contradiction of it. They must have expected some miraculous rescue even at the last moment, some sudden restoration even after the city had been plowed under and its name changed. We know how strong that faith remained among the exiled people even up through Hadrian’s time, and how desperately they rose up against Rome because of it. To an apostle of Christ, such faith was simply unbelief: the facts he saw confirmed prophecy rather than refuting it. And yet I don’t think any Jew who rejected Jesus as the Son of God can have felt the awe and horror at this overthrow that John felt. His people’s calling was no less sacred to him than to the ordinary Jew—it was infinitely more sacred.
Some modern critics like to set Paul and the writer of the Apocalypse against each other, as if one were resolutely anti-Jewish and the other fanatically pro-Jewish. But I don’t know how anyone could speak more strongly than Paul does in Romans 10 and 11. He would be willing to be cut off from Christ himself if it would save his nation. To Israel belong the covenants, the law, the promises; from it, by human descent, Christ came. It cannot be cast away—he is certain of that, and he himself exists as living proof of it. A seed survives for future growth. He can just bear the thought of Israel’s present death when he sees what life for the Gentiles will come from it. But that comfort isn’t enough for him; he has a dim but dazzling vision of far higher blessings still to come at Israel’s restoration.
So spoke the man his own countrymen denounced as the worst apostate from his ancestors’ faith. John, who did not have Paul’s calling to become a Gentile in order to win Gentiles, cannot have felt less amazement at the desecration of the city where he had shared the last supper with his Master, had seen Him risen, and had received the Spirit with his brethren. That the nation had destroyed itself, he plainly saw. But could human wickedness overturn God’s purposes? Wasn’t it the teaching of both Law and Gospel that God accomplishes His great work of righteousness and love despite every opposing evil will? Wasn’t it the Gospel’s particular teaching that even the will itself might finally be won over? Could Christ’s coming to fulfill all things and gather the ages into Himself mean that the whole order of the universe was to be undone, proved a failure?
I. The answer to these terrible doubts lies, I believe, in the vision of the sealing of the tribes, before the four winds were let loose on earth, sea, or tree, recorded earlier in this chapter. If you ask how a vision could sustain anyone against the pressure of overwhelming facts, I answer: only so far as the vision uncovers the principle and meaning behind the facts, corrects the vague impressions the senses receive, and leads the seer past what is passing and accidental to what is permanent. A vision in Scripture is not a picture for the eye; it is a revelation to heart and spirit of what does not appear to the senses but truly is. A city of walls and towers appeals to the senses; a polity—the constitution of a nation, the thing that gives the walls and towers their worth, without which they would crumble—must be grasped by another faculty.
It was to that faculty that the vision of the sealing of twelve thousand from each tribe of Israel was addressed. The twelve tribes seemed hopelessly broken apart, about to be scattered to the winds. The prophet was taught otherwise. When Jesus chose His twelve apostles, He pointed to this ancient, divine institution and affirmed its permanence. These men, and all of Israel who received their message, went out as witnesses to their scattered countrymen that their election had not been in vain, that the original charter—to conquer the earth and bless all its families—was not cancelled but was to be fulfilled to the utmost. They were to declare who God is and how He has revealed Himself, and to declare it, as of old, through their very organization: representing the tribes in their unity as one nation, and in their distinctness as separate families, each under its ancestral standard.
I’ve shown you before that this view of the nation as an imperishable reality, beneath all its changing outward forms, matches exactly the language of the ancient prophets. They spoke of branches lopped from the great oak God had planted, its leaves withered, nothing left but a bare stripped trunk—yet what looked dead to human eyes had a life in God that all would eventually be forced to acknowledge.
Such words became reality for the apostle through the events of his own time, understood by divine illumination. The baptized believers scattered in small groups through the cities of Greece and Asia were not replacing the old commonwealth of Israel—they were its continuation and expansion. Its tasks had passed to them, with higher powers and a wider reach than their fathers had known even at the height of their prosperity. An earthquake was shaking, and would go on shaking, both the Jewish and the pagan world. Jews, pagans, even Christians might think that a new world was simply rising on the ruins of an exhausted old one. In truth, only a carcass was thrown to the eagles; the body itself survived. Not one of the Almighty’s purposes had been disappointed; no method had been abandoned.
