https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tyodQdCqRvY
Let us begin in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Hail Mary full of grace. The Lord is with thee Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now at the hour of our death. Amen Say John the evangelist In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Amen Okay. Well, we’re picking up on Revelation chapters 6 through 8 verse 5 and What we’re going to be covering here is Kind of the part of the book of Revelation that really gets people kind of wound up, right? We’re talking about the part where Jesus has appeared in this vision He says, I’m going to show you what’s to come. And we see all of these strange, seemingly completely disconnected images, some of them of disasters and calamities happening all over the Earth, other things happening in heaven. This is where people really get tripped up. They don’t know how to organize it. They don’t know what’s going on. This is a lot of where some of that trying to map things on very literally onto historical events. You know, it’s where a lot of this stuff starts getting mixed in. And that’s not quite the right way to read it. And so I’m going to read an extended quote from the Catholic commentary on sacred scripture by Dr. Williamson. And this extended quote, it really helps us to understand what’s going on in this particular section of the Bible. So probably the most important point to note about Revelation’s structure is that its plot does not advance chronologically. Although the visions unfold one after another in an orderly manner, the story advances by a spiral rather than a straight path, like a road that circles its way up to a mountain, offering diverse vistas of the terrain below. Sometimes multiple visions depict a single event. For example, the relationship between the series of the seven seals, trumpets, and bulls is not strictly sequential, since the sixth item in each series seems to position the reader at the same moment just short of the end of human history, while the seventh seems to signal the end. Moreover, the forward movement of the visions is disrupted by flashbacks, such as those that recall the birth and exaltation of the Messiah, and by the atemporal visions of heavenly worship in which God’s victory is celebrated as already achieved. Despite these non-chronological elements, the narrative of Revelation does progress from the prophet’s first vision of the risen Christ to a vision of the heavenly throne room through increasingly severe chastisements of the world and trials for the church during her time of testimony to the return of Christ and the full arrival of God’s kingdom in the final two chapters. So we’re not getting a story that’s being told chronologically. It’s sort of like we’ll get a snapshot at the end of the world, and we’ll run right up to it, and then we’ll get meandering off, and then we’ll run right up to the end of the world again and meander off again, run right up to the end of the world, and meander off again. So why is this helpful? Why did John write it this way? Why did the Holy Spirit inspire him to write it this way? Now, the idea is, so remember that very first session where we were talking about all of these patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, all of these patterns which will manifest themselves on different levels of reality. And I think the way that this sequence unfolds, the way this book unfolds itself to you, is that it’s kind of giving you the pattern of the end of a world, the pattern of an end of the world over and over again. And you get different snapshots of the end of a world. You get different ways that this happens. You get different vistas along the way, rather than, let’s say, writing a really straightforward, strict historical account of a prophecy, which is what we might expect to find. And it’s useful to be able to see that end of the world. So let’s think about it this way. We all know that Jesus is coming again. This is an article of our faith. I wouldn’t imagine you’d be here on a Monday night unless you didn’t believe that. And Jesus has plainly told us, especially in Matthew’s gospel, that there’s going to be these severe calamities at the end of time. And then the whole world, St. Paul tells us, will be dissolved and we’ll have the new heavens and the new earth, the full fulfillment of God’s kingdom. So we get this pattern. But the thing is that that pattern, that’s the big one. That’s the big picture of what’s going on here. But that pattern repeats itself in small ways. That pattern of the end of a world repeats itself in small ways. And so as we go through this kind of unfolding and then the spiral approach into history, we’re just going to get a very detailed picture of what the end of a world looks like. But the end of a world, what am I talking about about the end of a world? A lot of people will look at the collapse of the Roman Empire and the transition from that whole ancient way of thinking into the medieval period. That was the end of a world right there. The Rome had existed for far longer than the United States of America had existed, first as a republic and then as an empire. Something like 1,000 years almost, 800, 1,000 years. And when that all fell apart, it left a huge amount of chaos and darkness in its wake. And eventually, the medieval Christian order was able to come out of that. So that’s the end of a world right there. Another end of the world, September 11, 2001. That was a very distinct point where you can look at that post-Cold War economic expansion. The 90s were just a very quiet time in terms of global politics. We didn’t nuke ourselves. That was pretty great. There was only one global superpower now, not two. All of that changes in September 11, 2001. And all of you would remember much better what the world was like before that. I was a little kid at that time. You didn’t used to have to go through miles of red tape in order to get on an airplane. And the world’s changed since then. That was the end of a world there. Or maybe the beginning of the end of a world. So anyway, enough talking about it. We’re going to get this pattern laid out for us here, starting in Revelation, chapter 6. All right, so context. This goes immediately from chapters 4 and 5, right? In chapters 4 and 5, John is having this vision of being in the heavenly court with the ancient of days on the throne, with the lamb, the altar, the 24 elders, the angels, the incense, the four creatures. And it moves straight into