The Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham has released a beautiful short video with the punchline ‘come home this Christmas.’ The home that they have in mind is families coming home to each other, and home to church.
The key relationship is an estranged mother and daughter. It maps some of the pain of their estrangement over teenage and young adult years, hinting that the daughter may have got herself into financial trouble. Then in a final scene during a carol service that her daughter was once an angel in, the mother gets a loud phone call while the charismatic, robed, vicar is praying (to Jesus) to ‘send your Holy Spirit now, reveal yourself to every person in the room’, and that ‘those who feel far from you would experience now your love and goodness and delight over us.’
The call is from the daughter. She is outside and after a pause while they look at her, during which the carol O Holy Night fades to silent, the mother runs towards the daughter and they have a much longed for embrace. The caption on the screen then reads “COME HOME THIS CHRISTMAS.”
Aside from the vicar forgetting his Trintiarian lines (New Testament prayers are almost always ‘to the Father, in the name of the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit’ or simply ‘Our Father’…1) this is an on the money piece of theatre about the estrangements we all feel in this life and the longing we have for a miracle of reconciliation.
It’s a longing mirrored in eternity deliberately echoing Jesus’ story of a father estranged from two of his sons. One is estranged by attitude and the other by history and location. In that story the one who went far off, wasted by wild living, made it home safe to his father knowing he desperately needed mercy and forgiveness, the one who played it safe and thought he had stayed at home never really allowed himself to become his father’s son. He never seems truly home. It’s a story about our eternal relationship with Father God.
When the first-century church was weak, in danger of dying out and facing extreme persecution, Jesus reveals through John what ‘Coming Home’ will one day look like. He wants John and us to gaze on a throne.
As we move from the letters of Revelation 2-3 into Revelation 4-5 we get a whole new perspective on the world:
‘we turn from the church on earth to the church in heaven, from Christ among the flickering lampstands to Christ at the very centre of the unchangeable throne of God. It is the same Christ but an utterly different perspective.’2
Focusing on this can change our perspective on everything:
‘Our vision of the future tends to be too negative. We seize on the assurances of Revelation that one day there will be no more hunger or thirst; no more pain or tears; no more sin, death of curse, for all these things will have passed away. It will be better and more biblical however to focus not so much on these absences as on [what will] cause their absence, namely the central dominating presence of God’s throne.’3
When the throne is established on earth as in heaven that’s when we have really come home. We will have come home into the Kingdom where God’s people are in God’s place, under God’s rule, enjoying God’s bounty and provision and proximity for an unbroken eternity of joy.
The churches that Revelation is written to face a clear and present danger. An existential threat. For them the throne was the answer now, and the answer forever. As John Stott puts it:
“The churches of Asia were small and struggling in comparison with the might of Rome. What could a few defenceless Christians do if the imperial edict were to banish them from the face of the earth? Yet they need have no fear because at the centre of the universe stands a throne. From it the wheeling planets receive their orders. To it gigantic galaxies give their allegiance. In it the tiniest organism finds its life”4
As our children were growing up we would take them most years to the delightful retreat centre, Lee Abbey, in North Devon. After a few years of simply surviving there with the kids, relishing in the in-built child entertainments of an activity centre, a large house they could run around in, and scenery that can revive a soul, we found ourselves giving talks as well. These were opportunities to dig into a theme for a weekend, mid-week or longer in a summer holiday. In one ambitious year I decided that the New Year’s theme could be:
How ‘the joy set before you’ can help us make the most of the rest of our lives – beginning with 2024. We check out some of the highlights reels of what the Bible says about eternity, including Jesus being our stairway between heaven and earth. We touch on the end of the Narnia stories where ‘the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them’ and consider how our glorious future with God can shape our life now. [See more here].
This was one of those ideas that seemed simple, until I realised how much I had forgotten about Narnia. Then as I read more, I realised that CS Lewis was playing 3D chess where I was looking for noughts and crosses. As Rowan Williams puts it:
‘Lewis is trying to re-create for the reader what it is like to encounter and believe in God…The point of Narnia is to help us rise out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity – which is almost everything…the essential thing is this invitation to hear the story as if we have never heard it before.’5
I have long been a fan of Michael Ward’s thesis that Lewis knew what he was doing when he wrote the seven books of Narnia. His thesis suggests there is a deep coherence to Narnia. A christological story that teaches us of old gods, related to the seven medieval ‘planets’ of astronomy, that all teach us about the one God.6
Peter exclaims, ‘By Jove’ as he walks through the Wardrobe into Narnia, and that jovial book is a type of Jupiter, the bloodstained planet, and Kingly god. The fertile planet of Venus is behind the Magician’s Nephew, with the wicked Jadis playing the role of anti-Venus based on a Ninevan goddess Ishtar. And the Last Battle is represented by Saturn where:
‘Aslan does not appear at all until all the characters are dead, reflecting the nature of Saturn, the planet of (apparent) ill-chance and treachery and death. Aslan is here the deus absconditus, the God who is felt only in abandonment. Father Time with his scythe is a mythological character based on Saturn. In a surviving Narnian typescript, Father Time is named “Saturn,” but Lewis amended this to “Father Time” before publication in order to keep his planetary theme more carefully hidden.’
