Worthy

Revelation 5:6-14

April 18, 2025 (Good Friday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

There is no other day on the calendar like this day. Oh, certainly there are holidays, even significant Christian holidays, sprinkled all throughout the year. Easter is just around the corner, when we remember the resurrection of Jesus. After that will come Pentecost, when we remember the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Christmas celebrates Jesus’ birth and All Saints Day celebrates the ones who have shaped our spiritual lives. All of those days make sense. They have at their center something really good, a real reason to celebrate. But there is no other day on the calendar like this one, a day when we remember the cruelest injustice in human history and we dare to call it “good.” No one looks at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and calls it “good.” No one talks about the stock market crash and calls it “good.” But today, the day we remember Jesus nailed to a Roman cross, is called “Good Friday.” We look at the horror of the cross, the ugliness and the brutality of the crucifixion, and we call it “good.”

And it’s not because we know what’s coming. That’s cheating. It’s not “Good Friday in Anticipation of Easter.” It’s not called “He’ll Be Back Again Friday.” No, this day stands alone. It’s “Good” Friday all by itself, because of what happened on this day. And some people believe we’re crazy, to celebrate the brutal murder of our teacher, our rabbi, on a cruel Roman cross as “good.” How could such an inhumane act be turned into something good? From a worldly perspective there is no way. I mean, yes, certainly good things could come out of it. Good things can come out of most anything. But we dare to believe that the act itself, the death of Jesus on the cross of Calvary, was a good thing and the world says, “No way.”

That’s why we need another perspective, a heavenly perspective, one which John gives us in the final book of the Bible. John is an old man by now, exiled by the Roman emperor to the island of Patmos, and lest you feel badly for John, let me tell you that Patmos is actually quite a beautiful island. I visited it several years ago and in the afternoon a group of us hiked to the top of the island. It was a beautiful view, but one of my friends pointed to a little tiny rock of an island a bit further out and said, “If I were the Roman emperor, I would have sent John to that island.” But John went to Patmos, and while he’s on that island, Jesus visits him. Some say Jesus gave him a roadmap to the end of time, but what John says he actually got was a “revelation of Jesus Christ.” He got a glimpse of Jesus as a reassurance that no matter what happened to him, Jesus was with him. Despite the hard times the Christians in his day were going through, they were not forgotten. The book we call Revelation begins in eternity with a glimpse of the worship that takes place all the time around the throne of God. John is trying to take it all in and write it all down, and when you read the book, you get the sense that he can’t write fast enough. Paul, who also seems to have gotten a glimpse of that worship, said it was beyond trying to describe (2 Corinthians 12:4), but John gives it his best shot. And there comes a point when a scroll full of God’s purposes needs to be opened, but no one is able to do so. That’s when a lion shows up—“the Lion of the tribe of Judah” (5:5). He can open the scroll. He can reveal God’s purposes. He is worthy to do so.

And when John turns to look at the Lion, what he sees instead is a Lamb, “looking as if it had been slain” (5:6). And I don’t know what that looked like or what we will see when we enter eternity; I don’t think any of that is John’s point. It’s the response of the citizens of heaven that John wants us to see, and over and over again in the verses that follow one word keeps coming back to refer to this Lamb. That word is “worthy.” “You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals,” they sing (5:9). “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain” (5:12). Worthy—the Lamb is worthy.

He is worthy, according to John’s vision, because of the cross. He is worthy because by his death, his willing sacrifice, he bought back “persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.” Not that he paid a ransom to a Father who was angry with us; that’s a pagan idea. The cross is not about God punishing his Son for our sin. The cross is about what the Son endures in order to forgive us. The cross is about Jesus revealing what God is like, that there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do to turn his people, as another author has put it, “from hopeless rebels into useful servants, from sin-slaves into ‘a kingdom and priests.’ From rubbish into royalty” (Wright, Revelation for Everyone, pg. 56; Zahnd, The Wood Between the Worlds, pg. 16). The letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus this way: “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame…” (Hebrews 12:2). And what is the “joy set before him”? The joy is found in this: because of what he endured, you and I can be forgiven. We can be made right with God. In some way that we don’t completely understand and could never really explain, the worst act of evil in history because a way of grace. Jesus, the Lamb of God, took the worst we could do to him and through it conquered the evil of the world. Not through a sword or with an army. Not though military, economic or political might. No, he conquers with his own blood (cf. McKnight, Revelation, pg. 109), given freely. That, according to Revelation, is why Jesus is worthy.

