Category Archives: Bible Study

Sea of Glass

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Russian icon depicting the victory of the Archangel Michael over the dragon, the beast, and Babylon the Great; Christ in the upper corner invites the faithful to the banquet of the heavenly Eucharist.

Then I saw another portent in heaven, great and astonishing: seven angels with seven plagues…. and I saw, as it were, a sea of glass mingled with fire and, standing beside the sea of glass and holding harps of God, were those who had been victorious against the beast and its image and the number of its name. (Apocalypse 15:1-2)

St. John sees another seven angels ready to unleash another seven plagues on the earth and then he sees the victorious martyrs standing beside a sea of glass and fire, holding harps and singing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.” (Apoc. 15:3)

We have encountered the sea of glass in Apoc. 4 — here it is described as a molten mix of glass and fire. This sea is an allusion to the Red Sea which was deliverance for the Israelites and doom for the Egyptians. Here, the victorious sing “the song of Moses” which is no vindictive triumph over enemies but solely a song of praise to the Lord and King.

St. Andrew of Caesarea thinks

The sea of glass is both the multitude of those being saved and the future condition–the brilliance of the saints-, who will shine by means of their sparkling virtue…. the fire will both burn the sinners and illuminate the righteous. Fire is both divine knowledge and the life-giving Spirit–for in fire God was seen by Moses and the Spirit descended upon the apostles as tongues of fire–and the harps indicate the mortification of members (Col. 3:5), the harmonious life of a symphony of virtues plucked by the musical pick (plectrum) of the divine Spirit. (Chapter 45, “Commentary on the Apocalypse”)

The sea is both salvation and condemnation, just as the incense in the bowls held by the angels:

We are the sweet fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing: indeed, to some the fragrance of life and to others the stench of death. (2 Cor. 2:15-16)

Tyconius, in his classic commentary on the Apocalypse, points out that the prayers of the saints–the incense offered by the angels, an allusion to the liturgical intercessions of the Church on earth–lead to both the salvation of the world and the condemnation of the fallen order.

As with so much in the Apocalypse–as in life–the same events or experiences can lead to either salvation or damnation. How do we choose to react to these events?

The choice is ours.

Harvest and Winepress

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Detail of a miniature showing the Last Judgement from the “Queen Mary Apocalypse”, early 1300s (Royal MS 19 B XV, f. 40r).

Then I looked, and … another angel came out of the Temple and called in a loud voice… “Put in your sickle and harvest for the hour of the harvest has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. (Apocalypse 14:14-15)

In much of the New Testament (Matthew 13) or the Old Testament prophets (Isaiah 17, Jeremiah 51, Joel 3), the images or parables about the harvest use the image of “harvest” as a way to talk about the Last Judgment, the End of Days. Often, the idea of harvest includes the idea of condemnation: the wicked will be harvested and condemned to their eternal punishment. But in the Apocalypse, the idea of harvest is about salvation rather than condemnation. The righteous are ripe–they have withstood the test of persecution–and they are harvested in the Apocalypse, not the wicked; the righteous are harvested and gathered before the Throne of God as crops are gathered into a barn for safekeeping.

But after the righteous are harvested, the wicked are gathered into the divine winepress. The “great winepress of God’s wrath” (Apoc. 14:19) is outside the heavenly city, just as the Cross was erected outside the walls of Jerusalem. The winepress grinds up those flung into it and their blood pours out as the grape juice flows from a winepress on earth, ready to be made into wine. Christ is flung into the divine winepress on the Cross and his blood pours out into the chalice of the Eucharist; in the Apocalypse, the wicked are thrown into the divine winepress which is outside the city–outside the Church–and they are trodden as grapes are trodden. But they do not emerge from the winepress victorious, as the martyrs do. The wicked are destroyed in the winepress because they choose to align themselves with the dragon–all the powers that oppose God and the Lamb.

Harvest and winepress. Bread and wine. How we choose to prepare for (1 Cor. 11) or respond to these experiences results in our salvation or condemnation. Often in ways that we do not expect.

Hymns in the Apocalypse

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I was about to write my next entry on the Apocalypse when the new issue of Worship arrived in the mail. Worship is one of the leading academic journals about liturgy and liturgical studies; it always has essays and book reviews that fascinate and illuminate. There was an essay in this issue about liturgical hymnography and look what I discovered: a mention of liturgical hymns in the Apocalypse!

The portrayal of the heavenly liturgy in the Book of Revelation features many hymns that must surely reflect the worship experience of the author and intended audience. Again, they are clearly in a psalm style and their diction mines the Psalter extensively, but they would also have been immediately recognized as a “send-up” of the hymns commissioned for the imperial cult. Take, for example, Revelation 11:17-18.

We give you thanks, O Lord God, the sovereign over all (pantokrator) who are and who were, that you have taken your great power and begun to reign. (Rev. 11:17)

The Christians of the seven churches in the Roman province of Asia would have immediately recognized this as a parody of the acclamations of the divinized Roman Emperor sung at the imperial festivals that were a regular feature of life in their cities.

(Margaret Daly-Denton, “Instilling the Word” in Worship (July 2021), pp. 200-201.

In the Apocalypse, not only do we encounter the history of the Church and the wonderful works of God’s power (told over and over, from a variety of perspectives), we also encounter the Christians thumbing their noses at the imperial power hell-bent on destroying them.

We should remember that as St. Paul and other New Testament authors were urging the Christians to “obey the civil authorities” and “Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” it was those same civil authorities and the same imperial policies that were actively putting the Christians to death; the same authorities that were to be obeyed were making martyrs.

Modern Christians who urge cooperation with civil authorities when they think the authorities will legislate in their favor and resistance when they don’t care for the civil policies, quoting those New Testament authors, should remember that: submission to civil authorities was first and foremost given to civil authorities that oppose everything the Church stands for.

Early Christian political theory can be summed up in one sentence: Don’t give your enemies any more reason to arrest you than they already have.