Catholic Commentary
Transition: The Third Woe Announced
14The second woe is past. Behold, the third woe comes quickly.
Revelation 11:14 marks the conclusion of the second woe—a divine judgment characterized by the locust plague and death of the two witnesses—and announces the imminent arrival of the third woe with urgent finality. The verse functions as a juridical declaration that God's sequential judgments are purposeful and bounded, with the ominous third woe representing the escalation toward complete divine justice.
God's judgment is not chaotic or endless—it is numbered, sequential, and moving toward a final trumpet blast that belongs to Christ alone.
Typologically, this verse participates in the broader biblical grammar of escalation. Just as the plagues of Egypt grew in intensity, and just as the covenantal curses of Leviticus 26 escalate through successive "sevenfold" punishments, the woes of Revelation do not merely repeat — they intensify and expand. The structural parallel to the Exodus plagues is deliberate: John is casting Rome (and every empire that oppresses God's people) as a new Pharaoh, and the woes as a new Mosaic series of divine interventions. The brevity of verse 14 stands as the moment between the ninth plague and the tenth — the pause before the destroyer passes over.
Catholic tradition reads the Book of Revelation not as a cryptographic timetable of future events but as a rich tapestry of theological truth about the nature of God, history, evil, and ultimate redemption. The Catechism teaches that Sacred Scripture must be read "in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written" (CCC 111), attentive to the unity of the whole canon, to living Tradition, and to the analogy of faith.
Within this framework, verse 14 bears specific theological freight. First, it witnesses to the sovereignty and pedagogy of God in history. The sequential woes — bounded, numbered, progressing — reveal a God who does not permit evil or suffering to simply metastasize without purpose. St. Augustine (City of God, Book XX) understood the tribulations of Revelation as the ongoing struggle between the City of God and the City of Man throughout history, not merely a future episode. The "woes" are the groans of a fallen world pressing toward its redemption.
Second, Catholic tradition, particularly through St. Robert Bellarmine and the great Jesuit commentators of the Counter-Reformation, emphasized the typological and recapitulationist reading of Revelation popularized by Victorinus and later developed by Tyconius and Primasius. In this reading, the woes do not describe three successive periods of literal history but rather three modes or intensities of the Church's experience of persecution and the world's experience of judgment — each woe being a fuller manifestation of the same eschatological reality.
Third, the phrase "comes quickly" (erchetai tachy) resonates with the Church's ancient prayer Maranatha — "Come, Lord Jesus!" (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20). The swiftness of divine judgment is the shadow side of the swiftness of divine salvation. As the Catechism states: "The Church…will receive its perfection only in the glory of heaven" (CCC 769). The tension of verse 14 — the woe behind, the woe ahead — is the tension in which the Church perpetually lives: between already-accomplished redemption and not-yet-consummated glory.
The Catholic who reads verse 14 in morning prayer or in a lectio divina session will recognize its geography immediately — because it is the geography of their own life. We live between woes. We emerge from one suffering, one loss, one season of darkness, only to be told on the horizon: another is coming. Cancer survived, then a marriage fractures. A financial crisis weathered, then a diagnosis. A pandemic receding, then political upheaval. The verse does not offer comfort in the conventional sense — it does not say the woes are over. It says: the second is past, behold, the third is near.
The spiritual discipline this verse invites is not stoic bracing but apocalyptic attentiveness — the posture of a watchman. St. John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris (1984), taught that human suffering finds its meaning not in escape but in participation in the redemptive suffering of Christ. The "quickly" of this verse is not a threat but a promise: God's timeline is moving. The Christian does not wait in despair between woes but stands at each threshold with idou — "Behold!" — the posture of someone who knows that the last woe is not the last word. The seventh trumpet, which follows immediately in verse 15, breaks into the doxology: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." The woes are real. They are not the end.
Commentary
Revelation 11:14 — "The second woe is past. Behold, the third woe comes quickly."
To appreciate the precise weight of this verse, one must locate it within the broader structural architecture of Revelation. The seven seals (chs. 6–8) give way to the seven trumpets (chs. 8–11), and embedded within the trumpet sequence is a further tripartite series of "woes" — solemn prophetic announcements of escalating divine judgment pronounced by an eagle in 8:13: "Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!" The first woe corresponds to the fifth trumpet and the locust plague of 9:1–12, which John himself closes with "the first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come" (9:12). The second woe is associated with the sixth trumpet — the unleashing of the four angels bound at the Euphrates and the vast cavalry of destruction (9:13–21) — as well as the dramatic intervening episode of the two witnesses (10:1–11:13), whose deaths, resurrection, and ascension constitute the culminating horror of this woe. Now, with the earthquake that swallows seven thousand in Jerusalem still echoing (11:13), verse 14 drops like a gavel.
"The second woe is past." The Greek verb apēlthen ("has passed," "has departed," "has gone away") is the same root used when Jesus describes heaven and earth passing away (Matt. 24:35). This is not merely transitional prose but a juridical declaration: the divine court has adjudicated and moved on. The woe has been executed; its sentence is complete. John offers no pause for mourning, no elegy for what has been suffered. This terse pronouncement is itself a theological statement: the judgments of God are purposeful, bounded, and sequential — not chaotic.
"Behold" (idou) — the characteristic apocalyptic attention-command, used over 25 times in Revelation alone. It functions as John's prophetic pointer, demanding that the reader's gaze be wrenched from the past to the present threshold. It echoes the prophetic hinneh of the Hebrew prophets and insists on the immediacy of what follows.
"The third woe comes quickly." The adverb tachy — "quickly," "soon," "without delay" — is a signature word of Revelation (1:1; 2:16; 3:11; 22:7, 12, 20), carrying within it not necessarily a prediction of calendar imminence but a quality of divine urgency. When God acts, He acts with swift finality. The third woe is not explicitly labeled as such anywhere in chapters 11–16, though scholarly and patristic consensus generally identifies it with the seventh trumpet and everything that flows from it — including the seven bowls of wrath (chs. 15–16) — the full, final outpouring of divine justice upon the unrepentant world. The very of what the third woe contains is itself terrifying. John does not itemize it here. He simply announces it is coming. The reader is left in the posture of one who has survived the second flood and is told the third is on the horizon.