CELEBRATING HEAVENLY LITURGY ON EARTH

WEDNESDAY, THIRTY THIRD WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Apo 4:1-11; Ps 150; Lk 19:11-28

The Man of Noble Birth and his Kingdom

John gives us his vision of heaven in today’s reading. From his description of the eternal throne of God, it is tough to decipher the correct meaning of all that he presents to us, for the language is all in symbols. The images used must not be understood in a literal sense, for what he describes for us is the source and hub of eternal and spiritual realities. We attempt to decode some of the symbols in the following. A door opening in heaven implies spiritual access to John to understand things beyond human capacity. Recall that St. Paul once had similar access to heavenly realities, as he revealed in 2 Corinthians, where he saw and heard things impossible to capture in any human language, which remains secret even after God has revealed them. In the same understanding, John goes up according to the command of the voice he heard, not by transversing space and time but by a mystical and spiritual ascendance to the presence of God. “With that, the Spirit possessed me and I saw a throne standing in heaven, and the One who was sitting on the throne, and the Person sitting there looked like a diamond and a ruby.” By throne, we must understand, not a seat, but a symbol of authority, power, and rulership of all things and beings. Thus, we conceived the Father as the unoriginated Origin of all things. The One sitting on it is the Person looking like a diamond and ruby. By the One, we understand the unity and uniqueness of divine substance, and the Person indicates the individuality of the Father. At the same time, the diamond and ruby symbolise His agelessness and timelessness.  

The twenty-four thrones and elders sitting on them are pointers to highly privileged witnesses to God’s almighty power and authority. The proclamations of these twenty-four elders are perpetual and timeless. Their dress, the crowns, and the activity of proclamation show them as privileged saints of God. Another set of symbols representing the expression of the holy and eternal will of the Father is the emerald-looking rainbow indicating holiness, the issuing flashes of lightening and associated sound of peals of thunder expressing/revealing the holy will, and the seven flaming lamps, which are the Seven Spirits of God that enforce the divine will. Seven here would most likely imply fullness of the Holy Spirit, the third divine Person. “In the centre, grouped round the throne itself, were four animals with many eyes, in front and behind.” The descriptions of these four animals are strange. They never stopped proclaiming the holiness of our God. The holy Mother, the Church, identifies these animals with the four Gospels containing the proclamation of the eternal will of the Father by his only Begotten Son in his humanity. This identification offers us an interpretative framework to recognise the whole vision as the symbolic representation of the mystical and heavenly liturgy of the Church, in which the Gospel proclamation is the revelation of the Father’s holy and immutable will, worshipped and lived out by the Patriarchs and Apostles of the Lamb, and the whole Church: militant, suffering, and triumphant adore and worship.

This liturgical strain is taken up in the responsorial Psalm praising God’s holiness in his holy will and works. “Praise God in his holy place, praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his powerful deeds, praise his surpassing greatness.” The holiness of the Father’s will is the root or cause of the noble birth of the man in the parable of our Lord. The Man Jesus Christ is of noble birth because he embodies the eternal and immutable will of the Father. The same holy will of the Father is lived and proclaimed through his life, death, and resurrection as contained in the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He has given us the Gospels as talents to use and bear heavenly fruits in our lives as Christians. The vision of his warnings and admonitions to the seven churches shows he will base his pending judgment on how well we have harmonised our lives on his revelation of the will of the Father. Just as the man gave the same talent to the ten servants to trade on and make profits, we have received the same revelation of God’s will from the Lord. We must invest our lives in the message of the Gospel with faith to reap abundant and heavenly profit. The last servant failed to invest because he misconceived God’s will and was damned forever. “I tell you, to everyone who has will be given more; but from the man who has not, even what he has will be taken aways.” Let us invest what we have received from the Man of noble birth, with the whole Church, that we may reign with him in heaven.

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to comprehend to an extent, the goodness and holiness of your divine will, which is incomprehensible and a mystery of holiness, that each day, devoting our whole mind, heart, and will, we may proclaim and do your holy will revealed by your only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.