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Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.—Rev_22:14.
I always regard this as a test text. I should like to ask every Sunday-school teacher, every district visitor, every worker in an inquiry room, to take it, just as it stands, and expound it. And if he stumbles over it, or muddles it, I should like to send him back for a while to a form in God’s school, there to learn Christ from Christ Himself, before he ventures to teach others. I said “learn Christ”; not theologies, not systems of doctrine, but Christ. Christ is here in every word, Christ Jesus, God’s Anointed Saviour of poor sinners; “all and in all” to souls. If a man cannot preach Christ from this passage, He does not know the Gospel so as to be a fit teacher either of babes, or of strong men. It is not a difficult passage, if a man has first the root of the matter in him, and then has sat, as a little child, at the feet of the Holy Ghost to be taught, as He alone can teach, God’s beautiful equipoise of truth.1 [Note: A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, ii. 105.]
The text tells us (1) who are the Blessed of the last Beatitude, and (2) what are their Privileges. The Blessed are “they that do his commandments,” or, as in the Revised Version, according to another reading, “they that wash their robes.” Their privileges are right of access to the Tree of Life and entrance through the gates into the city.
The Blessed
Dean Vaughan speaks even more strongly against the reading. If this is the saying of Christ, he says, we must bow to it. If it pleased Him to leave as His last word to the Churches the condemning sentence, it is not for us to remonstrate or to rebel. If it was the will of Christ to replace His Church, by the very latest of His revelations, on a footing of meritorious obedience, it must be so, and, though with downcast looks and tottering steps, we must set ourselves to follow. Yet we cannot check the rising thought, “We trusted that it has been he which should have redeemed Israel.”
But is there this difference between the readings? There is, and more than this difference, if they who “do his commandments” have not yet “washed their robes”; or if, to put it from the other side, the washing of the robes were not one of the commandments that had to be done, and indeed the sum and substance of them. It is quite true that our right of access to the Tree of Life is not of works, but of grace; yet when we have been saved by grace we proceed to keep the commandments of God. This is the evidence of our salvation, and the enjoyment of it. “If a man love me, he will keep my words”—that is doing His commandments—“and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (Joh_14:23)—that is enjoying access to the Tree of Life.
Swete has some difficulty in deciding between the readings. If the Greek letters were changed in the course of transcription, he thinks it slightly more probable that “wash their robes” arose out of “do his commandments,” than that the reverse occurred. But the evidence of the documents is in favour of “wash their robes”; and in the Johannine Writings the phrase is “keep his commandments,” “do” occurring only once, in 1Jn_5:2. On the whole, then, he thinks, “wash their robes” may with some confidence be preferred.
1. I need not remind you, I suppose, says Maclaren, how continually this symbol of the robe is used in Scripture as an expression for moral character. This Book of the Apocalypse is saturated through and through with Jewish implications and allusions, and there can be no doubt whatever that in this metaphor of the cleansing of the robes there is an allusion to that vision which the Apocalyptic seer of the Old Covenant, the prophet Zechariah, had when he saw the high priest standing before the altar clad in foul raiment, and the word came forth, “Take away the filthy garments from him.” Nor need I do more than remind you how the same metaphor is often on the lips of our Lord Himself, notably in the story of the man who had not on the wedding garment, and in the touching and beautiful incident in the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the exuberance of the father’s love bids them cast the best robe round the rags and the leanness of his long-lost boy. Nor need I remind you how St. Paul catches up the metaphor, and is continually referring to an investing and a divesting—the putting on and the putting off of the new and the old man. In this same Book of the Apocalypse, we see, gleaming all through it, the white robes of the purified soul: “They shall walk with me in white; for they are worthy.” “I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number,” who had “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
All three made their way to the beautiful valley of Ivirna, where the lands of the chief Manaune were situated. The welkin rang with merry shouts of Kua tau mai Rori! (“Rori is found!”). The news spread all over the island the same day, so that crowds came to see this poor fellow. And a miserable skeleton he was, his skin almost black through continual exposure. A feast was made for him by the people of Ivirna, but he scarcely tasted the unaccustomed food. He was then led in procession round the island by his protector and others; the crowning point was for him to bathe in Rongo’s Sacred Fountain, in token of his being cleansed from a state of bondage and fear, and being allowed to participate freely in all the good things of the dominant tribe.1 [Note: W. W. Gill, From Darkness to Light in Polynesia, 234.]