this vision. Then I watched while the lamb broke the altar, the lamb broke the open, the first of the seven seals. And I heard one of the four living creatures cry out in a voice like thunder, come forward. I looked and there was a white horse and its rider had a bow. He was given a crown and he rode forth victorious to further victories. When he broke open the second seal, I heard the second living creature cry out, come forward. Another horse came out, a red one. Its rider was given power to take peace away from the earth so that the people would slaughter one another and he was given a huge sword. All right, so one of the things to notice here is we’ve got these famous four horsemen of the apocalypse, right, these famous four horsemen, a very striking image here opening up these seven seals. Now the four creatures around the throne are those powers. They represent kind of the force of nature, the power of nature, the lion, the ox, the man, and the eagle. And they’re also perfectly obedient to the will of God. These aren’t adversarial figures, these are good figures in the heavenly court. And so one of the points is that ultimately God’s in charge of what’s going on here. Even though these things seem to be horrible calamities, we remember that God is this supreme Lord of the universe, that his hand is governing all these things. And you notice, you notice the way that this is phrased. He was given a crown, right? He was given power, but using kind of a passive voice verb there, right, you guys remember your grammar classes, the passive voice verb when something is done to you rather than you doing something. I think that’s a way that John is signaling that this is kind of the permissive will of God. We don’t say that God would cause moral evil in the universe, right? But we do say that he allows it to happen. If he’s all powerful, that obviously has to be the way we explain it, that he allows this to happen. And it’s still a part of your plan, right? And we can look at kind of the whole order of creation this way, what better manifests your skill and mastery of something is when something goes perfectly according to plan or when something tries to knock your plan off and you’re able to write it out again, right? So I keep on getting golf videos on Facebook. And some of the golf videos that come up are some classic Tiger Woods shots, right? Where he would like land the ball on a tree root, you know? And it’s like the commentators think this is gonna be impossible to hit. He’s just gonna have to take a mulligan to get it off this tree root. And then he just smashes the tree root open and manages to hit the ball onto the greens there, you know? So taking this bad situation and turning it around, making it good, that actually shows how amazing of a golfer he is, right? Not that every shot goes perfect, but even if you’re able to make something better, even when it goes wrong, that’s a real manifestation of power, you know? God, I think in the liturgy it says, “‘You wondrously created us “‘and still more wondrously redeemed us.‘” You know, so God allows these things and it’s not like he’s being taken off guard. He makes better things come out of it. And these chastisements that he’s allowing, the whole goal of this is so that we might be converted, you know, that we might turn to God in our need. That’s what all chastisements boil down to. Now, the first of these horsemen represents war, right? That’s obviously, you know, the language is very clear. He rode forth victorious to further his victories. And victorious generals would wear white clothes when they’d be honored in a triumph, right? If you had a really good military victory in Rome, you were honored with a triumph. You were wearing white clothes that day. And so that’s the symbolism of the white horse. And he also, very interesting, he had a bow, right? And I think a lot of commentators think that kind of on the eastern edge of the Roman Empire is where the Parthians were. They were renowned horsemen, that they could do these incredible feats of horseback archery, right? And they were kind of perennial enemies against the Roman legions. The Roman legions were actually defeated several times by Parthian cavalry in that first century AD, right? And so this idea then of this first horseman is war happening outside of your domain, right? Because far away from Rome, you know, this was on the edge of the empire. It was something that was happening outside. The second horse, the red horse, given power to take peace away from the earth so that the people would slaughter one another. This is an internal turmoil, internal strife, right? This is like civil unrest. That’s what this is symbolizing. The second living creature, you know, with the huge sword, kind of political violence within. So there’s violence without, and there’s violence within. Might manifest itself today as rioting. When he broke open the third seal, I heard the third living creature cry out, come forward. I looked and there was a black horse and its rider held a scale in his hand. I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures. It said, a ration of wheat costs a day’s pay and three rations of barley costs a day’s pay, but do not damage the olive oil or the wine. When he broke open the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature cry out, come forward. I looked and there was a pale green horse. Its rider was named Death and Hades accompanied him. They were given authority over a quarter of the earth to kill with the sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth. All right, so these are the second of the two horsemen, the second of the seven seals, or the, yeah, three and four. So famine, right? That’s what that passage in that, describing the third horse is all about. So imagine a loaf of bread costs $400, right? That’s a back of the envelope approximation for what it means that a ration of bread costs a day’s pay. And when you look at kind of the wheat and the barley, that’s daily sustenance right there, right? Those are the things that a Roman citizen, a citizen of the Mediterranean would be expected to eat every day, whereas the wine and the oil was a little more luxurious, a little more extravagant, showing that these famine affects the poor much more than it affects the rich. And then finally, this last horse, it tells you it’s riders named Death, right? So it doesn’t, you know, it interprets it as there for us. Something very interesting when it says that Hades accompanied him. Now they’re not