Voice of Steve: "He will be a staff for the righteous, with which for them to stand and not to fall.

And he will be the light of the nations, and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled.

All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him,

and they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of Spirits" (1 Enoch 48:4-5).

The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons, and saints.

All the time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat, secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is.

What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it well? How do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence?

Orthodox Christian priests Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young host this live call-in show focused on enchantment in creation, the union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history.

Welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, critter-crushers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

You're about to waste another perfectly good three, four, five hours of your life.

My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, Romper-in-Chief of the Romper Room, is with me straight from the swamp in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Two things concerning that. First, to this day, every time I read the names during the Great Entrance, I feel like I'm doing the Magic Mirror bit.

But also, number two, I know we're supposed to be one big happy family at Ancient Faith, but you need to put someone else on before this show.

I'm tired of being associated with that modernist. I don't know why you have him on.

Fr. Andrew: I will… I'll speak to the manager. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and I'm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, perched precariously atop the Arcane Tower of Podcasting, hovering dozens—dozens, I tell you!—of stories above a dis-used gateway to the underworld—and we are live.

And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346—that's assuming that Mike has gotten the phones working again—and you can talk to us. We'll get your calls in just a moment.

And the aforementioned Mike Spick-and-Span DeGan will be taking your calls.

So, before we begin tonight's episode, which is on the Cross, I wanted to mention to everybody an opportunity for our listeners or their friends or their family who are Orthodox Christians aged 18 to 23.

Fr. Stephen: Ageism.

Fr. Andrew: Ageism. Yeah. Yeah, you're not invited, Father. You are more than twice the age.

Fr. Stephen: I know.

Fr. Andrew: The oldest of these people.

Fr. Stephen: Unfair, I tell you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: If I want a third act— Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. And if you're, you know, Orthodox Christians of those ages, 18 and 23, interested in Orthodox media: so this July 17 through 20 at our headquarters in Chesterton, Indiana, Ancient Faith Ministries is going to hold the second annual Lampstand Institute.

That is an introductory training opportunity for young people to interact directly with and be mentored by the professionals on the Ancient Faith stuff.

It's completely free and even includes a travel stipend, but only ten people will be accepted after review of all of the applications.

So you can get info about that and you can apply at ancientfaith.com/events.

Fr. Stephen: That's especially cruel to say, I don't qualify based on age—and then make it free.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. I know. It's like, it's like catnip for Dutch people, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. You're just, you're just deliberately trolling me.

Fr. Andrew: No. Well, you could come in and say that you are, like, two and a half applicants.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There we go.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Free things for other people. Just not right.

Fr. Andrew: Believable. Yeah.

So another thing that you can do at that same URL, ancientfaith.com/events, is you can read up and register for the second Lord of Spirits conference, October 2 through 5 this year at the Antiochian Village.

Last I checked, only about a quarter of the rooms at Antiochian Village are still left, and it's been like a week since I checked, so I'm not even really sure what the current status of all that is.

Fr. Stephen: I am invited to that, right?

Fr. Andrew: You are. You, in fact, I think we have a room reserved for you.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Good.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You don't have to turn in an application like we made you do last time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I'm surprised I made it through the process.

Fr. Andrew: It's pretty rigorous.

Fr. Stephen: Given my outrageous demands.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So we've talked a number of times about atonement, which is what most people associate with the cross of Christ.

And on our last episode, we put atonement talk into the context of the Apocalypse of Abraham, including a pretty direct and thorough rejection of the Calvinist—Calvinist—doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

Death is what brought Christ into the underworld to destroy the power of death and the devil, but why was that death through crucifixion in particular? What is it about the cross? Why did Jesus choose to give up his life in this manner in particular?

So that's where we are tonight. So, Fr. Stephen, did the Romans invent crucifixion? Is this all their idea?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Okay. Well, I guess we have some reading to do.

Fr. Stephen: They did not. It was actually the Persians.

Fr. Andrew: The Persians?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Huh.

Fr. Stephen: I do not know if this is in any way related to their predilection for chandeliers. Both involve hanging things.

Fr. Andrew: Or carpets.

Fr. Stephen: But, yes, so the Persians invented it, and when we say invented it, right, what are we talking about? We're talking about crucifixion as such, as a method of execution.