I don’t think we need this vision’s assurance and comfort any less than John did. We’re inclined to think that at some point a set of opinions and practices called Judaism simply vanished, replaced by a set called Christianity, and that this explains the history of the old world and the new. It is true that a miserable, narrow, inhuman, godless version of Judaism existed in Palestine, and that precisely because it denied everything the nation existed for, it was doomed to destruction along with the holy places that had become its shrines. It’s also true that a thing called Christianity appeared after Jerusalem’s fall, set itself violently against Judaism—leading often to the persecution and massacre of Jews—while embodying some of the same faults it denounced: the same inhumanity, the same godlessness. We need to remember Judaism’s fate, because since God’s purposes don’t change, it stands as a fearful warning of what could befall that kind of Christianity. But the name the Jew dishonored was not his own but God’s; the order he abused was not his own but God’s. He could stumble against the rock on which he and the world stood, and be broken by it. He could not move that rock, not even a fragment of it. The one foundation was laid, his polity rested on it; and so it could expand to fill the earth, and neither he nor his successors nor the powers of hell could overturn it.
Most of the baptized, like most of the circumcised, might imagine they bore their own seal rather than God’s, and were meant to be a curse to the nations rather than a blessing. The Church’s ministers might claim the Church had nothing to do with tribes and families, that these interfered with its supposed uniformity. But such arrogance could not defeat the purpose of the Most High. Families, tribes, and nations kept asserting their existence, however much a so-called universal Church tried to treat them as merely earthly rather than divine. All that Church’s machinery, its schemes to make itself a name, its tower meant to reach heaven, have been mocked and brought to nothing. Its attempts to create—or even preserve—a unity God had made have been thwarted as thoroughly as the unity of Israel’s tribes was broken under Jeroboam. Its bids for independence have been set at nothing as thoroughly as Jewish independence was, by Chaldean, Persian, and Roman conquest. And yet the different tribes—Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic—have still carried the divine seal, and out of them have still come people who believed they bore that seal and were bound to testify of a kingdom centered on a divine King and High Priest, of a universal family whose Father is His Father, of a unity that time, place, and death cannot break, whose author is the Holy Spirit.
II. It’s at this point that John’s first vision passes into the second. He has been comforted in his despair at seeing the commonwealth fall, even though he had long expected it. He now has a sense—one he could hardly have had before, even as Christ’s beloved disciple grown old under His teaching—of the permanence and harmony of God’s dealings. And so he was ready for another, still more wonderful revelation—very different from the one that prepared him for it, with no mention now of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, or Joseph, but which, without that earlier vision, would have seemed merely brilliant and fantastic rather than solid: “After this I looked, and behold, a multitude no one could count, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages.”
Last week I spoke of how Christ’s words about the narrow gate and the few who find it were confirmed in His apostles’ experience. John had plenty of evidence of how small the Christian bodies in Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna, and Laodicea were, compared to the worshippers in synagogues and pagan temples who rejected Christ. What a sight, then, to burst upon him now! A multitude no one could count—not made up, as we might expect, of patriarchs, lawgivers, and prophets who had believed the promises and waited for them, but speaking every language, belonging to every race! No wonder the thought rose in this Galilean fisherman’s mind—and no wonder he was sure a divine messenger had put it there—“Who are these, and where have they come from?” There was a time when he might have reacted like Peter facing the sheet full of unclean creatures, and recoiled at the sight of Gentiles standing with palms before God’s throne. Even now the sight overwhelms him; he can only answer the angel, “Sir, you know.” But that answer comes from humility and wondering joy—the vision seems almost too good to be real. Yet it is exactly the truth John had spent years learning, and for proclaiming which he had been exiled: “I was in Patmos for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.” He had spoken of a Word existing before all worlds, whose life was the light of men; he had said this Word became flesh in Jesus Christ, who is ruler over all the kings of the earth, who died and is alive, who holds the keys of death and hell.