White was widely considered among the ancient nations as the colour of innocence and purity. On this account it was appropriate for those who were engaged in the worship of the gods, for purity was prescribed as a condition of engaging in Divine service, though usually the purity was understood in a merely ceremonial sense. All Roman citizens wore the pure white toga on holidays and at religious ceremonies, whether or not they wore it on ordinary days; in fact, the great majority of them did not ordinarily wear that heavy and cumbrous garment, and hence the city on festivals and holidays is called “candida urbs,” the city in white. Especially on the day of a Triumph white was the universal colour—though the soldiers, of course, wore not the toga, the garb of peace, but their full-dress military attire with all their decorations—and there can hardly be any doubt that the idea of walking in a Triumph similar to that celebrated by a victorious Roman general is present in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse when he uses the words, “they shall walk with me in white.” A dirty and dark-coloured toga, on the other hand, was the appropriate dress of sorrow and of guilt. Hence it was worn by mourners and by persons accused of crimes.2 [Note: W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 386.]
2. The foul robes can be cleansed. The text does not state the method. That has already been declared. “They washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev_7:14). In his Epistle, St. John has the same paradox: “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1Jn_1:7). St. John saw the paradox, and he saw that the paradox helped to illustrate the great truth which he was trying to proclaim, that the red blood whitened the black robe, and that in its full tide there was a limpid river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the cross of Christ.
In one of the letters written by Dr. Dale during the first year of his ministry at Carr’s Lane, he says: “If all the truths which have been realized and made precious eras of our religious progress, all the facts which at different times have assumed to our spiritual consciousness the hardness and grimness of a rock, all the wisdom which has come from the lips of others, or has been painfully learnt from doubt and difficulty and sin and folly, could be kept visibly and consciously before the mind, how different our life would be. Why, even that blessed text, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin,’ which sometimes comes down on the heart like a whole heaven of peace and joy and glory, will at other times be as meaningless as the darkest sayings of the prophets, or as powerless as the vainest utterances of human folly. And then just as one is bemoaning its darkness, it will suddenly blaze out in astonishing brightness, and almost startle the heart by its revelations of safety and strength.”1 [Note: A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 79.]
3. But it is not a past washing only that is spoken of here. It is also a daily washing of the robes of the redeemed even now. It is not, “Blessed are they that have washed.” The Greek is the perpetual present—“Blessed are they that keep washing.” Having once washed the whole body in the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, they have need constantly to wash the feet, soiled afterwards, and again and again, by contact with the dust and the miry clay of this world. “Blessed are they that evermore wash their robes,” by an ever-repeated application of the “blood of sprinkling” alike to the accusing conscience and to the sin-stained life.
It is a most dangerous thing to fall into the habit of letting any committed sin pass sub silentio (as it were) between man and his soul. Scripture indeed counsels no morbid self-scrutiny. Harm may be done by it. A man may walk timidly and slavishly before God by reason of it. We are not taught that many express words, or perhaps any express words, need pass about particular wrong thoughts, acts, or words, in direct converse on the subject between God and the soul. But if so, it must be because the intercourse is so thorough that it need not be microscopic. The man does not wash each separate spot and stain, because he washes the whole robe, and them with it. One way or another, the tablets of memory and the tablets of conscience and the tablets of life must be sponged clean every evening—and in only one way, by what Scripture calls “the blood of the Lamb”—that is, the atonement made once for all for all sin, applied in earnest faith to the individual man’s heart and soul in the sight of God.
I have been told, says the Rev. D. M. Henry of Whithorn, Wigtownshire, that in this district in days gone by, those who were communicants of the Church might be known by the “washings” on the ropes in their greens, or, if they had no greens, on the dykes and hedges near their houses on the week before the communion Sabbath. And on one communion Sabbath morning, as I had occasion to go over the dewy fields very early, I met a working man near a rock in the middle of a field well away from the town, to whom I said, when I came up to him, “Dear me, James, you are early about.” To which he replied, “Ay, I always come out at sunrise on the communion Sunday to prepare”; and then something told me quite plainly that he had been at prayer at the rock-side before I had appeared.