And to define it as a method of execution, it is attaching a human, by some means, to a pole, a stake, a tree, an object, a wooden object of some sort—

Fr. Andrew: When you said stake, all the Jehovah's Witnesses in our audience got really excited.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the torture stake, yeah.

—that puts them in a stress position, which, through a slow and agonizing process, results in their death.

That is what we're talking about.

So, you know, the Assyrians, for example, before the Persians, were very creative in ways to do horrible things to people, but they did not have this as a regular method of execution. So that's what we mean when we say the Persians invented it.

But the Romans kind of perfected it.

Fr. Andrew: A dubious—

Fr. Stephen: Meaning they used it constantly on non-Romans. It was illegal to crucify a Roman citizen because it was such a horrible way of executing someone, such a horrible way of dying. Romans got beheaded.

That's why St. Peter was crucified, but St. Paul was beheaded: because he was a Roman citizen. Beheading was considered more humane.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it was faster, typically.

Fr. Stephen: Typically… Well, than crucifixion, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's not over in one blow with beheading, unfortunately.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But crucifixion, as we were saying, this mode of execution that is literally so tortuous and painful that we invented a word to describe the pain, that word being excruciating...

And the way it works, as we said, is a person is affixed in such a way that they're in a stress position, meaning their body is in a position where it is unable to rest, and in particular, this was generally set up so that the person was unable to fully take in a breath without sort of contorting themselves.

And so eventually, you know, your body will do a lot to try to breathe and try and keep you alive, but eventually, over the course of often two or three days, with no water or food, hanging on something, the person eventually— their body just gives out.

They're unable to get into a position where they can breathe, and they die of asphyxiation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Pretty awful.

Fr. Stephen: We probably should have had some kind of warning at the beginning of this episode.

Fr. Andrew: I don't know, maybe. I mean, crucifixion talk is moderately common, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Pretty early on, we just went right into this, but okay!

Yeah. And so that is how people died.

But being in a stress position like that is a form of torture in and of itself. So it's not just: things were pretty horrible for a couple days and then they died. It is two to three days of just constant physical and mental torture until you're like— your whole system finally gives out.

Added to that is the fact that the Romans in particular used this as a deterrent, so it was also a form of public humiliation. People were crucified naked—and publicly, along roads, along thoroughfares, so it could serve as a deterrent to crime or rebellion or whatever it was that was being punished.

And they often… Well, that's what's going on with what's called the titulus in Latin, the sign that Pontius Pilate has put over Christ's cross, declaring him to be the king of the Jews.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews."

Fr. Stephen: The idea is this is a way of mocking someone and also sending a message to any other would-be messiahs out there who might see it, that this is what's in store for you.

The Romans also, and very perversely, Roman soldiers who were assigned to this task of executing people were very creative and inventive in how they would do it.

So we hear these stories about certain saints being crucified on their sides or St. Peter being crucified upside down or St. Andrew's cross being like an X and different things. That's all very real. Romans did that kind of thing all the time.

Just to… I guess they got bored executing people, because sometimes crosses were used for mass executions. For example, Spartacus' slave revolt ended with Spartacus and all of his men being crucified. So, because they were slaves, not Roman citizens, they could be crucified.

So you can imagine the soldiers assigned this duty.

It's a grisly duty. It's a horrible duty. And it's the kind of… Doing this kind of duty is the kind of thing that coarsens and hollows out a person to the point where they would start to find things funny, like crucifying someone upside-down and this sort of thing.

But that was very much the case among the Romans.

Pontius Pilate, in particular, as governor of Judea, was a big fan of using crucifixion as a tool for population control.

Basically, as governor, Pontius Pilate was assigned to keep the peace in the Roman province of Judea. That was his whole job: just keep the peace.

And in order to do that, he could do just about anything he wanted to to the local population, especially if they weren't Roman citizens.

If they were Roman citizens, he had some more rules he had to follow, but if they're not Roman citizens, no one cared. They're essentially considered like animals and so no one cared what you did to them.

And of course, if he failed to keep the peace in Judea, he would be the one getting beheaded. He'd be the one getting executed, and that's ultimately what happened to him when he was recalled to Rome.

But he got a bum assignment in that regard, in that, during the first century, especially the mid-first century AD, there were almost constant would-be messiahs and Jewish revolts breaking out,

culminating in what happened in AD 70, and then the Bar Kokhba Rebellion later on, where the Romans just ended up wiping out Judea and the Jewish people in response.

