I’m working through Revelation (still, week 41 and I’m only in chapter 7) for our Adult Sunday School class and I’m really struck by the tone of this book. The expectation of the book is that saints will suffer. Again and again and again we find visions of these saints that have undergone persecutions of one sort of another. They are crying out for deliverance and imagery of having undergone persecution and suffering gets repeated over and over again. All of this is very clearly and cleverly paralleled with the Lamb.

Richard Bauckham did a fascinating study looking at the parallels between Revelation chapter 5 and 7. In Rev. 5 we find John weeping because no one is worthy to open break the seal and open the scroll.
Rev. 5:5: He is TOLD about “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered.”
Rev 5:6f: He SEES a lamb that had been slaughtered
Rev 7:4-8 He HEARS the number of those who had been sealed, the 144,000 lead by Judah. They are the army of the one on the throne
(Bauckham argues convincingly that this 144k is an army, OT census lists, in Rev 14 they are virgin young men…)
Rev 7:9 He SEES a multitude made up of every nation wearing white robes (persecution metaphor)

We hear tell of this conquering king and his army but when we look we see a lamb that had been sacrificed and his persecuted followers.

Again and again and again the New Testament keeps hammering that we follow Jesus through this narrative. If we enter into his death and sufferings we will enter into his resurrection. Baptism signifies this as Paul says clearly in Romans 6.

I’m also preaching through Luke (been in it on and off now since 07) and from there I have worked on my vocabulary of the age of decay and the age to come. The best way I can understand what Jesus is preaching and going in Luke is through the perspective of the ages and the relational polarity of each. Jesus lives out the polarity of the age to come, the relational life of the Trinity, self-giving to the other in love but in the incarnation he does this in the context of the age of decay. In Luke’s version of the sermon on the mount this comes out as all those “unrealistic” teachings of Jesus: turn the other cheek, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, be perfect like your Father in heaven (Matt), etc.

Whenever I preach those passages the more honest (and less churchy) members of my congregation are free to contest. “Do you know what happens in THIS world when you do this stuff?!” What is behind their questioning challenges is the expectation and assumption that what I am going to give them from the pulpit is advice on how to get what they think they want out of life. What do they want? They want what everyone wants. More money, more comfort, more power, more choices in life, more options, better situations, more experienced meaning and happiness. They see quite quickly and quite rightly that the recipe Jesus is handing out here will very quickly get them into trouble.

I find this expectations to in fact be operating broadly beneath the surface in all kinds of ways. We pray to get God to give us what we want. We go to church and are moral so that things will work out well for us in life. We so often do what we do fully expecting that our system of getting what we want out of life works better than everyone else’s and then in the end we get heaven too.

The dirty little secret is of course that this doesn’t work. The children of Christians get in trouble. Christians get cancer, heart disease and have car accidents just like the rest of the world. Christians who have harbored those expectations long enough then feel resentment when bad things happen to them or the discover they have done bad things and the consequences are painful. “Where was God when I needed him most? Didn’t I do for him? Why was he unfaithful in doing for me?”

Living the way Jesus says within the age of decay gets you exactly what Jesus got. The gospel is just exactly this. You’ve just got to follow the plotline through Good Friday to Easter.

Our consumer expectations really want to truncate the story at about Palm Sunday. Yeah, we expect some trouble, but like a good Disney movie we expect that the little bit of suffering and self-denial we’ve had to endure along the way will be made up for by our neighbors eventually coming around to honor and glorify us in a nice little parade. Doing good things to other gets good things done back to you. You try returning good for evil a time or two, and you keep it up for the nice people who start to come along and return you good for good, but you quickly trash the project for those who just keep returning evil to your good and you quietly note that Jesus’ program works well to a degree, but then you’ve got to reach for the sword to get the real work done.

It’s a lot easier to sell the “My Name Is Earl” Karma brand (do good things, good things happen, do bad things, bad things happen) than this following Jesus through the full story brand. Following Jesus requires that you believe him, all the way through the grave. Working Earl Hickey’s way is nice because the results come quickly, or so the 18 minute sitcom leads us to imagine. Jesus’ way requires endurance through a lifetime.

Jesus’ way seems irresponsible to this world. Hoping for a resurrection (or a soul filled heaven in our cultural imagination) is respectable as long as the chips on the table have value before the grave, but loosing chips all through life counting on God to make good at some future resurrection just looks wrong.

I hear the “life abundant” verse trotted out a lot. As the seeker wave diminishes and the emergent wave increases I tend to hear a lot more triumphalistic world fixing talk instead. Meaningful pleasure can be found in successful duty probably more deeply than in simply religious self-indulgence. This narrative of following Jesus all the way through? That’s a much tougher sell to people trying to make life work in the age of decay.