talking about the Greek god Hades that you might have seen in Disney’s Hercules or whatever. Hades is actually this realm of the dead, right? That was where in kind of the Greek mythology that souls of the dead would go. And so when you got this idea of Hades accompanied him, it’s like you’ve got the rider riding and it’s like the whole horde of the dead riding behind them. It was quite the powerful images. And you notice how this fourth rider includes the first three, right? To kill with sword, famine and plague and by means of the beasts of the earth. So this fourth rider kind of summons up the results of the first three and adds a few things to them. Then talks about having authority over the quarter of the earth. Again, we’re dealing with these symbolic numbers, right? Not, shouldn’t be interpreted literally like, you know, at this point in earth’s history, a quarter, exactly a quarter of the people die. It means a significant portion of the earth’s population, but not a majority, right? That’s kind of what that symbolism of the quarter is. So that’s kind of the four horsemen. So let’s talk about this idea of a world ending then and see if we can apply it to these four horsemen. Now the reason that a world, right? A world, just using that very broadly, very broadly idea. The reason a world comes to be and is able to be stable is because it actually makes things work, right? That’s the basic idea. Whatever organization it is, however it helps people work together, it works. And that’s a good thing. We can all try and increase that order of the world. The thing is, is that human societies need constant updating, right? Just like human beings need constant updating in order to continue to stay relevant, right? Like if you act in your 40s the same way you act in your 20s, your life is going to have changed by then and that you need to be transformed on your way through this life, right? And so that’s a part of growing up. That’s a part of being a human being is you have to constantly adapt to the changes in your life. You have to constantly adapt to changing circumstances. You gotta bring in new habits. You gotta let old habits go away. Something that worked and was good for a while won’t always work forever, right? It’s easier to do it when it’s just you, right? And it’s hard enough to do it when it’s just you, but it’s easier to do it when it’s just you. When you’re trying to organize large groups of people together, it gets much harder, right? It gets much harder to solve problems, right? One of the problems that the Roman Empire had was that land kept on getting accumulated into the hands of a few wealthy people, right? The way they dealt with that, and that left a whole bunch of people without any means of production, right? They had no way of earning their own living and they didn’t know what to do. Are we gonna do like a forced redistribution of wealth? That wasn’t a very popular idea among the ruling elite. And so for a while, the way they dealt with that was just by continually expanding, right? So we talked about how Philippi was a Roman colony for retired Roman soldiers. Like you go out and fight Rome’s wars, we’ll give you land, you know? And as long as they were able to keep that expanding, they were able to keep that problem solved. But eventually, they had extended to the furthest bounds of their borders. They weren’t able to keep that war machine going. It wasn’t able to continue working. The whole thing begins to collapse. It’s not working anymore. It’s not solving problems, right? Even the laws that had worked in the first century BC, first century AD, was no longer working in the fourth and fifth centuries. Everything’s starting to fall apart, right? And so what happens when things start to fall apart? War, civil unrest, right? People are beginning to not be content with the way that things have been organized. People are beginning to not be content with how things are and they start fighting. They start fighting outside and they start fighting inside. Is that good for food production? No, so famine naturally follows, especially in the ancient world. It’s like you’ve had this invading army come in. Is it a civil war or is it an outside war? It doesn’t even matter. All of a sudden, you’re not planting. You’re not harvesting. They’re taking the food. Famine just follows very naturally from that, right? And then you’ve got war, famine, and then finally death shows up. Sword, famine, and plague, and by the beasts of the earth. The whole order collapses. And so the Book of Revelation is telling us about these end times, about that massive event at the end of history, but it can also tell us about these little cycles, right? It’s not terribly mysterious how this stuff all works out. That’s why it’s useful to see because you can keep your eyes open. You can read the signs of the times. You can say, wow, we’ve got all this stuff going on. Might we be at the end of a world right now? Well, maybe. Not the end of the world necessarily. It might not be the big one, but you could be at the end of a world and it can still be not a whole lot of fun to go through. The symbolism, the patterns keep repeating themselves on big levels and on small levels. All right, so that’s the first four seals right there. Now we get to the fifth seal. We’re completely changing pace. We are no longer looking at calamities on the earth. When he broke open the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered because of the witness they bore to the word of God. They cried out in a loud voice, how long will it be holy and true master before you sit in judgment and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth? Each of them was given a white robe and they were told to be patient a little while longer until the number was filled of their fellow servants and brothers who were going to be killed as they had been, right? All right, so all of a sudden we’re just switching our attention back to, we’re still in heaven, right? The writers have gone out. We’re switching our attention back to the altar and there’s the souls of the martyrs underneath the altar, right? So we’re talking about, first let’s talk about the phrase, the inhabitants of the earth. Now every time that John uses the phrase, the inhabitants of the earth, he’s talking about, he’s very specifically referencing people who do not accept Christ, people who are not being saved by the blood of the lamb, right? And it’s very interesting, he uses the phrase, inhabitants of the earth 10 times in the book of