4. The washing of their robes is done by the blessed themselves. “Blessed are they that wash their robes.” On the one hand is all the fulness of cleansing; on the other is the heap of dirty rags that will not be cleansed by our sitting there and looking at them. The two must be brought into contact. How? By the magic band that unites strength and weakness, purity and foulness, the Saviour and the penitent; the magic band of simple affiance, and trust, and submission to the cleansing power of His death and of His life.
A long list of uncouth, monosyllabic names at the end of Dr. Gordon’s church directory attests the patient interest which the Clarendon Street Church has taken in the Chinese of the city. A school was organized many years ago for these strangers. Its proportions grew rapidly. More than one hundred laundrymen from all parts of Boston and from adjacent towns meet each Sabbath.… That conversion is much the same experience among all peoples can be clearly seen from the following:—
Chin Tong came into the mission school a raw, uncouth, unresponsive Chinaman. Unlike most of his fellows, he was in his person very unclean and unsavory. The teacher to whom he was assigned worked with him month after month without making upon him the least apparent impression. One Sunday the text, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” was marked in his New Testament and assigned for the next lesson. When he turned up the following Sabbath the verse was almost obliterated from the page by the incessant movement of his finger back and forth over the lines. One word alone puzzled him, the word “cleanse.” However, this was easily explained to one whose daily work was over tubs and ironing-boards. During the next week a young man called twice at the teacher’s home, but would not leave his name. When the hour for the Chinese school came round again, the teacher took her seat in the accustomed place. Presently a man in Occidental dress entered and sat down beside her. It was Chin Tong, but so changed as not to be recognizable. His cue was off, his hair shingled, his long finger-nails pared, his face clean as a new coin, his clothes new and well cared for. The text had done its work. “Jesus Christ make me clean inside and outside,” he explained. Heart, mind, and person had been transformed.1 [Note: A. J. Gordon: A Biography, 341.]
Their Privileges
What are the characteristics of this city of God into which the blessed of the last Beatitude enter?
1. It is a city of social activities.—Genesis began with a garden; man’s sin sent him out of the garden. God out of evil evolves good, and for the lost garden comes the better thing, the found city. “Then comes the statelier Eden back to man.” For surely it is better that men should live in the activities of the city than in the sweetness and indolence of the garden; and manifold and miserable as are the sins and the sorrows of great cities, the opprobria of our modern so-called civilization, yet still the aggregation of great masses of men for worthy objects generates a form of character, and sets loose energies and activities, which no other kind of life could have produced.
Why do our citizens appear to care less for London than their citizens care for Florence, or Venice, or Rome, or Pisa? Is it because we are interested mainly in a few famous thoroughfares and buildings and have never yet begotten a civic patriotism enlightened and powerful enough to care for the back streets and obscure houses? Are we satisfied if our millionaires are richly housed in Park Lane, that their destitute neighbours should be rack-rented for the use of a cellar in St. Pancras or Soho? It is the old story. We perish for lack of vision. The cure is to breed citizens who shall be penetrated with the civic ideal. No man with the New Testament in his hand can complain of lack of guidance in the matter of citizenship. Here is Paul, the hero of the Apostolic age, boasting his local patriotism to the city of Tarsus, proud of its commercial and educational traditions; glorying, secondly, in his imperial citizenship, and looking beyond the narrow boundaries of Tarsus to the frontiers of the Roman Empire to whose civilization and citizenship he was free-born; and, finally, claiming the supreme privilege of his citizenship to the Kingdom of God, his membership of a society that acknowledges no limitations of race, or tongue, or land, but exists to create a universal brother-hood on the basis of a universal righteousness. There are still thousands of excellent Christians who admire and extol Paul’s devotion to the Kingdom of God, who have no use for his local patriotism or his imperial citizenship. Yet the lesser flags do not challenge the supremacy of the august Standard that is the symbol of Christ’s universal rule.1 [Note: C. Silvester Horne, Pulpit, Platform and Parliament, 182.]
In a speech he delivered at the opening of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1878, the Bishop said: “I have no wish, like Mr. Ruskin, to retire into the solitude of a Westmoreland valley. I like to hear the thud of the steam-hammer and the whistle of the locomotive. I like to live in the midst of men and women who are dependent on their industry for their daily bread. Where I find content and good relations subsisting between men, that is my bit of blue sky, of which I want to see more and more.”1 [Note: T. Hughes, James Fraser, Second Bishop of Manchester, 242.]
