If anyone who’s here is interested in background material of the Apocalypse—authorship, literary style, history of interpretation, how it made it into the canon, what are the characteristics of this kind of literature—and of course, there were apocalypses outside, in addition to the Apocalypse of John. The Apocalypse of John is the only one canonized by our Church Tradition. There are CDs about that, and we’re not dealing with that here at all, but if you’re interested in that part, you might get these from the library or whatever.

Okay, last night we started in the beginning. We’re trying to move through the book rather quickly. We made it through the introduction and through the beginning section of the seven letters to the seven churches, and we mentioned yesterday and will mention again and again that the Apocalypse and this writing, it’s rooted in the time in which it was written, the end of the first century, around there, but it is applicable to the Church in any time, any century, and today, understanding how it works, what the language is like, what the symbols are like, and so on. And that is a characteristic of Scripture generally and the apocalyptic literature in particular.

We are always in the same condition as the earliest Christians, namely in the time between the rejection, the crucifixion, the raising and glorifying of God’s Son, the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the world, and the coming again, the parousia at the end of the ages—that’s the time that we live in. And in that time we live in, two realities, if we are believers: we have died with Christ in baptism, we have been sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, we participate in the messianic banquet of the kingdom of God, the holy Eucharist. The Lord teaches us from heaven as the Word of God. We enter into his eternal sacrifice on the cross that is permanent through the whole ages in his broken body, spilled blood, and we are awaiting and calling his coming.

During that time, while we are doing that, we are in the age of tribulation; the great and final tribulation, the end of the ages has come on the world in the crucifixion of Christ. It’s all over. Nothing to be added, nothing more to be revealed, nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done, except to receive the spirit of God, to live already in the kingdom of God, already risen with Christ, already sealed with the Spirit, already longing [for] the age to come and testifying and bearing witness to that, every moment and with every breath and every act of our life, and each generation of Christians doing that until the end comes.

So that’s where we are; that’s the setting. We’re in the kingdom. We are a kingdom of prophets and priests. We have died with Christ; we are raised with Christ. We are worshiping God in the worship in spirit and truth that Christ in St. John’s gospel said God the Father wants. The context of this writing is worship; it probably is even liturgical worship of the earliest Church. It may even be connected very particularly to the Easter Liturgy of the Church, but it’s definitely a book of worship, prophecy, martyria, witness, testimony, and prophecy in the sense of edification of the faithful, exhortation to stand firm and patient, enduring the time of the tribulation, and it’s a book of consolation, a book of comfort, comforting those who are in this particular time as believers in Christ.

Now we ended yesterday with finishing off those seven letters to the seven churches. We said that those letters, taken together, show us the temptations that are constantly confronting the churches, and what is promised to those who conquer, because the whole of the Apocalypse is about the conquering of the Lamb of God. It’s about the victory of Christ over all of the enemies of God, and at the end of each of those letters it says that “those who have ears to hear, let them hear what God gives to those who conquer,” and then at the end of each letter, you have this symbolical expressions about what those who conquer receive from the Lord. I will not repeat any of that now.

But then when you finish with those letters, you enter into the vision of the celestial liturgy. This whole Apocalypse setting is “in the spirit, on the Lord’s day,” the day of the kingdom, the first day, the eighth day, Sunday, the day of resurrection. And this is where it is written, in that context. So in the fourth chapter, we saw already yesterday, beside the flashes of lightning and the peals of the thunder, that we enter into the celestial liturgy, where we have the vision of the Lamb of God and he who sits upon the throne with the Lamb who was slain and risen, being worshiped, first of all, by the 24 presbyters, the 24 elders that stand for the 12 and the 12, from the Gentiles and the Jews. We said yesterday that 12 is also a symbolic number. Seven is the number of completion; 12 is the number of the people of God, those who are chosen and faithful and elect from the tribes of Israel and from the Gentiles, the crowd from the Gentiles. And that’s why there’s 24: it’s 12 [plus] 12; with their white garments, risen from the glorified bodies; the crowns on their head as the martyrs; and who are worshiping him who sits upon the throne.

Also worshiping, we saw yesterday, were the four living creatures that stand for the cosmos, the four ends of the universe, the four winds of the universe, the four directions; and then they stand for all of the created reality. So you have the lion, the ox, the human being, and the flying eagle. These are often connected to the four gospels: Mark is the lion, Luke is the ox, Matthew the man with the commandments, and with the eagle the theology is John. And they probably also symbolize the four literary genres of the Old Testament.

It’s a plausible theory that there are four gospels because you have to have the Gospel being written in the new Scripture according to the Scriptures of the previous covenants. In that sense, Matthew is the Torah; Luke-Acts, two volumes of the same book, is the Chronicles; Mark is the apocalyptic book, where you have the clash at the end between good and evil, God and Satan: that’s Mark, very stark; and then you have John being the theological gospel, the mystical gospel, that in our tradition is read only between Pascha and Pentecost.

And I would even say my opinion would be we should never, ever evangelize with John. John is for those who already believe, who are already baptized, who are already participating in the holy Eucharist, who are already living in the context of the book of Revelation. It would be almost incomprehensible to the people on the outside. And John has a similar structure to Apocalypse; it’s also seven signs in John, with a theological introduction, and then a Passion narrative that’s half the book, about the suffering of the Messiah and our entering into his glory, and it gives the theological insight into the doctrine of the Trinity—the Father, and the Son and Word and Lamb, and the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit.

