{N}1,{/}2 The text says: {C}"witness (or declaration) of Jesus Christ{/}". This expression denotes here the messages given by the prophets of the Church (19,10). John then considers this "revelation" as the fruit of the prophetic spirit that was given to him. For this reason, even knowing that the revelation is a literary genre that follows concrete rules and has recourse to conventional images, we know that the inspiration is prophetic. It is much more than a literary composition and the difference is more noticeable when it is compared with other "revelations" of that time -even with the apocalyptic parts of Daniel 10-12. The Church was not mistaken when it spoke very early about the apocalypse of John the Prophet without knowing for sure if he was the same John the Apostle.

{N}1,{/}6 The Church is the "remnant of Israel", so that the descriptions that God made of his own people when He made his covenant with it, apply primarily to the Church. 

{N}1,{/}8 {C}The Master of the Universe.{/} The Greek word could also be translated as the Almighty. But in the Greek bible that the Church used, that word appeared always as the translation of "Sabaot": The God Sabaot is the God of armies, not so much of the armies of Israel but of the armies of heaven and earth (Ps. 148,2), that is, of all creatures that fill the universe.

{N}1,{/}9 Here the {C}testimony of Jesus{/} seems to be the message of Jesus: John does not like to mention God without putting Jesus side by side, just as Paul does with the words God and Lord.

{N}5,{/}8 The angels present the prayers of the saints. John only recalls the tradition of the Old Testament: Tob 11,12. Perhaps Jesus was thinking of it when he spoke of the angels of "the little ones" in Mt 18,10.

{N}5,{/}9 The old manuscripts contain discordant texts. Many have: "You purchased us for God from all tribes and nations..." The whole text implies that the participants in this passage are the actors of the Old Testament, and they acclaim the Lamb when he takes up his place in heaven immediately after his Resurrection. And they glorify him because he added to the chosen of Israel, already acquired by God in the Covenant of Sinai, those numerous peoples who will enter the Church and who will be together with them kings and priests (Ex 19,6).

{N}6,{/}1 Once again it is seen that the numeral 7 splits up into 4 and 3; 4 is the number of earth and 3 that of heaven (like in the petitions of the Our Father). Four horses for the earthly factors of history, and three heavenly elements: the souls of the martyrs, the stars of heaven and, in 8,1, the decision of the Judgement.

{N}7,{/}4 There is no explanation for this list of the twelve tribes that has a doublet (Manasse was a member of the house of Joseph) and omits Dan. The list varies according to the places in the Bible where it is found: see the note to Gen 48,1.

{N}8,{/}1 It must be recognized that these chapters 8 and 9 pose a serious problem to those who try to find a chronological order in this book. Let us leave aside the Messages to the Churches found in chapters 2 and 3. It is evident that chapters 4-7 take place in the realm of the Old Testament and that the Lamb has the key to this history; it ends or rather opens up in a multitude of elect from all nations who come from the great persecution
On the other hand it is also evident that chapter 10 inaugurates the history of the Church starting with the coming of the Son to this world. Later the book will focus on the witness of the Christians in the Empire until its destruction (19,10). From 19,11 to 20,10 we have an evocation of the times to come. Later in 20,11 comes the final Judgment followed by the heavenly Jerusalem: ch. 21-22.
What is the meaning then of these chapters 8 and 9 that present a series of trials that are not the final ones (9,20) but rather the preamble of the judgment: invasion of the powers of hell, unleashing of the scourges of violence and war, and all this without the conversion of sinners? Apparently this picture, even taking into account its apocalyptic colors, expresses something more than the Jewish tragedy of the years 66-70 which John had witnessed, and especially paragraph 9,20 refers only to the pagan nations. The most likely is that these two chapters 8-9 are the end of a first scene that begins in chapter 4. In this first scene John does not go beyond the entrance of the baptized from all nations in the history of the people of God. Then he leaves aside a future that he does not know, an interval of years or centuries symbolized by the silence of about half hour (8,1) and in these two chapters he goes on directly to the great trials that will precede the judgment.
Then, in chapter 10, a new scene of his Revelation begins with the coming of the Word of God to the world. Without any further consideration to the Jewish roots of the Church, John turns towards the future, and shows this Church faced with the world of the pagans, up to the great trials that precede the judgment. These trials are described in 19,11 and 20,1 by means of images different from those in the first part. At this point the two great visions converge to end up in the heavenly Jerusalem.

