Fr. Stephen De Young: So verse nine, that’s sort of the introduction to the general letter, the greetings, and he’s now planted a whole bunch of seeds for what he’s going to be doing in the rest of the book. So now he’s sort of going to frame the book.

Verse nine: “I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was on the island that is called Patmos for the Word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

Just like the last time he said “the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ,” “the Word” should be capitalized there, the word “Word,” because again this is talking about Christ. So he identifies himself again as St. John. He says he’s their brother and companion in three things: in the tribulation—so the tribulation is not something that’s going to happen 2,000 years in the future; the tribulation is something that’s happening right then. What’s he referring to? He’s referring to the persecution for the sake of Christ. They’re suffering it; so is St. John.

So he’s their brother and companion in that persecution, but also in the kingdom. What’s he referring to in the kingdom? Well, what we just saw: Christ rules over the kings of the earth; he’s made us kings. So he’s also your brother in that, at the same time. So he’s saying: We as Christians at the same time are being persecuted—I’m out here in exile at a salt mine—but I’m also a king, because Christ shares his rule with me.

And then, third, patience. Patience for what? Enduring this waiting for the day when things are set right. So he says we have these three things in common: we’re all suffering, we’re all reigning with Christ, and we’re all patiently waiting the day when this is all sorted out and made right. And he’s in exile specifically because of his devotion to Christ and the testimony he gave about Jesus Christ, preaching the Gospel.

Verse ten: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” That one should be capitalized. It’s singular, notice. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice as of a trumpet.”

So the phrase “in the Spirit” is a phrase that’s used a couple other places in the New Testament, but mostly in late first-century and early second-century literature to refer to worship. You’re in the Spirit when you’re praying or worshiping, meaning the Holy Spirit. And so he’s saying he’s participating in some kind of act of worship on the Lord’s day. He doesn’t go into great detail into exactly what kind of worship that was.

The Lord’s day means it’s Sunday, the first day of the week. There already, as we talked about— Already by this time at the end of the first century, the pattern was that Judaism and Christianity aren’t separate yet, so Christians would go to a synagogue, including, in some cases, majority Christian or just straight-out Christian synagogues on the sabbath, where there would be the reading of Scripture—at this point the Old Testament Scripture, because the New Testament is still coming into existence—the Old Testament Scripture and preaching. And then just the Christians—there might be non-Christian Jews mixed in there at the synagogue on the sabbath—and then on the Lord’s day, on the first day of the week, they’re gathering to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and the Eucharist.

So then what happens in the middle of the second century, when the Christians are expelled from the synagogues, then the split sort of becomes final, is the Christians take that synagogue part of the service and move it to Sunday also, and put it before. So that’s how our Divine Liturgy gets its shape. The first part is very much like a synagogue service. If you ever go to an Orthodox synagogue, they do a procession with the Torah scroll the same way we do the Little Entrance. It’s the same structure with readings and preaching. Then we have the second part with the Eucharist. Those were originally done separately on two different days; now we do it all together, as the Divine Liturgy.

So he is participating— He doesn’t say he had a bunch of other people with him and they were celebrating the Eucharist. He doesn’t say exactly, so he could have been in that cave praying privately, he could have been praying with others, they might have been celebrating the Eucharist—we aren’t told.

But he hears this loud voice, and he describes it as being like a trumpet. I tend to think that “like a trumpet” refers to not, like, the quality of the voice, because I don’t know what a voice that sounds like a trumpet would be, more to the volume, more to the loud. [Laughter] And the kind of trumpet he would be talking about would probably be like a shofar that would be blown outside of synagogues. That’s probably what he’s referring to in terms of volume, and those are pretty high-volume if you’ve ever— Those could be heard through the whole city. So if you’re standing there worshiping and all of a sudden you hear a voice that loud right behind you, it would get your attention is what I mean.