So they’re singing, “Holy, holy, holy”—we know “Holy, holy, holy” from Isaiah, the vision in the Temple. It remains the center of Christian worship at the holy Eucharist. In fact, in the Eastern liturgies you have a trisagion before the proclamation of the Gospel, and you have a trisagion at the offering of the bread and wine, the Melchizedek sacrifice of the new covenant, which is Christ’s body broken, his blood shed, and our bodies broken and our blood shed together with his: that’s Christian worship. And that’s what you have witness to in the Apocalypse.

So you have the 24 presbyters. You have the four cosmic creatures, the living creatures. And then, later on, there will also be the myriads and myriads of angels that will be singing the “Holy, holy, holy” also. So it’s celestial, it’s cosmic, it’s liturgical, it’s in the economy of salvation. All this worship comes together in the worship of the Christian community. And this book, the Apocalypse, is the most liturgical book of the New Testament, and basically classical Christian liturgy is patterned on this book, and we might even say that this book is patterned on Christian liturgy that was existing before it was written. So it’s written on the basis of the worship of the new covenanted community in the Messiah, and then once it’s written it becomes a pattern for the subsequent worship.

Therefore when Christians began building buildings for the celebration of the word and the holy Eucharist, the buildings are patterned after the Apocalypse. The apocalyptic, heavenly sanctuary is patterned after the tabernacle and the Temple of the old covenant. So you have the sanctuary, you have the holy place, you have the altar, you have the seven candles. In place of the commandments tablets you have the four gospels; in place of Aaron’s rod you have the cross; in place of the manna you have the Eucharist. Over the altar in the mercy seat that was empty in the Old Testament, now it’s the Theotokos, Mother of God, with Christ on her lap, and the Word became flesh, and that’s where he speaks to us from in church.

To understand Eastern Orthodox liturgy, it helps very much to understand the book of Revelation, but to also understand Revelation is also the insight into understanding Eastern Orthodox Christian liturgy, which we believe is simply ancient Christian liturgy. It was that way in the West as well for many centuries, and it’s very interesting that when people say, “You’ve got to get back to early Christian worship; you’ve got to worship the way the first Christians worshiped.” Well, this is how they did it! [Laughter] This is how they did it. They didn’t do it with—well, you know what I mean. [Laughter]

Now, we want to continue here. The next three chapters have to do with the seven seals. As we mentioned yesterday, the book is constructed in seven sets of seven. So you have the seven seals—and that’s three chapters long—then you have the seven trumpets, the seven visions of the dragon’s kingdom, the seven visions of the worship of the Lamb and the worshipers of the beast, you have the seven bowls of wrath, you have the seven visions of the fall of Babylon, you have the seven visions of the end of Satan’s evil age and the beginning of God’s righteous age, and then you have—it ends with the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem that we are expecting to come and that we are already experiencing sacramentally, mystically, spiritually, liturgically, in the Church of Christ on earth right now. So all of our worship is a foretaste of the coming worship.

By the way, that’s very important. It’s not simply a memory of what Jesus did when he was on earth. What Jesus did when he was on earth is over! And Jesus ain’t on earth any more; he’s on the throne with the Father, surrounded by all the saints and all the angels. That’s where he is now! And that’s where we worship him now. So we worship him as he is now, and we enter into that celestial worship. This is also testified to in the New Testament Scriptures in the letter to the Hebrews. So the other great liturgical book of the new covenanted Scripture is the letter to the Hebrews, often attributed to Paul, but even in the earliest time people did not think Paul wrote it, but it’s definitely of a Pauline tradition. My hunch is it was probably written—it might have been written by Apollos, who was a very learned Jew, a disciple of Paul, in the Pauline tradition; therefore he could call it Paul if he wanted to, because that’s where he learned it.

And it has to answer the question: How do those who accept Jesus as the Messiah worship? How do they worship, what do they do, and how does that relate to the Torah of Moses? How does that relate to Leviticus? To all the instructions about worship in the Old Testament? Because all Christian worship is a messianized version of the worship of the Law. That’s very important. By the way, the 27 books of the New Testament, that’s what distinguishes them from the pseudoepigrapha, the false writings. There were plenty of false writings at and after the time of Jesus, plenty, way more than these 27 that we say are kosher, that are dependable, that have received the blessing of the Orthodox Catholic community: these are the ones you’re supposed to read; don’t read those. Well, the great difference between the canonized writings and the not-canonized writings is the canonized writings, they are totally centered on the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. Half of the material in the four gospels is that. St. Paul only teaches that, practically, and he never even knew Jesus when he was on earth, never saw him, and, by the way, never quotes him. Did you notice that St. Paul never quotes Jesus, ever, not once?

Also, the other thing about the canonized books is, like the Apocalypse, they’re constantly referring to the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets; they’re constantly referring to Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Ezekiel, Daniel, all the prophets. And the false writings virtually never do. They in fact practically deny the passion; it is not central. And sometimes they don’t even think that the God of the old covenant is the same God as the new. And there are a few other things, too. The spurious writings like to make up stories about Jesus’ childhood and all that, which you don’t find in the canonical books at all.

So there’s great differences here between them. I wanted to mention that because they’re making a comeback now! Oh, yeah, these spurious writings are making a huge comeback. The so-called academic scholars are making careers off this stuff! Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, Bart Ehrman’s whole stuff, I mean, all of this, the TV programs, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and they call… And these popular books, like Da Vinci Code, and then a couple years ago, just before holy Pascha, they came up with a “new finding” called the “Gospel of Judas,” and “this is a Christianity that was crushed and hidden” and all that. Well, we’ve got to say several things.