{N}8,{/}3 Let us fix our attention in this preparation of the Judgment that takes the form of a liturgy: incense and sacred trumpets.

{N}9,{/}21 A classification of the great forms of evil: first, idolatry with the worship of objects that were made by human hand; then crime, sorcery, sexual immorality, theft. At the end of the book, in 22,15, they will appear again under a rather similar form, but theft will be substituted for falsehood which John especially denounces in his first letter and in the Revelation.

{N}12,{/}1 {N}THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON{/}
This vision of the woman takes up again the sun, the moon and the stars of Joseph's dream  in Gen 37,9, but the role of the sun and the moon makes us think immediately of the woman in the Song 6,10. In Genesis it was Joseph in the midst of his brothers; in the Song it was Israel in the midst of the nations (see the preceding lines of the Song in 6,8-9). Here it seems that the woman is the center of creation. The chapter is presented as a continuation of Gen 3,15 but without forgetting the Emmanuel or his mother in Is 7,14 (and Mi 5,2).
This chapter is one of those that seem to imply the mixture of different pieces, hence the many solutions that have been imagined to reorganize it and to find the original elements; however the multiplicity of these essays demonstrates that none of them is convincing. This chapter, like the first chapter of Ephesians, is divided into two periods: first what happens in the eternal plan of God, then its realization on earth; this is much in keeping with the vision of history that is found in the apocalypses. 
1-2:  the woman and the Incarnation in the center of God's plan for the universe.
3-4a: the presentation of the dragon, a mighty angel. It is said that he will provoke the rebellion in the celestial realm, but this rebellion does not take immediately.
4b-6: the dragon decided to devour the child of the woman, and God intervened: the child will become ruler of the nations, even though the woman will have to live in the desert (as the mother of the Emmanuel).
7-9:  division of the world of spirits and expulsion of the evil ones.
10-12: the chorus (in the sense of the old tragedy) praises God's decisions.
13-18: transition to the consequences of this crisis in time and in history. This refers to the Church after the Resurrection. But it is difficult to interpret the river poured out of the dragon's mouth behind the woman. In 17-18 there is a return to the persecution against the Christians of the Empire, whom John is addressing.
If we wanted now to determine exactly the sense of the vision, we would have to relocate it in the book. In this regard see the note to 8,1. The vision of the two witnesses in ch. 11 is the evangelization and the call to conversion throughout history. Now the vision of the Woman and the Dragon presents the protagonists of the struggle that will appear in the following chapters. The Woman is humankind spoused to God. Let us not say that it is the Church, because she was there before Christ and she it is who gave him birth, but in each period it is identified with the redeemed. Before Christ, she was the spouse of the Son, anxiously awaiting the visit of her King. Later on, she becomes one thing with her children who now are the children of the Gospel, witnesses and prophets of Jesus; because in the Hebrew culture {C}the children of... {/}be it of Adam, of Belial or of the prophets designate a community that constitutes one entity with the legendary father to whom they are bound.
Here John kept his own language, but there is a new element: the mother of Jesus is a concrete person, and suddenly the Woman comes out of the world of symbols and becomes a reality in Mary.
If John recognizes Mary in the Woman, both in Cana and in Calvary, it is also very legitimate to keep here that identification. In contrast it would be an error to think that the {C}impressive sign{/} could be a means to designate in an exclusive way this person or that community that John had in mind: the prophecy gives a signal that embraces the totality of time, and later on John applies it, or we apply it, with greater or lesser success, to the events and to the persons located in the corresponding line. The figure of the Woman in the center of the Revelation is extremely important. In fact, even though the Bible is almost completely dominated by the viewpoint of males and tinted by experiences lived exclusively by males, one of the dominant traits of Christian revelation, and what gives faith its own identity, is to conceive the entire relationship of humankind with God as the preparation of a grand wedding. The Song and the sign of the Woman express what is in the center of all prophetic revelation. In the same way it is true that in defending the predestination of Mary, her perpetual virginity and her presence in the entire work of salvation, the Church reaffirms one of the essential traits of the God of the Bible: not to recognize the privileges of Mary is not to worship onlGod, rather it is adulterating the face God wanted to give to himself.
But it is also a fact that in our century Marian piety has invaded many domains where it was formerly absent. In past centuries, faith itself and the vision itself of God and of Christ-Spouse were based on convictions and on a piety that were different. Many God's lovers have seen themselves again in the Spouse of the Song, seeing totally in her above all the figure of the Church: they saw themselves as an important part of the mystery and of God's predestination. The identification of Mary with the Woman should not be now one more way to underestimate our own calling and the unique love in which we have been known by the Father. Jesus invited his apostles to believe that they were in the center of the plan of God, rather than to envy the greatest saints of the past and live through intermediaries.