And that voice said, in verse 11: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last.” So that’s the first statement. Well, so who is this? It’s Christ, because that’s the same thing he said just a couple of verses ago to identify himself. He says, “What you see, write in a book, and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia: to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamos, to Thyateira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.” This is not the one in Pennsylvania, just for the record. So he lists the seven cities.

“You’re going to have this vision; I want you to send it—” So this isn’t just an afterthought by St. John where he got excited about this vision and said, “I really need to tell my friends in the seven churches.” This is the deliberate purpose—I know I’m hammering on this, but it’s kind of important. The purpose of this vision is not to add another book to the Bible, to enrich St. John’s spiritual life; this vision is directed to these seven groups of people in this particular time in these particular places. And then its meaning for us and everything grows out of that, but that’s where it has to start.

Verse 12: “Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me, and, having turned, I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands, one like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded at the chest with a golden band.”

So: very loud voice. He turns to see who it is, he sees these seven lampstands. “Lampstand” sounds kind of vague. When we talk about lampstands, we’re talking about lampstands like the ones in the tabernacle in the Old Testament, like the one we have on the altar now. So this is a seven-branched candlestand. He sees seven of those. Yeah, what’s now going— So he sees seven of those, seven different ones. We’re going to see… Well, I’ll wait until we get there; there’s enough to talk about here. [Laughter] So he sees seven of them; he sees this figure in the midst, who was the one speaking. So that identifies, too, as to who it is, that it’s Christ.

And then when he starts to give the description, he’s drawing on actually two figures from the book of Daniel. That first part, he says “one like the Son of Man,” that’s obviously connecting to the vision in Daniel, the one like the Son of Man who comes on the clouds of heaven. So he’s identifying this, and he just said Christ was coming on the clouds of heaven, so he’s saying, “I saw this person, whom Daniel saw.”

And then that second piece, about how he’s clothed—he’s wearing this garment and then he has this golden band—that’s another figure. There’s this Man in heaven, in Daniel, this heavenly Man in Daniel who comes and talks to Daniel. It’s sort of never explained in Daniel. He has all these angels coming to talk to him, and then he just sees this Man in heaven, who’s also a figure who gets interpreted as being Christ. So St. John draws these two together in this description of the person.

Now, he’s already identified this person as Christ, as Jesus. St. John knows Jesus. Like, really well. St. John was in the inner circle of disciples. St. John’s the one who leaned on him when they were having the Mystical Supper. So we need to give full weight to the fact that St. John is saying his friend—like whom he went fishing with, whom he ate with, whom he being a very young man grew up around—is, well, God. [Laughter] And is this divine being coming to judge the world; is this being whom Daniel saw in his vision. He’s saying: These are the same person.

So this isn’t like an intellectual exercise by somebody like me, sitting here and looking at the Bible and making connections that they think are neat. This is a person St. John knows, whom he’s now seeing in this other state and identifying as the second Person of the God of Israel, which is not a normal claim for someone to make, shall we say. [Laughter]

So then the description continues in verse 14: “His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes like a flame of fire.” And what’s interesting about that is that’s actually from a third figure in the book of Daniel. That’s part of the description of the Ancient of Days. So in the scene that Daniel sees, there’s the Ancient of Days, who’s Yahweh the God of Israel, and then he sees someone who looks human—that’s what “like a son of man” means, someone who looks human—come up before him on the clouds. And that one who looks human then is given dominion and authority; he judges the devil and the demonic powers, and he has this kingdom established, in the book of Daniel.

So St. John here is not only identifying Christ as the heavenly Man and the Son of Man in Daniel, but he’s taken part of the description of the Ancient of Days, of the God of Israel, and also applied them to Christ here in the vision. So this is another way that he’s communicating that Christ is Yahweh the God of Israel—but not the same Person. This is where again the concept of the Holy Trinity comes from.

