Unlike reality, revelation requires an observer. The apostles are the first and paradigmatic observers of God’s revelation in Christ. Living by their and the Church’s witness, we have to struggle with the tension between the old and the new – in ourselves and the world.

---Fr. Anselm Ramelow, OP

I.

If the tree falls in the middle of the night in the middle of the forest, and nobody did see it, did it really fall? People who are asking these kinds of question tend to be philosophers. And people who would answer this question negatively are philosophers who think that reality is just in your head. So the tree does not exist, unless you see it, and the world is only what appears to you. Reality exists only as your knowledge of it.

Obviously it is against any common sense to think such a thing. It violates any intelligible notion of reality as distinct from our mind. If we think of something as real, we think of it as something that exists regardless of whether we know of it or not - and indeed, regardless of whether anyone knows about it. God, for example, exists even if nobody knows about him. He exists, for example, even at the time of the dinosaurs, in which there were not yet any people around to know of him. He was there even, when the earth’s crust was still cooling, and even when there was no universe yet.

II.

And so we would think of falling trees in the middle of the night: they are real, even if nobody notices. But our response would change if it were not a question of reality but of revelation. Revelation indeed does not exist, if nobody knows about it. If God reveals something to us, and we do not notice, then revelation has not happened, nothing has been revealed to anyone. The message has not arrived. Revelation is something relational: it exists only in relation to an observer.

You might want to think of a letter: if you write a letter and put it in the mailbox, but the mailman loses it, then it never arrives. To be sure, letter exists, but the message has never arrived; there might be a message, but no communication.

III.

Now, as can be expected, God has taken care that his letter arrives. It would be futile for him to try to reveal himself to us, if he did not make sure that we can know about it.

And so how does he do this? We hear it in today’s Gospel: he calls the apostles and makes them fishers of men! Jesus calls the apostles, and throughout his 3 year ministry he carefully prepares them, knowing quite well that they will understand a number of things only after his resurrection. And he makes sure that they witness him as resurrected, that they become eye-witnesses: he arranges various occasions at which they can meet and see him and even eat with him. Thus, when they select a replacement for Judas, they choose Matthias, because he was an eye-witness as well.

So the apostles are the prime receivers of the message. Yet, they are not only the ones to receive the message, but also the ones to hand it on. They do so partially by writing parts of the New Testament, and partially by their preaching – which then is written down by their followers. St. Peter’s preaching, for example, is written down by Mark the Evangelist.

So, what the apostles receive and formulate definitively and conclusively, is what we call “revelation.” Revelation consists of God showing himself and the apostles seeing and understanding it, and conveying it to the next generation as the “deposit of faith”.

This is why the Church says that “public revelation” is closed with the death of the last apostle, presumably with the death of St. John at the end of the first century A.D. The rest of the tradition of the Church is tradition with a small “t”: it is the Church’s continuous interpretation of what the Apostles have left behind, the “deposit of faith”. This deposit is that revelation which includes the apostles themselves as its first and authoritative receivers.

In other words: there might be trees falling in the night without anybody noticing, but there is no revelation and no Christianity without the apostles.

IV.

Still, what the apostles had conveyed, had to be handed on, and this without alteration and in a correct interpretation. What was needed were successors to the apostles; it needed a church. There has been this “apostolic succession” ever since, down to our day: the college of apostles has been succeeded by ecumenical councils, always with the pope as their head and arbiter in controversial issues.

What that means is that the apostolic succession and the Church are essential for God’s revelation to arrive in our knowledge, today. Revelation is happening here and now as well, for us, in our minds; the letter still keeps arriving. And this happens in the proclamation of the Church. Without the Church we have no access to Christ. We would not know about Jesus’ teaching, death and resurrection for our salvation without the Church, and so salvation would hardly become applied in our life.

In other words, the slogan that you sometimes hear: Jesus yes, Church no, simply does not work; you cannot have Jesus without the Church.

V.

So the Church connects us to the Jesus who lived 2000 years ago. But the Church also connects us with the Christ who now lives in heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us with the Father, and sending the Holy Spirit to guide the Church – and to guide us through the Church. It is that Christ who becomes present through the Holy Spirit on our altar in a few minutes when we celebrate the Eucharist.

At his Ascension, Jesus promised to be with us unto the end of the world, and he means by this that he will be with us by sending the Holy Spirit. In fact, he says so to the apostles, i.e. to the Church; the Holy Spirit is promised to the Church, and the Church is the way in which he says he is going to be with us. And so when the apostles convene at the first council, as we find it in the book of Acts, they can rightfully make a decision saying: “it has seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit” to make these decisions. And even after the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is still active in the Church and her teachings, so that it can arrive in our lives today as well.