One is, yeah, it was crushed. It was—by us! By our forebears, who said, “Don’t read this stuff.” And obviously they did destroy a lot of it, because they really believed it was wrong. But what we have to know is, if they’re called the lost books of the Bible, they were never lost; they were very well-known. There’s lists of them already in the second century, in Irenaeus and Epiphanius and other writers. And, very important, they were never of the Bible, never, because the Bible are the canonized writings, not all the writings that ever existed, only the ones that were considered right, true, according to the one Gospel of God in Jesus, which is centered in Christ crucified. The crucified Messiah is the center of Orthodox Catholic classical Christianity, and the raising and the glorification and our dying and rising in him, that’s the center of the Christian faith. It’s not “nous,” it’s not “mystery,” it’s not “uncreated light” and all that kind of stuff.

Here, a word to the Orthodox. If our theology and our life and our liturgy is not rooted in the Christ crucified of the Gospel, and if we do not interpret the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets of the old covenant through the prism of the risen Christ, like he teaches in Luke’s gospel how it all spoke about him, if that is not the center and foundation of our faith, then we might just as well be New Age Gnostics. And I’m very afraid that a lot of modern Orthodox spirituality books sound more like Zen Buddhism and New Age Gnostic literature than it does the canonical Scripture of the Bible. Here endeth my harangue. [Laughter] But I think it’s very important.

So you have these seven sets of seven—and why seven? Because it’s fullness. And if you have seven times seven, you have super fullness. [Laughter] You have everything that somehow, in a sense, needs to be said.

Now, it starts with the seven seals, and very quickly, if you’ve got seven seals—meaning seals, you know, sealed, not seals… [Laughter] The seven seals—you never know… I mean, somebody is like: “What’s he talking about, seven seals for?” What that would mean in the symbolics of apocryphal literature is you’ve got the most mystical of all the mysteries. It’s the mystery of all the mysteries, because it’s unknown, it’s sealed, no one knows what it is, it’s hidden, it’s in the hands of God.

But this section opens with: Who is worthy to open the scroll and break the seals? And then they weep because there’s no one there to do it, so we don’t know what the mystery is, we don’t know what God is really up to, it’s all hidden to us still. But then, very quickly—they’re weeping, and one of the presbyters, who’s doing the worship, says, “Don’t weep. Don’t weep. Weep not—for the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered”—there you have the conquering again, right? And as I said yesterday, the word “Yeshua” in Hebrew, it means conqueror, victor, healer, savior; it’s not just savior: it’s conqueror and victor—and we were speaking about—and I noticed today; I didn’t notice before—that you have that on your sign, the “Jesus Christ Nika, Jesus Christ Nike”: it means the conqueror. I will not get into yesterday’s harangue about Nike. [Laughter]

But in any case, they saw a Lamb standing. It had been slain. It has seven horns and seven eyes. Why seven horns and seven eyes? Seven horns means absolute power; seven eyes means absolute understanding and insight, absolute knowledge. The seven is the absolute, and then the eyes is the vision; the horns are the power. So he’s the super-duper powerful one, and there are the seven spirits of God sent into the earth. The seven spirits means the fullness of the outpouring of the divine Spirit—again, fullness, completion, absoluteness.

And then one of them takes the scroll, the elders; they fall down before the Lamb. And notice: they’re falling down in front of the Lamb exactly as they’re falling down before the One who sits upon the throne. In other words, the Lamb, who is the Son, who is dead, is being worshiped together with God. If he’s not divine, then you can’t worship him. So that’s an affirmation of the divinity of the Lamb of God, the Son of God.

And then you have the bowls of incense going up. So much for incense not being biblical. [Laughter] The incense going up, which is the prayers of the saints. And then they sing the new song—and everything here is new. There’s a new covenant, a new testament, a new heaven, a new earth, a new song, a new creation, a new humanity. But very interesting: no new Israel. There’s no new Israel, because the believers and the Messiah are the Israel of God.

I think that’s important to say in Mississippi, because that Palestine Israel, we will see in the 14th chapter, will be called Sodom and Egypt, where the Lord was crucified. It has no theological meaning whatsoever, and you cannot base it on the Apocalypse. It’s over; there’s a New Jerusalem from above; that’s the Jerusalem we are in, not a spot on a map. Gregory of Nyssa actually has homilies against pilgrimages! Christians don’t have holy places! Every place is holy—where the Eucharist is celebrated, where the Gospel is preached, where the Spirit is poured out, where Christ is present teaching from heaven, and where God is with us acting: that’s the heavenly Jerusalem. And you don’t have to go by plane or train or anywhere else to get there. In fact, you can’t get there that way. It doesn’t exist.

So in any case, they are there, and then it says, “Worthy art thou to take the scroll, to open its seals, because you were slain and by your blood you ransomed humans for God, from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, have made them a kingdom of priests for our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” So, again, here, this is very important because the Lamb has the power to open the seals, including the seventh seal, we’ll see, because he was killed. If he were not crucified, he could not open it. It’s the crucified One who is given the power to open the mystery of mysteries because his crucifixion is the mystery of mysteries. It’s God’s mystery, St. Paul will say, “hidden from before the ages” that the devar Yahweh, the Word of God, who’s incarnate in the words of the Scripture, becomes a human being, Mary’s Child, lives on earth, the Word becomes flesh, dwells among us—that’s the big mystery. And he comes to be crucified!