Revelation, right? Which I think 10 is kind of a human number. It’s not a number associated with divinity anywhere in the biblical canon. And every time he uses the phrase, inhabitants of the earth, he’s using it, directing it as people who are recipients of divine judgment, that they’ve been judged and found wanting. So that’s the inhabitants under the earth. Now the martyrs are underneath the altar, right? So let’s just, for a second, I just want you all to forget about the mass, right? You’ve seen it hundreds of times, just forget about the mass, think about ancient sacrifices, right? What makes the mass unique is that it’s a bloodless sacrifice, right? That I’m not actually up there slaughtering Jesus, you know? We’re representing that sacrifice, ritually and sacramentally, right? We’re not actually doing it. But anybody in the ancient world would have been familiar with actual animal sacrifice. It was something that you would participate in. The blood runs down the altar, you know? And the blood, the idea of the blood is, is that that’s actually the life force of the animal. It’s not hard to see how that works, that the blood is the life force in the animal. Think of, all the way back to the book of Genesis, the story of Cain and Abel, what does God say? God says, Cain, where is your brother? His blood calls out to me from the earth, you know? Very vivid imagery, right? And so these martyrs are underneath the altar, right? Right, they’re like the body of Christ and that part of the body of Christ that has been sacrificed, right? That identification between the Christian and Christ, you know, the mystical body of Christ, these are the ones who have suffered and have shed their blood and are underneath the altar, just like the sacrifices of old. They’ve been given the white robes, once again, that’s victory and that’s resurrection. And then there’s, until the number filled of their fellow servants and brothers who were going to be killed as they had been. Once again, you know, God knows exactly the whole plan, right? He knows how many people are going to be underneath that altar, he’s gonna wait until the end of time when that number has been filled up before he comes back and gives his divine judgment. So what do we have underneath just about every Catholic altar in the world? Relics, the relics of the martyrs. We trace that tradition even back to the second and third centuries, you know, we have writings about people who are celebrating the Eucharist in the catacombs, you know, because they want to be close to the martyrs, right? They wanted to have that closeness to the martyrs. Linking that idea, you know, I mean, the author of the, Saint Luke in the letter of the Acts does this very explicitly with Saint Stephen, right? Like, Saint Stephen literally quotes Christ when he says, Father, forgive them, they know not what they’re doing, you know, as he’s being stoned to death, you know. So that idea that you participate, that martyrs participate in the sufferings of Christ, it’s all linked together, it’s all the same idea. Then I watched while he broke open the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake. The sun turned black as dark sackcloth and the whole moon became like blood. The stars in the sky fell to the earth like unripe figs shaken loose from the tree in a strong wind. Then the sky was divided like a torn scroll curling up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place. All right, so, that’s obviously the end of the earth right there, right? The sky being rolled up, the stars are gone. We compare this to Jesus’s discourse in Matthew chapter 24. Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken. And then the sign of the son of Matthew, the son of Matthew, will be shaken. And then the sign of the son of man will appear in heaven. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn and they will see the son of man coming upon the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a trumpet blast and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other, right? And so this is not like St. John’s just making stuff up here, right? That he heard from Jesus this discourse about the end times when he was in Jerusalem, right? And he remembered, he links these two together. Perhaps even the communities in Ephesus by this time would have had manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel. We don’t know how quickly they circulated. Now, we need to talk about the way people viewed time in the ancient world. We’ll start off with the Greeks, right? And the Greeks had this idea that was actually very common that time was actually a cycle and it would kind of repeat itself over and over again. And some of the philosophers were quite explicit about it when they were talking about it, like Socrates will always be born. Socrates will always drink the hemlock and die. And it’ll go on like this circle, this endless cycle of ages, maybe a 10,000 year cycle. And we obviously don’t think that way, right? This idea of an end of the world, of history moving towards a moment where God is definitively acting, where God is definitively victorious, that is a very Jewish view of history, right? Like that is definitely an inheritance that Christianity received from and through the Jews. And that’s all over, especially some of the later prophets when they’re all talking about this day of the Lord that’s coming. And a lot of this imagery that we have in our passages, Revelation 6, 12 to 15, a lot of that is taken from Isaiah here, Book of the Prophet Joel here, all of this about this climactic day of the Lord. And it’s funny how these two images come together because the day of the Lord on one hand is this absolute calamity where the whole world seems to be shaken, the whole world seems to be uprooted and everything’s going crazy and everything’s falling apart. And it’s also the day when God reveals his final victory and the whole world is transformed into the Messianic age. And that’s sort of why a lot of this is kind of the chronology, you know, I mean, we talk about history moving towards this final end but it still has a little bit of the cycle in there, right? Because what happened on the day that Jesus was crucified? The sun went dark until three in the afternoon, right? And wasn’t there an earthquake? And the veil in the temple was torn in two. And as Matthew’s gospel tells us, the souls of many saints rose from their graves and were seen around Jerusalem. And nobody talks about that because we just don’t know what to make