Fr. Thomas Hopko: What we are going to do tonight, tomorrow night, and the next night is something rather risky, at least for me, but I decided I’d try it anyway since I’m among friends, and that is my intention is to read through the entire book and to make selected comments on it as we go through it all. This is kind of the opposite way that we normally would do things or that we’ve done things in the past or that I’ve done things in the past, because this book of the Apocalypse of John—that’s what it’s called: Apocalypsis to Ioannou, the Apocalypse of John—is controversial in every way. I mean, it’s just controversial in authorship, its place in the canon, its interpretation in Church history, how it’s to be understood, how it’s to be interpreted.

In the patristic era, there’s not many interpretations at all. There’s only one complete commentary that I know of, by a certain Andrew of Caesarea—however, don’t know who he is. [Laughter] He’s called “Saint” in some secondary literature, but I never found him in the calendar. No one knows quite who he is, although a wonderful biblical scholar in California, a presvytera, a woman married to a priest, Dr. Eugenia Constantinou, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on that, which I’ve read through.

In more recent time there have been more commentaries: a very famous Fr. Bulgakov in Paris has a full commentary; Archbishop Averky in the Russian Church Outside Russia has a line-by-line commentary. He also says that probably in old Russia, 19th century Russia, there were 80 or 90 commentaries on this book, but they’re pretty much inaccessible, and they’re of very, very varied quality and style.

But there is still this whole debate about how it’s to be understood. What is it, anyway? What is an apocalypse? There’s plenty of apocalyptic literature, just like there are plenty of gospels, plenty of acts, plenty of epistles, and only a few of them got into the canon of the Church that we believe is the Church. The rest were rejected. So it took a long time for the Apocalypse of John to make it into the Bible, but it ultimately did.

But if you’re interested in any of those kind of things, I would say borrow this from Fr. Paul. I think you have a copy of this, right?

C1: We have it in our library.

Fr. Tom: You have it in the library? And you can hear me hold forth about all of these various issues: authorship, writing, location, literary genre, what is an apocalypse, where does it come from, all those kind of things; which Church Fathers were violently opposed to it, which Church Fathers affirmed it, which Church Fathers completely neglected it. It is a controversial writing.

However, what we do want to say is that there is no doubt, no doubt at all, that following St. Athanasius the Great in his festal letter in the fourth century, you have the Apocalypse included in the books that are to be read by the Christians. Then there’s books that are not to be read. Then in the Quinisext Council—that’s the canons of the [Fifth] and [Sixth] Ecumenical Councils—the Apocalypse of John is included in the canon, in the books that receive the Church’s seal of approval to be read.

However, that being said, it’s never read in a Church service. You’ll never go to an Orthodox church and hear the reading from the Apocalypse, although references to it are all over the place, and as a matter of fact, as we’ll see, I hope, the very liturgy itself is taken from the Apocalypse. It probably is a liturgical book to begin with, and then once it gets written and once we have the visions that are there, then they are taken over by the Church as the Church developed its public worship, its sacramental worship, based on the Torah of Moses, actually, in the Old Testament. It helps immensely if you know the Bible, generally speaking, and particularly the apocalyptic parts of the Bible—Ezekiel, Daniel, in the Old Covenant, the Law of Moses, the Torah. If you know these things— Zachariah, who has the four horsemen and the two witnesses and all those kind of things.

But just the one last word till we get into my selective commentary here. I’m just going to read it and talk about it, do it backwards, so to speak. Just one thing more I would want to say. This kind of literature is for insiders. It’s an insider book. By the way, the Gospel of St. John is also an insider book. St. John’s Gospel is read in our Church only between Pascha and Pentecost when there’s no catechumens. You preach Matthew, Mark, Luke, the theological gospels; once you come in and accept the Gospel, then you are brought into the inner mysteries, the deeper mysteries of the faith.

And it would certainly be the case that the mystery of all the mysteries, as we’re going to see, the revelation about the revelation is the Book of Revelation, is the Apocalypse of John, that has been affirmed for the faithful people to read and to contemplate. But as I say, there’s very little commentary until modern time. There’s no patristic commentary, so to speak, at all. John Chrysostom, for example, never mentions it. Amphilocius of Iconium is against it. He says it’s a spurious book, shouldn’t even be there. So it’s controversial, but it’s there now and we’ve got it, and we’ve got to do something with it, right? Especially nowadays when people are interested in this kind of stuff.

But here I would just say something very outrageous. I would say this, God forgive me, but if a person is not living within the tradition of the Church in which this was produced and affirmed through the history, I just don’t see how anybody could possibly understand it. It’s bad enough if you’re an insider. [Laughter] It’s bad enough if you’re within that very setting that the book is speaking about and bringing us insight into. So that being said… And if you want to talk about these things more, we can do it later.

One more thing that I would say, by way of introduction, is that reading this book through… Apocalyptic literature basically has this quality: it has to deal with what’s going on, what the people are experiencing because they’re believers in God. This Apocalypse of John would have to do with what the Christians at the time were going through and experiencing, and it’s written in a cryptic language—symbolical, numbers, and so on—so that they would be encouraged, they would endure, they would remain faithful, they would not apostatize, and that they would have some insight into what is happening and what it means for them. That being said, however, it then becomes a kind of a model for the Christian community at all times and in all places, all through history, just down to the present day. So every Christian community, practically, reading this book, always felt that, “Oh, what’s going on is what’s happening to us!”

