The Four Horsemen Ride Still

 

Long before Hi-Def television brought live athletic events into our living rooms, our grandparents relied on newspapers. 

Only a few sports writers were able to give readers a sense of the true intensity of a game, but one of the best was Grantland Rice. In 1924 he wrote what many believe is the best lead in football history.

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Yesterday (they) struck again as Notre Dame beat the Army, 13 to 7, with a set of backfield stars that ripped and crashed through a strong Army defense with more speed and power than the warring cadets could meet.

The scriptural Four Horsemen are not unknown in the twenty-first century. When the four Cartwrights fiercely galloped their horses into the television camera, millions thought of the Apocalypse. More recently, if you read this week’s New York Daily News, you saw cartoonist Bill Bramhall addition of a fifth horseman adjacent to war, famine, pestilence, and death: MISINFORMATION.

In 2018, Veronica Tate wrote in the Salt Lake City Daily Herald about the four horsemen of American politics. She noted that Republicans and Democrats are locked in a loveless marriage, bound by the four horsemen of Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling.

Mark Rosenberg, President of Florida International University, took a more positive approach by citing four women in FIU’s medical college – an epidemiologist, a nurse-paramedic, an emergency management specialist, and a clinical health services manager – as the Four Women AGAINST the Apocalypse.

The original Four would have been a horrifying image for first century readers, thundering off the parchment on the I-Max screens of their imaginations.

It’s not just the horror of four lusty horses charging off the page, it’s the notion of what they represent:

The White Horse, in lieu of a clarifying footnote we wish John had provided, has sent modern interpreters in several directions. The horseman is thought to represent Christ or, perhaps, the Anti-Christ. Or, perhaps it represents the Roman Empire in its good days. Or – most famously, perhaps, pestilence. 

Some prognosticators speculate the white horse represents war, but most believe that honor goes to the red horse. Its rider is shown with an upraised sword that could be interpreted as attack or a declaration of war. It has also been interpreted as a prediction that the Roman Empire, once so unified and prosperous, is about to divide and begin a long collapse.

The Black Horseman, brandishing scales for weighing, has long been seen as a harbinger of famine.

And the White Horse is death.

None of these images would have surprised John’s readers because they were constantly focused on Christ and the Gospel and their lives within the Roman Empire. They had experienced pestilence, war, famine, and death. They did not have to over-think what John was covertly communicating. The Four Horsemen were not omens of things to come. They were emblems of things they were experiencing every day of their lives.

So it is with us. The horsemen are not so much warning of us horrors to come as reminding us of things that are: war, pandemic, poverty, and death. Instead of horses, the bearers of these omens are the seated braying pundits on Fox News and CNN.

These threats are as real now as they were in the first century and throughout all time. 

Anyone, then or now, who reads about the Four Horsemen and turns away in despair will miss the point John is trying to make. 

Wait. There’s more in the next chapter.

There will come a time, John submits, when those who go through this “great ordeal”

will gather in peace before God.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

    the sun will not strike them,

    nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

    and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (Revelation 7:16-17)

This no pie-in-the-sky promise. War, pandemic, poverty and death will not go away. All of us will struggle with health and check book challenges all our lives. We will despair over new virus variants and argue among ourselves about the best way to deal with them. We will face wars, some of us very directly when loved ones are called into harm’s way, others of us as we sit in growing gloom in front of our television sets. 

We will face, in ways that John could not have imagined, the intensifying effects of climate change, including hurricanes like Henri, disappearing shorelines, unbearably hot summers, raging wild fires, rain when it should be snowing in Greenland, and desperately cold winters. 

One observer has suggested that there is a fifth horseman in our day, and that is us, because we are the cause of this latest plague. 

Be that as it may, John is urging his readers – then and now – not to despair. He envisions a glorious future:

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!” (Revelation 7:9-10)

This is a beautiful poem, of course. It’s a metaphor. The future may not take the form of an international gathering of white-robed people. There may be no actual throne, no lamb in the ovine sense, no palm branches, no syncopated shouting.

But the metaphor does summarize the truth that God sent Jesus to be present with us and share these dangers.

Our redemption by the blood of Christ does not make these menaces go away. But this salvation – by the blood of the metaphorical lamb – gives us the spiritual strength to face these menaces in our earthly lives.

God’s plan, as John is unveiling it in Revelation, is that through the death and resurrection of God’s Son, no one who believes will die.

Those who believe will have the strength to stand amid the pests and perils of earthly life. 

Because, as John assures his readers, “Salvation belongs to our God.”