Tag Archives: Revelation

O Clavis David

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Christ trampling the gates of hades with all their locks and keys and setting the prisoners (Adam and Eve) free from darkness.

Christ trampling the gates of hades with all their locks and keys and setting the prisoners (Adam and Eve) free from darkness.

O Key of David, and Sceptre of the house of Israel, that openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man openeth, come to liberate the prisoner from the prison, and them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel; qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

The fourth of the O Antiphons, O Clavis David, addresses Christ by another title that comes from the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah 22, a scene is described in which a new ruler replaces an old, and this is accomplished by the Lord, who says of this new ruler that “… I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open” (Isa 22:22-23). Continue reading →

The Project – Part 2

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On either side of the river is the tree of life … and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

In part 1 of The Project, I looked at the “project-ness” of Creation, the somewhat alarming notion that the world was meant to go somewhere before the Fall.  God made a world full of potential  – a transitory kosmos full of exploding stars and volatile elements, untamed earth and nameless creatures.  He set capable stewards in a sacred turf with the charge to master it and then expand.  Imagine where that could have gone.  But the stewards strayed from their glorious task and onto the path of “Self Divorced from God.”  That path has thenceforth fractured humanity, taking what was the noble man and yielding, as one author put it, “two pitiable horrors, a corpse and a ghost.” Continue reading →