of it, right? That’s a very strange detail right there that there were just these people walking around as like, I thought you were dead, you know? Very odd thing, right? It’s so, the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord has already happened and the day of the Lord is coming, right? Because Jesus has already won the battle. He already has, you know, we’ve already reached the end of history, right? But we also haven’t reached the end of the history because the way time and eternity interact, the way God directs these things is already here, right? We are already in the kingdom of God. It’s not yet come to its fullest fulfillment. And I think this way of looking at history of how Jesus has already won but it hasn’t come to its full fruition, how we already have the kingdom of God but it hasn’t come to its fullness yet, how we’ve already received, you know, the amazing grace of baptism but we haven’t fully unlocked its potential yet in our lives. This is part of God’s way of renewing creation, right? That he’s using the church, he’s using his spirit which has gone out into the world, he’s using that to create a new world, right? It’s not enough for him to just patch up the old one, you know, to fix a few parts, to send it along its way, that what we’re looking forward to is this new heavens and this new earth, creation 2.0. And we’re a part of this already. And it’s already happened, it’s already been completed. You’ve already, you know, received the sacraments of initiation. Like how much grace is there in the Eucharist? It’s all there but it’s not yet. We’re still unfolding it, we’re still unpacking it, we’re still pilgrims on the journey. So I think that’s why a lot of this chronology, you know, if you’re trying to be overly literal, it’s just gonna throw you off, you know? It’s this mysterious dynamic process where time and eternity are interacting and it doesn’t necessarily make sense immediately. Good news is, is we don’t have to make sense of it, God’s in charge. And so that helps out a lot of things. The kings of the earth and the nobles and the military officers and the rich, the powerful, and every slave and free person hid themselves in the caves among the mountains. They cried out to the mountains and the rocks and they have fallen us and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb because the great day of their wrath has come and who can withstand it? So obviously we’re talking about the kings of the earth. This is obviously referring to those who are unrepentant, right? Those who have not believing in God, who are persisting in their sins, and when these great calamities happen, right? The power of God is becoming manifest and His judgment is coming. And so I don’t have much to say about these particular passages. The wrath of the lamb. So if you actually look at some of the, some of the Hebrew commentary on scripture, some of the Hebrew debates, some of these Jewish rabbinical literature, they actually have this idea of two messiahs, right? There’s the Messiah son of David and the Messiah son of Joseph. The Messiah son of David is this powerful military leader. It was sort of the idea that you have in history when you hear about that messianic expectation against the Roman Empire, right? And then there’s the Messiah son of Joseph and the rabbinic expectation was that, there’s been a prophecy about this and we hope that he doesn’t come because if he comes, he will find the world unworthy, he’ll be killed and many will be killed with him. He’ll be like this messiah that’s destined to die. And I find it very interesting that even in this rabbinic literature, those who do not know Christ, they would cut kind of these two images of the messiah present there, the one who is suffering and the one who is triumphant and that the suffering messiah comes first and then later the triumphant one comes. I don’t quite know what to make of that but it’s very, very interesting to me. After this, I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth so that no wind could blow on land or sea or against any tree. Then I saw another angel come up from the east, holding the seal of the living God. He cried out in a loud voice to the four angels who were given power to damage the land and the sea. Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees until we put the seal on the four heads of the earth and the seal on the four heads of the servants of our God. I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal, 144,000 marked from every tribe of the Israelites. And then I’m not gonna read it, but verses five to eight, it just says 12,000 from the tribe of Judah, 12,000 from the tribe of Reuven, 12,000, you can see that in your own Bibles. Just gonna save my voice a little bit. So, I’ve had this vision of all these angels calamities, all this destruction. We get a flashback here, right? Kind of before all of this happens, we’ve got these four angels standing at the four corners of the world holding back the four winds of the earth, right? So you could just imagine, you know, what does it mean to hold back the four winds of the earth? It’s like the earth is standing still at this point all of a sudden. It’s like they’ve hit the pause button. There’s no more wind even, we’re just holding it back. We’re not having any change on the earth. These four angels. And we’ve got like this head angel who’s given the orders, right? His head angel comes from the east, right? So what’s the signification of coming from the east? What comes from the east? The sun, the sun rises in the east. And so, Christians for centuries have regarded the east as that place where it represents the resurrection. The sun died at night and it rises again in the morning. Like the whole world is just trying to tell us about Christ. It’s also been regarded as that, which is the direction that Christ is going to return from when he returns again, right? So coming from the east, that’s kind of God’s direction. West, the land of the setting sun, that’s death and decay there. Coming from the east, that is resurrection, that’s new life, that’s the returning of Christ. So that’s why for centuries, churches were always built with our altars facing east, odd orientum. And even if, in the liturgy, especially the pre-Vatican two mass, always being celebrated that way, even if the church wasn’t literally built to the east, was always symbolically facing east, right? And then, it’s very interesting, when you would read the gospel, you would face north, right? And it’s like