Dorothy Sayers said, “Jesus of Nazareth, God’s own Son, the Word incarnate, is the only human being who was ever born to die.” Everybody else is born to live. He was born to die, in order that we might live. So he gets—the point, it’s a very important point. It’s also a point that not only does his crucifixion give him the right to open the seals, but it’s the crucifixion that allows him to be resurrected, glorified, and enthroned.

Here again, a little harangue. Sometimes people say, “The Eastern Church, the Orthodox is the Church of the resurrection; the Western Church is the Church of the crucifixion,” or something. That’s just baloney! First of all, the Orthodox Catholic tradition of the West was as Paschal and resurrectional as anything you’ll find in Asia Minor. But the preaching of the cross, by the Asian religion called Christianity, whose greatest first spokesman was a Hellenized Jew from Tarsus named Saul—his Greek name was Paul… And by the way, he wasn’t Paul, Saul who became Paul; he was Paul always, the Greek name for a Jew. The Hebrew name was Saul; the Greek name was Paul—it’s the same name.

In any case, the whole teaching will be that he is raised, he is glorified, he is worshiped, he’s enthroned because he was crucified, raised, and glorified, in total obedience to the Father. And even in John’s gospel, the same author who wrote this, he says that the cross of Christ is his glory! His glory! It’s not like the cross of Christ is degradation and resurrection is glory. That’s wrong, totally wrong! When he is lifted up on the cross, he’s lifted up into the heavens and then he becomes glorified over all the earth. So he says, “When I am lifted up, you will behold my glory.”

So a very important point: the crucifixion does not conceal God; it reveals God! On the cross, God is not hidden; God is manifesting himself as love for the sake of saving the humanity and the creation that he adores and that he doesn’t want to be lost. So it’s very, very important that the crucifixion and the passion is a revelation; it’s an apocalypse of God. It’s not, it’s not— We don’t have sometimes what’s called theologia crucis, theologia gloriae, the theology of the cross, theology of glory. The cross is the glory, and the cross is the power, and the cross is the wisdom. Read St. Paul. Read St. Paul. Read St. John. In fact, I would say: read the New Testament. It helps a lot! [Laughter] Especially if you’re going to have an opinion about it, and even, worse yet, write a book about it. I saw that book you had about St. Paul today—whoa!—on your table in your house. Woo!

So he’s worthy because he was slain, and every tribe, tongue, people, and nation has been made a kingdom of priests for our God. That means Gentiles and not just Jews. It means slaves as well as free people. It means women as well as men. The whole Gentile world now becomes God’s people, an assembly, a qahal, a church, of prophets and priests, and kings.

So then they sing, when they see that he has this power; they all sing. Everybody sings. The creatures sing, the elders sing, the presbyters sing, the myriads and myriads and thousands and thousands of angels all sing: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” That’s liturgical language. And the language “worthy is he” is very important, because that remains in the eucharistic canon. How do we pray when we offer the holy Eucharist in church? We say, “Let us lift up our hearts. Let us give thanks unto the Lord. It is worthy and it is right. Bonum et dignum. Axion kai dikaion,” you see.

And, by the way, to worship the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, that’s an addition by the Russians. It’s a totally grammatical non-sequitur there. But anyway, that’s another story. Listen to Ancient Faith Radio to hear about that. [Laughter] I’m commenting the Divine Liturgy, line by line, on the radio right now. I’ve done 30 of them so far, and I haven’t started the Liturgy yet. [Laughter] I haven’t gotten to “Blessed is the kingdom…” yet! I think there are ten-hour podcasts on vesting… But in any case, it’s fun to do when you’re old and you have nothing better to do, and stay out of my wife’s way, you know. [Laughter]

So he hears every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, in the sea—everywhere!—saying, “To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and power and might forever and ever.” And the four living creatures—that means the whole of creation—says, “Amen!” And the presbyters fall down on their faces in worship. If you have gone to Orthodox liturgy, you know we love to fall on our faces! [Laughter] Once someone said if you go to Orthodox liturgy, when you leave, you’re always crumbing, chewing, dripping, and aching, because your body has to be involved in it, and if you’re not praying with your body, you’re not praying. So you’ve got to flop on your face.

Once Fr. Yerger and I know a woman who’s now a nun in the Orthodox Church, and she was coming into Orthodoxy just about the same time you were, and she was in church and she was praying in my parish, and when she was crossing herself she said—she crossed herself like this, you know. So I’m doing my job, so I said, after the service, quietly; I said to her, “You know, sister, you probably— You know, it’s okay, nothing wrong with that, I mean, fine— But people are watching you, and the old ladies might think you don’t know what you’re doing. So hold your fingers like this and go to the right side first and bow. That’s how we do it.” And she looked at me; she said, “Father, I’m slow. Let me first learn how to flop on my face. Then I’ll learn how to cross myself.” [Laughter] So we’ve got to learn how to flop on our face if we follow the Apocalypse, because every other line, they’re flopping on their face, did you notice?

Okay, now you have the angels around, the creatures, they’re worshiping, they’re saying, “Amen. Blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving.” All of these are doxological and they’re from the Scripture. We use them until this very day. “To you are due all glory, honor, and worship. To you are due all thanksgiving and honor. To you are due all might and dominion.” It’s just from here.

And then one of the elders addresses John and says, “Who are these people, clothed in white robes? Where have they come from?” So you’ve got the white robe again, right? We spoke about the white robe yesterday. Very important, the white robe. The fundamental vestment of the clergy is the white robe. Don’t wear a purple one, don’t wear a red one: it’s got to be white.

