 |
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati Main Page || The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index |
Live
Letters Second Sunday of
Easter |
The Catholic Telegraph
April 20, 2001Although the Lectionary readings for the Sundays after Easter have no relation to one another on any given Sunday, they are all somehow connected with the resurrection of Jesus. The gospel readings for the first three Sundays give us the narratives of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. The gospel for the fifth Sunday of Easter is about the good shepherd, the risen Christ looking after His flock. For the last two Sundays we have gospel readings from Jesus’ last supper discourse in John’s gospel in which Jesus encourages His followers to look beyond the events of the next few days to a more distant future.
The first readings for these Sundays are about the results of the resurrection in the young Church as described in The Acts of the Apostles. These are offered in "a three year cycle of parallel and progressive selections," as the Lectionary’s introduction puts it.
The second readings are series of readings from books of the New Testament that "fit in especially well with the spirit of joyous faith and sure hope proper to this season." For year C we have readings from the last book of the New Testament, The Book of Revelation. This book deals with the ultimate outcomes of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Revelation is a book whose intent is to offer encouragement and hope to its readers in time of tribulation. The tribulation may have been a persecution, or, more likely, a time of rejection and alienation during which Christians were being excluded from ordinary society because of their refusal to take part in the worship of the emperor that was expected as part of ordinary civic life. The encouragement that Revelation offers comes in the form of visions and narratives that deal with God’s involvement in the present world and with His future triumph in the world still to come. It’s important to be aware that Revelation is not intended to give us a set of specific predictions about the future, but rather to remind us of ultimate salvation and ultimate victory that began with the resurrection of Jesus. It is a difficult book, not so much because its content is obscure or enigmatic, but because the means that the author uses to communicate his message (e.g., symbolic colors, garments, numbers) are not the means that we would employ for the same purpose.
The first part of Revelation consists of letters from God to seven local churches. Their general message is that God knows what is going on here in our world and that He has expectations about the behavior of Christian believers. The reading for this second Sunday of Easter is the introduction to this first part of the book. It comes immediately after the verses that give the title of the book and its opening salutation.
The author introduces himself as John, in exile for the faith but a sharer with his readers in adversity and in hope for the final kingdom. (Scripture scholars hold that this John is not the same as the author of the fourth gospel.)
He tells how he was called by a heavenly voice to write down the visions that he would see. This heavenly voice belonged to the triumphant Christ, standing in heaven in the midst of lampstands that signified the local churches, dressed in a way that identified Him as both priest and king. When John collapses in reverential fear, Christ encourages him and speaks of Himself as Lord of history, risen from the dead, ruler of the living and the dead. He calls John to write down what he would see: an explanation of both present and future. (Notice how often we have words such as "as though," "like," "as" which indicate that what John describes is not to be taken literally, but as a sign of deeper realities.)
In the context of Revelation as a whole, these verses are introductory material. Nonetheless, they have a message for us. They reminds us that Christ is now in eternal glory, awesome beyond the capabilities of human language to describe.
We all have images of Christ. We think of Him in many different ways. Sometimes we imagine Him as He must have been when He walked the roads of Judea and Galilee. Sometimes we think of Him as He described Himself: the good shepherd, the sower of the seed of God’s word. Perhaps we picture Him as the judge of living and dead, the Lord of the Sistine Chapel’s last judgement. Or maybe we think of Him as the cosmic Christ, Lord of the universe, as He is portrayed in the great mosaic in the National Shrine in Washington. We all have one or more favorite pictures of Christ. That’s not inappropriate. We should have many images of Christ in our minds because the reality of Christ is too rich and too complex to be expressed in one image. Christ is both God and man, temporal and eternal, infinitely merciful but all just, one who suffered the death of a criminal yet reigns as Lord of heaven and earth. We can never capture His full reality in any single image or concept. Today’s reading reminds us of certain dimensions of Christ that we must not forget. He is Lord of all and judge of all, yet He reaches out to us and tells us not to be afraid.
###
Conversation Questions
What dimensions of Christ are most important to me?
If I were an artist, how would I picture Christ?
###
Main Page
|| The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index
Copyright © 2001 Archdiocese of Cincinnati.