NOTES for Rev 19:7-8
Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride is an image well known to the first generations of Christians, just as it is to us today. This very marriage is what John sees. And the whiteness, the purity of the Church, is the righteousness of the saints of whom it consists. It should be noted that in medieval Christianity the concept of holiness changed somewhat compared with the original one.
In those times people began to call saints those whom, in the language of the Bible, it would be more correct to call righteous people. But holiness in the Bible is something else. Holiness is the simple fact that a person is sanctified by God's presence, as, for example, everyone who came to Yahwistic altars was sanctified even in pre-Christian times, if only he was clean and did not bear on himself the consequences of sins committed. There is no human merit here; sanctification is entirely God's work.
And Christians of the first generations understood very well the fact that Christian life presupposes sanctification; otherwise it is simply unthinkable. Therefore Christians in those days often called themselves saints precisely in this sense. Only later, when the church became a mass church and Christianity became nominal for many, did the quite realistic understanding come that not everyone who considers himself a Christian lives the life of sanctified people. Then there appeared the idea of certain special, righteous people who lead a special, in fact simply normal, Christian life.
The apostle is shown that such a sanctified life is a necessary condition for abiding in the Church and entering the Kingdom; without it, those who consider themselves Christians have nothing to count on. But righteousness too is important, for it is precisely righteousness that allows a person to preserve the sanctification he receives from God in God's presence. Otherwise what has been received will immediately be lost, and the person will quickly roll back into his former state, returning to his former life, which presupposes no sanctification. Thus holiness and righteousness complement each other, giving the Christian the possibility of living in the Church and entering the Kingdom.