What we should not do here—and I say we should not do this, because people do this all the time—is: you will hear people say, “Well, in that vision in Daniel, this means that the Ancient of Days and the one like the Son of Man are both Jesus, like one is Christ’s divinity and one is Christ’s humanity.” What’s the problem with that? You just said that Christ’s divinity and his humanity are two separate people. That’s bad. We’ve been saying that’s bad for 1600 years. And people were saying it was bad before that, but it’s officially bad for 1600 years. [Laughter]

So Christ is one Person. He’s not the same Person as God the Father, but they have the same nature and essence. And as we said Christ is, as we were told by St. Paul, the express image—he’s the exact image of God the Father. So if you see Christ fully revealed, who should he look like? Right, and so that’s what we see here. That’s what we see here in this description.

What we’re going to see throughout the book of Revelation is that a lot of the same kind of ideas, theological ideas and this kind of thing, are going to be communicated by St. John through imagery like this that St. Paul talks about just in prose. St. Paul’s just going to make all these complicated arguments and lay this stuff out, and St. Peter’s going to say, “Yeah, he says a lot of stuff that’s hard to understand.” St. John is going to do this through imagery. For some people, that’s a lot easier to connect with than complicated Greek arguments. So he’ll do it by using an image, but he’s not saying something different. He’s showing us that Christ is the image of the Father, whereas Paul is going to say, “Christ is the express image of the Father,” in prose.

Verse 15: “His feet were like fine brass as if refined in a furnace, and his voice is the sound of many waters.”

The “feet of brass as though refined in a furnace” is a reference back to some of the appearances of the God of Israel in the Old Testament. There was this episode— There’s a lot of these episodes that people don’t read much, but there’s a point where actually— Remember when Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, everyone else is scared to go near it, because they’re going to die? But there is a point where the elders of the people, 70 elders, go with Moses and Aaron halfway up, and when they go halfway up, it actually says that they see God and they eat a meal there. The “legs of bronze” is drawn from this and other descriptions. So this is more imagery again connecting Christ to this God who was seen in the Old Testament, that this is the same, the same Person.

And “waters”: “the sound of many waters” doesn’t mean, like, Raging Rapids Water Park in the summer. It also doesn’t mean flooding, since we’re in southern Louisiana, although it’s closer to flooding. It’s the idea of waters— Remember, waters— We tend to think of water in terms of refreshment and making things clean, but water in the ancient world was a symbol especially of the sea, of chaos, in terms of destruction, like a flood. And so when it says his voice was like the sound of rushing waters, this is an image of sort of power.

Parishioner: Tsunami.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

Verse 16: “He had in his right hand seven stars; out of his mouth went a sharp, two-edged sword; and his countenance was like the sun, shining in its strength.”

Now if you try and draw this, you’re not going to have a good time. [I’ve seen attempts.] Yeah, so we’re getting clued in here in chapter one. We’re not supposed to take this super literally. This isn’t telling us what Christ looks like in heaven, that he’s walking around with a sword coming out of his mouth and his face on fire. That’s not what we’re going for here, like a literal description. All of this is imagery used to convey something about Christ.

So we’re going to see more about the seven stars. For now, stars generally represent angelic beings in the Scriptures. This goes all the way back to Deuteronomy 4 stuff also, and even in the promises to Abraham, when he says, “Your offspring will become like the stars of heaven, like the angels.” But we’ll get more about those seven stars here in a little bit.

“And out of his mouth comes a two-edged sword.” What have we seen said about the Word of God before by St. Paul? That should have been a capital-W. It’s like a two-edged sword, cutting to bone and marrow. So this is again a symbol like the water. Remember the voice coming out of his mouth was like raging waters; now he’s got a sword coming out of his mouth. So this is talking about executing judgment, setting things right.

“And his countenance,” meaning his face: it’s a great old King James word. “Why is your countenance so downfallen?” [Laughter] It means “Why the long face?” So this is talking about his face “like the sun shining in its strength,” meaning broad daylight, meaning you can’t quite look at it. Christ’s glory is so overwhelming you can’t look directly at it. That’s not only his glory but also even his holiness, that you can’t make eye contact. Being in his presence, you become aware, as Isaiah did when he had his vision, of your own lack of holiness.

