The Tau Mark and the Sealing of the Servants of God
Old Testament: Ezechiel 9:4-6
And the Lord said to him: Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem: and mark Thau upon the foreheads of the men that sigh, and mourn for all the abominations that are committed in the midst thereof. ... Utterly destroy old and young, maidens, children and women: but upon whomsoever you shall see Thau, kill him not, and begin ye at my sanctuary.
New Testament: Apocalypse 7:2-3
And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the sign of the living God; and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, Saying: Hurt not the earth, nor the sea, nor the trees, till we sign the servants of our God in their foreheads.
The connection
Before judgment falls on a corrupted Jerusalem, the Lord commands one man to move through the city first and "mark Thau upon the foreheads of the men that sigh, and mourn for all the abominations that are committed" (Ezechiel 9:4); when the destroying angels follow, they are told plainly, "upon whomsoever you shall see Thau, kill him not" (Ezechiel 9:6). Thau, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, was written in the older paleo-Hebrew script as a simple cross-shaped mark, X or +. The mark itself, not any strength or hiding place, is what shelters the one who bears it. The Apocalypse stages the identical scene before the identical outpouring of judgment. Four angels are given power to harm the earth, and are held back by a fifth: "Hurt not the earth... till we sign the servants of our God in their foreheads" (Apocalypse 7:2-3). Judgment again waits on marking; the seal again precedes the storm rather than following it.
Moral sense
The mark is given specifically to those who sigh and mourn over evil, not to those merely untouched by it; grief over sin, one's own and the world's, is not weakness but the very thing that marks a soul as belonging to God rather than to what is being judged.
Anagogical sense
The sealing in Ezechiel and in the Apocalypse both look past the immediate judgment to a final one still coming, when the same mark, now fully revealed as the sign of the Lamb Himself, will be the only thing standing between a soul and the very last storm.
The Fathers
Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book III, ch. 22, quoting Ezechiel and then reading the letter itself: "He signed them with that very seal of which Ezekiel spake: The Lord said unto me, Go through the gate, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set the mark Tau upon the foreheads of the men. Now the Greek letter Tau and our own letter T is the very form of the cross, which He predicted would be the sign on our foreheads." An earlier version of this field reported his argument rather than his sentences because the passage had not been checked against the text. It has been now, and he says it outright.
Warrant
The badge is patristic. No verse of the Apocalypse cites Ezechiel 9, but the Fathers read the mark as Christ's: Tertullian takes the Tau as the very form of the Cross (Against Marcion III.22), and Cyprian makes Ezechiel's mark the sign of Christ that keeps its bearer safe when the world is judged, "whoever is found in the blood and the sign of Christ alone shall escape" (To Demetrianus 22). Apocalypse 7:2-3 stages the same sequence, a sealing on the foreheads carried out before the judgment is allowed to fall, without naming Ezechiel. Checked in the Greek: the Septuagint sets the mark upon the metopa at Ezechiel 9:4 and the Apocalypse seals the metopon at 7:3, the same noun for the forehead in both, which is evidence that the two scenes share a vocabulary and not only a shape.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1296.
The verses
Ezechiel 9:4 · Ezechiel 9:5 · Ezechiel 9:6 · Apocalypse 7:2 · Apocalypse 7:3