2. It is a city of reunion.—Scripture leads us to associate the reunion of dead and living with a world from which all idolatry and all selfishness will have been for ever cast out by the unveiled presence of that one Person whom to know is life, whom to serve is glory. St. Paul used to speak of meeting there his own converts, Asiatic and European, and seemed to say that it would scarcely be heaven to him if they shared it not with him. “He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us—with you.” “What is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?” So large was his conception of the amplitude of the glory, and of its characteristic features of human sympathy as well as of Divine communion.
Surely there, amidst the solemn troops and sweet societies, the long-loved, long-lost, will be found again. I cannot believe that, like the Virgin and Joseph, we shall have to go wandering up and down the streets of Jerusalem when we get there, looking for our dear ones. “Wist ye not that I should be in the Father’s house?” We shall know where to find them.
We shall clasp them again,
And with God be the rest.2 [Note: A. Maclaren, A Year’s Ministry, i. 52.]
3. It is a city of abiding.—The city is the emblem of security and of permanence. No more shall life be as a desert march, with changes which only bring sorrow, and yet a dreary monotony amidst them all. We shall dwell amidst abiding realities, our-selves fixed in unchanging, but ever growing, completeness and peace. The tents shall be done with; we shall inhabit the solid mansions of the city which hath foundations, and shall wonderingly exclaim, as our unaccustomed eyes gaze on their indestructible strength, “What manner of stones, and what buildings are here!”—and not one stone of these shall ever be thrown down.
The third essential development of Marius’ thought is that of the City of God, which for him assumes the shape of a perfected and purified Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world’s seers—from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante—the ideal of the City of God. It is but little developed in Pater’s “Marius the Epicurean,” for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this “dear City of Zeus” shining in the clear light of the early Christian time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City, as it were some celestial new Rome in the midst of it.1 [Note: J. Kelman, Among Famous Books, 61.]
The tree of life stands out in the first page of God’s Word as a sacramental symbol to unfallen man. It was a visible and tangible thing—a tree growing in the garden like other trees, but so inscribed with the word of God that in the use of its fruit unfallen man could receive the spiritual assurance of God’s love and favour. In this respect it differed from the other trees of the garden. They were God’s permitted gifts to satisfy man’s animal wants; but the tree of life has regard to the higher needs of his spiritual nature, which even then had a genuine sacramental instinct, and hungered for some tangible assurance of God’s abiding grace.
When Adam sinned, the way to the tree of life was no longer open to him; and this healthful sacrament became at once forbidden fruit. In very mercy its use was forbidden to him, and put beyond his reach. Evidently its withdrawal has a peculiar solemnity about it: it is to save man from a fresh blunder and a new sin. The dream—that if only, by any means, he could retain the coveted assurance of God’s love, all would be well, and all his disobedience would be neutralized, and all his sin forgotten—must at once be rudely broken. Even more than that, there is a dreadful possibility of his destroying all hope of restoration, if he rush in and claim the old symbol of God’s love. For him to feed on the tree of life, when in a state of sin and anger and shame, would practically mean a second death.
But when we have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, we have again as good a fitness to approach the tree of life as in primeval innocence. It is our fitness that constitutes our right. It is in being cleansed that the new right to come and eat is valid. Not unsullied innocence itself can come with surer step to have the bread of God’s own life given to it than impurity that has been graciously cleansed away. The pardoned rebel, in his robes washed white, has a title to life as good as the angels, who have never defiled their garments.
I am going to a city
Where the living never die,
Where no sickness and no sorrow can molest;
From this body to release me
He is speeding from on high;
He will greet me and escort me to my rest.
Charles M. Alexander, the singer-evangelist, once told the following story of the origin of the hymn of which the above is the chorus:—
“I always like to know how hymns came to be written, and so I asked the man who wrote this hymn how he came to do so. He told me that a friend of his went from New York City to the country. He was far gone in consumption, but in the deceptive nature of the disease thought that he was growing better day by day, till one morning he said he was so much improved in health that he was returning to the city the next day. The writer of the hymn went to see him in the afternoon, and found him in bed again. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to the city tomorrow?’ The sick man’s face lighted up, and he answered, ‘I’m going to a city, but it is a city where the living never die, and where no sickness and no sorrow can come.’ After his death, his friend, remembering his words, wrote this hymn.”