And then the answer is: “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation, who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” So they’re the baptized. They’re the baptized. They’re the ones who have died with Christ, because the white robe, it symbolizes the raised body, the risen, glorified body. That’s the meaning of it.

Then you have again another doxological hymn, you see, and very interestingly here, that being before the throne day and night within the temple, he sits upon the throne, he protects them: no more hunger, no more thirst, no more sunstroke, no more scorching heat. But then it says, “And the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their Shepherd.” So the Lamb becomes the shepherd. And so the Christ is the Good Shepherd as well as the Lamb of God, but again he earns the position of being the Good Shepherd by being the Lamb who is killed.

And this is very important, because in our Orthodox rite of ordination, the man being ordained to be a pastor is offered at the entrance with the bread and wine, with the cover of the chalice on his head. And he’s got to be sacrificed. And if he’s not first sacrificed, he can’t be the pastor. Think about it, guys. [Laughter]

So he, the Lord himself, will be their shepherd, and of course that fulfills the prophecy of the prophets, that Yahweh himself will shepherd his people, because all the shepherds have gone astray, they’re all selling their—offering bad sacrifices. Just read Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Malachi, about the shepherds of Israel. Whoa! So the prophecy is that the Lord himself will come and be their shepherd, and that’s the Lamb, but he becomes their shepherd by being the one slain. “And then he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” That’s Isaiah also. Every tear will be wiped away, and no more sighing, no more suffering: life everlasting.

Then you get to the point where the Lamb opens the seventh seal, and it’s interesting that there’s silence in heaven for half an hour, because when you have the real seventh seal, mystery of mysteries, you’ve got to be quiet. You’ve got to shut up. And that even is retained liturgically in the Eastern Church when, on the Eucharist of Great and Holy Saturday, it’s all done in silence. At the Liturgy of Presanctified in Lent, the Gifts that are already consecrated are brought in in silence. And silence is the language of the age to come, and if you’re going to interpret Scripture, as St. Basil said, St. Ignatius in the second century, you not only interpret the words; you interpret the silence between the words. And you’re brought into the silence from which the words proceed, and then the words take you back into that silence, into a reality that is literally ineffable and unspeakable. You can’t— No words contain it.

Gregory the Theologian—Gregory of Nyssa said in theological language—he quoted a line of Psalm 116 in the Septuagint version, Greek translation by the Jews, where he said when it comes to speaking about God, every man is a liar, because everything you say has to be corrected. Cardinal Newman even said theological language is—how did he say it?—it’s saying and unsaying to a positive effect. So before God you can only be in wonder.

Even if you say such a thing like, “God exists”… Suppose I’m walking down the street with my outfit on. They say, “Oh, you’re one of those faith-based community guys.” I say, “Yeah. I don’t know how faith-based it is, but it’s definitely…” And then if they say, “Do you believe in God? Does God exist?” Well, normally we would answer yes, God exists. But then if we were really doing our job, we would say, “You have a few more minutes?” [Laughter] And then we would say, “God does not exist, if you think God exists like you exist, I exist, or the hundred thousand billion galaxies exist. God is beyond existence.” He’s beyond non-existence.

We even apophaticize and correct negatively even our negative sentences! And it’s interesting that the icon of the author of the Apocalypse—how does it look, the icon, the panel icon of John the Theologian? He has his hand over his mouth. He has his hand over his mouth, because you can say all this, but the only way you can really understand it is to enter into the silence. Hesychia, silence, is a big thing in the Christian tradition.

So anyway you have this last seal, and then it says it was opened. The angels came, the incense again was offered, the prayers of the saints. They fill the incenser; they cast it onto the earth. There are peals of thunder, flashes of lightning, and the earthquake, because the ultimate mystery is now disclosed. This ultimate mystery will then be told in the next sets of seven that come through the book as we go through.

We’re going to kind of hurry through this a little bit here. What do you have first? First you have the seven angels and the seven trumpets, and then you have the blowing of the trumpets each time—one, two, three, four, five. I’m not going to comment on this at all in detail except to say that these are all actions of God in history in the time of the tribulation that the believers have to live through, and they probably were connected to actual happenings in the earliest Church, and they probably knew what they were talking about in these. But we have to know they’re not historical primarily. They are theological, they are spiritual, they are to teach the kind of things that we go through.

Now, the one thing I will point out, though, is that in each of those visions there, that every time it says “one third”—you see, one third of the trees are burnt up, one third of the earth is burned, one third of the sea is blood, one third of the waters become wormwood—and, by the way, “wormwood,” that was Chernobyl in Slavonic; that was the thing that blew up under Gorbachev—a third of the waters, the third of the stars, the third of the day was kept from shining. So what this means, this third, what it means is it’s only for a time. It’s temporary; it’s not final. One third would mean not complete. We will go through things like this.

And it speaks about all kind of cosmic woes that human beings cause on the planet Earth. And it begins with all the destruction of nature itself. The earth, the air, the waters, the seas—are all polluted; they’re corrupted. In St. Paul’s terms, they’re in agony and travail until they would be saved, and that’s why, in our Church, we’re blessing everything they can bless, especially on Epiphany, when Christ is shown to be… The water: What does he do? He goes into the Jordan River, because he’s got to sanctify and redeem all the cosmic, and water stands for it. That’s why you have water all the time—that’s why you have that pool of water in front of the city; that’s why you have the raining water; that’s why you have the waters of Leviathan. Water is another symbolical point used in apocalyptic literature. Water, earth, air, fire: these are just the classic elements. It says how all of this is being polluted and corrupted.