In a sense that’s true, but it’s also happening to the people who come after us, and it’s happening until the end of the ages. Here, of course, the classical apostolic Christian faith believes that once Christ is crucified, raised, and glorified and his Spirit has poured out, the end of the ages has come. It’s already here. We just suffer for it, bear witness to it, be faithful to it, until the Lord returns again in glory. And every generation of Christians has to do that, and they have to do that in their own way, but the pattern, the consecrated scriptural pattern about what happens and how it works is in this book. So it’s an early Christian book, obviously, but it applies to every age and generation, and it would apply to us.

However, this would mean that we would never, ever, ever identify any of the part of it with a particular historical happening. You know, that’s what people do do. For the Protestants the Pope of Rome was the whore of Babylon. For the Catholics, it was Martin Luther. For the Old Believers in Russia, it was Peter the Great. I mean, you know, there’s always these sons of perdition, men of lawlessness, the beast, the dragon—they’re always all over the place, and it’s a perennial reality in which Christians live.

One point, just to make from the beginning: people think of the Apocalypse, they think of anti-Christ. Well, the word “anti-Christ” is not in the book; the word “anti-Christ” is not found in the Apocalypse. It’s not used by the author, whoever that author is. But that author is connected with the Church of John, Asia Minor. By the way, we have Onesimus in vespers. He was the runaway slave that Paul told Philemon to take back. According to Church legends, he was the first bishop of Ephesus, who gets one of the letters. So who knows? He might have been the bishop of that church when this was written! So that’s an interesting point; we just don’t know.

In fact, Fr. Paul was kind of saying that what he knows we’ve gone through together and so on, but when you said it, I thought of the line of St. Paul, which is very pertinent for us to get started tonight. The Apostle Paul said in the Corinthian letter, the first one, “Anyone who says he knows does not know yet how he’s supposed to know.” [Laughter] If you say that we know, you don’t yet know. So you’ve got to be a little bit more humble, and certainly we have to be humble with this book, because, unlike, I don’t know, the gospels or the writings of Paul, where we have loads of commentaries, and there were historical controversies and so on, we don’t have this with the Book of Revelation.

So what I’d like to do is to do a backwards method, is to just read it and comment on it, and then that would show, hopefully—hopefully: we live in hope—what kind of literature this is and what it may have meant—we don’t know that—but what it means is much more important than what it meant. [Laughter] What it means for those who believe in the Lamb who was slain and is risen again and sits upon the throne with the one only God whose Son he is and all of this is inspired in us in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, this is what we would like to do.

Of course, also my commentary is very subjective, is very selective. We can’t talk about everything, but I’m just going to pick out parts that I think could be helpful to us, and hopefully helpful to you; if you would go back and read it yourself carefully and go through it, it might be something that could be helpful to you. So this is a beginning; this is not an end. It’s just something to whet the appetite and get us started. Okay, so let’s do it.

The word “apocalypse” means “revelation.” That’s what the word means, it’s what is revealed. This is a revelation to John, and in the tradition of the Church, it was John the Theologian, the disciple of Jesus, who was living in Ephesus, in Asia Minor, at the time. Certainly the Book of Revelation and the Gospel according to St. John are within the same tradition. You can tell that just by reading it and how it’s written. There may even have been another John, John the Elder, the Presbyter, who was a disciple of John the Theologian, who actually did the writing. That’s a possibility. It might be that different people were writing within that particular community also, so we don’t know that. But it is definitely Johannine. It comes from that part of Christianity, Asia Minor Christianity. That’s where he was.

Now it says, “The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants.” So God gives to Jesus this revelation to show to his servants, and we are those servants. “Which must soon take place, and he made it known by sending his messenger”—it says “angel” here; angel in Greek is messenger, right? It’s why they have wings—“to his servant, John.” One quick commentary. This whole business of “soon”: “what must soon take place.” If you interpret that chronologically, you’re in big trouble, because it’s 2,000 years later, and that ain’t usually “soon.” [Laughter] However, “soon” can mean this is what’s happening right now to us, and then the next generation could read it and say, “This is happening to us, too,” and “This is happening to us, too!” And of course, one of the difficulties in the New Testament was that the first Christians, probably Paul, thought that the Lord was returning pretty soon, chronologically. In fact, 2 Peter, which is an apocalyptic book also in the Bible, has to explain what “soon” means. He says with God, a thousand years is like a day and like a watch in the night, and what God calls soon is not soon, but we always live in function of that immediate coming, the imminent coming. For us, it must be theologically and spiritually always soon. You have to live in expectation of it all the time.

When it comes to the chronological point… And here I want to say something again, very strongly. Many people—most people—interpret the revelation as if they were interpreting things that were going to happen through history, trying to figure out when the end was going to come. So they try to figure out this and figure out that. Here one thing is very clear. We have a commandment of our Lord God and Savior, Jesus Christ, not to do that. It’s one of the few times when they asked him the question: “When will the end come?” He said, “None of your business!” [Laughter] “It is not for you to know.”

It is not for you to know, and he even went so far as to say it’s for the Father alone, not even the Son, not the sons of God. And your job is to be ready, waiting, watchful, always saying, “Come, Lord Jesus!” every minute and not trying to figure out when he’s going to come chronologically, because as a matter of fact, theologically he’s already come, and he’s already with us and he’s already glorified and he’s already on the throne with the Father and for us the end of the ages has already come. St. Paul says it in his letters: “The end of the ages has come upon us.” And in the book of Acts, St. Paul himself says, “It is not for us to know the times and seasons. That is hidden to God alone.”

