 |
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati Main Page || The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index |
Live
Letters Third Sunday of
Easter |
The Catholic Telegraph
April 27, 2001Like last Sunday’s second reading from Revelation, this Sunday’s also gives us an image of Christ. In chapters 1 to 3, the author has recounted the letters from God to seven local churches of Asia Minor. Now he proceeds to record the visions he experienced and was ordered to share. By way of introduction to these visions, he shows us, in chapters 4 and 5, a convocation of the heavenly court.
First of all, at the beginning of chapter 4, we see God seated on His throne of glory. The atmosphere is filled with thunder and lightning, like the atmosphere of Mt. Sinai when God gave the commandments to Moses. Around God’s throne are twenty-four elders, a circle of priestly kings who are nonetheless subject to the King of kings. Also present are "four living creatures covered with eyes in front and back." These represent the elemental powers of the cosmos. The living creature and the elders are pictured offering adoration to the One on the throne.
Next we see a scroll in the hand of God, His complex plan for the world. But who is there to implement the plan? Now there appears the lion of the tribe of Judah, the offspring of David, the lamb slain, yet endowed with power. This complex image represents the risen Christ. (As regards the image of the Lamb, recall how John the Baptist pointed out Jesus to his followers in John 1, 29, how Isaiah described the Servant of God as "a lamb led to the slaughter" in Is. 53.7 and how Paul spoke of Christ as "our paschal lamb" in I Cor. 5.7) Only the Lamb is able to carry out what is determined in the scroll. The elders and the living creatures fall down before Him in worship. This is where our Sunday reading begins.
Now countless angels join the living creatures and the kingly elders to proclaim the worthiness of the Lamb to receive every kind of reverence and recognition. (Lovers of Handel’s Messiah will recall the glorious music that the composer provides for these verses.) Next the circle of praise widens to include every creature in the universe crying out honor and glory to the Lamb. The elders and the living creatures confirm the worship of all creation with their own Amen.
The purpose of chapters 4 and 5 is to offer Revelation’s readers hope by recalling the heavenly foundations of their salvation. It also provides the background setting for the visions in which God’s plans for the future of heaven and earth will be manifested.
As presented to us in the Lectionary, the reading does not give us the full context of John’s prefatory vision. It only shows us the Lamb being worshiped by the celestial beings in heaven. Perhaps the intent is to invite us to reflect a little about how we ourselves offer our worship and honor to the risen Christ here on earth.
If one were to ask a random sample of people what prayer is, most of them would probably answer that it is talking to God. If you pressed a little further, they would probably say that prayer is talking to God to ask Him for things. "When all else fails, pray!"
Prayer is much more than that. Our traditional Catholic Christian spirituality teaches us that there are four purposes for prayer: to ask God for things, but also to express our sorrow for sin, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to offer to God our praise and our thanksgiving.
God is not a kind of rich uncle, approached only when we need something. To view God that way is to acknowledge our own immaturity, as if the only word in our vocabulary were "Gimme!" To be sure, God wants us to acknowledge our needs in His presence, but He also wants us to acknowledge our sinfulness and our unworthiness of His love and care. Even more than that, God wants us to keep ourselves attentive to all the wonderful things that He has done for us in the past and continues to do for us with each passing minute. We can never run out of things to be grateful for.
But perhaps most important for our prayer life is the prayer of praise, the acknowledgment of the greatness and the excellence of God. Praising God doesn’t mean offering Him flattery, as if we had to keep God in good humor so that He will be nice to us. No, praising God means keeping ourselves aware of who and what God really is. This awareness results in a more intense prayer of thanksgiving as well as a more intense awareness of our need and unworthiness in relationship to God.
It’s important for us to know how to praise God, because praising God is what we will be doing for all eternity in heaven. We will be expected to be able to join in with the kingly elders and the living creatures and the angels and everything in the universe as they offer blessing and honor and glory "to the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb."
Maybe the reason why Handel’s Messiah music for this passage is so deeply moving to us is because we have an instinctive intuition that some day we’ll all be singing it together in God’s kingdom!
###
Conversation Questions
Do I offer praise and thanks to God? Why? For what?
What do I look forward to in heaven?
###
Main Page
|| The Catholic Telegraph || Live Letters index
Copyright © 2001 Archdiocese of Cincinnati.