I want to draw our attention first not just to our readings for the day, but to the whole shape of readings in these past few weeks. One thing about going through the lectionary—whether you’re hearing it at Mass or preaching it—is that you get used to certain things while you fail to notice others. Since the Easter Octave, we have been skipping around in St. John’s Gospel. This starts with some of the post-Resurrection appearances, but it moves quickly into some of the deeper theological statements in John that fit nicely into this high holy period of the Church year. The first reading comes from Acts—which is typical in other years as well, as the early Church seeks to organize and understand itself in light of the Resurrection. But the second reading this year has come from Revelation.
On the surface this might seem like an odd choice to make. We associate Revelation with the Apocalypse, with the end of the world, with the Antichrist—the Beast, the Dragon, the bowls of wrath and the four horsemen—in other words, some of the most dramatic imagery in the Bible, which has further inspired some of the wildest speculation and dramatization over the last two millennia. Isn’t that the realm of crazy street preachers and fundamentalist cults? Don’t Catholics avoid all that?
If by “that” you mean sitting around trying to predict the future and coming up with things to worry about, then yes, we are supposed to avoid all that. But Revelation has more to it than doomsday prophecy. It is a classic example of apocalyptic literature whose purpose is to reveal God’s final purposes for the world. Rather than a kind of decoding exercise in history as it unfolds, Revelation is a spiritual vision—it is, literally, a vision given to John on the island of Patmos—meant to show us something of the final state of things.
Catholic students of Scripture will remember the idea of the fourfold sense of Scripture—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical. That is, we read Scripture first for what the words say and what they convey in their historical or rhetorical meaning; second in how it relates to other parts of salvation history; third, how it relates to our moral life as human beings; and fourth, how it relates to our final state in heaven.
Revelation has a natural tendency to this last sense of Scripture, the anagogical. It relates directly to what the Creed calls “the life of the world to come.” But it does so first on the literal level. How is the anagogical sense different?
The Greek word anagogy has to do with leading up or ascending. And I think what the Fathers have in mind here is more than a mere intellectual thing. Knowing about the world to come isn’t just a piece of trivia to tuck into our back pockets and pull out when someone asks a hard question about Revelation. It is rather a spiritual engine pulling us upward—“further up and further in,” as C.S. Lewis writes in The Last Battle. We begin this journey here in Easter, with the “newness” of the Resurrection.
Notice this word’s repetition this morning in our propers. In our Introit: “O sing unto the Lord a new song.” In Revelation: a new heaven and a new earth, and the voice of the Lord saying, “Behold, I make all things new.” In Acts, we have the newness of the good news, and the newness of God opening the door of faith to the Gentiles. In John we hear Jesus give the disciples a “new commandment”: Love one another.
In itself, there is not much new about newness. Change is part of creaturely life; it is definitional to created things. Our collect describes this constant newness as the “sundry and manifold changes of the world,” which suggests that the newness of worldly things is more often a cause for anxiety than of comfort. So what exactly is new and good about the good news?
I think this is where the anagogy comes into it. For the apostolic preaching in Acts, the good news is the accessibility of the kingdom of God. Revelation gives us a vision of this kingdom: Heaven and earth are renewed—not just recycled or moved to the next stage, but made perfect. This perfection is possible because God himself dwells with his people. The kingdom of God is neither an otherworldly escape from temporal things nor a mere this-worldly kingdom of peace; it is fellowship between God and his creation.
Although we can envision a more perfect world, even a perfected creation will always contain, in some sense, “sundry and manifold changes,” because change is an intrinsic part of existence for anything that is not God. The difference is that, in Jesus, we now have a fixed reference point where joys are to be found; rooted in him, the change and newness of this life can become for us less a cause of fear and uncertainty than a cause of delight. We can enjoy the unfolding of the story because we know the ending. And if we can learn to fix our hearts on him in this life, in the unfolding of that story, we will be well prepared and ready for our fellowship with him in the life to come. Amen.