So I would say if anybody is using this book to try to figure out when the end of the world is coming and what’s Armaggedon and Iran and Palestine and Israel, they are simply—I’m tempted to say blaspheming the book, because that’s not what it’s about. It’s just not what it’s about, and if you try to read it that way, you’re not reading it faithfully to what it is as an apocalyptic literary book that has its place within the canon for Christians of every age and generation. In other words, I would say we’re forbidden to do that, and anybody who’s doing that is not following the commandment of God. We have to be ready, we have to be watchful, we don’t know, and we don’t know. But it is what is taking place.

Then he says he knows by his messenger, the angel, “who bore witness to the word of God and to the witness of Jesus Christ.” Here I have the RSV in front of me. It says, “witness and testimony.” Those are the same words in Greek. So the Apocalypse is a revelation and it is a martyria, it is a bearing-witness; it’s a testimony, a witness to the word of God, and of course in Johannine literature Christ is the word of God, and that’s going to be one of his names in the Apocalypse. In fact, he’s got two names in the Apocalypse: the word of God and the lamb of God, and that shows it’s most likely a liturgical book, because when you go to worship and pray, you have Jesus as the word—and on our altars we still only have the four gospels, not the whole Bible, not the whole New Testament: it’s Christ who is the word of God. And for Christians, the word of God is a person; it is not a book. And the Bible is not a Christian Quran; it is not! We don’t even know which books are in it, and it took ten centuries to figure it out. So we are not bound to some book that then is, you know, Bart Ehrman corrupted and all that stuff. It’s simply not our way of looking at it. This word of God and then Jesus is called the lamb, which is the name for our eucharistic bread in our Church, 28 times in this book, we will see.

But in any case, “...even to all that he saw. Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written here, for the time is near.” And it’s always near. We live in function of the time being near. That’s how we live as Christians. It’s interesting here that it’s called a prophetia. It’s called the martyria, it’s called an apocalypsis, and it’s called a prophecy. Some people say, “Ho, ho! A prophecy! Therefore it’s going to tell us what’s going to happen, because prophets foretell the future.” That’s not the first meaning of the word “prophet”; it’s not. The first meaning of “prophecy” in Scripture is the one who can pronounce the word of God for what is going on now. It’s the one who can say, “Thus says the Lord!” And even to speak conditionally: “You keep acting this way, that’s going to happen to you.”

But if you take Paul—and Paul here is important, of course, although this is John literature—when he’s dealing with all those gifts and charismatics and all those people in Corinthian community… Someone once said the Corinthians made it into the Bible the same way Pontius Pilate made it into the Nicene Creed. [Laughter] For how bad they were. But in any case, he says, “Seek most of all to prophesy.” And we’re going to see that in this book we’re called a kingdom of prophets and priests, all of us together, all who are baptized, all who have been sealed with the Spirit, all who belong to Christ, all who have shed their blood with the Lamb, all who are children of God.

But prophecy, St. Paul says, is three things. It is consolation, edification, and exhortation in times of tribulation. It’s nice in Latin: Consolatio, exhortatio, edificatio. That is 1 Corinthianss 14:3: “Seek first to prophesy.” And to prophesy, and this book is a book of exhorting people to fidelity, building them up in the face of adversity, and comforting them in time of affliction. That’s what the book is about.

Then it says, “Blessed are they who read and blessed are they who hear.” So that’s very nice, because you’re blessed and I’m blessed, because I’m reading and you’re hearing, so we’ve got the blessing of God on us without a doubt. [Laughter] “And keep what is written here.” The last line of the book—because all biblical literature is chiastic; you begin in a certain way and then you go through everything and then you end up in the same way and you’re back to where you were in the beginning—it’s going to say a line that is in the Torah of Moses; it’s going to say, “Anyone who adds to this book will receive the curses that are in this book, and anyone who takes away anything from this book will also perish.” So in the Mosaic law it said you don’t add, you don’t take away, and it’s the same thing about this book. We’ll see when we get to the end, hopefully on Thursday night, if everything goes well.

Here I just can’t resist saying—I’m wasting my own time—that particular text was very important in Church history in the relation of Eastern Orthodox to Western Christians, because in the old polemical times when Christians used to fight with each other about what the faith is really about, the Orthodox always accused the Western of either adding or taking away. They said, “The Romans, the Latins, have added, and the Reformed have taken away.” And you shouldn’t add, and you shouldn’t take away. It’s kind of an interesting historical thing.

The book itself, its structure—it’s worth saying this in the beginning—it begins with seven letters to the seven churches. It has an intro, and then it has seven letters to the seven churches. Then you have seven sets of visions. So you have seven times seven visions. You have the vision of heaven, then you have the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven visions of the dragon’s kingdom, the seven visions of the worshipers of the Lamb and worshipers of the beast, and the Lamb is a counterpart to the beast, just like the woman clothed in the sun is going to be a counterpart to the scarlet harlot. There’s a holy trinity; there’s an evil trinity. There’s the dragon, the harlot, and the beast; then there’s God and the Lamb and the Spirit, the Trinity.

Then you have the vision of the bulls of God’s wrath, the vision of the fall of Babylon, which is gone, and Babylon is a symbolical thing, too. Then you have the seven visions of the end of Satan’s evil reign and the beginning of the reign of the righteous. Then you have the ending of the eschatological vision that comes at the end that we already experience in the Church here and now, particularly in liturgical worship, when we gather as Church to worship God through Christ as the Logos-Word and as the Lamb of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

What we’re going to see right now is that’s when this book was written. That’s when it was given. It says, “John, to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace, from him who was and who is and who is to come.” Note, it’s not “who is, who was, and who will be”; it’s “who is, who was, and who is coming,” because God is coming in the Person of his Son at the end, and we live in function of his coming soon. And that was one of the earliest Christian prayers: Maranatha; come, O Lord Jesus, come quickly. So the calling of him to come—“thy kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer—is calling this end of the world; it’s calling for the end of the world. But God in Christ is the one who is, who was, and who is coming, and that’s what we use in the cupolas in the center of our church when we paint our church in the way that it’s normally painted as history unfolded.