But so he was sent to a place where there wasn't really any peace and told, "You better make sure there's peace here."

To that end, he did a lot of... things that now are very clearly atrocities to us, but that the Romans thought nothing of.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Shock and awe.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

One of those Christ actually refers to. There's— In Luke 13, Christ refers to some Jewish people whose blood was mingled with the sacrifices by Pilate.

And you say: Well, what's that about? That is— At a previous Passover in the early 20s, word—

You know, Passover, there's all of these thousands and thousands of pilgrims coming to Jerusalem from all over the world for the feast, and Pilate got word that there was going to be some kind of issue:

someone was going to try to start a rebellion; there was some would-be messiah going to try and start something.

And so as the time was approaching, he decided to head that off of the pass. He grabbed 150 random Jewish men, women, and children off the streets—literally at random—and crucified them.

Men, women, and children along all the roads leading into Jerusalem, so the pilgrims would walk past them all on the way into the city, to send them the message not to cause any trouble.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah, but again, I mean, this is pretty normal for Rome.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this was typical for Rome. That was good tactics from the perspective of Roman governors.

We don't appreciate how little the pre-Christian pagan world looked like our world a lot of the time, and just how monstrous it was.

But that's the kind of guy who Pilate was.

When you read skeptical scholars talking about the stories of Christ's crucifixion in the gospels, the thing that they find unrealistic is that Pilate gave him a trial. That's the part they find unrealistic.

They're like: Why would he bother talking to him?

Now, I think that's answered by what we find in the gospels, that his wife had had this dream, because, as brutal as the Romans could be, they were also incredibly superstitious about omens and dreams and things.

And so if his wife had a dream—"Oh, there's gonna be this man brought before you today; don't do anything to him because it'll go badly for you"—he would take that very seriously, at least seriously enough to exchange, you know, a few sentences with the person in the crowd.

It's not like he gave him a real trial.

But that gives you an idea of the kind of person Pilate was.

So this, of course, is crucifixion as it existed at the time of Christ. This is, of course, what happens to Christ: he is crucified by Pontius Pilate, by the Romans.

But in terms of understanding what's going on with crucifixion and what's going on with Christ's crucifixion in particular, the New Testament authors—especially but not only St. Paul—go back to the Torah.

And they go back to Deuteronomy 21 which is, I know, everyone's favorite chapter of Deuteronomy, where it's talking about capital punishment.

So Deuteronomy 21, chapter 21, verses 22 and 23 are going to talk about another mode of execution, but previous to that it's talking about stoning: things when someone is going to be stoned to death, which was the the normal method in which, if an execution had to be performed in Israel, that it was performed.

And we see that continue obviously into the New Testament with, for example, St. Stephen, with St. Paul a couple of times.

The reason for that is that that is a mode of execution that can be sort of brought about by mob violence, like you can use it as a quasi-judicial mode of execution.

It doesn't require any specialized equipment or hardware or anything , but you could also just get a mob to do it, which is how it works with, like, St. Stephen you have St. Paul inciting a mob right to to do it.

And what happens to St. Paul? Mobs sort of get incited to go after him and do it.

But Deuteronomy is the rules for when it's carried out because of a situation where someone has violated certain commandments of the Torah that call for death, is completely unrepentant, and sort of exile isn't a reasonable possibility.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, is it—? Like, is the idea of execution by mob, aside from being, you know, kind of practical—you know, no special equipment or whatever—is it also about rejecting that person from the community, like everyone is casting them out effectively, you know?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and it diffuses the guilt. It's a collective action.

Fr. Andrew: So they're all doing it; it's not just one guy.

Fr. Stephen: It's not one person executing them, yes.

And that's— When execution has been carried out in modern times, they have found various ways to try to do that, something similar to that, to kind of diffuse the responsibility for taking a human life, like you have a firing squad where some of the guns have blanks. You have a— You know, so that the people doing it never know if they actually had a bullet or not, that kind of thing.

So— But then in verses 22 and 23 of chapter 21, it turns from that to executions by hanging.

Now, it is not talking about crucifixion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's like a noose.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's talking about hanging someone or taking their dead body and hanging it, on public display.

