Mary In The Book of Revelation

A pocalyptic literature has one fundamental message: in spite of present hardships, evil cannot conquer. Good is always ultimately victorious. The Book of Revelation, written when the church was sorely persecuted by Roman emperors, testifies that the People of God can never be overcome. Jesus, the Lamb of God, is clearly the conqueror. In order to convince his audience of this basic truth, the apocalyptic author uses arcane imagery involving colors, numbers, veiled references to earlier writings both religious and secular and to the politics of former and present ages. If any book of the Bible demands an interpreter – and one who is well versed in the teachings of the Church – it is the Book of Revelation.

[In every age], more and more false prophets claim to find indisputable end-time chronology and clear references to impending cataclysms in the verses of this book. Not one of these self-made seers has ever been correct in the past, which prophesies the success-rate for their heirs.

Revelation is not a crystal ball awaiting the incantations of a diviner so that we may know historical details of the final age of the cosmos. Rather, it is the clarion cry of the definitive triumph of Jesus Christ over all the forces of evil. When will creation witness this victorious coming of Jesus, the triumphant Messiah in all of his glory? Times and dates are not ours to know. With hope-filled patience, we await the details which are known, Jesus tells us, only by the Father (Mark 13:32).

Limiting ourselves to chapter 12, we ask: Who is the woman? Who is the child? Notice that there are three scenes in the chapter: the woman and her child in heaven and the dragon (v 1-6); Michael and the dragon (v 7-11); the woman and her offspring on earth and the dragon (v 13-17). Our brief study will examine only the first and last sections of chapter 12, since only in those scenes is the woman mentioned.

To summarily declare that the woman is Our Lady creates more problems than it solves. Mary did not give birth in heaven to Jesus, which the first two verses would imply. Tradition clearly opposes that the virginal Mary “cried out in pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.” Mary’s Child was not, immediately after his birth “caught up to God and to His throne” or pursued into the desert after giving birth, or persecuted through her other children (v. 17). Who, then, is this mysterious woman of the Apocalypse?

The vision of the woman in chapter 12 is one of the many mysterious signs used by the author as he un-folds the final victory of the Lamb. In its primary sense, the woman signifies the People of God, often described as a woman in both biblical and extra-biblical literature and so often persecuted by the forces of evil. She personifies the people of the Old Covenant, protected in the wilderness (Exodus), the people from which with great pangs (cf Is 26:17; 54:1 66:7-9) – signifying the difficult and troubled times which usher in the age of the Messiah – comes our salvation, the crucified and risen Jesus (cf Ps 2:9), who “rules over all the nations with a rod of iron.” She is also then a sign of the New People of God, the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:2,10), the Church which flowers from the synagogue, the people so persecuted for their faith in the Messiah. Her twelve stars symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel (cf Gen 37:9), now the twelve apostles.

Is Our Lady found in this vision of the woman, the people of God? Saint Bernard gives us the answer: “the whole sequence of the prophetic vision shows that it is to be understood of the Church but I see no inconvenience in applying it to Mary.” In prayerful meditation on this text, the liturgy of the Church “rightly,” as Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Signum Magnum, “interprets [Rev. 12:1) as the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the grace of Christ the Redeemer, the Mother of all men.” For Mary is the member of Israel through whom the Messiah’s reign comes to be, she is the pattern of the Church and now “in the glory which she possesses in body and soul in heaven is the image and beginning of the Church as it is to be perfected in the world to come. Likewise she signs forth on earth, until the day of the Lord shall come (cf 2 Pet 3:10), a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim People of God” (Constitution on the Church, #68).

Amid the varied levels of the mysterious sign of the woman of Revelation, the Church is seeing ever more clearly the outline of the woman who in a fuller sense was prophesied in Gen: 3:15, the woman who stood at the foot of The Cross (Jn: 19:25-27). Mary, the Mother of the Redemption, She, the ikon of the People of God, is in a mysterious way seen in the Apocalyptic symbol: A woman clothed with the sun around her head, a crown of twelve stars.”