Then it says, “Grace and peace from him who is and was and who is to come,” and that’s very liturgical language: grace to you, peace to you. Then it says, “And from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness.” By the way, that’s where Jehovah’s Witnesses get their name. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Jesus is the faithful witness; he is the witness of Jahweh, but they deny his divinity; they deny that he’s divine with the same divinity as God. But we say, no, but he still is “the faithful witness, o pistos o martys, the first-born from among the dead, the ruler of all the kings on earth.” So there’s Jesus, the one who bears testimony to God… By the way, in Johannine literature, God bears testimony to him; the Holy Spirit bears testimony to him. It’s not bad. The three Persons of the Holy Trinity are bearing testimony to each other all the time, that Jesus is saying who God is, God is saying who Christ is, the Holy Spirit is telling us who Christ and God are, and we enter into that reality of that witness of God himself to us.

Now it says, “Who was the first-born from among the dead.” The first-born is the one who inherits everything, so he’s the first-born of creation and he’s the first-born of the dead. That’s a biblical title for Jesus. And, by the way, all of these titles for Jesus, if you’re interested, on Ancient Faith Radio, I did a series of 55 podcasts on the 55 titles of Jesus in the New Testament Scripture, so you can hear a whole hour and a half on “first-born” or “ruler” or whatever, “faithful witness.”

It says, “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and has made us a kingship, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.” That’s worship language, and we still use that: eis tous ton aionon, unto ages of ages. It says, “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.”

Of course, those who know the Scripture know that that’s written in the Old Testament: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced,” that he is coming with the clouds. If you know Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that’s what gets Jesus killed in the synoptic gospels, when they keep asking him, “Are you the Messiah? Are you this and that?” And then Jesus finally says, “You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with the angels to establish the kingdom of God.” Then the high priests ripped their garments and decide to kill him. They decide to kill him. So that’s the ultimate… And of course, if you know Scripture, too, that’s Daniel, because the Ancient of Days is on the throne, and the Son of Man comes to him, and to him is given all glory, honor, dominion, worship. We’re going to see this all the time through the Apocalypse. To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb, who is now sitting on exactly the same throne as he, as him—he?—as he who is sitting on the throne.

That’s how you have the introduction. Then it goes on. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Now God is saying that, the Lord God, but in a few minutes, Jesus is going to say that about himself. So you have the same thing being said about him who sits upon the throne and the Lamb who was killed and raised and glorified, so this is what you have. Then it says, “The Almighty, Pantokrator.”

“I, John, your brother, who share with you in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance”—those are the three things that we’re interested in. The kingdom of God, the tribulation, and the hypomone, the enduring patience of fidelity to Christ. Every Christian in every generation has to bear witness to and share in, in Jesus, the tribulation, the kingdom, and the patience endurance. “...he who was on the island called Patmos,” and that’s, as you know where that is; it’s off the Asia Minor coast, “on account of the word of God and the martyria, the testimony, of Jesus.” At the time, Patmos was a penal colony, and the Christians who were arrested were put there. So it probably means that John was an arrested Christian who was in prison. He was in prison for Jesus, and just about everybody was in prison for Jesus.

I mean, I always wanted to get a student to get a doctoral dissertation: How many of the greatest books of Christianity were written by people who were in jail? Jesus, of course, was in jail himself. I once saw a cartoon of a guy sitting in a prison. He had shackles on his legs, and he was writing, and two Roman soldiers were there, and one says to the other, “Look at poor Paul. All he can do now is write letters.” [Laughter]

So there he is; he’s in prison, and then you have this incredibly important sentence. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” I was in the Spirit, en Pnevmati, on the Kyriaki emera, on the Yom Yahweh, on the day of the Lord; I was in the Spirit.” The day of the Lord is Sunday, ismiaton savvaton. The Christians are in the Spirit, worshiping God, on the Lord’s day, and there are some scholars who think that this Apocalypse is in fact an apocalyptic writing depicting the Paschal Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem that John brought to Asia Minor, how the Christians celebrated the Passover when they believed that Jesus was the Messiah, raised and glorified. So you’re going to see how it’s going to be connected to the Old Testament worship, the “holy, holy, holy,” the angels, the altar, the white robes, the incense. All those kind of things are already there; they’re in the Bible. I would say the Apocalypse, together with the letter to the Hebrews, are the two most important liturgical books for Christians. That’s where you understand what Christian liturgy is about: letter to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse of John.

So he’s in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and he hears “a loud voice like a trumpet: Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyateira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.” Why seven? Because in apocalyptic imagery, seven is the number of fullness; it’s the perfect number. The sabbath is seven—and, by the way, the sabbath is Saturday; it’s not Sunday. Sunday is miaton savvaton; it’s one after sabbath, which takes you back to the first day, and then it projects you forward to the eighth day, the eighth day of the coming kingdom. In Jewish apocalypse, the Messiah comes on the eighth day, the one after the sabbath.

