Psalm 135.1-14
OT Reading: Song of Solomon 3.2-5 and 8.6-7
NT Reading: Revelation 1.12-18
Text: Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever (Rev. 1.18).
Christ is risen. This morning he met us at the empty tomb. And now as John ponders the truth about the risen Christ in his exile on the island of Patmos, we are swept away by a dazzling vision of one like the Son of Man who has triumphed over Death and comes to strengthen his beleaguered disciples. Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one.
The imagery that leaps out at us from these verses harks back to the apocalyptic visions of the prophet Daniel. In Daniel 7 [and 10] the prophet is given a vision of heaven. There he sees an Ancient One with white hair and white clothes who sits in judgment on a flaming throne surrounded by a vast court of servants and attendants. To him there comes one like a Son of Man, and he is given everlasting dominion glory and kingship over all peoples, nations and languages. Daniel falls to his knees before such power and majesty, as does John. But in both cases the awesome figure touches him, bids him not to be afraid, and entrusts him with a message. John receives a message of encouragement addressed to the seven churches of the province of Asia. If you visit Pergamon to-day, one of the seven cities to which John wrote, you can see how the temple to Trajan, which was being built as John wrote, would have dominated the acropolis. And if you read the letters of Pliny the Younger you can see how even a relatively civilised Roman Governor felt constrained to execute Christians who refused to honour the new super-god. In the triumphant figure of the Son of Man, the people of the seven churches are invited to see that if they suffer persecution and even death for the sake of their Master, like Him they will pass through death to arise crowned with glory and honour. An Easter message indeed.
But what is the Easter relevance of our Old Testament reading from The Song of Solomon? Many Christian commentators, following the lead of their Hebrew predecessors, have argued quite persuasively that these essentially secular love songs should be understood as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and the believer’s soul, or indeed of the relationship between Christ and his church. But I like to think that these poems are there to remind us that God’s love for each one of us burns with the same consuming passion that we are capable of feeling for one another. They suggest an intensity about God’s love for us, which I find both astonishing and deeply humbling. How could God possibly love us like that, pursuing us playfully yet urgently with his love, valuing us far more highly than we deserve, and with such total disregard for all our faults and failings? Yet it seems that he does.
This too is an Easter message. For one of the many wonderful things about the Easter story is the assurance it gives us that this passionate personal experience of love is just as deeply embedded in the heart of God as the majesty and power of the risen Christ that forces us to our knees. On that first Easter Day, the very first person to whom Jesus showed himself, most gently, was Mary Magdalene, whose passionate personality perhaps needed him more urgently than anyone else. And then he appeared to Peter, the most fiercely passionate of the disciples, distraught in his sese of guilt and grief and loss. These appearances were the acts of one who both knew and responded to love in all its passionate intensity, and they took precedence over any display of the vast power over all things that he had now received from his Father.
And so it is to this day. It is when we need him most that our risen Lord draws closest to us. He may come to us in a sudden blaze of passionate intensity that shakes us to the very core, so that we fall at his feet, there to receive the strength and reassurance that we so desperately need. But more often his gentle presence reaches out to us through the veil of our tears.
The humanity of his love is one with the divinity of his power. To each of us he says: Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever.