NOTES for Rev 1:1-8
Today we begin reading the last book of Holy Scripture, the Apocalypse. This Greek word means revelation, that is, what God reveals to the chosen about invisible reality and about what we need to know concerning what is to come. Reading this book, one must be ready for the fact that all the visions here are described in the language of symbols, often obscure and strange, without strict form or narrative sequence. For this very reason, reading it is always joined to painstaking work of understanding and translating the text into accessible language. Otherwise the meaning of the revelation will remain hidden or distorted.
Like the book of the prophet Daniel, the Apocalypse is an answer to the sharpest question for believers: why does God permit persecutions of His chosen ones? The apostle and evangelist John returns to the main themes of all the prophetic writings of the Old Testament and speaks of the great Day of Yahweh, of the holy people enslaved by powerful enemies, scattered and almost destroyed as a result of cruel persecutions, of the proclamation of the day of salvation, and of the need to keep watch while awaiting the Second Coming.
In today's short text we find a greeting to the seven churches, and the use of a number expressing fullness means for us an address to the whole Church. John sees and contemplates what the Lord gives him and, using the language of the Old Testament prophets, tries to clothe what he has seen in the form most understandable to us. The nearness of the end of the world is so obvious to him that it could trouble us, if not for its obvious connection with Christ's words on the Mount of Olives that the times and seasons are not given to us to know. The nearness of Christ's coming in glory must mean constant readiness and watchfulness for believers. John calls us to keep the prophecy, thereby bringing us back to the fact that prophecy is not prediction of the future, but the proclamation of God's will through His messenger. Fulfilling this will is precisely what man was created by God for, God who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of creation and history, their beginning and end, or, as Isaiah says, the first and the last (Isa 44:6).