But whenever you have seven, and I already showed you how the whole book is structured by sevens—seven visions, seven churches, seven times seven—and if you’ve got seven times seven, then you’ve got the ultimate fullness. And if you’ve got seven times seven [plus] one, you’ve really got everything, and that’s why in the Bible and in the Orthodox Church tradition, the Pascha of the Lord is celebrated for 50 days, and then it’s completed on Pentecost. Pentecost means 50; 50 is seven times seven plus one. So all those numbers are incredible important, mystagogically, liturgically, symbolically, historically. And they’re symbolic numbers; it isn’t just seven as seven counting. And that’s going to be the same thing through the whole book. Twelve is going to be used that way; four is going to be used that way; six is going to be used that way. Multiples like the 144,000, that’s all going to be symbolical numbers.

Then it says, “I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and, turning, I saw seven golden lampstands. In the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man”—and that’s the main messianic title for Jesus in the New Testament, the Son of Man. By the way, the new translations of Scripture are politically correct; they don’t use “son of man” any more, which means you can’t understand the Bible. [Laughter] It’s a total perversion of the Scripture not to use the expression “son of man.” But in any case, it’s the son of man who comes to Daniel, it’s the son of man who comes on the clouds, “are you the son of man?”—it was a messianic title.

So “one like the son of man, and clothed with a long robe, golden girdle on his breast, hair white as snow, eyes flame of fire,” burnished bronze furnace and so on. No one can read that without thinking of the Ancient of Days of Daniel or the vision of Isaiah in the Temple. It’s a divine theophany, but it’s now like a son of man, and it’s applied to Jesus. Then it says and then there’s “the voice like the sound of many waters.” “Many waters” is biblical imagery for thunderous presence of God.

And then you have “in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp, two-edged sword,” and according to the letter to the Hebrews, the word of God is a two-edged sword, that cuts to the bones and marrow, the hearts, and reveals all that’s going on. So the Christ, when he comes, he slays the people with the breath of his mouth as the Logos of God himself, and this is very typical biblical language. “His face was like the sun shining in full strength.” And you have that in the chiastic center of Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the feast of the Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah, Peter, James, and John see Jesus in his divine glory, shining like the sun. So all of this is brought together here.

Then it says, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though I were dead.” If you don’t go to church and fall on your face as if you were dead, you ain’t been in church yet. [Laughter] God is not a smiley face on a bumper sticker. [Laughter] You approach God with fear—fear. Not awe, but fear! It says fear. People say, “Yeah, but, Fr. Tom, it says, ‘Fear not,’ in the Bible, ‘fear not.’ The most repeated commandment of God in the Bible is ‘Don’t be afraid; fear not.’ ” That’s true, except that God can’t say, “Fear not!” to somebody who’s not afraid! [Laughter] You’ve got to first be afraid! Then he can say, “Fear not.” But if you’re not afraid, you just come in and cross your legs and rest and relax and pray singing, “Alleluia,” why say, “Fear not,” to you? You’re not afraid of anything. So we only have the fear of God transformed into this fire.

I can’t go into all of this, but every single one of those are apocalyptic images: bronze, gold, light, fire, shining, snow, white. You see, those are all symbolical meanings, with spiritual meaning. Then you fall dead at his feet, “he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not.’ ” There you go. Me phovou, me phoviste. It’s the most repeated command in Scripture: Don’t be afraid. But it can only be said to people who are first afraid. You’ve got to be afraid first.

Then it says: “I am the first and the last”—alpha omega, right? Alpha is the first [letter] of the Greek alphabet; omega is the last [letter], so that’s why it’s that. Then it says, “The living one; I died, and behold, I am alive forever more, and I have the keys of death and Hades,” Sheol. That’s the place of the dead. So now it is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end; it’s clearly Jesus. At first you’re not quite sure. It’s he who sits upon the throne; it’s God. Now for sure it’s Jesus, because God the Father wasn’t dead and isn’t alive again; only Jesus was.

Then it says, “And as for the mystery”—so you’ve got now prophecy, testimony, revelation, and mystery. See? This is what’s here: “the mystery of the seven stars which you saw in my right hand.” Then it says, “The seven gold lampstands; the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.” So you have the seven churches. Why seven again? I think that the answer is because in those seven letters—you might put it this way—everything that churches need to hear are in those seven letters. In other words, again, they are paradigmatic letters. They’re not just this one’s for this one, this one’s for this one, but when you read it and put the seven together, you have again this completed vision, a kind of a full vision. That’s why there’s seven and that’s why everything is seven.

Then it says, “I know your works, your toil, your patient endurance, how you cannot bear evil men but have tested those who call themselves apostles but are not, who found them to be false.” So false prophets, false apostles, are going to be all over the place; all over the place, and that beast is going to be a faker, too, you know. Then it says, “You found them to be false; I know you are enduring patiently.” How many times that word is going to reappear! How many times! It’s all over the place in the New Testament. If you know Greek, hypomone; look it up in a lexicon. You have three pages of how many times it’s repeated: patient endurance, patient endurance, patient endurance, in the midst of affliction, in the midst of tribulation—because Christians are in the time of tribulation since Jesus was crucified until the end of the world. We’re in the tribulation right now.

By the way, the Lord’s Prayer, when it says, “Lead us not into temptation,” that’s an Aramaicism for saying, “Do not let us capitulate and surrender when we are tested, tried, and tempted in the time of the final tribulation.” That’s what the Lord’s Prayer is saying. “May your name be sanctified, may your kingdom come, may your will be done in me, in us on earth, as in Jesus who’s enthroned in heaven,” because we are his members on earth, we are his body, we are his hands. In last Sunday’s epistle: “Do you not know your body is a member of Christ?” So we are his presence on earth, suffering with him until we die or until the end of the world comes. That’s what it means to be a Christian.