And specifically what it is giving commandments for, if you're going to do that as a mode of execution or for some other reason, then the bodies have to be taken down before nightfall.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what's that all about? I mean, there's a reference to that in the gospels.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so Deuteronomy is not commanding that this be done. It is not saying you should do this, you should go and hang people from trees—it is not saying that.

What it is saying is, when that happens, the commandment is: you must take the body down before nightfall and give it a proper burial—and give it a proper burial.

And the reason for that, it says, is that anyone who dies in that manner is seen to be cursed, and that curse will sort of rub off if he's left there, even just overnight. That curse will sort of taint and rub off on the ground, the tree, the land around it, and then that will also be cursed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this sort of sin contamination idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so by burying the body, you're sort of removing the body's cursed state and laying it to rest .

And we see an incident where this part of Deuteronomy sort of plays out. We just get instructions here, but we see that kind of play out historically in the book of Joshua,

and that's why the book of Joshua, as well as Judges, Ruth, and 1 – 4 Kingdoms (or 1 – 2 Samuel and 1 – 2 Kings), are called the Deuteronomistic history sometimes, because you see principles in— that are laid out in the book of Deuteronomy sort of play out historically, then, through the history of Israel.

This is one example in Joshua 7-8 which deals with the siege of Ai.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, isn't this one of those giant clan cities?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, this is the home of one of the giant clans.

Some of you have as kids may have heard of this as the siege of A-i.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Or the siege of AI.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is not the Butlerian Jihad; this is an entirely different incident.

Fr. Andrew: I caught that reference!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] But the siege of the city of Ai—

And so God has told them: this is one of the giant clans; this city needs to be wiped out; you're executing my judgment on it; therefore you're not allowed to take any spoils, you're not allowed to take any wealth, you're not allowed to—

Fr. Andrew: Right, you can't take the women, you can't— Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, none of that.

Fr. Andrew: Which is completely ridiculous in ancient warfare, like, why would you take a city and not take their stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the point here is they're like the fire falling from the sky on Sodom and Gomorrah, like they're just executing God's judgment. This isn't about enriching them or any of that.

So they go; they attempt to lay siege to Ai; the siege fails.

So they're like: Well, wait. What happened? God told us to go do this. He told us he'd be with us as long as we were keeping his commandments. We went; we failed: something's not right here.

So they have this sort of investigation, and they find this guy named Achan has done some lootin' and pillagin' when he wasn't supposed to and is sort of hiding his— the proceeds in his tent.

So Achan, for doing this, gets stoned to death. He's cut off from the people.

And then they lay siege to Ai again. This time they are successful: they kill the king of Ai and they hang him on a tree; this guy who was the god-king of the city of Ai gets hung on a tree.

But, in Joshua 8, even this guy—even this nephilim god-king of Ai who— the judgment of God was against him and and that judgment and his accursed status is being displayed by him being hung on from a tree—they take him down and they bury him before nightfall so that the the curse on him won't spread on the land.

This is why there is so much concern in the gospels when Christ is crucified on a Friday, on the day of preparation, before the sabbath—not only is it the sabbath, that sabbath, as the King James says, was a "high day." [Laughter] It's the Passover.

There was so much concern that Christ, and those being crucified with him, be taken down before nightfall.

And this is why the soldiers are sent to go break the legs, because, of course, if you break someone's legs, they're not going to be able to change their position; they're going to asphyxiate very quickly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it'll speed up speed up the death.

Fr. Stephen: And so then, of course, as we read in St. John's Gospel, they come to Christ: he's not— he's already dead, and so they do not break his legs, but to make sure he's dead, they plunge a spear into his side right to verify that there's no reaction and that he is indeed dead.

But so that's why they were concerned about the bodies coming down, because they believed that [if] the bodies were still hanging there on the sabbath on that Passover, it would sort of curse and taint the whole affair that is supposed to be holy.

And there's a certain irony there in the text of like: Well, didn't you already taint it by, you know, turning Christ over to the Romans to be crucified? Talk about following the letter of the law and not the spirit! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's the same reason that, like, the— I can't remember which of the leaders of the Jews, they don't want to go into the praetorium so that they don't— pollute themselves.

Fr. Stephen: So they can eat the Passover.

Fr. Andrew: So they can eat the Passover, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we can't go into this Roman— Yeah.