{N}12,{/}18 the old texts are divided. Some read: "He stood", and they join it to verse 17. Others read: "I stood", and link it to the following vision.

{N}14,{/}14 That Son of Man refers probably to Christ the judge, but John rejects anything that could be interpreted as a Judgment in the style of Michelangelo: Jesus will not appear and he will be replaced by an angel..

{N}16,{/}1 The seven cups are like a new version of the seven trumpets of chapters 8 and 9. Once again appears the water changed into blood, the intervention in the Euphrates, the invasion of the diabolic spirits... And again the divine punishments are presented under the form of a grand liturgy. But here everything will be concentrated in the Great City.

{N}20,{/}7 {N}PROPHECIES{/}
We see here a sudden change of speed of the prophetic vision. John spoke extensively about the Roman idolatry and about the persecutions of the totalitarian power; then, in chapter 20 we enter into the times that follow and John apparently sees in them only the joy of the recovered peace. The totalitarian beast and the false Christ -institutions more than persons- have been sent to the eternal fire and the agents of Satan have been purely and simply eliminated (19,21). Only after those thousand years of peace summarized in a few lines, the devil starts working anew; in two paragraphs the great revolt (Paul will speak of the apostasy in 2Tes 2,3) is dominated and the story ends with the devil being sent again to hell.
We find here what was already noted in the prophets of the Old Testament: the prophecy sees in the events of the moment an anticipated presence of the Judgment, overlooks everything positive that is in them and tries to show only whatever in them demands an intervention of God. Therefore all the time that will elapse between the condemned present system and the end of history is only a great deceit: the prophet was not there to describe beforehand the development of history.
There is a continuity between the prophecy of the Old Testament and the Christian prophecy. Although revelation definitively ends with the book of Revelation, the prophetic charism however is not extinguished. Nowadays many persons turn towards heavenly messages, which become all the more numerous, the more the world becomes bigger and the present revolutions destroy our certainties. Whatever the part of credulity and illusion may be in the heavenly messages that flourish almost everywhere, it would be very unfair to underestimate all those warnings; frequently they emanate from prophets whose charism it would be difficult to reject. Most of the time they only repeat with intensity, by means of images that strike our imagination and bring us to conviction, the calls of the Gospel to conversion and the imminence of the judgment of God on the idolatrous systems that imprison us. Even if their message should convey only what we find in Scripture, read with faith, those prophecies are not useless, because they touch those persons whom the Church or the circumstances have not allowed to enter into the Bible.
It is not then a matter of ignoring the Christian prophecy of our time from the ceremonial chair of our theological science, often too rationalist; the Spirit and the spirits are as necessary as the prelates in the life of the Church, even if they touch the monopoly of authority. But of course the biblical criteria must be applied to them. We should listen to the warnings, pay attention to the nearer signs that are given us; but on the other hand, everything in those messages that may pretend give us informations regarding what will happen in the future, should be attributed to the imagination and to the human limitations of the prophet and not to the Spirit of God.