And then as I tried to find links with Revelation and Narnia I was helped by Daryl Burling’s insight that Lewis’ chronology is closer to Jesus’ prophecy of the end times in Matthew 24 than to the book of Revelation.7
Nevertheless, despite all these lenses there are insights that are helpful as we conclude our look at Revelation 4&5.
Remember that these chapters reveal a throne, a scroll and a lamb.
- A throne – from which God rules
- A scroll – the book of history, closed and sealed, held in God’s right hand
- A lamb that was slain – worthy to open the scroll and control and interpret history (but who is announced as being the ‘Lion of Judah’)
Remember the deep disappointment that no-one is able to reveal the mystery of history, until the lamb is revealed as worthy. The lamb takes the throne from God’s right hand, and sits with him on the throne as the creation (four living creatures) redeemed people (24 elders) and angels all worship him alongside God. He is worthy because he has been slain.
Then remember the Voyage of the Dawntreader to the Utter East. This is the book Ward says represents the Sun (one of the pre-Copernican medieval planets).
‘This is a story about a journey towards the rising sun. Aslan flies out of the sunbeam towards Lucy as an albatross; he appears in the room when she utters the spell to make invisible things visible; he is seen shining as if in bright sunlight, though the sun has in fact gone in, on Goldwater Island. Gold, of course, is the sun’s metal. The killing of dragons on Dragon Island is drawn from Homer’s Hymn where the sun-god Apollo is Sauroctonus, the lizard slayer.’
But as they reach Aslan’s home they have a strange encounter that has little to do with Apollo and everything to do with Christ (although nb: the ‘scattering light from his mane’):
‘But between them and the foot of the sky was something so white that even their eagle eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw it was a Lamb.
“For you the door to Aslan’s country is from your own world”… but as he spoke, his snowy white flushed into tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane.
“But there I have another name… Come, I am opening the door in the sky”’
Aslan’s home, Christ’s throne, is somewhere worth sailing to:
A previous generation would have heard the words ‘Come Home this Christmas’ as an invitation to enter their eternal rest. ‘George has gone home’ would have meant, ‘George has been promoted to eternal glory.’
During COVID-19 our biggest failing as a church was not talking about eternity. We had got out of the habit. To late-twentieth century people living for the present our marketing drive had become a Life Worth Living Now. We invited them to come home to a relationship with Jesus now, to church, to each other. We didn’t prepare them for the Lord of eternity. When COVID hit we had little to say to a nation suddenly faced with mortality, we couldn’t even invite them to church. We had forgotten how to prepare them for eternity.
But people facing death – like the Revelation churches – need to know we have a throne. We have a Lamb. We have a scroll. We have a destination beyond.
In his helpful message ‘Home for Christmas’ Bishop Paul Williams from Southwell and Nottingham reminds us of the power of coming home. He says that the good news of Jesus is that wherever we find ourselves this Christmas we are invited to find our true home with God because God made his home with us.
In Revelation this theme is taken up a gear. God not only made his home with us as a man for 33 years, he will also make his home with us forever as a Lion and a Lamb. Ruling in power. Slain for our sin. His throne will be at the epicentre of the New Heaven and New Earth he invites us to live in.
Come Home this Christmas, means being welcomed home by your Father forever. As wonderful as a reconciliation is in the here and now with loved ones (as in the prodigal son story and in the video), these moments point to our needed for a bigger Welcome Home still. A welcome home that gives you:
- A clear and confident expectation that you will one day get to see that throne which already dominates creation.
- A clear and confident expectation that we get to see that the Lamb on the throne
- A clear and confident expectation that you will see clearly the One whom CS Lewis saw as the ‘all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together.’
Dear friends,
You are Welcome Home this Christmas to an eternity that starts now… One Day you will Come Home to a throne you have been longing to glimpse all of your life. But in the meantime, give him your heart, mind, soul and strength, and you’ll find the throne can be built on earth as it is in heaven.
Read More in this Series
The Lamb Wins Whole Series Catch Up : Introduction: Chp 1: Hope is Here | Chp 2: First, Love: Ephesus | Chp 3: Fear Not: Smyrna | Chp 4: I Know: Pergamum | Chp 5: Tolerate This: Thyatira | Chp 6: Wake Up: Sardis | Chp 7: Hold On: Philadelphia | Chp 8: Knock, Knock: Laodecia | Chp 9: What Must Soon Take Place | Chp 10: Holy Forever | Chp 11: Most Blessed | Chp 12: One That Was Slain
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- Jesus teaches disciples to pray in his name John 14:13-14 (not to him), although Stephen when being martyred prays ‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit.’ Acts 7:59 ↩︎
- Stott, John, Through the Bible, Through the Year, 2020, 409.
↩︎ - Stott, John, Through the Bible, Through the Year, 2020, 410. ↩︎
- Stott, John, Through the Bible, Through the Year, 2020, 409. ↩︎
- Williams, Rowan. The Lion’s World: A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2012, 28. ↩︎
- Ward, Michael ‘Narnia’s Secret: The Seven Heavens of the Chronicles Revealed’ Touchstone, December 2007. ↩︎
- Burling, Darryl Eschatology in the Last Battle https://darrylburling.com/eschatology-in-the-last-battle/ (he is a little disappointed Lewis doesn’t share his pre-millenial theology). ↩︎
Your name is like honey 