And we can see that here in verse 17, because St. John’s response: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet like dead.” [Laughter] So he collapses on the ground. He doesn’t say, like, “Oh, yay! It’s my old friend! I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon!” [Laughter] He falls down as if dead.

“But he laid his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.’ ” So we’re going back to the Alpha and Omega part. “ ‘I am he who lives and was dead. And behold, I am alive forever more.’ ” Now there’s something interesting there in that that “lives” is translated correctly. It’s present tense, meaning it’s ongoing. It’s not “I am he who lived and was dead and now I live forever more.” It’s “I am he who lives.” So living is one of the attributes, chaia in Hebrew, attributed to God over and over again: the living God. He is the living God over against the dead idols. So “he who lives,” ongoing, is taking another title of God in the Old Testament and applying it to Christ.

It also implies, since he says “was dead,” that means he was dead and living at the same time at some point if you sort the verb tenses. There was a period when he was both living and dead, and now he is alive forever more, meaning he will never die again. So again, going back to the identification of Christ as God, where somebody might have tried to argue ambiguously, it’s becoming pretty unambiguous here.

And the result of this is: “ ‘And I have the keys of Hades and of death.’ ” So he now has those keys, which means who doesn’t have them?

Parishioner: Satan.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t say the pope. Okay. Right, the devil doesn’t. As we read in Hebrews, the devil was the one who had the power of death, before Christ went and stomped him, as depicted in the icon of the Resurrection. So it’s not that death ceased to exist for everyone; it’s not that Hades ceased to exist for everyone, but it’s now Christ who has that authority. This is why Christ is the one who judges the living and the dead, because he has that authority, too. So everyone answers now to the devil or anyone else. We only answer to Christ, and this is why St. John was saying in 1 John that the person who will be our judge on the last day is also our advocate, is also someone who loves us, is also someone who is compassionate towards us. So this should give us great hope, because, guess what, the devil is none of those things towards us.

Verse 19: “ ‘Write the things which you have seen and the things which are and the things which will take place after this.’ ” Why is he reiterating: “You need to write the stuff that just happened and the stuff that’s happening now and in the future”? Well, because he just collapsed on the ground. So Christ appears, he says, “Hey, you need to write what you’re about to see down and send it to these churches.” He turns around, looks at him, and collapses on the ground! [Laughter] And so Christ is lifting him up and saying, “Hey… We need to write this down, everything that’s happening.”

Verse 20: “ ‘The mystery of the seven stars, which you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands which you saw are the seven churches.’ ” So we’ve got two sevens here.

Why is it important that the churches are lampstands?

Parishioner: Because they hold light?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah? And, if we’re talking about lampstands like in the Temple, that means that each church is like the tabernacle or the Temple in the old covenant. Because remember there was one place where you were supposed to go—that was the one place where God was, was the tabernacle and then the Temple. So if you were going to offer sacrifices, if you were going to offer worship, that’s where you went, that one place.

But St. John here, through this imagery, is saying: each one of these cities in the Asia Minor, in the western part of Turkey, along the coast there, in Pontus, each one of these cities has these little group of Christians. Let’s be real here, has maybe 40 or 50 people, tops, who get together in somebody’s house, bring some bread and some wine, and celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday morning. And he’s saying each one of those little gatherings is the Temple of God, where his presence is, where true sacrifices are being offered.

This is massively significant in terms of the change that’s happened from the old covenant now in Christ. That all of these little gatherings are now the same thing as what went on in Solomon’s Temple in all his glory. In fact, in a lot of cases, when we read the letters to the seven churches, it’s a lot better than what was going on in Solomon’s Temple at the time that it was there, because there was idolatry and everything else that was going on there. And at worse, it was about the same in these churches. [Laughter]

So that’s the importance of these lampstands. It’s easy to brush over: “Oh, okay, it’s the symbol of a church.” But it’s a very particular symbol, chosen for a particular reason. And we’ll see in the letters to the seven churches the way their lampstand is talked about is going to continue to carry this kind of significance.

