Most scholarship of the last few decades on the book of Revelation has focused on its
colonial conditions and heated, even forceful, political engagement, making conflicting
conclusions about to what extent it “reproduces” or “resists” imperial ideology. Of particular
focus has been the striking image of the lamb on the throne, an image that
ambiguously imparts both conquest and victimhood. This essay builds on and steps to
the side of this work by addressing the image of the lamb on the throne as an expressive
and emotionally, rather than ideologically, ambivalent image. Placing this image alongside
other affectively rich spectacles in Revelation’s context, I suggest that the enthroned
lamb gives voice to conflicted feelings about imperial life: attachment and loss, extravagant
dreams of sovereignty and victory, as well as the painful realities of vulnerability
and subjection, all in complex inter-implication.