this is initially a Mediterranean religion, it’s a phenomena that forms around the Mediterranean basin and north is where the barbarians are. So that’s where we go to preach the gospel. It’s just the liturgical imagery there. And this angel holds the seal of the living God. So when you seal something, that’s a mark of identity, right? So if you’re gonna seal a letter, in the ancient world, it’s like a signature too. This identifies this as mine, right? So you know if every king would have their own unique seal showing it like this is a letter from the king, this is my seal and nobody can reproduce that. Another common idea is when you were recruited into a Roman legion, you would have the, I think the name of the general you were working for tattooed onto your hand or on your arm. It’s got this kind of military idea to it. It’s like you’ve been set aside for this. And then when you get to that roll call of the Israelites, it kind of echoes some of the censuses from like the book of Numbers of the fighting men in Israel, right? So you got a lot of this military imagery going on here. Now the seal for the Christian then is baptism, it’s confirmation, it’s the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We call baptism, confirmation, and Holy Communion, what are those? Sacraments of initiation, right? And when you’ve gone through them, you’re all fully initiated members of the church militant, right? You’ve gone in and Christ has sealed you, you know? You’re not repeating these, you repeat communion over and over again because it’s sustenance, but baptism and confirmation are not repeated. Now what’s the symbolism of 144,000? Is heaven gonna be that empty? No, no, so what’s the symbolism of 144,000? It’s the square of 12, right? So you’ve got 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles, so you’ve got the church brought together as Jew and Gentile, so 12 times 12 times 1,000, a big number, right? Symbolically, 1,000’s a big number. It was also the largest unit that would be under the command of one person in a Roman legion, you know? There were 5,000 for the whole legion, but anyway. So it sounds like a military census. Now the interesting thing is that Judah is mentioned first because Judah, you know, who was Jacob’s oldest son? None of you were obviously in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat because then it’ll be burned into your head. Ruben was the eldest of the children of Israel. So Ruben was the eldest, but various events in the Book of Genesis means he’s not in Jacob’s favor anymore, and Judah ends up supplanting him. So Judah’s listed first. And then it’s very interesting to note, so the Old Testament doesn’t always get its 12 tribes straight, right? You’ll get various little different lists. It’s mostly the same, but what really confuses people is that Joseph is divided into either one or two tribes, right? Sometimes it’ll list Ephraim, and other times it’ll list Manasseh after the two sons of Joseph. And this one lists Ephraim and Manasseh, and there’s no mention of Dan, right, the tribe of Dan. But there’s several Old Testament passages which kind of link the tribe of Dan with idolatry. They settled beyond the Jordan River, and so there’s this idea that they’re kind of outside the Jordan River. And so this link with idolatry that they’re no longer included in the 144,000. All right, we have another interruption. So we just got done with an interruption of something that happened in the past. People receiving the seal. Now we got a vision of heavenly worship. After this I saw a vision of a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hand. They cried out in a loud voice, salvation is from our God who is seated on the throne and from the land. All the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They prostrated themselves before the throne, worshiped God, and exclaimed, amen, blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever, amen. So we’ve got this image of heavenly worship. And there’s kind of a pervasive idea that goes around today is that you want to die and go to heaven, right? Now that’s not actually the final destination, is it? See, we’ve got this heavenly worship and that’s good. That’s a part of God’s plan. But every week we talk about the resurrection of the body and the creed, right? The resurrection of the dead. And so the final destination isn’t actually heaven. That’s actually kind of a stopping place along the way. And St. Thomas Aquinas, my hero, actually says that a human being in heaven, soul separated from the body is actually an aberration, right? It’s actually like kind of metaphysically wrong in a way that you would have a human being whose soul is separated from the body. Is that you’re supposed to be an embodied creature. You’re supposed to have hands and feet and a face and all this different stuff, right? That’s the way that you were fundamentally constituted. And so I just like to hammer that point forward over and over again. The final destination isn’t heaven. The final destination is this new earth that we live on. So, all right. We’ve got this great multitude which no one could count. Right, so what promise from the Old Testament is this fulfilling? A great multitude beyond numbering, beyond measure. Promises to Abraham, right? Yeah, I will make your descendants like the stars of the sigh, like the sand on the seashore, like the dust of the earth if anybody could number it, right? That’s a heck of a thing to say about the church in the first century AD, isn’t it? I mean, that is just like an absolutely astounding prophecy. We’ve got about two billion Christians on earth today, right? And so it seems perfectly obvious to us, right? Well, of course there’s gonna be a great number of people in heaven. Look at how many Christians there are. But we were talking tiny churches at this point. Our slimmest fraction of the people in the Roman Empire were Christians at that point. And somehow, somehow he has this vision of this massive heavenly worship. From every nation, race, people, and tongue. Not just these people. And this kind of helps balance out our view of, view of the Old Testament, the New Testament. Jesus is always talking about coming back soon, right? Like behold, I’m coming soon. That’s actually something that Jesus says in the book of Revelation. But right here in the first century, there’s this idea that there’s gonna be these great multitudes of people, right? All of these great multitudes of people. So it’s like, okay, apparently the word soon