If this dangerous proclamation was no dream but the true account of God’s universe, was it strange that He should be bringing multitudes from east and west, north and south, to sit down with Abraham and Isaac in His kingdom, gathering a family from every nation? However unlike this vast, united multitude was to the small, scattered flocks the apostle knew on earth, or to anything the future might show on earth, he could not doubt that it was the fulfillment of everything the best people and societies on earth had been striving toward. Without such a body as this, the hopes of past generations would have failed, and the promise of Pentecost would have been broken.
I said we would understand much more of the purpose of this whole book—which has shaped the thought, art, and language of eighteen centuries, and yet which people often dismiss as a mere collection of unsolvable riddles—if we connect the vision of the sealed tribes on earth with this vision in heaven, which the Church presents to us as the vision of All Saints. The whole book must remain forever a puzzle unless we hold to its foundational principle: that Christ’s death and resurrection have broken down the wall between the seen and the unseen world, and that He is the center of both. This belief has seemed too awesome and too good for people to hold onto; they have pushed it away, sometimes wishing it weren’t true, sometimes insisting nothing so blessed could be true.
They have paid for this unbelief. The conviction that there must be some communion between the living and those they’ve lost, between the living and past ages, was one they could not shake off. So they have been haunted by dark terrors and ghastly apparitions, and left at the mercy of every fraud. Each place and race has colored its superstitions according to its own circumstances and temperament. Civilized ages, noticing this, have concluded the superstition itself had no basis beyond those circumstances and temperaments. They thought they could discard it; it has reappeared dressed as science instead. Christendom, which by its very name and its solemn ceremonies professes faith in One who has conquered death and opened the kingdom of heaven, has nonetheless built a system of priestcraft claiming, through its prayers and curses, to manage some occasional relation between the living and the region lit by God and the Lamb, or the region of outer darkness. Yet our own consciences tell us that we cannot, by any act or thought, cut ourselves off from communion with either of those worlds—if we could, the sun and stars would mean no more to us than they do to cattle. Shall we always be at the mercy of fortune-tellers and frauds who trade on people’s fears and hopes? Shall we not dare ask whether some light from above has fallen on these mysteries we keep trying to decipher by dim glimmers from below?
III. The proof that the light in the Apocalypse comes from above lies, I think—as the proof of any scientific discovery lies—in how many confused notions it dispels, in how it confirms our strongest and most precious hopes, and in how it helps us with our highest and our most ordinary duties.
1. Nothing distresses an earnest person more than the notion, sometimes arising in his own mind and sometimes preached as though it were settled Scripture doctrine, that here we are bound together in families and nations, but after death all such bonds cease and everything becomes solitary and individual. I have heard this stated from the pulpit as an unquestionable, self-evident truth every orthodox person must accept. I can’t imagine anything more repugnant to conscience, more flatly asserting that future blessedness is not the perfection of present blessing but its total undoing. Escaping isolation, becoming capable of friendship and society—this has been God’s gift to us here below. Families, nations, churches have been His work; our sins have been the violent effort to tear them apart. If the pulpit teaching is right, then God’s work has failed and ours has won: society ends, and selfishness is everything.
If John’s teaching is true, that other teaching is false. The countless multitude is a society. Their robes are white because every stain of selfishness has been washed away by the Lamb’s blood. Their palms show they have conquered the very things that destroy the unity of families and nations here. There is no dull sameness, no single language—all is harmony within diversity. Here on earth, some glorify power at the cost of meekness, and some claim meekness excludes strength; there, all give glory together to the One on the throne and to the Lamb. Here, people sealed in God’s name have thought they honored that name best by proclaiming His condemnation of their enemies. There, the one word joined to the divine name is Salvation—salvation from the curse people have made for themselves.
