The Book of Revelation, with its visions of Armageddon and a new heaven, of seven spirits and seven stars, of seven seals and a scroll, has not shaped our faith and practice very much. And we are in good company!

Vast sections of the ancient church did not regard this book as Scripture. Luther’s hesitations are on record. Calvin’s are perhaps betrayed in that he wrote commentaries on every book of the New Testament—except Revelation.

In our time, the last book of the Bible has not gained easy acceptance among heirs of modernity. Its cosmology—its way of understanding the foundations of the world—doesn’t square with Astronomy 101. And isn’t our egalitarianism shocked by a vision of Jesus Christ that finds tattooed on his thigh, "King of kings and Lord of lords" [19:16]?

Despite the church’s long distrust of Revelation, the book persists both in the canon of scriptures and our culture. And for the moment, that’s all the warrant we need for the lion and the lamb of chapter five.

Scene One: The heavenly monarch holds in his right hand a scroll fastened with seven seals. We later learn that this scroll tells the conclusion of the human story. When a strong angel with a loud voice asks, "Who is worthy to open the scroll and break it seals?" No one anywhere in the universe is found worthy [Revelation 5:2-3].

Scene Two: Our court reporter, the seer of Revelation, begins to weep uncontrollably. According to his account, "Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and it seven seals’" (5:4-5).

Scene Three: No sooner has our elder stage whispered to the stricken seer to expect the Lion of Judah, that who should appear but "a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain" (5:6).

We are told to expect the symbol of majesty, and we are given the symbol of meekness. We are told to expect one who is sovereign, and we are offered one who has suffered. We are told to expect the Lion of Judah, and we behold the Lamb of God. Expect a lion, and what do you get? A lamb! Some comfort. What’s going on here?

When the lamb appears instead of the forecasted lion as the one who is worthy to take history in hand, neither the sobbing seer nor the comforting elder reacts with any surprise, shock or confusion. It’s as if the lion and the lamb have already become synonymous, that to behold the Lamb of God who suffered under Pontius Pilate is to behold the Lion of Judah who reigns and shall reign forever and ever.

Here we have a revising and redefining of ultimate reality. For the God made known in Jesus Christ is one whose majesty is in meekness and whose sovereignty is in suffering. The one who is lionized is the living lamb who was slain. God’s utter vulnerability is God’s victory.

In Jesus Christ, our seer perceives that the lion of justice and lamb of love are not Jekyll and Hyde opposites in God but one reality. If this is true, then we have glimpsed a vision that contradicts those that still presume to govern our world.

For the world we so often experience is, on the one hand, a sentimental one, in which "love, sweet love" is proclaimed without regard to matters of deep injustice; or, one the other hand, a tyrannical one which liquidates "dissidents" or deports refugees, all according to the letter of the law, but without regard for mercy. Love without justice is sentimentality. Justice without love is tyranny, the enemies of our full humanity.

Some years ago, The New York Times magazine carried a feature story by Nicholas Gage entitled, "My Mother Eleni: The Search For Her Executioners."

Gage’s mother, Eleni, was a Greek peasant. She was one of 13 villagers tried, tortured, and then murdered by communist partisans on August 28, 1948.

According to her son, Eleni’s only crime was to have smuggled him out of the village before he could be shipped by the communists to a "re-education" center. For this deed she was executed.

Thirty-two years later her son, now a New York Times correspondent, quit his job and devoted all his efforts and savings to tracking down his mother’s killer.

In a story that reads like a spy-thriller, Gage penetrated layers of silence, aliases, and false leads, and finally found the man who had ordered Eleni’s execution, the feared Katis.

Gage came upon Katis dozing in his comfortable seaside cottage, much as David—Judah’s lion—had once overtaken sleeping Saul. Gage writes, "I stood staring at the man who had killed my mother, for a few minutes, perhaps more."

But as he readied his revenge, Gage recalled how his "mother did not spend the last of her strength cursing her tormentors, but, like Antigone, she found the courage to face death because she had done her duty to those she loved…. Killing Katis," Gage confessed, would have given "me relief from the pain that had filled me for so many years. But as much as I want that satisfaction, I have learned that I can’t do it. My mother’s love, the primary impulse of her life, still binds us together, often surrounding me like a tangible presence. Summoning the hate necessary to kill him would have severed that bridge connecting us and destroyed the part of me that is most like Eleni."

Gage had pursued the truth about his mother and about her killer. Every dirty fact had been unearthed at last. Like a roaring lion he had ranged over Greece seeking to vindicate his mother’s love. He had finally cornered the killer and confronted the truth. Justice was being executed—and then a moment of grace interposed. A love, which would not let him go, grasped him. A love, which acknowledged ugly reality, held him. A love, which enlarged his humanity beyond the genuine need for revenge, overcame him. And he acknowledged its sovereignty. Vindication took place by overcoming vindictiveness.

That’s the God we discover in Jesus Christ.

The one who like a lion tracks us down, penetrates our disguises and our aliases, and confronts us with the unflattering truth about ourselves and our lives, not to devour us, not to destroy us, but to destroy all that dehumanizes and disfigures us.

In Revelation 4:5, every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth crowns the lamb with praise and thanksgiving. Yet we do not sense from the seer of Revelation that this universal shout of acclamation will be coerced or forced out of willing subjects. The victory of God is not in our compulsion but in our recognition that the Lamb of God who has stooped to shoulder his cross is the Lion of Judah who has our destiny in hand.

"To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever!" And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" and the elders fell down and worshipped" (Rev. 5:13b-14).