Notice also then that these seven stars are seven angels, that each of these communities has an angel sort of assigned to it. And there were already, back in the gospels, for example, when Christ was talking about the little children, he said, “Their angels are always before the Father in heaven.” That’s talking about the idea of a guardian angel, that each person has an angel or a patron in heaven. This is here applied to a community. This is why our church is named Archangel Gabriel. This is why churches are dedicated to angels and saints, that they have a patron. There is a spirit in a church that motivates and moves through—or can.

And part of the reason for having a patron at the level of community is that when a community comes together—it doesn’t matter how big or how small it is—when a community comes together, any gathering of people, they’re going to have a collective life. We each have our own individual life, but the community also has a life of its own, that we’re all a part of, just like your body is made up of living cells. Each one of those cells is alive until you shed it off and then it dies, but it’s alive, but it’s also part of you, one being who has life. In the same way, a community has life. And that life is going to be invigorated by and guided by some kind of spirit, because something being alive means it has a spirit.

Most times when humans get together, the spirit that’s motivating them is not the Holy Spirit, is not an angelic spirit, and so communal life goes to all kinds of destructive places, internally and externally destructive. And so part of what’s happening, as these Christian‐again, from the spiritual level: Revelation is revealing this spiritual level of reality—is that we have these people who have been part of a pagan Roman city, which has spirits whom they worship—things they’ve been worshiping, spirits that guide them. One of them is Rome itself, the genius of the emperor, the greatness of Rome, these gods that represent physical strength, power, wealth, beauty. All these things that we want, they worship them to become like them. And if you know anything about the Roman world, it was incredibly brutal and ruthless and rigidly stratified by class. Not a good place to be if you’re a woman, not a good place to be if you’re a man who’s not a Roman citizen and rich. That’s where these spirits that were motivating them were taking them.

This is why when the Christians come they say, “Those spirits are demons. You think they’re trying to help you become healthy, wealthy, and wise, and that’s not what they’re aiming at.” Like Livy said about the Roman empire: “They created a wasteland and called it peace.” [Laughter] “We’ve established peace! Everything’s dead!” And this is the kind of spirits motivating them.

So as people come out of that, as people are coming out of those communities, and they could no longer take part in those communities, because they can’t participate in the pagan festivals, they can’t eat the meat offered to idols, they can’t worship those spirits any more—and those spirits were worshiped in the trade guilds, in every part of that life. So they’re having to come out of those communities and form new communities. And so part of what they need to do is replace that spirit that had been guiding them with one that’s going to guide them towards Christ.

The community as a whole— Not just as a person do I need to stop worshiping those other spirits, as an individual person, and find a patron saint who’s going to help guide me to Christ, but the community as a whole needs that, to guide its collective life, its communal life. And so here we don’t have a lot of human saints yet. It’s still the first century, so we’re still mostly talking about angels. Those angels are going to be joined by departed human saints. And so at a certain point, Aphrodite, whoever, whatever she actually was, is going to get the boot from Thessaloniki; St. Demetrios is going to be the one whom they’re following. St. Demetrios is going to be leading them to Christ. The same thing is happening here. That’s what it means that there’s an angel sort of assigned to this church. That angel is not just sort of carrying messages back and forth to the church, because St. John’s carrying a message back and forth between God and the church! The angel is there to guide the community, if they’ll listen.

Parishioner: Didn’t you tell us earlier that the gods of the nations were originally angels assigned to the nations?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the parallel is exact. That’s what’s going on at the Tower of Babel when you read Deuteronomy 32, is that these other spirits are going to the nations, and things go south. Things go sour, except for St. Dionysios says things went sour pretty much everywhere except Israel, where they had St. Michael as their angel. Yeah, but this idea is all through this Scriptures and continues here with the Christian communities.

Since we’re at the end of chapter one and we’ve probably covered enough—a whole chapter, everybody!—we’ll go ahead and stop here for the night. We’ll pick up with the letters to the seven churches starting in chapter two next time. So thank you, everybody.