Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Why are only 144,000 redeemed and joyous around the throne of God as we hear in today’s rendition from Revelation? Are only 144,00 saved?
Numbers don’t always mean what they seem. Walking into Partial to Pie on Wayne Avenue we can order a baker’s dozen. How many donuts is that? In the early days of television if you answered the $64,000 question correctly would you have been able to retire? Why is “16” sweet? Why is “7” considered lucky in the roll of the dice?
We miss the purpose of these numbers if we rely solely on a surface understanding. There’s a deeper meaning behind them. The same is true for the use of numbers in apocalyptic writing such as the Book of Revelation. We must look beyond the obvious numeric sense to find the deeper, symbolic meaning (as would have been known by the original audiences). Everything in apocalyptic writing is symbolic.
7 There are seven churches, seven spirits, seven lampstands, seven flaming torches and seven seals. For the ancient semitic peoples seven meant fullness, perfection.
12 There are twelve stars on the crown of the woman clothed with the sun. Mention is also made of the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles. Twelve connects us with God’s old and new people.
666 Three sixes is the number of the beast. Given that 6 is a number that indicates imperfection, repeated three times it indicates absolute evil, an evil that wants to conquer and destroy the faithful.
1,000 In Revelation, as we hear today, this number symbolically represents a long period of time, even beyond our ability to calculate. Thus 144,000 is 12 x 12 x 1000. This is a limitless number.
Some approaches to Revelation ignore the purpose of author St. John of Patmos (the Roman penal colony where it was written) and the circumstances of the original audience. They refuse to see Revelation in the context of the many apocalypses written to encourage God’s people from 200 BCE to 200 CE. The seer of Patmos, for them, is obsessed with our time and circumstances. Thus Revelation has had no purpose or relevance for Christians until our time. Talk about hubris!
To hold that only 144,000 will be redeemed is to make Revelation, which is a book of hope, into a book of hopelessness. But we who are in Christ are not people of despair. To quote Andy Dufresne in the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies”
—Timothy J. Cronin