C (16:43)
Yeah, I think you've started at exactly the right place. I think Scott Hahn's book the Lamb's Supper is a fantastic resource for coming to see the Book of Revelation in a new light, seeing it as a liturgical book rather than simply like a prophecy of the future. And you can see from the writings of the early Christians this is how they understood the Book of Revelation as well. So to give you just one example, think about like the, the four living creatures in the Book of Revelation. Do you remember this part? There's four living creatures. One looks like a lion, one looks like an ox, one looks like a man, and one looks like an eagle. The Church Father. This is Revelation 4:6 to 8. The church fathers were really clear that they believed that these represented the four Gospels. So they didn't think this meant some like, you know, strange looking four headed creature or four different creatures. Or anything like this. They understood this instead as a reference to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that they were reading it in a liturgical way. And at first, that might sound very confusing for people who've never, you know, read Scripture in this way, but let's see if we can unpack each one. So you have the eagle is the Gospel of John. That's the fourth of the four. And the eagle soars above. There's kind of like the mystic heights. And this is also an image of God's glory. And how does the Gospel of John begin? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word is with God, and the Word was God. That it starts from this, the cosmic level, and then moves down to earth very quickly with John the Baptist. Or you have the crying out of the voice of John the Baptist, like a voice crying out in the wilderness, which is associated with the roaring of the lion. And so the Gospel of Mark, which begins this way, is connected to the first of the four living creatures. The second, the ox, is the image of priestly sacrifice, because an ox was one of the sacrificial animals. And the Gospel of Luke opens on the priest Zechariah in the temple. And then you have the face of a man that you have the Gospel of Matthew, which begins with the human genealogy of Christ. So they and different church fathers associated these four in different ways. But even when they disagreed about which ones were which, there was a general consensus that the four living creatures were the four Gospels. So that's an important interpretive clue. Like, they don't deny that there are things prefigured about the future as well, but they understood it in a liturgical way. They understood it in a way that this is about the structure of worship. And I guess a similar way to approach it would be to say, okay, when Jesus talks about the abomination of desolation, is that a reference to the future, or is that a reference to desecrating divine worship? And the answer would be, well, both. This is about, you know, the Romans coming in and desecrating the temple in the year 70. And it's drawing on imagery of when the same thing happened under Greek rule before the time of Christ. So you can see it's liturgical as well as prophetic. Well, similarly, the Book of Revelation is liturgical as well as prophetic. And many Protestants who have never encountered the beauty of the Mass or high liturgy in this way are unfamiliar with these kind of liturgical dimensions to the book. And so you have the, you know, you have the offering of incense, you have the Holy Holy. Holy. It's right there in the book if one after another of these things. And so Scott Hahn describes this experience of going to Mass after having studied the Book of Revelation and being just kind of dumbstruck at the number of references between Revelation and the structure of the Mass, that the Mass is consciously echoing the Heavenly Liturgy that we see in the Book of Revelation. And if you read it in that way, you start to notice, like, oh, wow, there is an awful lot of liturgical imagery here. Even like the seven churches are represented with the seven candles in the lampstand, which is a liturgical image, the seven candled Menorah. And so the entire book is structured in this deeply liturgical kind of way. So that's one part I would encourage you as well, if you don't mind doing a little more reading. Although if you've already read the Lamb's Supper, you clearly don't mind doing a little bit of reading to read, or ideally even get your friend to read the relevant sections of First Apology by Saint Justin Martyr, because it'd be easy to imagine that this was all like some newfangled thing that, you know, in the 20th century or something, Catholics started celebrating the Mass in this way that sounded like the Book of Revelation. But the reality is, as far back as we find Christian worship, we find Christians worshiping in this way that looks and sounds like the Mass. So if you read the first apology from the mid-1100s, beginning specifically around chapter 65 and then 66, 67, those three chapters, and they're really paragraphs more than chapters. You see the structure of what worship looks like, and you see a beautiful description of the Eucharist. You see, like, the kiss of peace. You see, like, the whole structure of they've got the readings, they've got preaching, they have a collection, they've got the sign of peace, they have the Eucharist, they receive Communion, then there's a dismissal, and the whole thing looks and sounds again, astonishingly a, liturgical B, like the Mass today, and C, you can then read backwards and say, well, where else do we find this basic pattern? So you've got Revelation, you got first apology. The extra clue I want to add here is the road to Emmaus. In Luke 24, Jesus is on the road to Emmaus with the two disciples. And it's structured in this very demarcated way, the first half, you have a kind of Liturgy of the Word. They're reading Scripture, or rather they're talking about Scripture, and Jesus is opening the law and the prophets and showing how it points to him. So you've got the unpacking of Scripture. Then they arrive in Emmaus. They then invite him in, and he eats with them, or rather he goes to table with them. And then we're told in verse 30, when he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And we're told after that, in verse 35, that they went back and told the apostles what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. But they don't know who Jesus is during this kind of Liturgy of the Word. They recognize him in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, that in the Eucharist, they understand who he is. And that language, taking blessing, breaking and giving is, again, very liturgical. And the reference to the breaking of the bread is how Luke also describes the early Christian eucharist. In Acts 2, for instance, we're told that the early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. So I mention all of that to say, show him those pieces. And I think things might start to come together. It's not like you're going to see one silver bullet where he just says, aha. That verse is used in the Bible, and therefore I'm going to become Catholic. But learning to read things like the Road to Emmaus, learning to read things like the Book of Revelation in this liturgical way with an eye towards what the earliest Christian liturgy looked like, should prepare him to understand the Mass at a deeper level. That makes sense.