So, what do we mean when we say, you know, "This person is under a curse and that curse can sort of spread to the tree, the land, the elements of creation around it if the the body isn't taken care of"?

Fr. Andrew: We did do a whole a whole episode on that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so pause right now—even if you're listening live—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, go listen to those three hours or whatever: "Blessings and Curses." [Laughter]

But we'll say something briefly right here, especially for those of you who are live.

Fr. Stephen: Well, all right. Yeah, yeah, because you're listening live, I don't know that it's possible to DVR this. So I don't know that you can actually pause this like live TV and go take care of that. TiVo? Does anyone have a TiVo anymore?

Fr. Andrew: My kids don't even know what live TV is. They have no concept that you can't just watch something when you want to watch it. It's amazing.

Fr. Stephen: This generation...

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know.

Fr. Stephen: This wicked and adulterous generation!

Fr. Andrew: Who-oa! [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah. But just to quickly kind of cover some some sort of main bullet-points from that episode, the curse section of that episode: "curse" refers to a couple of different closely related things, so "curse" can be used to refer to the sort of metaphysical taint that's left behind by sin, sort of uncleanness, state of uncleanness.

Fr. Andrew: That's that's why the Jewish leaders didn't want to go into the praetorium, because of the sense of: it's a dirty place, spiritually speaking.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that could, of course, be purified. There's various ways of dealing with that: washings and...

And there's the sort of metaphysical taint and stain left by sin and in the sanctuary that's purified on the

Day of Atonement. We'll get into that more in a little bit.

"Curse" also refers to corruption which is really referring to the effect of that stain left by sin. So, like Adam is told, "Cursed is the ground because of you, so when you go to work the ground to bring forth food there's going to be thorns and thistles."

Fr. Andrew: I mean, corruption is the idea— It's like— We tend to— It's funny: the word "corruption" now, in modern English, here in early 21st-century modern English, we use it almost always only in a moral sense, like: "That guy's corrupt."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like financial, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But that's actually a metaphorical usage. "Corruption" literally means breaking apart, decay—

Fr. Stephen: Rot!

Fr. Andrew: —rot, turning bad. You know, like if you pull out moldy bread from your fridge, you can say, "Ah! This bread is corrupt!" And you would be literally correct!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and then analogically that was used to refer to people's moral state.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Morally decayed, like rotten.

Fr. Andrew: Which— We can say, "Oh, he's rotten." That still participates in both the literal—

Fr. Stephen: Rotten to the core!

Fr. Andrew: To the core. Do people have cores?

Fr. Stephen: Not just a little bit of rot that you could cut off and still eat the banana or the apple. No!

Fr. Andrew: That's very Dutch of you.

Fr. Stephen: Rotten to the core!

Fr. Andrew: Right to the core. Just cut the core out!

Fr. Stephen: Ha, yeah, who eats apple cores anyway? [Laughter] Horses, I know. Sorry, horses. All of our horse listeners, I apologize. Don't want Mr. Ed calling in and getting all upset.

Fr. Andrew: With all these wine fans?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But yeah, so "corruption" in that sense: of decay.

And then also we talked about—and this is probably the the preeminent use—the one that the other things flow from is the idea of disunity, the idea of a person's will and the will of God and the wills of other created things being misaligned, this kind of disunity, this fracturing.

So the most obvious is the fracturing between man and God, but this also produces a fracturing, as we said in that episode, between man and the rest of creation, which is why animals now prey on humans

and why, you know, there are particular saints, for example, who, because of their way of life, because they have been forgiven and purified of sin—they're further along the road than us—they're able to live at peace with wild animals, because the animals don't feel threatened or or scared by them.

But the the opposite state that most of us find ourselves in is because of the other.

So all of this is sort of included under that concept of curse. Being cursed is living at your worst; being blessed is living at your best, as the great man once said.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: But, importantly— importantly when we're talking about curse in terms of way the New Testament talks about that passage in Deuteronomy we just read and Christ's crucifixion, it's not just curse in general or like a curse or cursedness in some abstract sense, but specific reference is made to the curse of the Torah, usually translated as the curse of the law.

And the problem with the phrase "curse of the Law" in English is not just— We've talked before on the show about how "law" the way "law" is used today is not really a good translation of the word "torah,"

but also when we say, for example, as St. Paul does to the Galatians, that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, a lot of people will read that and think that's saying that the law is itself a curse, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— that's crazy.

