Belmont University Advent GuideSample

In the verses just preceding today’s reading from Revelation 5.1–5, John weeps bitterly “because no one was found worthy to open the scroll in the hand of God or even to look inside it.” John was no drama king: years earlier, he had recorded the gruesome details of the Lord’s crucifixion in terse, minimalist language. What could have made a man like that weep inconsolably just because a book couldn’t be opened?

Here in the scroll seems to be sealed the secret to the universe whose inaccessibility is a sentence of grim futility, life as a cruel joke eternally played out upon its helpless inhabitants. John is comforted by an angel who assures him that the Lion of Judah, the Root of David, terms of Messianic conquest and rule, has won the right to open the scroll.

There is paradox in these passages: we are directed to look at a Lion and what we see is a Lamb with marks of slaughter. We look for a victory and see that the victory was won through sacrificial death. It is through the lens of these paradoxes that the other passages for today take on a clarity and depth which they are not likely to have otherwise.

In the passages from Psalms 40 and 51 and Zechariah, the emphasis is on the fact that, in Chesterton’s words, “we become taller when we bow.” It is not through the performances of self-serving rites and rituals that we humans “open the scroll” of life’s meaning but from ever closer identification with God, His character of holy love and His purposes in this world and the next. The God who defines love longs for His love to be received and returned freely by those He has perfectly created and redeemed to do so.

We look and see both Lion and Lamb: we hold these two in our imaginations by the Holy Spirit’s help in an integrated whole where one image’s potency in no way diminishes the potency of the other. We bow and we grow tall in Him, the bowing and the growing in an organic interdependence as natural to our new selves in Him as height and weight grow together in a healthy child. We repent and that opens a gateway for the King of Glory to come in. We are sorry for our sins and that opens the door to His knocking.

Ruby Dunlap
Professor of Nursing