Then you come to the fifth angel, and he sees a star fallen from heaven. The keys of the shaft of the bottomeless pit. Great furnace, smoke coming up. And then they see, in that reality of this furnace with the smoke and the locusts and the scorpions, those who do not have the seal of God upon their foreheads, in other words, those who do not belong to God. And here, we will see in a minute, the juxtaposition to those sealed by God are those who bear the mark of the beast.

So we’re going to see that there’s going to be—I’ll give you a sneak preview here, because we’re probably going to have to hurry— You’re going to have these—what can you call them?—oppositions in the book. You’re going to have those sealed with the seal of the Lamb, those sealed with the seal or the mark of the beast. You’re going to have the woman clothed with the sun, who is pregnant with the Son who is Jesus—we’ll see that in a minute—and then her opposite is the woman on the scarlet beast, the scarlet harlot, who fornicates with the beast. Then you have the Son of the woman, who is the Lamb and the Son of Man who is Jesus; then you have the beast from the sea. Then you have Michael versus Satan—big fight going on there.

Then you have the seal of the Lamb, the mark of the beast. The name of the Lamb’s father; the name of the beast. Then you have the saints and the virgins and the 144,000—that symbolized the saved, the 12 times 12,000—and then you have those who follow the beast. Then you have the redeemed over against the beast. The firstfruit over against those who buy and sell. The martyrs over those who make war on the Lamb. And then you have the 144,000, which is the symbol of those saved; and then the symbolic number of those with the beast is 666. And six is the sign of evil, insufficiency, wickedness, because it’s one less than seven. So six is a symbolical number also, a symbolical number. So 666. And then you have the New Jersualem on high, and it ends with the Babylon being destroyed and the New Jerusalem being exalted, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

That’s how it continues, and then you have the Alleluia of the heavenly Jerusalem to the “Woe, alas, oi, oi, oi” of those who are lost. And then you have the two trinities. You have the Father, the Lamb, and the Spirit, who fills the saints; and you have the dragon, the beast of the sea, and the second beast, the 666, who acts like a lamb but is not, the anti-Christ, although the word “antichrist” is not used in the book of Revelation.

So continuing on with this quickly, quickly, the ninth chapter is the fall of Satan, the star fallen from heaven, who goes down into the depths of Sheol and tortures those who do not have the seal of Christ and God on their forehead, and they are tortured, and there’s a scorpion and it stings. And then it says an incredible sentence. “In those days, men”—people, human beings—“will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, and death will fly away from them.” So they’ll even be unable to die, and so their dying will be an unending dying, more and more and more dying forever and ever and ever. And they will want to die but they will not be able to, you see.

Then you have the appearance of these locusts and stings and scorpions and Abaddon in Hebrew, and this is the first woe; there are still other woes to come. Then you have the trumpets blown again. You have the four angels released. You have a third of the mankind being attacked and killed. And so you have this imagery of this great warfare between these opposite powers.

Then the final angel is in the tenth chapter, where the mighty angel coming from heaven is wrapped in a cloud with a rainbow over his head. Now you all know the rainbow imagery of Noah, that “I will never again crush the earth; I’ll never again flood the earth.” So the rainbow is the sign of hope. Even that’s used in a strange way today. Woo! [Laughter] But anyway, you have the rainbow there. And then you have the one whose face is like the sun, legs like the pillar of fire, the scroll in his hand. He puts one foot on the sea, the other foot on the land. He calls with a loud voice. Seven thunders are sounded. A voice from heaven says, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said! Do not write it down.”

That’s the ultimate mystery that can’t even be written in the Apocalypse. You have to enter into it, but it is obviously, very clearly a description of the final reign of Christ. These two [feet] on land and sea, that’s Old Testament prophecy. He will rule from sea to sea, from north to west… You know, that’s what it’s saying here, and it’s the seventh angel, the mystery of God, announced to his servants, the prophets, that it should be fulfilled. So it’s the fulfillment of the prophecy of the salvation of the world through the Christ who is the Lamb who was slaughtered and is raised again. I said yesterday that the term “lamb” is used 28 times in the Apocalypse. It’s used again and again.

And then they are told to eat the scroll, just like Ezekiel was. And when you taste it, it tastes sweet! But when you swallow it, it’s bitter. [Laughter] And that’s how the word of God is. When you first come to church, it’s sweet; you stay around a little while, it’s bitter. And that’s why most people leave, making an excuse that “they’re all hypocrites anyway.”

I can’t resist telling you this. I wrote a little book on Christian Faith and Same-Sex Attraction, and a person who read it, who struggles with that, said to me, “When I read that book, you know, I remember in Scripture that it says, ‘It was sweet to my mouth and bitter to my stomach,’ but I’ve got to tell you, Fr. Tom, it was bitter to my mouth. Then I kept thinking about it, and it became sweet to my stomach.” [Laughter] So I was really happy with that, so I have to brag a little—I hope it’s true.

And then you have the two witnesses that come, they get killed—they are killed in Jerusalem which is called Sodom and Egypt—I already referred to that.

They will kill them; their dead bodies will lie on the great street of the city which is allegorically called or spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified.