So we have this patient endurance, and “[you] are enduring patiently, bearing up for my name’s sake.” You could say a lot about the term “name” here, but name means the presence of the person. That’s enough for that. “But I have this against you: you have abandoned the love you had at first.” So you already have it going downhill. The apostle’s not dead yet and he’s telling the people: You had abandoned the love you had at first.

“Remember then from what you have fallen; repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.” Now, forgive me for saying this, but these seven churches, they are all in Asia Minor, they all belong to the patriarchate of Constantinople, and every single one of them is empty today of Christians. And all of the titular bishops who form the synod there are bishops of these sees that have no people. It’s something for us Orthodox to think about. I won’t go further on that one.

“Yet [this] you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans”—those were the Gnostics—“which I also hate.” Then you have, every time: “He who has ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” Then you have, at the end of each one of these churches, the following formula: “To him who conquers” or “To those who conquer” in plural (o nikon or nikontoi in Greek), “I will give,” and then each time he gives them something. But each time it’s given to those who conquer.

We’ve got to know that the word “Savior, Yeshua, Joshua,” that we normally translate “Savior,” in Hebrew meant “Victor,” and it meant “Savior,” and it meant “Conqueror.” It meant the one who destroys the enemies. And the main thing about Christianity faith is God’s Son, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, who came on earth to die on the cross, came to destroy all the enemies of God: all the sins, all the evil, death itself St. Paul says is the last enemy, and to bring this victory.

The Divine Liturgy is a victory celebration. That’s even why we make processions. That’s why we hold banners. That’s why we sing Alleluia. That’s why we sing Holy. That’s why we walk in. That’s why we do fans. It’s a victory celebration. It’s the victory of God over the devil, over the sons of perdition, over all the evil-doers, over every anti-Christ possible, and there’s lots of them, according to 1 John—the many anti-Christs are out there, not just one. It’s a victory celebration, and that’s why, on everything on our church, we have that seal: Iesus Christos NIKA. Nike, you know, it’s the sports thing. That means victory. And it’s on our church bread, it’s on altar tables, sometimes it’s on our vestments.

Can’t resist telling you how once I was putting a vestment on at St. Vladimir’s Seminary where I used to work, and this vestment had Iesus Christos, Nika, Iesus Christos, Nika, all over the vestment. And then it even had abbreviation in Slavonic: Bog, which means “God.” So it said, “God, God, God, Jesus Christ the Conqueror, Jesus Christ the Victor.” I said to Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “Father, isn’t it kind of funny we put this cloth on our body, we walk around with it, we sit down with it, and it says, ‘Jesus Christ the Victor, God, God, God’? If it were in English, people would say, ‘Geez, why are you wearing that,’ but it’s in Slavonic, so it’s mystical, you know.” [Laughter] But he looked at me and he said, “Tom, just be happy that it doesn’t say, “OCA.” [Laughter] Orthodox Church in America. It says, “God,” at least; it says, “God.”

But sometimes I think that, in our time, the Nike symbol is the mark of the beast, because it really stands for a carnal life, scoring and making it in this world in every possible way, especially carnally and sexually, with no reference to God, the crucified Christ, eternal life, or virtue in any way. But I don’t want to get in trouble with the Nike guy. [Laughter] Because he gave such a nice talk at Joe Paterno’s memorial service. He’s on the board of Penn State.

So then it keeps going, and we’re going to hurry up here. It says, “To the angel of the church in [Ephesus],” then it goes down. What does he say to this Ephesus church? And that was John’s own church, Ephesus. In fact, there’s a big ruins of a basilica there and so on, and they even claim that Mary was there with him. “To him who conquers, I will grant him to eat of the tree of life, which was in the paradise of God.” The tree of Christ is the cross, and the fruit on it is the dead body of Jesus. And the book is going to end with the tree of life in the midst of the New Jerusalem again. So the tree of life is going to be there from the beginning to the end. So that’s what they get.

Smyrna, Smyrna: Polycarp was there. Polycarp was a disciple of John. Polycarp was one of those guys who defended the Apocalypse, by the way, in history. It was the Johannine guys who defended the Apocalypse, as opposed to the Hellenes and the Antiochians and so on. But anyway, he says:

I know your tribulations, I know your poverty, but in God you are rich, and the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. The devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested.

Now, by the way, that term, peirasmos, it means “temptation,” it means “test,” and it means “trial.” It means all of those three things, not just tested, tempted, like “I want to eat a cookie” or something. It means being tested. Job says the whole life of a person in this world is a test. And about Jesus, it says he was tested in every way that we are so that he could be with us in our patient endurance and in our being tested. So we’ve got to be with him. So you’re tested. “You will have tribulation”—there you’ve got it again, this famous tribulation. “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” That’s all over the place, too; I don’t have to comment on that.

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who conquers,” and then it says, “shall not be hurt by the second death.” We’re going to have to figure out what that second death is. Well, I would put a better, more traditional Orthodox: We can’t figure it out. We have to pray to God to illumine us to know what the second death is. And my hunch is the second death is the judgment. The first death is the baptism. If you’ve been baptized in Christ, you’ve already died, but then you have to be raised, and you may face the second death. I think that, when we get to it on Thursday, that’s what this millennium and this chapter 20 in the Apocalypse is all about. It’s about standing and not having to endure the second death, but you can’t endure the second death, which is eternal death, unless you first die with Jesus. So you’ve got to die with Jesus. That means you’ve got to be baptized, but not just baptized with water, because you could be baptized unto condemnation. You’ve got to really die with him.