{N}22,{/}3 {N}THE SALVATION OF NON-CHRISTIANS{/}
Is it not true that the New Testament, the final word, should tell us how those who have not known the Only Savior will be saved? But it does not do so, and the Revelation that closes the book speaks only of the struggle waged by the powers of evil, scattered through all the spheres of society, against the newly born Church. Never does it mention the innumerable non-Christians who have been neither witnesses of the word nor instruments of evil.
And the same happens in the letters of Paul: the non-Christians are {C}the outsiders{/}; they are a {C}world{/} in which the evil spirit acts without hindrance. Even the text in 1Tim 2,4 ({C}God wants all to be saved...{/}) ignores our question, because it only refers to the divine will to make the message of salvation reach all people.
To ignore to such extent those who constitute the greatest majority could make of Christianism a sectarian message: we already said something about that "outside of the Church there is no salvation" when speaking of Mk 16,16. However we should not be surprised: the books of the New Testament were addressed to small communities whose universe was limited to the Greco-Roman world and whose problems did not go beyond their city. There was the struggle for those Christians, frequently not accepted or persecuted: it was necessary to tell them that the salvation of the world depended on their faithfulness.
Nothing however in the Gospel justifies a discrimination towards those who did not receive the biblical revelation: we can see how Jesus acted toward the non-Jewish in Mk 7,24-8,10. In the same way the parable of the final Judgment (Mt 25,31) does not make any distinction between believers and non believers. This is enough to make us rethink the problem of the salvation of those who have not received the faith. Moreover the question now is not to know whether God has a spirit generous enough to be interested in "the outsiders", but rather to understand how He laid out human history in such a way that all will be saved by the only Savior, although only a minority may know the Son made man. Why such diverse callings: to know or not to know the great divine manifestation? If we believe that God acts with a boundless generosity and without distinction of persons, how can we see in this a work worthy of Him?
Many Christians today would like to think that only language and culture separate us from those who do not share our faith, that the religious diversity is a product of our limitations and that truth must be found beyond the different creeds. They are open to the eastern spiritualities or immersed in our liberal culture; there is a great temptation to deny the differences and to refer everything to the field of comparative religions. Christian revelation is opposed to this type of concessions: even though we may accept that there are other revelations of God and that other religions are based on prophets different from ours, whom we must respect, the fact remains that the Son is unique just as God is one. 
However, without rejecting the uniqueness of the Christian salvation, we can amplify our traditional vision: it should be enough to present not an affront but a challenge of the non Christian wisdoms towards that of the people of God. For centuries there has been an effort to be reassured by belittling those other wisdoms and religions: they are but human babbling, preachers said, where God gives us the fullness of light. But why not recognize that there are two ways equally loved by God, although the Spirit of Evil has sown there all sorts of confusion and mirages?
We cannot doubt of our privileged vocation, but neither can we conclude that God measures the gifts He grants to others and saves them reluctantly. God saves some by revealing himself to them and others by letting them seek Him (He 17,27); what seems to be here a contradiction is in fact an absolute demand of the holiness of God. Because God cannot reveal himself without at the same time remaining hidden; He cannot promise and commit some part without sinking immediately into mystery or, if we prefer so, without submerging us into our condition of creatures.
To speak of the Holy God is to confess that we have a sharp conscience not so much of what He is but of his ever unforeseeable action. The events we live, with their share of tragedies and scandals, appear to us then as a divine game: we see that they take place in a background of reality where there is nothing but the mystery of divine freedom. {C}Our God is a devouring fire,{/} and we are unable to do anything in front of the initiatives and the exuberance of his unattainable riches, often terrible, that can crush us with all our wisdom.
The Holy God has willed the most inconceivable thing for the human reason; to make that created beings return to Him in his eternity. By doing this He assumed amazing risks: What can, and what should they know of God? What experiences should they have in the course of their existence, so limited in time? What must they guess about the superior Being from whom they come so that their present life may be a prelude of eternity? What traumatisms are needed to prepare them for such metamorphosis? 