2. The sight of this multitude from every nation must have taught the missionary of John’s day, as it can teach the missionary of ours, a lesson that curbs both his pride and—why say “but,” why not “therefore”?—his despair. He sometimes tries to comfort himself with thoughts of God’s mercy toward the ignorant who never had a chance to know better. But then he sees the actual brutalization and corruption among the people he goes to, and no tolerance for their religion makes that fact less appalling. And when he considers how few can ever hear him preach, how few even understand his words, he begins to wonder if God has abandoned His own world. But it isn’t so. His converts may be few, his powers of communication weak. But the One he speaks of, who sent him, has His own ways of making Himself known, of bringing people of every nation, tongue, and land, through much suffering, to know the Lord who died for them and remains with them, and to know His Father as their Father. They are not saved each by whatever sect he professes; they are saved by the one name given under heaven. But it doesn’t depend on our words or wisdom how they come to know that name. If its letters reach them through us, it is another than we who reveals what they mean. He can make it known even if we stammer badly in speaking it, even if we never speak it at all.
3. I know how easily a hostile bystander, ignorant of a missionary’s real anguish and real inspiration, could twist what I’ve said into an excuse for indifference, since the work will be done without him. He might be tempted to laziness by that argument, or by any other—the devil has countless arguments, and I’m sure the claim that the task is hopeless is the most powerful of them. But that argument will always be defeated by anyone who counts it his highest honor to work alongside God, and who knows he could never convert a single soul without God’s Spirit doing it. And if it occurs to him—rightly, so long as it isn’t pushed into irreverence—that God, whose Son became man, works through human beings to reveal His name, then I return to John’s vision and ask: why not through just men made perfect, as well as through just men still clothed in their imperfection? Why should the cry of “Salvation to Him on the throne and to the Lamb,” rising from this multitude, not be more powerful than the cry of a weary, divided band of witnesses on earth? In hours of unspeakable sorrow, comforting voices have come to you from you know not where. In moments of temptation, teetering on the edge, some old remembered sentence has come back to you as if from sleep, some house or tree seeming to speak warning or encouragement. Why might those not be voices of people who once spoke such words aloud, now speaking to the heart instead of the ear, stirring memories they still share with you? Would it seem strange, rather than entirely natural, that a mother watches over the son she would have died to bless, even before her love had grown to its full flowering in God’s love? Why might not older patriots and martyrs be echoing Christ’s own words in the ears of their brothers—in lonely prisons no earthly friend can reach, at the stake with no visible smile to greet them, even while God’s name is invoked to condemn them—“Be faithful unto death, and He will give you the crown of life”? And why might these same voices not go on teaching and evangelizing the very lands they wept and bled for while on earth? What could hearten a struggling soldier of the Church on earth more than knowing these unseen armies fought alongside him?
Milton’s words are true:
“His state is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed. They also serve who only stand and wait.”
The countless multitude proclaims salvation to God and the Lamb. But those too who lie on sickbeds testifying that a Father chastens them, those who die at an assassin’s hand in distant lands—they also are apprentices, waiting to be initiated into these same joys and labors. They too will one day fully obey His command, hearing the voice of His word—and that command is: “Love all men for my sake.”
4. There’s one more thought on this subject I dare not leave out. In much of Christendom’s calendar, All Saints’ Day is followed by All Souls’ Day. There may be good reason why we don’t observe the latter as we do the former: bound up with it is a notion that we care more for our departed brothers’ souls than God does, and that through our intercession, or some saint’s, His will toward them can be changed. Whatever custom feeds that irreverent, pagan-like idea must be given up, however much beauty it may seem to hold.
But we can reclaim the day, free of its dangerous associations. We can remember that the angels of God rejoice over one repentant sinner because God Himself rejoices. We can be sure that He who marks even a sparrow’s fall does not lose sight of a soul He has made. So we can be sure that all saints care for all souls. Their affection and power to sympathize and bless are not limited, as ours are, by time and space. They are limited only by the love of God itself—whose height and depth and length and breadth they can no more measure than we can, but which flows forth to them, in them, and through them forever.