The response of eternity to the cross is not sorrow or crying or even lamenting. We can understand those who stood by the cross with great sorrow, but eternity shows us a different perspective. When they witness the Lamb who has been slain, Jesus the Lamb of God, the response is worship. “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,” and the song goes on in quite a dangerous way: “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” (12:12). And you say—what’s so dangerous about that, pastor? We sing those sorts of things to Jesus all the time. Yes, we do, but think about who this was originally written to and the world it was written in. For the Jew, to give those things to anyone other than God was blasphemy, and to sing those things about a man who was killed on a Roman cross, one who by their own law was considered “under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23), would be worse than blasphemy. To worship this convicted and murdered criminal who claimed to be God might get you killed along with him. And it certainly led to severing family and community ties. You don’t worship a man on a cross. For the Romans, their world was centered around power and wealth and wisdom and all the rest. Who was supposed to receive such things? Not a man they had nailed to a cross. No, the emperor was the main one worthy of worship and worthy of receiving those things, though others were constantly posturing to receive those things themselves. But the emperor is the representative of the gods, and might even be a god himself. You might worship other things, but ultimate allegiance was given to the emperor, to Rome eternal.

But this small (at the time) band of Christians dared to believe that somehow, this man on the middle cross, a rabbi who had never been trained, a man who drew crowds and also repulsed them—he was the only one worthy of worship. And power. Wealth. Wisdom. Strength. Honor. Glory. Praise. No one and nothing else was worthy. And many of them would stake their lives on and give their lives to him because they believed that so firmly. Which leads me to ask: to what do we give those things? What was power over our lives? What do we do with our wealth: grasp onto it ourselves or use it for Jesus’ sake? What do we trust for wisdom: TikTok or Jesus the Lamb? What is the source of our strength: our reputation, our education, our fitness program or is it a Lamb who has been slain? Honor. Glory. Praise. To whom are these things given? Only to the one who is worthy, the man on the middle cross.

Not only is Jesus on the middle cross; in his vision, John sees the Lamb standing at the center of the throne of God (5:6). That’s a reminder to John and to us that Jesus is the “heart” of God (cf. Mulholland, Revelation, pg. 161). He’s at the center of everything—the center of the throne, the center of the three crosses on the hill outside Jerusalem, the center of the lives of those who follow him. Everything centers on him and what he does or what he did then. He gave his life. He made possible the forgiveness of the sin of the world once and for all. He conquered the world by shedding his blood. He made it possible for men and women to not only have a relationship with God the Father here and now but to begin a relationship now that continues for eternity. “The blood of Jesus calls every prodigal son and every wayward daughter back home to the Father’s house where the feast of reconciliation is prepared” (Zahnd 24). Paul put it this way when he wrote to the Ephesians: “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13).

Years ago, the cartoonist Johnny Hart, who often included Christian themes in his newspaper strips, had one of his B.C. characters composing a poem that went like this:

Now, who can call Good Friday ‘good’

A term too oft misunderstood

You who were bought by the blood of His cross

You can call Good Friday ‘good.’

First of all, can you imagine that running in any newspaper today? But second, can you allow that image of the cross to bring you to worship? With all we have uncovered this Lent about the cross, have you seen again that there is only one who is worthy? And will you worship him with everything in you? Tonight, we will once again hear the story of the cross and experience the darkness of this day. At the same time, as we hear the story, we will remember again the goodness of this day as we cast our gaze on the Lamb that is slain. May our hearts focus this night on the one who is worthy.