A sermon on Revelation 22 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

We come to the last week of the Paschal or Easter season, a season in which we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the way his resurrection gathers us all up into his victory over death. But here we are tonight, feeling like death is a formidable enemy indeed, one that seems to have the upper hand in our shared life at present.

We had barely finished the funeral rites for Eliz and Ian’s son William when the news came through that our beloved friend and longtime church member, Sylvia, had died after three months in hospital battling multiple medical problems, none of which would necessarily have been fatal on their own, but were when they all seemed to hit her at once.

So how do our celebration of resurrection victory and this confrontation with the continuing power of death relate to one another? And might tonight’s Bible readings have anything to contribute to our consideration of that question?

Not only have we reached the end of the Paschal season and the end of Sylvia’s life, but in tonight’s readings we heard the end of the book of Revelation which is the very last page and the last words of the Bible. The very last word of the Bible – you could have probably guessed it if you hadn’t known – is ‘Amen!’ It is a word with no exact equivalent in our day to day language. ‘Too Right’ is perhaps as close as we get in individual speech, but ‘Amen’ is usually a group expression. ‘And so say all of us’ is as close as I can come up with. And when you remember that it is not just closing the Revelation to John but the entire Bible, that’s not a bad note to finish on: “And so say all of us!”

It raises an important question though, especially as we contemplate this juxtaposition of endings: “what it is we are saying ‘Amen’ to?” What exactly is it that we are affirming if we join in with this cry of ‘So say all of us’? 

It would be a bit too easy to say “the Bible, we’re saying Amen to the Bible”. That might just sound like we were patting ourselves on the back and saying we’re good Bible-believing Christians without it actually making a jot of difference in our lives. We can far too easily reduce the Bible to a slogan; a mere bumper sticker, for all it affects us. It would certainly not be making any clear connection with our question about resurrection and death. 

If we’re not careful we could do exactly the same thing if we say that it is Jesus that we’re saying ‘Amen’ to. ‘Jesus’ may be a perfectly good answer, the ‘correct’ answer even, because we clearly heard him saying in the reading tonight, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Or in other words, “I am the whole story, from A to Z.” So our final ‘Amen’ to the whole story is an ‘Amen’ to Jesus Christ. But if we just say that like a slogan and congratulate ourselves on getting the right answer it might not be worth much more than a bumper sticker either.

When Jesus says, “I am the whole story, from A to Z,” it is not a Muhammad Ali type ‘I-am-the-greatest’ statement, although we might want to make such a statement for him. Nor is he suggesting that the whole Bible was actually talking about him and that you’ve just got to crack the code to see him in every page. There are people who see the Bible that way, but such a view always seems to reduce the Bible to a big detective novel and distract people from actually living out a faithful response to the God that it bears witness to.

What I think Jesus is saying is a little more subtle and a whole lot more earth-shattering than that. It is also a whole lot more relevant to us as we try to come to terms with Sylvia’s death. Rather than saying that he can himself be seen in the whole story of the Bible and the whole history of the world, it’s the other way around. He is saying that the whole story of the Bible and the whole history of the world can be seen in him, in his life-story. 

The distinction is subtle, but important, so I’ll try to make it as clear as I can. If Jesus was saying that he was in the whole story, from A to Z (which incidentally might be true too, I’m not sure), it would simply be a statement about the details of that history, or at the most, a statement about the nature of God’s involvement in that history. Was Jesus at work in the cosmos prior to his birth or wasn’t he? That kind of stuff. Probably nothing that’s going to help you deal with real life loss and grief, or inspire you live life differently when you get out of bed tomorrow morning.

But if Jesus is saying that the whole story of the Bible and the whole history of the world is summed up in himself, that is, by contrast, a statement about meaning. It is a statement that enables us to see the story of the Bible and the history of the world and the stories of our own lives in a whole new light. It tells us that when we immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus Christ we are immersing ourselves in the story of life itself. 

When we look at this life which was lived in passionate commitment to liberating the godlikeness in all people, to breaking the grip of injustice and hostility, and to writing love into the very fabric of the universe, we are looking at the quest of every life, at the yearning deep within the heart of every one of us. 

When we look at the suffering and apparent defeat of his death, we are looking at the story of what the callous and corrupt powers of this world inflict on everything that embodies true goodness and love. When we look at his resurrection from the dead we are looking at the only possible reason why love and mercy and hope have not been utterly extinguished – the fact that death cannot entomb them, that God’s power to keep raising them up again is stronger than even the formidable forces of death, bitterness and destruction.

