Day 39 - Wednesday, January 6
Title: GLORIFICATION OF THE MESSIAH: WORTHY IS THE LAMB
Scripture: Revelation 5: 9, 12-14
And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.... Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.... Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth for ever and ever.

Poetry: 
Melchior Vulpius
by Marianne Moore

contrapuntalist—

              composer of chorales
    and wedding-hymns to Latin words
    but best of all an anthem:
      “God be praised for conquering faith
       which feareth neither pain nor death.”

We have to trust this art—
                                         this mastery which none
   can understand. Yet someone has
   acquired it and is able to
      direct it. Mouse-skin-bellows’-breath
      expanding into rapture saith

“Hallelujah.” Almost
                             utmost absolutist
   and fugue-ist, Amen; slowly building
   from miniature thunder,
      crescendos antidoting death—
      love’s signature cementing faith.

WORTHY IS THE LAMB

The Lamb who was slain lives for ever and ever! Marianne Moore’s poem to Melchior Vulpius, contrapuntalist, is apt. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison about the polyphony of life, suggests that God in Christ is the ‘cantus firmus to which the other voices of life resound in counterpoint.’^[1]  Handel’s Messiah catches the hearer up in the layers of praise acclaiming the worth of this Lamb, wave upon wave upon wave. The settled melody is a lamb who was slain but who now reigns, who is worthy of all acclaim. Both artistic image and Scripture passage invite us into a participative posture, adding our voice to the ‘crescendos’ ‘slowly building from miniature thunder’, of recognition and worship, joining with angels and elders. The art of the poet’s memorialized composer takes us up into a Hallelujah and an Amen even as the fugues of our lives play on, resounding without resolution toward death, yet ‘antidoting death’ in faith cemented by love.

Augustin Frison-Roche’s iconic retable shows the blood of the lamb flowing, from his side, enveloping and washing white the robes of those who have come through the great tribulation in the titular passage of Revelation 7:14. As a recapitulation of our Scripture from Revelation 5 where the 4 living creatures and 24 elders ascribe worship to the Lamb in the throne room of heaven, accompanied by myriads of myriads of angels, Revelation 7 includes those who have suffered as followers of this Lamb. Some of the visualized worshippers are winged, others not. We are included. We who walk in faith through trial and difficulty. They, we, will be guided to springs of living water by the Lamb, God will wipe every tear from our eyes. (Rev 7:17) But we are not effaced, homogenized, but remain in Revelation 7, a multitude from every nation.

Wonderfully, the miniscule historical events of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem opens up heaven to God come near. God who comes even to death, to establish faith by a blood that redeems. Frison-Roche’s desire is to draw viewers as souls closer to the truth of heaven and resurrection hope. His sacred, liturgical and funereal art, tinged by his own experience of fraternal bereavement, and in this instance produced in this studio while in pandemic lockdown, points to the hope and comfort in the face of death that God’s truth, particularly as laid out in Revelation, offers Christians, and through the church, the world.

Martyrs, witnesses unto death, stand in, typologically, for the church of Christ in Revelation. They stand firm in the face of death. How many of our sisters and brothers are standing firm in faith in the wake of waves of pandemic death? Are we worshipful this post-Advent season with them or even, more poignantly, without them? Certainly, as daily death tolls rise staggeringly in the US as I write, our hope for our Savior whose worth overcomes death, relativizes the proximate hopes of vaccination, social distancing, and track and tracing. Yet all these measures, about which we may be conflicted or disgruntled or reassured, are the contrapuntal responses of daily fraught love in step with the Lord Jesus who brings his church through tribulation. As our actions as Christians, in securing our public worship while honoring our vulnerable fellow sisters and brothers, neighbors and fellow-citizens, are tested and contested, we can look to the one who has broken the seals and opened the scrolls of history and its meaning (Rev 5:1-6, and Rev 5-7). ‘The sacrificial death of God’s Messiah is the event to interpret all events. It alone can offer human existence the assurance of cosmic meaning which is required. It justifies creation within history, and justifies history within creation.’^[2] As Advent closes, we are pointed ahead, by Epiphany’s gifts, to Lent and the fulfillment of Christmas God-with-us by God-for-us by his redeeming blood at the cross - All Praise to the Lamb!

Prayer
Open our eyes, O God, that we may see you enthroned on high. Open our ears that we may hear your messengers of peace. Give us the Spirit’s voice that we may join the unceasing song of praise, as the hosts of heaven cry “Holy!” And raise us up, that we may ascend upon the ladder joining heaven and earth, even the Son of Man who came down from heaven, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics 
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University

(Oliver O’Donovan, The Word in Small Boats. Sermons from Oxford, ed. Andy Draycott. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2010, p. 49.)

^[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison- Reader’s Edition, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2015, p385-386

^[2] Oliver O’Donovan, ‘History and Politics in the Book of Revelation’, in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection. Christian Politics, Past and Present, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004, p. 30.

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