[Fr. Robert Barron] [comments on]
[The Biblical Revelation]
I had the privilege just last week to speak at “Magnificat day” in Philadelphia.
It was a day sponsored by the Magnificat Foundation,
and it was attended by – I think about - 4.000 people,
so it was a great Catholic jamboree and wonderful to see all the people there
and something very rare really in my speaking career,
the organizers assigned me a topic.
They said we want you to speak on the word the risen Jesus speaks
to the Church of Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation.
Just very clever, so I’m addressing the church
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2013,
but Jesus addressed
the Angel of the Church of Philadelphia in the first century.
So it was a good challenge for me to go back to this great text
and then to apply it for a present time.
One thing. The Lord addresses 7 churches and the words are
pretty harsh for the most part. They are pretty critical.
The one to Philadelphia though is very positive.
It’s the most positive of the words and here’s the beginning
of what he says to Philadelphia:
“To the Angel of the Church in Philadelphia write this:
the Holy One, the True, who holds the key of David,
who opens and no one shall close, who closes and no one shall open.”
So, the risen Lord speaking to Philadelphia identifies himself as David
and holding the key of David.
David is one of those pivotal figures in the Bible
because he looks back to Adam, he looks forward to Christ,
and he sheds considerable light in both directions.
Adam. Adam is the first King. He’s given the task of tilling
the soil of Eden (don’t read that simply as instructions for farming).
It’s caring for this flourishing garden of life
that God wants for his people.
God wants to rule as king but precisely through his viceroys,
namely human beings made in his image and likeness.
On this reading, what’s original sin but a failure in Kingship.
Adam listens not to directives of the Lord but to the serpent.
He allows the serpent to have sway in the garden.
He thereby becomes a bad king not defending this flourishing garden of life.
And the garden devolves into a desert.
So Adam is a failed king but God does not give up on Israel.
What he does is he forms a people after his own mind and heart
and then he sets up a series of Kings.
So think of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel,
up and down the biblical revelation you have governors of Israel
or tenders of the sacred garden.
All of them are failed figures.
All them, to varying degrees, commit the sin of Adam:
they go after false gods, they give in to corruption, etc.
A climatic figure in the Old Testament is David.
David more than any of the other ones is a kind of new Adam.
As David establishes his kingdom, the tribes gather around him at Hebron,
first in the south then in the north.
David sets up his capital in Jerusalem, and then he establishes the Ark
in his capital and he unites Israel.
He then even begins to conquer neighboring peoples.
The idea is: he is doing what Adam was supposed to do:
establish the garden and then carry that divine order to the whole world.
However, we know David is not a perfectly pristine King.
David falls as well.
Think of Bathsheba and lots of other failures.
So Israel begins to hope and to dream that a
new and definitive David would come.
What did they mean?
They mean the King who would rule the world for Yahweh,
who would be the definitive tender of the garden.
So David looking back to Adam and now looking forward to his fulfillment:
Jesus. Is announced from the beginning as a new David.
He’s born in David city of Bethlehem. He is a warrior King from the beginning.
He enters Jerusalem the way Zachariah the prophet said he would,
as a new David.
He does battle but in the most unexpected way.
Not fighting with the weapons of the world
but fighting precisely on the cross where he swallows up
all the darkness of the world.
All the darkness that’s bedeviled the human race from Eden on,
this new and definitive David takes it on, conquers it.
The Resurrection is the showing forth of his victorious Kingship.
What’s evangelization as Paul understands it?
Announcing to all the world that the new and definitive king has emerged.
Jesus Kurios. Jesus the Lord.
All of that, all of that is in this opening move
in the word to Philadelphia.
“The Holy One the True, who holds the key of David,
who opens and no one shall close, who closes and no one shall open.”
Is Jesus Christ the King of your life? That’s the question.
He wants to dominate you.
Dominus is just the Latin rendering of Kurios. Lord.
He wants to dominate your mind, your will, your body, your passions,
your public life, your private life.
Not to be sequestered in one little room of your life,
but he is moving in as King.
That’s Jesus now as the definitive David reigning in your life.
Here’s what the Lord says next to Philadelphia:
“Behold I have left an open door before you which no one can close.”
It’s a wonderful image, isn’t it? The open door.
Door is to play a prominent role in the book of Revelation.
Remember the image of Jesus knocking at the door.
I knocked at the door. Will you open to me?
But also we hear about an open door to heaven.
But the first interpretation of this door is: the door of mission.
So you’ve discovered that Jesus Christ is the Lord, he dominates you,
the next move is to go through the open door of mission
to announce the Lordship to the world.
I’ve used the image before of Noah’s Ark. The same idea.
If you preserve a microcosm of God’s good order in the Ark
but then the minute Noah was able he opened the windows and doors
and let the life out.
So we are meant now –as Christian communities-
to go through the open door of mission so as to announce his Lordship
to the rest of the world.