1. Access to the tree of life is a matter of right, not of reward. This we might illustrate by reference to the case of a pupil who is being promoted from a school of one grade to a school that is of a grade higher. He is promoted, not for the purpose of rewarding him for the faithful work he has done in the inferior grades, but because the superior grade is the place for him. He has acquired the “right” to a place in that grade. That pupils are sometimes promoted before they have acquired the right, and prematurely advanced out of consideration of favouritism, is undoubtedly the fact, but advancement on such grounds invalidates the whole scheme of promotion and, in all ordinary relations,—in everything, one may say, except in religion,—is amenable to universal disapproval. Whether in schools or in matters of civil service, individual merit is regarded as the essential condition of promotion; and to set up some other principle of preferment in matters of the future world, and to assume that there is some other legitimate title to the tree of life than simple individual right to the tree of life, and right to a residence in the celestial city, is to break with what we all recognize as justice in affairs of mundane experience, and to let our future condition be decided by a so-called system of Divine determination too arbitrary and evasive to be tolerated by any responsible human society. If, then, the pupil is promoted, it is not to reward him for his work; and if he is not promoted, it is not to punish him for his lack of work. There is a place where he belongs, and in any well-regulated system of school administration the place where he belongs is the place where he will be kept or put.
2. But if the right is more minutely examined, it will be found to be—
(1) A right of promise.—“This is the promise which he promised us, even the life eternal” (1Jn_2:25). The promise is made sure by the washing of the robes in the blood of the Lamb. “For how many soever be the promises of God, in him is the yea: wherefore also through him is the Amen (2Co_1:20).
(2) A right of inheritance.—“As many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God” (Joh_1:12). And this Johannine assurance is confirmed by St. Paul: “Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal_3:26). “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom_8:17).
(3) A right of fitness.—This is the special right of the text, and it is as sure as the others, however astonishing that may be. “Made fit for the inheritance of the saints in light”—that is one thing. That is the entrance which is abundantly ministered unto us through the gates into the city. Fitness also for fellowship so close and intimate that because He lives we live also; and that “I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” That is the right to the tree of life.
Almost beyond belief it seems blessed in the eternal kingdom to “have right to the Tree of Life.” All is of God’s grace, nothing of man’s desert. Of His grace it pleases Him to constitute such a privilege our “right”; and our right thence-forward it becomes, whilst first and last all is of grace. “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.” As the hart desireth the water-brooks, doth our soul so long after that Tree of Life? Surely yea, if we be not lower than the beasts that perish.… Alas! not “surely” at all, unless our present longings can stand one test which too often shames them. For already we have a right to our own precious Tree of Life, Christ in the Sacrament of His most Blessed Body and Blood. Whoso longs not for Christ here, wherefore should he long for Him there? Because our Saviour longed for us on earth, we are convinced that He longs for us in heaven. If we long not for Him on earth, who shall kindle our longing for Him in heaven?
Good Lord Jesus, our only Hope; because we cannot help ourselves, help Thou us. Because we cannot quicken ourselves, quicken Thou us. Because we cannot kindle ourselves, kindle Thou us. Because we cannot cleanse ourselves, cleanse Thou us. Because we cannot heal ourselves, heal Thou us. For Thou hast no pleasure in our impotence, lifelessness, coldness, pollutions, infirmity. If Thou desire our love, who shall give us love where-with to love Thee except Thou who art Love give it us? Helpless we are, and our helplessness appeals to Thee.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 537.]
Literature
Grant (W.), Christ our Hope, 327.
Johnston (S. M.), The Great Things of God, i. 320.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Miscellaneous, 267.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 380.
Maclaren (A.), A Year’s Ministry, i. 43.
Meyer (F. B.), Blessed are Ye, 131.
Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 239.
Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 80.
Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ii. 105.
Ramsay (W. M.), The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 386.
Rossetti (C. G.), The Face of the Deep, 537.
Wickham (E. C.), Words of Light and Life, 94.