Who is Worthy?

When I was a kid, my dad took me to a “men’s business meeting” at the church that we were attending. At one point, my dad had proposed that we help a widow who was needing some assistance with her utilities. Sounds like standard churchy stuff to do right? But one of the other men at this meeting had some beef with this widow. And he started to become visibly agitated by the suggestion. Anyone paying attention could have picked up on the obvious social cues. Unfortunately, my dad wasn’t paying attention.

After a few minutes of dad rehashing the reasoning, this guy stood up and took off his jacket and said, “You wanna fight Cletis? (yes, that’s my dad’s name) Because’ I was golden glove in high school, and I reckon I could still take you.”

So in the book of Revelation, after Jesus writes to the 7 churches, John turns his attention to the vision he had given about what life was like in the Heavens. He sees a throne and a scroll, and a sea of glass. Now, sea in the Bible and specifically in the book of Revelation is the symbol for evil. The Jewish world knew the sea was the abyss, that was after all the place where the beasts came out in the book of Daniel.The sea was  But despite the presence of evil, God is on the throne and His purposes have not been undone. That’s what the sea means.  But what about the scroll?

N.T. Wright thinks that the best guess is that the scroll contains God’s secret mysterious plan to undo and overthrow the evil in the world. Somebody’s got to do something about the sea (cancer, AIDS, poverty, injustice). But who is worthy to do that?

In other words, John’s problem is our problem?

Did you know that in the Gospel of Mark, the first time that Jesus confronts true raw evil was when he kicks a demon out of a guy who had come to the synagogue? So the first time Jesus deals with evil in his ministry… It’s in church.

Then Jesus goes out to the desert, he spends 40 days in the wilderness (an obvious reference to the Israelites in the Exodus) and he is tempted by Satan (again like the Israelites) in the wilderness. But, and here’s the kicker, where they failed, Jesus’ succeeds. They clamor for power and control and to be like God. Jesus, who is actually God, doesn’t do that.  He doesn’t give into the temptation that Adam, Eve, and the Israelites gave into. He  is faithful to God’s purposes for His life and the world.

And the rest of Jesus’ ministry is done out of that.

Every funeral that Jesus goes to he ruins, every sick person he bumps into he heals, he can calm storms and walk on water. Because He is what it looks like to be the faithful human, he has bound up the strong man, so He speaks and Creation obeys.

Which brings me back to the Scroll in Revelation.

It’s interesting that  Revelation doesn’t start off with Jesus opening up the Scroll. He starts Revelation by reading a letter first to the 7 churches.He warns them each of their particular brokenness and holds up a mirror to the problems that they are trying to ignore. Yes, Jesus eventually lets his disciples partner with Him in His mission of setting the world right. They are going to do greater things than He did, but they are going to have to do them the way He did.

So then Revelation does something amazing! John tells us that he hears this: “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” He hears a direct quote from Jewish writings about the Lion of Judah.” A lion.  That’s what John’s expecting to see, but then he turns to see…

A Lamb.

The problem with the people of God is that we are people…and we want to be God. That’s kind of been the problem from the beginning. We have always been called by God to do something in the evil around us, but as hard as we try we keep coming back to the realization that the evil isn’t just “out there” it’s in us too. We start unity movements and then call it “The Church.”  We try to give generously to a cause and find out the senior Pastor has been embezzling the money. We fight for family values as we watch our own marriages fall apart.

We try to help widows and we end up getting in fist fights.

For all of us, in a thousand different ways, we try to be lions while we follow a Lamb.

The Temptation of Churches happens every day, For Ephesus, it was losing their love, for the church at Pergamum it was trying to hard to be relevant at the expense of being set apart. To the church at Laodicea it was loving money, and Jesus warns them to deal with the evil in them first before they turn to get the speck out of their neighbor’s eyes. Jesus wants to work in them before He works through them.

And when we start to get all indignant and self-righteous as we look at the evil in the world, maybe it would be good to borrow John’s question “We can’t fix this, we are too broken. So Who is Worthy?”

And the answer, of course, is the Lamb.