Well, so much for the geographical Jerusalem. For the writer of the Apocalypse, it might as well be Sodom and Egypt. Sodom and Egypt are pretty heavy symbolical words, together with the word Babylon. We’ll get to that. What you have there is these two witnesses being killed. I don’t know who they were. Believe it or not, I don’t know. I don’t know; I don’t even have an idea. Some people think it’s Elijah and Enoch because they were both taken up. Some people think it’s Moses and Elijah, that stands for the Law and the Prophets, that is then killed on the streets of Jerusalem, because they kill the prophets and they do not follow the Law. But then they’re going to rise again, you see. So that would be my hunch; my hunch is that it would be Moses and Elijah that they’re talking about, but I don’t know. I have no idea.

But they were being tormented, I think that simply means the Law and the Prophets are rejected, because for sure Elijah’s the quintessential prophet, and Moses is the quintessential giver of the Law. On the Transfiguration, they’re the ones who speak to Jesus. And they not only stand for the Law and the Prophets, Elijah stands for heaven and those who are alive; Moses stands for the earth and those who are dead. So it shows that Jesus is the Lord of heaven and earth, and the living and the dead, and the Law and the Prophets. So my hunch is that this is a symbolical way of saying that there was a rejection in Jerusalem itself of the Law and the prophets of God, and that’s why Christ is rejected there, because you cannot accept Christ unless you follow Moses’ law and the prophets led by Elijah. [Sounds of increasingly heavy rainfall] That’s apocalyptic accompaniment, right. Thank you, Jesus. [Laughter]

Then what is said at the end of that is that fear fell upon everybody, the second woe is over, the third woe is coming, and then the seventh angel blows his trumpet, there’s loud voices in heaven saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ!” and the 24 elders who sat on their thrones before God fell on their faces again and worshiped, saying, “We thank thee, Lord God”—and that’s eucharistic language. If you read that in Greek, it’s “Efcharistoumen to… We give thanks to you…” That’s how we begin our prayer at the Eucharist. Efcharistia means thanksgiving; we thank you. “Let us lift up our hearts; let us give thanks to the Lord.” So we say it is meet and right. This is all apocalyptic language. “Axion kai dikaion. Efcharistoumen tou Kyriou.” It’s what we still use in worship.

And then it says: For thou hast taken thy grand power, begun to reign. The nations rage, the wrath came, the time for the dead were judged, rewarding of the service of the prophets, and fear came upon the peoples, small and great, and the Lord begins to rule on earth. And this would mean—I believe it means—that for those who believe in Jesus, he is the only king, and he’s the King of all the kings on earth. He’s the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and it’s his kingdom that is here with us in the Church and will come at the end of the ages throughout the whole of creation, which leads to another point.

The kingdom of heaven does not mean that the kingdom is in heaven, somewhere else. The kingdom of heaven is an expression that it means it’s the kingdom of God. The kingdom is not just for souls; it’s for bodies. When people say Jesus preached a spiritual kingdom, that is not true! —if you mean by it the body and the earth and society and nature and the animals don’t participate at all; that’s absolutely not true, because the kingdom of God that’s coming is going to fill the whole creation, and the book of Revelation is going to say, tomorrow night, there’s a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. That’s quoting Isaiah, and he says, “Behold, I make all things new.” But he doesn’t say, “Behold, I make all new things.” And he doesn’t say, “I’ve just come to save your souls and not your bodies.”

Last Sunday’s epistle and gospel, for the Prodigal Son Sunday—and “prodigal” is a very bad translation of that word. It means a lecherous, lewd fornicator and glutton. That’s what it means in Greek. “Prodigal” is a nice King James word. But in any case, it’s all about the body. “Don’t you know that your body is a member of Christ? Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? Glorify God in your body.” And here the King James translators of Scripture, they just couldn’t resist, and if you read the King James at the end, where it ends, “So therefore, glorify God in your body,” they write, “and in the spirit, too,” because they’re just too afraid of the body. Yet spiritual life begins with your body and it ends with your body. You’re raised in your body. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Your eyes are God’s eyes; your ears are God’s ears; your hands are God’s hands—that’s physical! And the Bible is very physical! Very physical. Bread and wine, dripping, crumbing, chewing, aching. That’s worship, and it’s bodily. It’s bodily.

So here you flop on your face all the time and so on. [Laughter] Ephraim of Syria says if your body’s not praying, you’re not praying, no. In fact, even in the 12 Step movement, they’ll say, “Move a muscle, change a feeling.” You start with your activity; then your mind and spirit catches up.

Here about worship, just another little remark. We don’t study the liturgy, explain the liturgy, agree with the meaning of the liturgy, and then we do it. It’s just the opposite: we do it. What the Savior commanded to do, we do. Then you understand it, and you can’t understand it unless you do it first. Then you understand what you’re doing, but you’ve got to do it.

And by the way, it’s the same thing… Let’s take, for example, pedophilia. That’s a good example, right? I once saw a priest being interviewed about pedophilia, and when the interviewer said to him, “Didn’t you— weren’t you in counseling? Weren’t you getting instruction? Weren’t you getting help?” He said, “Oh yes, I was, all the time.” Then the interviewer says, “Well, why didn’t it work?” He said, “Well, it was because I was still acting out.” And you’ve got to stop the action first; then you can do the therapy. But if the action is still going on, you’re wasting your time. If you’re talking to an alcoholic and he’s drunk or she’s drunk, you’re wasting your time. If you’re talking to a food addict who just ate three boxes of cookies, you’re wasting your time.

The action has to stop first, but the opposite is also true. The good action has to begin first. You first don’t commit adultery, you don’t steal, you don’t— Then you can see the uncreated light and bound around with the angels. But it begins first in the flesh, on the earth, in your body. That’s how it begins.

