“I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (RSV, Revelation 22:13)

St John was a very old man that Sunday morning when Christ appeared to him and imparted the visions which form the Book of the Revelation – the last book of the Bible.

The persecution of the Church by the Emperor Domitian was well under way and St John had been sent to labour in the mines on the little volcanic island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea.

At the sight of the Risen Christ, the apostle, in his own words, “…fell at his feet as though dead” (RSV, Revelation 1:17), for Jesus stood before him in all his Divine glory, “…clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters…and his face was like the sun shining with full strength” (RSV, Revelation 1:13-16).

And there on that barren island, Our Blessed Lord proclaimed himself as the eternal God: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (RSV, Revelation 22:13).

As Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, so Jesus Christ, God made man, is he from whom all things take their origin, and in whom all things find their true journey’s end.