Category Archives: Byzantium

A Little Scroll

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This fresco on Mt. Athos from the 17th century depicts the opening of chapter 10 of the Apocalypse: St. John sees the massive angel, standing with a foot in the sea and a foot on land, who gives him a little scroll to eat.

Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head: his face was like the sun and his legs like pillars of fire. He held in his hand a little scroll which was open…. He said to me, “take it and eat it.” (Apocalypse 10:1-2, 9)

St. John takes the small, open scroll and eats it although the angel warns that it will taste sweet in his mouth and then turn his stomach sour. “You must prophesy over many peoples and nations and tongues and kings,” St. John is told after eating the scroll.

Eating a scroll is often the first thing a prophet is told to do (Ezekiel 3). The prophet ingests the message he is to deliver and integrates it into himself. It becomes his message as well as the message of God. (The scroll that Ezekiel eats is also sweet to taste but produces “laments and words of woe.” Both Ezekiel and the Apocalypse are associated with the liturgical season of Eastertide; the Death and Resurrection of Christ are simultaneously blessing and judgement which are described in terms of the Last Days by the prophet and the apostle.)

Given that the Apocalypse is a liturgical commentary, what does this episode correspond to in the Eucharist? Consuming the little scroll can also correspond with receiving Holy Communion, as does Isaiah’s lips being touched by a heavenly coal. Each communicant is called to the same vocation as the seer although details of how that vocation is exercised may differ.

Although this scroll is small, unlike the others mentioned in the Apocalypse, its most important distinguishing feature is that it is open rather than closed. An open message is one that will be fulfilled shortly after it is proclaimed; a closed message is about an event that will happen long after the proclamation is made. The message that will be accomplished soon is the preaching of the Gospel to “many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.” Prophets like Ezekiel were sent only to the Israelites; John–and the Church as a whole–are sent to the whole world. The ingathering of the nations to join Israel in receiving the blessings of God was proclaimed by the prophets as one of the signs that the Last Days had finally come; the nations responding to the preaching of the Gospel is a sign that the Last Days have now arrived.

The Apocalypse is, in many ways, the proclamation of the same message that the prophets proclaimed but that message has now been fulfilled-accomplished. The Last Judgement–while still a distant event in linear time–has begun and is already present in the spiritual-liturgical life of the Church. Eternity has begun to erupt into the world of space-time. The Apocalypse is not a blueprint or a timeline for something to happen in the future; it describes the life of the Church now.

The fancy theological way to refer to this is “realized eschatology.” Eschatology is the Greek word for “last things.” The last things have been realized/accomplished in the life-ministry-Passion of Christ and are now playing out in the life of the Church. Sometimes “realized eschatology” is contrasted with consistent eschatology, which insists that the Last Days are still entirely in the future. The two concepts are combined by some modern authors in inaugurated eschatology.

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).

Can These Bones Live?

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From left to right: three figures represent Ezekiel being set down by God`s hand among the Dry Bones, hearing God and witnessing the beginning of the resurrection. Over a split mountain, littered with destroyed buildings and body parts, are two additional hands of God.
(Dura Europas Synagogue fresco in the National Museum of Syria, Damascus)

“Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37)

Ezekiel heard the dry bones rattle, saw them come together to form skeletons, saw the sinews and tendons grow and stretch. He saw the flesh that spread to cover them. And then he prophesied to the wind and called it to come, to fill the lungs of the dead. He saw the dead raised, the People of God restored, reconstituted, made whole. More than simple resuscitation—which only delayed death—he saw the dead resurrected. If they were resurrected, never to die again, that meant that Death itself was dead.

St. Ambrose of Milan—and most contemporary Biblical scholars as well, but my money is always with St. Ambrose—understood Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones (which occurred around 600 BC, just after the People of Israel had been taken to Babylon in exile) to mean two things: one, that Israel would be restored to their homeland. All the people who felt lost, hopeless would be revived and brought home, to where they belonged. It was a promise to the People as a whole, that although they were as good as dead in Babylon, God would eventually –on his own timetable—bring them home and give them life again in the Promised Land.

Secondly, the resurrection of the dry bones, says St. Ambrose, is also about the Resurrection of us all—each and every one of us—that will occur at the End of Days. (Many Jewish teachers had also come to understand the dry bones in this way, about 100 years before Christ.) Israel restored and the human race raised. Not resuscitated. Resurrected.

And we do not have to wait for the End of Days to experience resurrection and come home. Because Death is already dead and is already losing its power. The dead are being raised every day. “But Death is not dead yet and the dead are not being raised every day,” reasonable people pointed out to St. Ambrose. But death is dead. Just as a farmer catches a chicken and cuts off its head, only to have the corpse get up and run around the farmyard, spouting blood and making a mess and scaring the kids before it finally collapses, Christ cut the head off Death when he who is Life itself died. Death—like that chicken—can still run around and make a mess and scare people but it is already dead and it will finally collapse altogether—just like that already dead chicken—when Christ comes again in glory.

How do we experience Resurrection in advance? The dead are raised and come home every time someone is baptized. The dead are raised and come home every time we approach the altar to receive the Body of Christ—bread as dead and dry as those bones Ezekiel saw but which becomes the living and life-giving Body of Christ. The dead are raised and come home every time we actively disconnect from the things and behaviors which we use to hide from God and ourselves and our neighbors, the things and behaviors that tie us down to the fallen aspect of the world.

To live in Babylon is to live in the cemetery which is the fallen world and Jesus famously healed the possessed and destitute who lived in the cemeteries. But using Ezekiel’s voice, God promises Israel that he would deliver them from Babylon and bring them into the Promised Land; in Psalm 116, we sing, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.” We understand the land of the living is the Promised Land. The living. Those raised from the dead. In a famous Byzantine church mosaic, we see Christ Himself identified as “the land of the living.” Because the land of the living is Christ himself, we see the land of the living anywhere Christ is—Heaven. The Church.