doesn’t mean like next week. You know, it’s like, I’m coming back soon. And it’s gonna be at least 2,000 years. But God does not delay, even though it may seem like a delay, because 1,000 years are his one day to him. And one day is as 1,000 years. He just relates to time differently. And we just gotta acknowledge that mystery rather than trying to cram God into our box. So there’s this very ancient idea that we have to gather in all the nations, you know? Once again, we’ve got these white robes and the palm branches. The palm branches, the white robe, that’s victory. The white robe is also worship. And the palm branches, during these Roman processions, people would be carrying palm branches, right? And when they welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem, they were carrying palm branches. So this idea of this triumphal procession, this entry into his own. And then also, the Feast of Booths, right? The Feast of Booths is an Old Testament feast, also called the Feast of Tabernacles. It depends on how you translate that Hebrew word there. It was a harvest feast, right? Harvest feast that comes at the end of the growing season. And as Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like, oh boy, there goes that parable. Jesus of heaven is, the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sows seed in the ground, and his enemies sow the weeds. Shall I uproot the weeds? No, let them grow together. And at the end, it is harvested, and the good fruit is taken into the barn, and the weeds are bundled up and burned in the fire. You know? So all this is still linking back to the gospels. You know, there’s nothing here that contradicts. It’s not like we’re dealing with contradictory accounts, a complimentary, they work very well together. And again, we’re back in worship, right? And it’s like, that’s gonna come up over and over again. Appropriate worship of God. Rejecting idolatry, worshiping the one God of heaven. So important, it comes up over and over again. Then one of the elders spoke up and said to me, who are these wearing white robes, and where do they come from? I said to him, my lord, you are the one who knows. He said to me, these are the ones who have survived the time of great distress. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. For this reason, they stand before God’s throne and worship him day and night in his temple. The one who sits on the throne will shelter them. They will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them. For the lamb who is at the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of life-giving water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. So the elder asks John a question, right? Now do teachers ever ask rhetorical questions so that they can answer them themselves? Yes, yes they do. Right? That’s what’s going on there, right? And John knows that’s what’s going on there. He says, my lord, you’re the one who knows. I’m not even gonna try and answer that question. So time of great distress. We’re always living in this time of great distress, right? You know, these patterns, they repeat over and over again. The end times are the big ones, but tell me who lives on this earth and hasn’t suffered? Who hasn’t had to go through these times of great distress? As Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is taken by force and the violent bear it away, you know? It’s under this continual persecution. It’s under continual danger from the world, the flesh and the devil. And we’ve got this very, very striking image. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. So they’re obviously. Yeah, they’re obviously, you know, we’re obviously gotta look at the symbolism behind this blood here. That symbolism represents, you know, we’re talking about how the blood is the life of something, right? And so it’s not enough that we’re just, that God no longer holds our sin against us, right? That God is no longer going to punish us, right? As if this was all just a juridical act. It is all just a legal act, like, oh, you know, you deserve to be punished, but I’m just not gonna punish you. It’s that our lives become immersed in the life of Jesus. That that very spirit that he walked around and that he had, that we get immersed into it. It washes us clean and it transforms us. And they’re pointing that out very right, because, you know, it’s like you don’t have to be around for very long to know that that blood, in a physical sense, doesn’t actually make things white. But during all of these sacrifices, it was understood that your sins would be washed away in this blood. It was a part of the ritual at the base of Mount Sinai’s, Moses sacrificed the two bowls and sprinkles the blood on you that you’re participating in this. And we now consume the blood of Christ, well, the body of Christ. We’ll get back to the blood of Christ soon enough, I’m sure. It’s like one of the last pandemic restrictions that’s hanging on here. And this idea, the one who sits on the throne will shelter them. If you look at the Greek, it literally says, will spread his tent over us, right? You know, we look at this idea of the inhabitants of the earth, right? And John uses that always to refer to those who have not accepted God. And then we’ve got this image from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians where he says, our citizenship is in heaven, right? That we no longer are inhabitants of the earth, that we no longer live on this earth the same way others do, that we now live in God’s dwelling, right? That we now are his temple. And under the shadow of his tent, we are freed from all suffering. But this is kind of the final destination that the evils of this world, the tribulations, they don’t have the last word, right? They can’t negate the joy that God is trying to give us, but will actually lead us to it if we witness to Christ and endure to the end. When he broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And then I saw the seven angels who stood before God were given seven trumpets. Another angel came and stood at the altar holding a gold censer. He was given a great quantity of incense to offer along with the prayers of all the holy ones on the gold altar that was before the throne. The smoke of the incense along with the prayers of the holy ones went up before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with the burning coals from the altar, and hurled it down to the earth. There were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. All right, so there’s silence in