They Who Have Come Out of the Great Ordeal

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
(Revelation 7:9-10,13-14, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

God gave George Fox a message, and a mission.

“If but one man or woman were raised up by his power,” God declared, “to stand and live in the same Spirit that the prophets and apostles were in, who gave forth the Scriptures, that man or woman should shake all the country in their profession for ten miles round.” 

The people of seventeenth-century England had access to the Bible—the King James Version had been around for nearly half a century—but they didn’t really get it, Fox felt. “And so they neither knew God, nor Christ, nor the Scriptures aright; nor had they unity one with another, being out of the power and Spirit of God.” 

Thus, in 1652, Fox and a small band of like-minded companions roamed England on foot, and “warned all people, wherever we met them, of the day of the Lord that was coming upon them.” They made their way in a northwesterly direction into Lancashire, until they came to Pendle Hill, rising many hundreds of meters above the surrounding countryside. “I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high,” Fox wrote years later—and, then, “from the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.”

That night, at a nearby inn, Fox’s vision expanded. “The Lord opened unto me,” he recalled, “and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in was about Wensleydale and Sedbergh.”

Bible-reading Friends would recognize that white-robed crowd.

Fox’s “great people” appeared in a portion of the Scriptures he knew intimately—the Book of Revelation, written in the late first century by John of Patmos. Early in his spiritual development, Fox reported, he had received “great openings concerning the things written in the Revelations,” which he tried to share with members of the contemporary religious establishment. They suggested it was a “sealed book,” too esoteric for lay people like Fox, “but I told them, Christ could open the seals, and that they were the nearest things to us; for the epistles were written to the saints that lived in former ages, but the Revelations were written of things to come.”

So when Fox envisioned a crowd that had come to know God and Christ and the Scriptures aright—a crowd that he would indeed gather around him soon after (minus the robes) at a site near Sedbergh called Firbank Fell—perhaps inevitably he saw the “great multitude” from the seventh chapter of Revelation, standing before Jesus and the throne of God.

In Resisting Empire: The Book of Revelation as Resistance, the Quaker author and pastor C. Wess Daniels describes that biblical multitude as “a beautiful tapestry woven together of all of humanity[,] a first-century vision of the beloved community.” He considers it crucial that “the oppressed and minoritized” stand closest to the throne and the Lamb—as the elder tells John the Revelator, “they who have come out of the great ordeal.”

Who wouldn’t embrace the promise of salvation at the far end of a great ordeal?

Although John had intended his apocalypse (literally, an “unveiling”) as a message to “the saints that lived in former ages,” we can understand why Fox believed it spoke to the chaotic conditions of Commonwealth-era England. The Book of Revelation has continued to fascinate Christians up to the present day, with people making all sorts of imaginative leaps to connect John’s imagery to the events of their time.

Quakers don’t seem to go much for literalist doomsday scenario interpretations of Revelation—at least not in the unprogrammed circles I know best. But John’s vision can still pack a spiritual wallop, as we’ll see in many of May’s messages. Because I think that many Friends, especially those in the United States, can relate to the feeling of living through a great ordeal right now. We may not face the explicit persecution Fox and his generation endured, but present circumstances call on us to let our lives preach more boldly than ever, at greater potential cost. Revelation does not flinch from the terror of such moments, but it also promises a happy outcome, when the Lamb “will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”