The Apostle James holds that in God there is no darkness but everything in Him is light. But that light is not ours, and it blinds us. What believer, on coming out of prayer, does not find himself suddenly disturbed by an unforeseen misfortune? How could God permit that...? Let us go further: there never was a friend of God, to whom He revealed himself beyond the common norms, who did not have to go through periods of interior trial, terrible at times, when it seemed that everything he had experienced was nothing but a dream. For God cannot reveal himself without his truth's being betrayed by our words. 
That mystery of a light that is given and denied is at the very bottom of the work of salvation. The tensions that in God himself are knotted and end up in unity are the ultimate reason of the contradictions that are inscribed in the plan of salvation with its diverse ways: the majority of humans will undertake the search for God on their own, even though God may keep for himself to intervene discretely; but others are chosen to be his people and to receive his own testimony. They will live other experiences and will be the witnesses of a divine wisdom, ignored by those who have not been called. And this is the way the holy God saves human history, using his left as well as his right hand, his bright as well as his dark face.
God foresaw that the majority of humans would not know their Savior during their earthly life, because this is good and necessary. But let us not say that because of that they are less loved: God loves every man and every woman with a total love that will be able to transform them in all their dimensions when the time will come. And when that time comes, no one will complain of having made their way without the weight and the riches of the revelation, because the weaknesses that were our lot on earth will appear as the instruments of the particular love God has for us since eternity. And from among those innumerable sons and daughters of God who are not his people on earth, He knows how to choose good friends for himself.
But God wanted to manifest himself to a people whom He made his own, because that too is good and necessary. The call to Abraham first, the call to believe in Christ later on, brought to birth a people that was not superior to others, but different. That people was really privileged because God gave himself to it. We not only know Him; we can also practice, beginning now, what will become the life of all in eternity, the relationship of mutual love in tenderness and in fidelity. And that people performs an essential function in the history of humankind, even though it has written many not so glittering pages. Among those who experienced the riches of the love of Christ, who will hesitate to say that he/she received the best part? Would we have to say therefore that that undeserved privilege gives us a superiority over those who were not called? St. Paul gave the answer to that question in his letter to the Romans, ch. 3.
It is now time to look more closely to the counterpart of God's gift. If the revelation of the Bible could offer us full security and make us examples of virtue, we could speak of inequality. But it is the Holy God who has brought us over to himself, and we are going to be  burned in the fire of his holiness. Who will bear the weight of the first commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength?" And who will act better than those apostles whom Jesus constantly reproached for their lack of faith? The biblical history is that of a long list of rebellions and incomprehensions that still continue in the history of the Church. Jesus made it clear that the saved, in the sense that He gives to this term, are very few. The chosen people is, more than any other, a people of sinners, and here the balance is restored (Mal 1,11-12).
Though a sinner, the believer would like to share with all the riches of his faith (2Cor 5,14). But there is a limit that we cannot overcome: God did not consult with us to offer each one our own destiny and frequently we will suffer seeing that God keeps those we love in ways where Christ is absent (Rom 9,3).
We will never finish making the synthesis of the Christian way and of the other ways, even though there maybe some on the other side who think they did, because the words {C}choice {/}and {C}grace {/}are at the base of the revelation. Not to speak of the choice, would be to deny the whole of biblical history. And that choice is confirmed by the word {C}grace{/} that only the Christian faith puts at the center of our relationship with God. But for what purpose should  we want to build at all cost a synthesis or accomplish the unity before the day of God comes? What counts is not what we have been able to raise here below. We should rather ask ourselves whether the two ways, both the way where God reveals himself and that other where we have to grope our way, are not equally necessary so that the riches of the love of God may finally be fully recognized: see the note in Rom 15,8.

