Category Archives: Icons

The Seven Seals

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The Lamb of God and the book/scroll sealed with the seven seals, a popular motif embroidered on a variety of vestments and altar linens. Note that most depict the seven seals still unbroken although occasionally the seals are already open.

I watched as the Lamb broke the first of the seven seals and …. as I watched, there was a pale horse. Its riders name was Death and Hades followed with him. (Apocalypse 6:1-8)

The book/scroll with the seven seals is among the most well-known images from the Apocalypse. Even if people don’t know the biblical source of the image, they at least know about the last, the Seventh Seal, from the famous movie by Ingmar Bergman. The seals and the riders or other visions that are revealed as each seal is broken have appeared many times in books and movies, whether in Agatha Christie mysteries or horror-fantasies or even comedies.

The seals reveal aspects of the liturgy–such as the relics of the martyrs contained in the altars on which the Eucharist is celebrated–as well as aspects of life that are judged by liturgical participation throughout history. Famine, plague, pestilence, and misery are constants throughout human experience. Many expect these to become especially intense just before the world ends; because of this, when these experiences have become intense in the past, many people expected that the world was about to come to an end.

Everyone loves to calculate and predict when exactly the End will come. Even St. Augustine has to tell his congregation, “Give your fingers a rest!” when they spend too much time and energy doing complicated math problems, trying to figure out when exactly the apocalypse will come. (Full disclosure: I still depend on my fingers to do even simple math problems!)

But it has not yet come to an end.

But the world does come to an end each time we celebrate the Eucharist and take our places in the eternal Kingdom of God. The apocalypse happens every time we proclaim, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The apocalypse happens every time we lift up our hearts.

The apocalypse happens every time we ask the Father to send down the Holy Spirit on us and on these Holy Gifts of bread and wine.

The apocalypse happens every time we say, “Our Father… thy kingdom come.”

The apocalypse happens every time because the Holy Spirit lifts us up from earth to heaven to see Christ revealed in all his glory.

When will the seals be broken? They are always being broken, throughout time (during what we call “secular” history) and eternally (in the celebration of the Eucharist).

“Heaven” in the Apocalypse

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A 13th century Cluniac ivory carving of Christ in Majesty surrounded by the four living creatures. The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night, saying:
“Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God Almighty,
Who was and is and is to come!”
The four living creatures reflect a combination of the cherubim in Ezekiel 1 and seraphim in Isaiah 6:2, they function as ‘the priests of heavenly temple’. Their song is an adaption of Isaiah 6:3.

“After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door!” (Apocalypse 4)

The vision of the heavenly throne room opens Chapter 4 of the Apocalypse; it is an interlude between the first two series-of-sevens of the book, the seven letters to the churches and the seven seals. (The series-of-sevens are the basic building block of the Apocalypse. Each series-of-seven tells the story of the Church’s journey through history from a different perspective or from another point of view. Each series becomes more intense but the Apocalypse does not tell a linear, sequential story; rather, it is a re-examination of the same story several times.)

The seer of the Apocalypse sees an open door in heaven. Most of us think of heaven as the eternal abode of God, the place of light and glory where the saints and angels stand before the Holy Trinity. We think that only Good exists in heaven. But that does not match the description of “heaven” in the Apocalypse.

Heaven, in the Apocalypse, is not eternal. It will be destroyed: “heaven and earth shall pass away,” we famously read. Heaven will cease. The eternal residence of God, we are told, is the New Jerusalem that will come down from out of heaven (chapter 21). There will be a new heaven and a new earth. Heaven, as it is currently constituted, will be replaced after the End of Days.

The “good” are not the sole residents of heaven. Evil dwells there with God. Spiritual realities and beings populate heaven–we meet the dragon and the rebel angels and the the beast with seven heads and ten horns, not just the four living creatures and the saints.

Rather than consider “heaven” as the equivalent of the Kingdom of God, we would do better to see heaven in the Apocalypse as the equivalent to “spiritual-invisible world.” It is this invisible world that we glimpse from a variety of angles in the different series-of-sevens that make up the Apocalypse. Each series-of-seven is true but it is not literal (as we understand that word in contemporary English).

I will be giving a talk on the Apocalypse this evening, Monday March 15 at 7 p.m. (New York City time) as part of the adult education series at St. Luke’s in the Fields. Join us here. A recording of the talk will also be available afterwards; the link will be posted on the Bible Study tab of this website.

Jezebel and the Nicolaitans

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Israel’s most accursed queen carefully fixes a pink rose in her red locks in John Byam Liston Shaw’s “Jezebel” from 1896. Jezebel’s reputation as the most dangerous seductress in the Bible stems from her final appearance: her husband King Ahab is dead; her son has been murdered by Jehu. As Jehu’s chariot races toward the palace to kill Jezebel, she “painted her eyes with kohl and dressed her hair, and she looked out of the window” (2 Kings 9:30). Image: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/Bridgeman Art Library.

“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet.” (Apocalypse 2:20)

There is a woman in Thyatira who is a rival of St. John the Apostle. She teaches a group known as the Nicolaitans. She–and her followers–reject the authority of the St. John and disobey his teaching. He compares her to the Old Testament queen, Jezebel.

Jezebel appears in the Old Testament (2 Kings). She is the archenemy of the prophet Elijah. She teaches the people to commit adultery and practice sorcery. Tyconius–the first Biblical scholar to write a commentary on the Apocalypse–says that the figure of Jezebel in the Apocalypse “stands for the whole fallen order.” She is everything that stands in opposition to God. Always and everywhere, whatever opposes God is “Jezebel.” Tyconius also says that her followers, her “children,” can be seen as Goliath, who refused to admit the truth: that Israel’s God is the true God and that David was the one chosen by God to protect the people. Jezebel’s followers refuse to admit the truth: that the Apostle John is the authentic teacher chosen by God and serves as the protector of the Christian communities, as David was in the Old Testament.)

The woman in Thyatira that St. John was concerned was an “antinomian.” (That’s a fancy word that means “against the rules.” Antinomian groups always object to having to follow any rules.) She taught her followers that it didn’t matter what they ate or who they slept with or if they denied Christ when arrested by the Romans and were facing execution. (There was an antinomian faction among the Christians in Corinth, as well–people thought it didn’t matter what they ate or who they slept with.)

“Jezebel” in Thyatira told her followers to just blend in with mainstream society. St. John did not want the Christians to assimilate at all with the society in which they lived. “How much assimilation is acceptable?” was a difficult question that different Christian teachers answered in different ways in different places at different times.