And what we are also seeing in this is yet another layer of the great picture of reconciliation throughout the book of Revelation and throughout the Bible. This great reconciliation, this marriage of heaven and earth is seen in Jesus Christ himself, for in him we see the story of God becoming one with the story of the world. Our story becomes his story and his story becomes our story. As Michael Leunig put it, “That which is Christ-like within us shall be crucified. It shall suffer and be broken. And that which is Christ-like within us shall rise up. It shall love and create.”

When we see our stories becoming Jesus Christ’s story, we catch a taste of hope, because Christ’s story contains the promise that suffering and brokenness are not futile and are not the end of the story. Christ’s story contains the promise that Sylvia’s sickness and death are not the end of the story, and Sylvia would have certainly been one to tell us that she had, in baptism, handed her unfolding story to Jesus to be subsumed into his story.

It’s certainly not just our own stories either. The Bible is full of stories which become Christ’s story and which, through Christ, become our stories too. A people suffering and enslaved, break free, passing through a seemingly impassable obstacle, and then wander in the wilderness, unsure of whether freedom is better than slavery, before finally receiving their promised land of life. 

We know how that story is gathered up in Christ’s story, because we have been hearing echoes of it throughout the Paschal season as we speak of Christ’s Passover from suffering to the promised land of resurrection life through the deep waters of death. And we know how often it is our own story; how often we find ourselves stuck in a no-man’s-land between the security of slavery and the terrifying unknown of the promised land, unsure of which way to go, and yet somehow irresistibly drawn onwards towards life. 

In Sylvia’s Funeral Eucharist this coming Thursday night, you will experience how these stories are drawn together in our ancient liturgical tradition. It will be one part of a journey that we undertake each time we face the death of one of our fellow pilgrims on this journey into Christ’s story. While Tuesday night’s Prayer Vigil will feel a bit more like a return to Lent and give us opportunity to prayerfully express our grief and our need of one another on the tough road of suffering and death, Thursday night’s Eucharist will sound a very different note. It will sound much more like the liturgies of this Paschal season, a celebration of the promise and hope of resurrection life. If that was the only liturgy, it might sound like we were in denial, and trying to smother our grief with a premature rush to joy, but as part of a liturgical journey it makes sense as a stage in the story and helps map out the pathway for us.

You will also notice in that funeral Eucharist liturgy that there will be a strong focus on how Sylvia united herself to Christ in baptism. This is not to be misunderstood as implying that baptism is just a kind of insurance policy and we now want to remind God that he is thereby now obligated to welcome Sylvia into resurrection life. Instead it is symbolising this fusion of Christ’s story and Sylvia’s story and our stories. The funeral liturgy echoes the baptismal liturgy because in baptism we surrender up our lives and begin our immersion into the death and burial of Jesus, and in death, our immersion into the death and burial of Jesus is brought to its completion, its fulfilment. Sylvia is now finally fully immersed with Jesus in his death and burial, and she will now be raised with him to resurrection life.

The same things are happening in our liturgy each and every Sunday, and especially during this Paschal season that is now drawing to a close. They are simply given a more explicit focus in the funeral Eucharist that marks the death and coming resurrection of a follower of Jesus.

And since these stories are always whispering through our liturgy as we gather around our Lord’s Word and Table, perhaps I should stop talking about them now and we can return to listening to them in our prayers and our communion at the Table where the body broken and the blood poured out become the bread and wine of the new life of the risen Christ, nourishing us to rise with him and fulfil our stories. 

Even now we stand waiting. We come to the last page of the Bible and the last Sunday of Pascha, and it is not complete. Something is missing. The story points us towards something that is yet to be fulfilled. Something for which we hunger and thirst. Something for which we yearn. Something for which the Bible itself seems to be yearning, as in its last paragraphs, all it can say is “Come, Lord Jesus, Come.” 

And we stand here, affirming that Christ is the first and the last, the A to Z, but suddenly realising that our story and his story is still somewhere around W or X, still with a bit to come. In a world where death still threatens us all, we yearn for fulfilment and our prayer is “Come, Lord Jesus, Come.” And so in the end, our ‘Amen’ is not to a final closure, but to a fervent prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come. And so say all of us!”