Archbishop of Sydney

Third Sunday of Easter

St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Acts 5:27-32, 40-41; Apoc 5:11-14; Jn 21:1-19

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
22/4/2007

In these weeks after Easter and before Pentecost we reflect on the meaning of the passion and resurrection of Christ; on the consequences in the history of salvation for people, the world and the universe which followed from Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.

Christ was not just another good person from history who suffered more than his due, but God’s Son who turned the world upside down. We Christians do not believe that history is an everlasting wheel of return, like night and day, like the four seasons. The Incarnation and Redemption achieved a decisive break in history and set the entire creation off in a new direction, beyond our experience and somewhat beyond our understanding.

For the next few Sundays the second readings are taken from the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, while the same book features regularly in the readings of the daily prayer of the Church, which is obligatory for all priests.

This is the strangest book in the New Testament, sometimes blood thirsty and violent, with the features of other apocalyptic literature, like the Old Testament book of Daniel which aims to reveal what is normally hidden. Unlike the Jewish prophets who were centred on the present, apocalyptists concentrate on the future and the end of the world.

These Jewish books were probably written between 200 B.C. and 100 A.D., when the Jews were suffering much from a succession of foreign rulers, saw no human hope of liberation and looked forward to God’s intervention to destroy their enemies and set up his Kingdom on the earth.

Many of the most spectacular and confronting segments of the Apocalypse are not included in the Sunday readings, but today’s reading does begin to spell out in mystical language what the heavenly triumph might be like. It is still used by everyday believers for this purpose as we shall hear.

More than 10 years ago a brother priest from my ordination class came to tell me he had cancer and there was little or no hope of a cure.  He was a brave, plain spoken man with a good sense of humour. Earlier on in his priestly life he had hovered on the brink of becoming an alcoholic, but pulled himself out of this successfully. When he heard the doctor’s sentence of death, he quipped to me that if he had known he was going to die so early, he was not sure he would have stopped his drinking!  He was joking, but the other point he made was deadly serious. “I have never been too much interested in the after life, in what heaven might be like, so I must start reading and meditating on the Apocalypse”. And I am sure that he did so.

The author of this book of Revelation was called John the Divine and exiled on the island of Patmos for preaching the Word of God and witnessing to Christ. Quite a number of commentators date the work to the persecutions of the Emperor Domitian (81-96) rather than the earlier persecutions of Nero, because the author is bitterly opposed to the Roman Empire, identifying it as Babylon, the traditional Jewish symbol of evil. The author has traditionally been identified with John the Apostle, especially in the West, but some Eastern theologians not only denied authorship by the fourth evangelist, but would not accept that the Apocalypse was divinely inspired and did not include it in the Canon, or list of New Testament writings.

After the struggle with and the defeat of Babylon, there is the marriage of the Lamb, the destruction of the beast and the false prophet before the general resurrection and the institution of the New Jerusalem.  All in all we have a spectacular cast of fierce powerful opponents and a story line quite outside our ordinary everyday lives. I do recommend it for adult reading, with the help of a non-technical commentary, concentrating on what is more readily comprehensible and avoiding fixed and particular identification with actual historical events.

Today’s passage is quite beautiful. The throne represents God’s absolute power over creation and history and all creation is gathered to worship the mighty Creator. The twenty-four elders represent the patriarchs of the Old Testament, the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles of the New Dispensation.

The Apocalypse is full of symbols, which are like Christian riddles. The designation of Christ who died on the Cross as as the sacrificial Lamb is quite straight forward, but the Lamb has a Bride and there is the symbol of the New Jerusalem, splendid and bejewelled.

There are 800 allusions to the Old Testament in the Apocalypse; cosmic upheavals like the sun becoming dark and the moon like blood and a zoo full of symbolic animals – the Lamb and Lion representing Jesus, while dragons, locusts and beasts represent evil.

In this passage however the final consequences of Easter are spelt out as all of creation unites to worship the one true God and his redeeming Son, the Lamb.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.