Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We are about to finish our year-long project, so read along with me. But first, let us pray: 

Come, Lord Jesus! 
Come to me as I read these divinely inspired writings.
Come and enlighten me so that I receive from them the nourishment I need to be your faithful witness in the world today.
Come to people who are seeking you, and to those whom I may meet on my daily round.
Come to those who see the Word lived by those who do not even know your name.
Come to those who hear the Word proclaimed, but see it contradicted by those who speak it.
And when the last day dawns, come to take us all to be with you!
Maranatha!
Come, Lord Jesus!

Today's chapters are Revelation 18-20.

In the prophetic depiction of the fall of "Rome/Babylon" (the epitome of the enemies of God's people), a lament is raised not so much over anything good about the Empire, as it is for lusts that can no longer be satisfied because of advantages the Roman Empire's power used to provide. (The deadly sins serve each other in this lament.) Recall that for St Paul (Ephesians 5:5) sexual immorality and greed were forms of idolatry. Satan, the beast, and the false prophet are closely linked.

As we move forward in today's reading, we are getting to the scene of the Final Judgment. And here again, we encounter one of those highly misunderstood passages of Revelation. Every era of history seems to have its own spin on the "thousand years" of 20:2-4. This tendency to take this literally as a millennium of earthly history and to build a theology around it even has its own name: millenarianism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church addresses this in the section about the Last Judgment (CCC 675-677). These paragraphs are also a fine commentary on today's chapters:

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

The canticles we have heard and will continue to find as the Book of Revelation reaches its finale are almost the sung version of Paul's theology as we found it in Ephesians (1:20-2:6 and 3:8-12). 

The fact that a section of 19:9 is used at a key moment in every Mass should make us take notice: Who are those "blessed ones"? What is the "wedding feast of the Lamb" for which "the Bride has made herself ready"? By now we should know: the Bride us us, the wedding feast is Heaven, but it is also the Mass. We are entering the Book of Revelation, the ranks of the angels and martyrs and saints and the throne of the Lamb, and we partake of the feast itself, every time we go to Mass. No matter what is happening on earth, the Book of Revelation shows us what is really going on: The battle has already been won, and the Lamb is victorious.

Start reading here.

For more background

Years ago I attended a lecture series by Dr James Papandrea on the Book of Revelation and found it very helpful. His book, The Wedding of the Lamb: A Historical Approach to the Book of Revelation, is kind of expensive, but there is a Kindle version in case you are looking for a companion to Revelation by a Catholic theologian. 

Another helpful resource (one that I am currently reading) is by Dr Michael J. Gorman, a Scripture scholar who is a particular expert on St Paul. Gorman is a United Methodist, but he teaches at a Catholic seminary and I have no hesitation about recommending his work. Catholic readers will just find that most of his immediate applications are to mainline Protestant experiences, rather than Catholic parish life. (By the way, I find Gorman's understanding of Paul on "Cruciformity" very much in line with our Founder's thought and with the teachings of St John Eudes.)