the heavenly worship, right? And if you’ve been to Daily Mass with me, you’ll notice that I, when we get to the offertory, I say those offertory prayers quietly, right? And the Roman Missal gives you the option to do one way or the other if there’s not music. I chose to do it in silence just because I think silence is a great place for the piety of everybody involved to have a place to kind of feel that, right? That it actually helps your participation sometimes to have silence rather than to have this constant words. So anyway, other priests make other decisions, and the church grants that. The seven angels, in the Jewish non-biblical literature at the time, they’ve got like the seven angels, and you’ve got the names we’re familiar with, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, which are mentioned in the Bible, and then I think other angels in this Jewish, and these were kind of the top angels in the celestial hierarchy, you know? Now you may be confused if you’ve heard of different systems of angelology, right? So if you’ve ever like read a book about angels and you’ve heard about these nine choirs of angels and the archangels are the second lowest, that’s because they’re basing their study of the angels on Dionysius the Areopagite or St. Gregory the Great, which has archangels as a lower choir. So anyway, it’s kind of confusing, and honestly, anybody who says things about angels that are like really, really, you know, maybe they have a private revelation, but the Bible doesn’t tell us that much about angels. So just hang loose, all will be revealed to us in the end. All right, these seven angels are given seven trumpets, and so this is one of the confusing things about the book of Revelation, is that we get to kind of the end of these seven seals, and then we get to the first, the seventh seal is the seven trumpets, and then there’s gonna be another interlude, and then the seventh trumpet is gonna be the seven bowls of wrath, and so it kind of all opens up like one of those Russian dolls, where you open it up and there’s another doll on the inside. It’s all just symbolic stacking. People who are trying to map it onto history, they just get so mixed up, and their predictions don’t come true, and it’s just, you just gotta hang loose with the symbolism there. Now trumpets, right? Did they have PA systems? No, right, and anybody who has ever been to a middle school band concert, what do you know about the trumpets? They’re loud, right? And so the trumpets are used to announce things, right? Trumpets are used to announce things. When the king shows up and he’s about to say something, you gotta get that crowd to be quiet, you blow the trumpet, everybody knows there’s something going on here. It’s like a great, big, loud speaker. There was a trumpet at Mount Sinai, signaling the arrival of God on top of the mountain. And Jericho, right? That’s where we’ve seen that image of the seven trumpets before. You’ve got the seven priests with the seven trumpets, they’re blowing it. After they march around the city of Jericho on the seventh day, they march around seven times, blow the trumpets. God’s power is now made manifest. And so, as we get to these seven trumpets, again, we’re looking at God’s power becoming manifest in the world. Yeah, talking about this gold altar before the throne. This was actually, you know, this idea that the temple mirrored the temple in heaven, the temple on earth mirrors the temple in heaven. There was a gold altar in the temple before the main altar, and that was the temple in heaven. And so, the temple in heaven was the temple in heaven. The temple before the main altar, and that was the altar of incense, right? They would burn up incense on morning and at evening as prescribed by the law of Moses. Now, incense, that’s got, that’s always had kind of this religious ritual about it, right? And I remembered, especially when we lived in Norway, we used incense every Sunday, and I just thought it was great. Sorry, Mary. She’s a little. Well, they can get some of it, but they’re not allergic to it. Yeah. But the incense is, you know, it’s a pleasing fragrance, right? And so, when something shows up with incense, it’s just, ah, you know? And the ancient people just had this very strong sense about incense as a pleasing fragrance rising up to God. It also is something that would purify, right? So you can imagine having a bunch of people from the ancient world crammed into a poorly circulated temple, and you’re sacrificing animals there, you’re burning torches, you know? It’s like, okay, what are we gonna do about this? So you get the incense going, right? As a pleasing fragrance for the gods, you know? Not just any fragrance. And so, the prayers of the holy ones are mixed in with this incense, right? So you just got this image of God receiving our prayers through the ministry of this angel, from the altar, being pleased by it, right? And it’s very mysterious how prayer works. And, you know, all throughout the Bible, you know, you can’t possibly read the Bible and come away with the idea that prayer isn’t a good thing to be doing, right? Even Jesus himself prays. And then you’re like, wait a minute, God already knows what I need before I ask him, you know? And how am I, in my prayers, going to change the will of the Almighty? With this image from Revelation, you know, we could do all sorts of theological speculation on how prayer works and the, you know, absolute versus contingent will of God and all sorts of things. We could go into the Bible, and the contingent will of God and all sorts of things, we could go there. But I think this image is just a lot more powerful, you know? God does receive our prayers as a pleasing fragrance, and his power is manifested through that. These burning coals come down from the altar, right? Where have we seen coals coming from the altar before? I’m talking about from the Bible. Isaiah. Yeah, Isaiah. Isaiah has this revelation, right? So these coals from the altar don’t really have this idea like they’re going to go and destroy things, right? But they’re purifying, right? They’re purifying. And then what happens on the earth? Well, there’s peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake, which is exactly how God manifested himself on Mount Sinai, right? It goes back to that symbolism over and over again. That’s what our prayers do. All right, and that’s the end of the seven seals. Next time, we’ll pick up with the… Yeah, with the seven trumpets. Any questions? All right. Thanks, buddy.