And here’s a clear Scripture teaching. If we do not die with him, we do not live with him. Period. There’s an early Christian hymn in 2 Timothy that says, “If we have died together with him, we will live together with him. If we have patiently endured”—it’s hypomone again—“If we have patiently endured, then we shall reign with him. If we deny him, he will deny us. And if we are faithless, he remains faithful, because he cannot deny himself.” And so again that’s very pervasive in the whole early Christian Scripture.

So you have here “faithful to death,” “crown of life,” and then “he who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.”

Pergamum, John Zizioulas’s diocese, Metropolitan John of Pergamum, famous theologian; this is his diocese. When he was consecrated, seven Pergamites showed up for the service. “The word of him who has the sharp two-edged sword.” Again you have that sword, the word of God. “I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. You hold fast my name, and you did deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my witness.” Antipas was an early Christian bishop who got killed, probably their bishop, probably bishop of Pergamos. Then it goes on; I won’t… We’ve got to move fast, but it says that they were trying to force them to eat the food sacrificed to idols, to practice porneia. Porneia is going to be a big thing.

In the Apocalypse, only virgins go to heaven; only parthenoi enter the kingdom. But the great thing is, Christ can make you a virgin, though your sins are red as scarlet. But if you don’t become virginal, you can’t enter God’s kingdom. And in the Scripture, the whore, the harlot, is the great symbol for those who worship idols and for those who are not faithful to their husband, who is God. Read Ezekiel, Isaiah. Ezekiel 16; read it when you go home. It’s the sexiest chapter in the Bible. [Laughter] I mean, read it! Ezekiel 16, write it down. Hosea is ordered to marry an adulterous wife and to stay with her, because that’s what God does; he’s faithful. So it says that you have this here, a practice [of] porneia. Then of course there’s the Gnostics also again, the Nicolaitans.

And then he says, “I will war with them. I will kill them by the sword of my mouth.” That’s the word of God again. “Let him who has ears to hear what the Spirit says to the churchces.” Then what do the conquerors get here? “To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone, which no one knows except him who receives it.” The new name and the white stone, that’s the new reality of being in Christ. “White stone” was a ticket to the banquet; you needed a white stone to get in, and then this new name and new song written on the stone. And the hidden manna is the bread of life, who is Christ himself. John 6 in the gospel: your fathers ate manna, they died; I am the bread of life who comes from heaven; if you eat my flesh, drink my blood, you never die, and you cannot die. That’s the new manna.

So it goes on. Then you get to Laodicea. “The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the arche, the source of God’s creation.” Those are all titles of the Lord Jesus. He’s the Amen, he’s the faithful and true witness, and he is the source of God’s creation, the first-born of all the creatures. Then it says, and it’s the famous one… I got kicked out of class once for this text. [Laughter]

I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth, for you say: I am rich, I have prospered, I don’t need anything; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

So the point is, you cannot be a Christian unless you know that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. If you don’t know that, there’s no way that this book can have any meaning for you, because if you don’t know it, you’re in the hands of the beast; you’re in the hands of the beast. “Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich,” and then you have this famous white garments. The white garment was the Jewish symbol of the resurrected body, and that’s why in baptism we put on people white garments. That’s why the priests, when they serve the Eucharist, must wear a white garment before they put their stole and the rest of their stuff on. It’s not supposed to be purple or red or blue, whatever the ecclesiastical tailors try to sell you. [Laughter] You wouldn’t put a purple robe on a baptized person.

The baptized person wears a white robe because they’re raised from the dead with Jesus. We’re going to see how the white robe is a continuous symbol through the book, always this white robe. In the earliest Christian mosaics we have, for example, Ravenna, fourth century, they have all these martyrs with these white robes, their crowns, holding their palm branches with Christ. So this white robe is going to be very important.

“And keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve or unction to anoint your eyes, that you may see.” All this is sacramental language, because when a person was baptized, they were given a white robe, their eyes were anointed, their head was anointed, their mouth, their ears, their chest. The Holy Spirit was poured out on them, and it was given to them, and they were “those whom I love.” And then it says, “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten, [so] be zealous and repent. [Behold,] I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” That’s, of course, very familiar from the gospels.

“I and my Father will come. We will make our house with you. Blessed are they who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” Here about bread, just a quick thing. In the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It ain’t “daily.” It’s epiousios artos, which means the supersubstantial bread of the kingdom to come. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer says. It has nothing to do with daily bread; it has nothing to do with gluten-free rice bread or rye. [Laughter] It means… It’s a word only used once in the whole Scripture. You see, “Give us today our future, super-essential bread,” and that is Jesus Christ himself; that’s his own body, his own flesh. So that’s what is here.

Then you get to: “He who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I myself have conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches,” which is a fantastic thing, because the most-repeated Old Testament Scripture in the New is the first verse of Psalm 110 that says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I put all your enemies that you have conquered (on the cross) underneath your feet.” That’s the most-quoted text of the Old Testament in the New. It’s all over the place. I can tell you, but I won’t. [Laughter] I mean, how many times it appears! It’s in Peter’s first sermon, it’s at the Passion narrative, it’s in Paul’s last words—it’s all over the place: “The Lord said to my Lord…” But the Lord—

And that’s how Jesus himself gets crucified, by the way, because they’re asking him all these questions. He says, “Let me ask you a question. When the Messiah comes, whose Son is he going to be? And they said, “The son of David.” He says, “Then why did David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, say: The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’?” If David calls him “Lord,” how is he David’s son? And then it says in Matthew they dared not ask him any more questions; they decided to kill him.