Now we get to the twelfth chapter. The great portent appeared in heaven: the woman clothed with the sun. She gives birth to a child. The dragon is there and wants to eat up the child. The woman runs into the desert. They can’t get them. The male child is going to rule all the nations. He’s going to be caught up in God to his throne, and the woman’s going to flee into the wilderness. What that’s usually interpreted traditionally is Mary, who stands for the Church, gives birth to the Messiah. They try to kill him. He is taken up by God after he’s crucified when they kill him. And then the Church then belongs in the desert; the Church has no place in this earth. We’re in the world, but not of it; we don’t belong here. We have no interests here; we have no place here. No, we are put outside the gates of the city, just like Jesus was. And so the Church of Christ is always in the desert, and the dragons are always after it to eat up the son of the woman clothed with the sun.

This is a quick… Now, here I haven’t been mentioning, by the way, that almost all of these woes, they either are said to last for a day, a day, and a half a day. Excuse me: a day, a day, and a—three days, and a half a day. Or in days: 1,260. Well, what does that mean? It means again, it’s not forever, because three and a half is half of seven. And one-two-six-oh is exactly three and a half. So it’s just two different ways of saying this is temporary; it’s not going to go on forever. The dragon ain’t going to be chasing around the Church and those who belong to the Lamb forever. He’s taken up, but he’s going to return, and then we’ll see what happens.

So it says now Michael appears. He’s fighting with Satan, and we know that Michael is the chief fighter of the angels. And the dragon and the angels fight. The dragon is thrown down, the ancient serpent who was called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world is thrown down to the earth. The angels are thrown down with him. So there is this cosmic revolt against God and his Christ, led by these evil spirits. And then it says, “And salvation and power and the kingdom of our God, the authority of his Christ have come.” They have already come for those who believe in him.

And the accuser of our brethren, that’s Satan. “Satan” means accuser and deceiver; it means both of those, and the enemy. That’s what it means. And then it says, “But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb.” So anyone who’s marked with the blood of the Lamb conquers the evil powers, and they have no power over them. And the word of their martyria, the word of their martyrdom, their testimony, for they loved not their lives, even unto death. So they were ready to die; they are the martyrs.

And that martyrdom is going to be what the Apocalypse is going to call the first death. And it will be connected to baptism. And those who have died the first death, the second death is not going to be able to touch them. And the second death is being thrown into hell, because biological death is not death at all. Christ is risen, and he raises up everybody. So we’ve got to see that.

So then it says the dragon is thrown down; he pursues the woman and the male child. The woman flees. The serpent is poured out. And you have this: now it’s a clear struggle between Christ and the Church, and this world and the dragon and the other dragon and the beast and the scarlet harlot is going to appear, and that would be the fallen, corrupted world.

Then the beast is rising from the sea: ten horns, very powerful; seven heads, complete evil, total evil, seven; ten diadems. The beast that I saw was like a leopard, bear, dragon, all these animal images of destruction. He had a mortal wound on his head, and some people said Nero had that, the first killer of the Christians. In more recent time they used to point out when I was young that Mikhail Gorbachev had a mark on his head, so the Russians really went to town on that one. I don’t recommend that.

But in any case, what you have is there are those who follow the authority of the beast and worship the beast. And they are at war with those who worship God, Christ, and are marked with the blood of the Lamb; they are sealed by the Spirit. And it says that God allowed them to make war on the saints and even for a time to conquer them. And we’re going to see later on that once all this is over there’s going to be a period where God lets loose Satan on the earth before he finally comes. And I’ll tell you tomorrow night, I believe we’re there now; that God has let Satan loose, but it’s not forever. And we have to get to that millennium tomorrow.

And then it says everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain… If anyone has ears let him hear; if anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone slays with the sword, with the sword he will be slain. Here is a call for patient endurance again. Remember yesterday? Patient endurance and the faith of the saints.

Then another beast appears. It looks like a lamb, and I said yesterday the Antichrist doesn’t mean against Christ; it means in place of Christ. The Antichrist tries to offer people everything that only Christ can offer, but can’t deliver and therefore deceives them. It’s prosperity, it’s property, it’s money, it’s possession, it’s prominence, it’s People magazine. It’s what our Fr. Paul and my friend Fr. Lazor used to call “the p-p words.” [Laughter] They’re all “p-p” words: property, possession, pride, power, possessions, popularity—there’s a whole list—preeminence. That’s just from the beast. But the claim is that that’s what God wants you to have; God wants you to be happy; God wants you to have peace; God wants you… Well, I don’t know who can say that after reading the Bible generally and the book of Revelation in particular… [Laughter]

But then we want to finish this off for tonight, because I have about one hour since we started on my clock. I gave myself one hour from when we start, not from seven o’clock. [Laughter]

And then it says, “No one can buy or sell without having the mark of the beast.” If you’re going to be successful in business, you’ve got to have the mark of the beast. Yeah. That’s what it says. And they have to be marked on the right hand, on the forehead.

No one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom. Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast. It is a human number. Its number is 666.

It’s the 666. Now I’m not into 666 on computer and who is the 666 now, is it the World Bank. I think that’s nonsense. It may well be, but it could be a million other things, too. But what it is is complete and total depravity, absolutely ungodliness. That’s what 666 stands for, as opposed to the seven.

And then he looks and he sees on Mount Zion the Lamb. He sees the 144,000 who have the name of God’s Father written on their foreheads. He hears the voice like the sound of many waters, the sound of loud thunder, and then we enter into the song and into the final clash and then the coming of the kingdom of God. And we will leave that for tomorrow night.