Because remember: David looks back to Adam.
That was Adam’s task as king of Eden now to “Edenize” the world.
We are under the lordship of the true king who wants to “Edenize” the world.
That’s called evangelization.
I want to look too at that second sense of the door.
I mentioned the door into the heavenly realm.
That’s in chapter IV, when the visionary looks through this open door
and sees the Liturgy.
Read Scott Hahn and people like that for the details here,
but he looks into Heaven and sees elders, presbyteroi
–our word “priest” comes from that- dressed in white robes.
He sees a great elder on the throne, he sees the Lamb of God,
he sees a scroll being read, sees incense, candles, etc.
What’s he seeing but the temple,
the heavenly temple, the heavenly Liturgy.
We become properly aligned under the Lordship of Christ the King
when we look through the open door of the Mass into Heaven.
Mass is not a like a little celebration of our community.
Mass is a participation even now in the heavenly worship.
So I would say the open door, 2 things: mission and Mass.
If you want to flourish under the Lordship of Jesus
go on mission, go out the open door,
and go through the open door to Heaven.
Attend the Mass.
I think is what’s being communicated here.
I love this, the next word: “You have limited strength”
he says to the Church of Philadelphia, “and yet you’ve kept my word
and you have not denied my name.”
Limited strength is not really a bad thing in the Bible.
It tends to me that you are now open to God,
so Paul says “I boast of my weakness.”
We are not into a kind of Greek or Roman culture of self-assertion here.
This is a Biblical worldview, so you are weak –well yes, of course-
therefore you rely on God.
But then “you have kept my word and you have not denied my name.”
Kept the word, kept the word.
What’s the word but this word of revelation.
The story of God becoming King. This is whole story of the Bible.
You have kept it, meaning you realized your mission is to tell the world that story.
The reason from the beginning we’re called upon to know the Bible,
the reason Vatican II called for a biblical revival is
that the Church’s task primarily is to tell the world this great story.
Keep the word.
The tragedy is so many of us in the Church have lost the sense of the Bible.
When we make Biblical references just today on the culture,
often people are lost.
Our job is to keep the Holy Word of God.
To know it so we can announce it to the wider world.
And secondly “you have not denied my name”, I love that.
The name of Jesus. It’s a saving name, it’s a saving word.
Yeshua. Yahweh saves. Are we ashamed of the name Jesus?
Do we privatize it?
Do we whisper it among ourselves in our liturgical prayer?
Or do we allow that name to come forth very publicly?
Is it on our lips readily? Is it in our ordinary conversation?
Do we bring Jesus to bear in all walks of life?
You haven’t denied my name, the Holy name of Jesus.
There’s something I really believe that Evangelicals can teach Catholics
-is to be more comfortable with the name Jesus
and with the story of Jesus readily on their lips.
Just maybe one more observation here.
I will keep you safe in the time of trial that’s going to come to the whole world,
to test the inhabitants of the earth. Trial.
So here is now or in the first century and the Lord talks about trials to His church.
Anyone that knows even a little bit of Church history knows that
every single age is marked by trial.
Why? Well, that’s the biblical message.
God is always testing his people.
Go back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Saul, the rest of them.
Every major figure in the Bible is tested and tried
because during times of testing we realize strengths
we don’t know that we had.
During timed of testing we are deepened and strengthened by the Lord.
We’ve been going through, of course I told the Church of Philadelphia this
as if they needed me to come from Chicago to tell them,
that we’ve all going to a time of great trial with the scandals
of the last twenty years. How do you read them?
We read them sociologically and psychologically and all that is fine;
but read them theologically: it’s a time of testing and purification.
What the Lord says to the Church of Philadelphia,
he says to us now –it seems to me- you have been passing through
a time of trial and that’s, in a sense, to the good,
because it’s cleansing and purifying your Church.
So be mindful of that.
Just a last observation now.
“The victor I will make into a pillar in the temple of my God,
and he will never leave it again.
On him I will inscribe the name of my God
and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem
which comes down out of heaven from God.
Here’s chapter III, isn’t it?
He’s anticipating the end of the book of Revelation, isn’t he?
Heavenly Jerusalem, the city that is representative of
God’s Lordship over the whole world.
We hear that when the heavenly Jerusalem comes down
there’s no temple in it. Why?
Because the whole city has become a place of right praise.
That means the economic life, and political life, and sporting life
and entertainment life and transportation.
All that goes on in the city, all of it has become radiant
with the presence of God because it is now ordered to God.
That’s the culmination of the entire biblical revelation.
What went bad in Eden is now restored and elevated in the New Jerusalem
which means the city is totally under the Lordship of Jesus.
The word he gives to Philadelphia is: you need to submit to that Lordship
so that you now can go through the open door of mission
and make the whole world into the heavenly Jerusalem.
So that deeply encouraging messaging to Philadelphia is still
a deeply encouraging message to all the Christian Churches today.