The point is that he sits on the same throne as God, not on a throne next to it; the very same throne. And all who belong to Christ and have patiently endured the tribulation with him and have suffered with him and have not surrendered to the beast and the dragon and the scarlet harlot and all that with him, they sit on the very same throne. You see, it says, “He who conquers, I will grant to sit with me on my throne, as I myself have conquered and sit down with my Father on his throne.” So we’re all enthroned. It’s very interesting that in the kingdom to come, there’s no servants; everybody reigns! Everybody reigns; we reign together with Christ and God.

Okay, so that’s the end of the seven letters to the seven churches. I would repeat and say, you put all of that together and you’re given an image of what the Church in this world is supposed to be and what the temptations are, and, if you remain faithful, what you get. You see, I think I skipped one, about being a pillar in the house of my God and so on. Going a little bit too fast; I keep looking at my clock. I started at 19, so I literally have three more minutes. But very quickly, we’ll move faster once we get going.

Then you have the vision of the celestial liturgy, the liturgy of heaven. Certainly anyone who’s familiar with Orthodox liturgy knows this is what we do, and that’s even why our churches—the church is built the way it is.

C2: This one isn’t.

Fr. Tom: Well, it is. [Laughter] Because you have the altar, you have seven-branched candles. Just like in the temple.

C2: Well, I thought you meant facing east.

Fr. Tom: Oh, well, that. It should be facing east. But the point is, when Christians began building buildings, they built them like the tabernacle in the Temple of the Old Covenant, but christened as understood in the Apocalypse. So you have a Christian version of the worship of God’s people, so even the furniture.

Let me just give you one example. Many people, especially Protestant people, they’re very scandalized when they come into our churches to see that over the altar we normally have a huge fresco of what they think is the Virgin Mary—and it is. Right? They only problem is, that ain’t the Virgin Mary. It’s the mercy seat; it’s the hilasterion of the Old Covenant.

Behind the altar, the cubic altar with the seven candles, in the Old Covenant, on the altar was the tablets of the ten commandments; we have the four gospels. They had Aaron’s rod that budded; we have the cross of Christ. They had the manna in the jar; we have the holy Eucharist in the jar. Behind it there was a place called the mercy seat; I don’t know why it’s translated that way in English, but it was empty. But there was a cherub on each side, and that was where Moses spoke—God spoke to Moses—and only he went in there. Sometimes Joshua went, but… That was the place where the meeting took place.

Well, in the New Covenant, the Word becomes flesh and we see him: it’s Jesus of Nazareth. So the mercy seat is Mary. He’s sitting on her lap over the altar. So if someone comes in and says, “What do you have Mary up there for?” say, “That ain’t Mary; that’s the New Testament mercy seat,” because the Word has become flesh and he’s speaking to us from heaven, and he speaks to us from heaven, not like Moses, you see, who had to hear on earth. He tells us what he heard from God before the foundation of the world, and that’s why he was born of the Theotokos to do that. So that’s why we either have the one praying like this [hands extended] or sitting. It’s from the Old Testament; it’s from the Bible.

By the way, just one more thing. People look at our icon screen, and they say, “Look, you put Mary and Jesus on the same level. You have Mary here, you have Jesus here: that’s not nice.” [Laughter] Our answer would be: That ain’t Mary and Jesus. That’s the first coming and the second coming. It is he coming in the form of a slave to die, being held in the hands of his mother as a real human being, and the other one is his coming in glory as the Word of God, to conquer and to give the kingdom to those who faithfully endure the tribulation with him. And everything on earth takes place between those two comings. And that’s why, on the doors, you have the four evangelists and the announcement of the Icarnation of Gabriel to Mary. So that’s why it is that way, but if you don’t know the Bible, you’ll never understand it. It’ll just be like, I don’t know, piety of some sort. There’s nothing worse than piety, frankly. [Laughter] Piety has done so much danger… But anyway.

Then he looks, and he sees in heaven the open door. It’s now open. You go to church and they open the door, right? And you see that holy of holies, like in the letter to the Hebrews. You enter into it with Christ, following him into the presence of God. “Then the one speaking like a trumpet says, ‘Come up higher. I will show you what must take place after this.’ I was once again in the Spirit, and lo, a throne stood in heaven.” And by the way, in Russian Orthodox tradition, the altar table is called the presto, which means the throne; it’s the throne. So there’s the throne, and behind the altar is the bishop’s throne. So you have this double-throne there in church.

And then you have all these stones, the rainbow, the emerald, and so on. We’re going to see later that the stones that are going to be in Jerusalem are the horoscope stones. The horoscope was the thing that allegedly governed the cosmos, the universe. The only trouble is, as we’re going to see on Thursday night, those stones are there, except they’re in reverse order and they’re upside-down, because Christ has turned the whole thing upside-down, and he has power over all of these elemental cosmic powers, which are symbolized in the horoscope stones, the birthstones—amethyst, emerald, all those things.

So here you have it, then again it’s exactly like in Daniel again. But here we’ve just got to quickly point out that around the throne were 24 thrones. Seated on the thrones were 24 elders. In Greek that’s presbyter, presvyteroi, and that’s the name for the priest in [the] Orthodox Church. I’m a proto-presbyter. In fact, the term “priest” was never used for a priest until about the fourth century. You had bishops, presbyters, and deacons. So these are the presbyters, and there’s a synthronon; they’re sitting together with Christ who sits upon the throne, on the high place behind the altar. We still have that in our architecture.