VI.

So this is how revelation works in the age we are living in. We are living after God’s revelation that he made in the beginning through Jesus. And we are living before his second coming. In the meanwhile, we have the time of the Church, the time of apostolic succession. It is an in-between stage between past and future, between heaven and earth. We are living in one world but awaiting a new one, the one in which Christ will indeed be revealed in all his glory.

The Church is somehow the incarnation of the in-between stage that St. Paul talks about in today’s second reading, when he says: I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out. …. For the world in its present form is passing away. The church is the kingdom of God; it is a piece of heaven; it is the spiritual space in which the king of this kingdom, Jesus, is present, enthroned next to the right hand of the Father and sending his Holy Spirit upon us.

VII.

This situation necessarily puts the church in tension with the kingdoms and powers of this world. We can witness it today in the strain on the relationship between Church and state. Yesterday, for example, 50.000 of us walked down Market Street in San Francisco (perhaps a little like Jonah, in the first reading, walking down the streets of Nineveh), to defend the life of the unborn and to protect women from further harm. At the same time the government of this nation has no intention to respect our religious freedom and is unwilling to provide conscience clauses for those who do not want to collaborate in this evil. We will be asked now to participate in the killing of children in their mother’s womb or go out of business.

So we do indeed have reasons to ask: What kind of country has this become? It certainly is a country of this world, one of which we clearly are not citizens anymore, at least in an ultimate sense. For we are citizens of heaven. And so we should expect conflict. The Church will always be something of an inconvenience, because like Jonah in the first reading, the Church has to be a sign of contradiction.

It will have to be like Jesus coming to Galilee and proclaiming:

"This is the time of fulfillment.

The kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent, and believe in the gospel."

And the response will not always be so favorable as it was in the case of the Ninivites – although we should never give up hope.

VIII.

Yet this should not cause us to become “pharisaical” (apparently a point that the archbishop yesterday made in his homily as well); i.e. we should not think of ourselves as better. Jesus addresses not only the “other people,” but us as well. The proclamation of the kingdom will also stretch us personally, because we live in two worlds. This is not just about the enemies of the Church, but rather cuts right through our own hearts; it strikes right between the old Adam and the new Adam in us. This is why St. Paul says that we are to have the things of this old cosmos as citizens of the new cosmos, of the new heavens and the new earth. He says:

From now on, let those having wives act as not having them,

those weeping as not weeping,

those rejoicing as not rejoicing,

those buying as not owning,

those using the world as not using it fully.

For the world in its present form is passing away.

What this means is that, though we are citizens of the kingdom of God, we are not yet already there. We are still walking by faith and not by sight, and we ourselves do still need the exhortation of the Church. We need the apostles and their successors, and we are asked to submit in faith to the teachings of the Church.

IX.

Having to submit to the Church – that is something very contrary to the present age, and to at least parts of ourselves as well. We, too, are children of this age and we do not like authority. Yet we still need the apostles to show us Jesus, we still need the Church until his final revelation in glory.

For without the Church Jesus remains like the tree that has fallen in the night and nobody has seen it. The tree might be there but how would we know?

The tree we are talking about is the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: Adam and Eve wanted to know for themselves, and so they tried to grasp the fruit of that tree. But rather than finding knowledge, they lost it. And we are now on our way, to find this tree again, the tree of knowledge and life. The Book of Revelation show us the Heavenly Jerusalem with the tree of life growing on either side of the river of life, bearing fruit every time of the year. And so the tree lost will be the tree restored:

Eating of the Tree forbidden,

Man had sunk in Satan's snare,

When his pitying Creator

Did this second Tree prepare;

Destined, many ages later,

That first evil to repair.

X.

This tree is also the tree on which Jesus was fastened by the nails of our sins. Jesus is found on the tree of the cross, which has become our tree of life. This tree might indeed exist even if we do not know about it. But then it does not reveal anything unless we have a way of knowing about it. And the Church is our way of knowing it. We do not know the tree of the cross without the proclamation of the Church. Nor do we know about the tree of life in the heavenly Jerusalem without the Church giving us the Book of Revelation.

We are living between these two trees: the tree of the cross and the tree in heaven, both of which we know only with the help of the Church.

We are indeed living in two worlds, extended between heaven and earth – which means that we are suspended with Jesus on the tree of the cross. The apostles and the Church are the ones who show us how to climb this tree and how to rise to heaven. And partially we are already there; here and now we are with Jesus, knowing through the help of the apostles of that tree – and of Him who can be found on that tree alone:

Tree, which solely wast found worthy

the world's Victim to sustain.

harbor from the raging tempest!

ark, that saved the world again!

Tree, with sacred blood anointed

of the Lamb for sinners slain.