Revelation: - Knights of Columbus, Supreme Council

V
THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN
In the second major part of the Apocalypse, chapters 12-19, John most
evidently parts company with the Jewish apocalypses. It is not that he ceased
to depend on the Old Testament or the Jewish literary tradition of apocalyptic
– if anything, this second part contains more allusions to the Old Testa ment
than the first – but in this section he speaks of things that the Old Testament
could not know. While the first section spoke in more or less general terms of
catas trophes and other aspects of God’s judgment, in this section we have a
portrayal of the role of the Church in great detail. It is the Church, the
fulfillment of the Old Testament aspiration, that makes all the difference
between a Jewish and a Christian apocalypse.
Again John begins this section with a series of preparatory visions. This
time, however, there is no pre sentation of the heavenly Trinity. Rather, the
“members of the cast,” so to speak, who are to be the sub ject of the following
revelations, are introduced to us in a series of “signs.”
The Cast of Characters
The first sign is “a woman clothed with the sun; with the moon beneath
her feet and twelve stars in a crown about her head. As we see from the
complete descrip tion of this woman (12:1-2, 5-6), she is both the Church and
the Mother of the Messiah. The Church is pre sented both glorified and in her
period of trial, all at once. The sun, moon, and stars is a figure possibly
suggested by Genesis 37:9, in the story of Joseph who is a foreshadowing of
the Messiah; the picture is intended, at all events, to show the glory of the
Church. The reference in v. 2 is a paraphrase of Micah 4:10, where the
daughter of Zion, that is, the earthly Jerusalem that is the foreshadowing of
the heavenly Jerusalem, is in suffering before the Lord is to save her from
Babylon. The child to whom the woman gives birth in v. 5 is certainly Jesus,
as He is described in the messianic language of Psalm 2:9. The woman has
other offspring (v. 17), who, as we shall see, are the Christians. This is Paul’s
teaching about Christ “the firstborn of many brethren,” our Savior Who has
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