Fr. Stephen: Looking at you, German monks of the 16th century!

—that the law itself is somehow a curse that we've been freed from. "We've been freed from the law: oh happy condition!"which is a complete misread and a complete misunderstanding of what this is talking about.

The curse of the Torah is referring to the curse enumerated in the Torah. I know that's a wild thought.

Fr. Andrew: From the Torah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But you have to, like St. Paul and the other New Testament writers, read the Torah to understand this, and you have to read a couple of places that people don't read all that often, frankly.

One of them is Leviticus 26—I know that's everyone's favorite passage of Scripture—and the second is like it: Deuteronomy 28 –30, but in both of those places God sets forth—and you should expect to find things doubled in Deuteronomy because that's deuteros-nomos: it's the second law, the second Torah—lays out blessings and curses,

the blessings being: if you follow these commandments, if you're living in a way that is in unity with the will of God as it's expressed in creation and with the rest of the created order, you will be blessed, and these are the things that will happen,

and he enumerates: you'll have crops in their seasons, the rains will come, you know, everything will be good, you'll have lots of kids, you'll live a long time: everything will be good! That'll be the result—notice: result.

And then, on the flip side, if you do not: this is what will be the result.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's from this that we have the basic sense that God rewards righteousness and punishes sin.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but the problem is with the word "reward" and "punishment."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, of course.

Fr. Stephen: Because those are extrinsic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: And that's not what the texts say. The texts are talking about result.

Fr. Andrew: This is what will happen.

Fr. Stephen: Not "This is what I will do to you;" "This is what will happen."

And among the curses: The sky will be like iron; the the earth will be like bronze. Good luck growing crops and feeding yourself and your family!

And things will be bad: You will not have children. The children you have, bad things will happen to them. Most notably, you will be taken off into exile and a lot of you will be killed, violently. This is what's going to happen when you disobey.

Lo and behold—we were just talking about the deuteronomistic history—what happens in 1 – 2 Kings? They don't keep the Torah, and these are the results.

And so those two things are sort of the big headings; the ultimate things of the curse that are going to result if you're if you're mastered by sin and you don't keep the commandments are: you're going to end up either dead or in exile.

And we've talked before on the show about how those things in the ancient mind were kind of commensurate. Being cut off from the people, being exiled from your community, being cut off from your society and your family, and just being dead were almost the same thing. That's why Socrates drinks the hemlock rather than be exiled from Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know, both on the kind of sense of, like, I don't want to or can't live apart from my home and place and family, but also, I mean, particularly like if you're wandering around in the Sinai desert for 40 years, if you are left behind, if you are pushed out of the camp, you're probably going to die.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but there's also a sense—and we've talked about this before on the show, too—remember, all of these external factors of relationships: that's your identity.

If all of those are broken, who are you? Do you even exist?

And we all kind of acknowledge this still, because you'll get people, for example, who move to another country, maybe even change their name, to get a whole fresh start, to sort of become a new person. "I'm not the person I was back then."

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: And in a sense, that's true! They're literally not the person they were! [Laughter] Because now they have this whole other web of relationships they exist in.

But so, exile and death. It's worth noting that in the Day of Atonement ritual, one goat dies and one is exiled.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of covering both bases/

Fr. Stephen: It's worth noting that the northern kingdom of Israel died, and the southern kingdom of Judah was exiled.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. Israel is both goats! [Laughter] Huh!

Fr. Stephen: Well, and Christ is Israel, but we'll get there…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, yes, yes! It's everything coming together!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I love this show. [Laughter] So I'm just saying that for all the people thinking that right now.

Fr. Stephen: If you do say so yourself! [Laughter]

So what's going on, then, in, say, Galatians 3:13?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where it says, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.' "

You know, it's funny to me— My sense is that a lot of attempted analysis of this verse skips the second half like it's trying to come up with some explanation that has nothing to do, or very little to do, with that Torah reference.

Fr. Stephen: The actual Old Testament, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yes. No, I have had Protestants of a Calvinist stripe tell me that it is wrong to look up the passages quoted in the New Testament to see what they mean in their original context.

Fr. Andrew: I— I have no response for that—

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: —other than to say: that is profoundly stupid.

Fr. Stephen: Because the the New Testament authors were inspired to use those verses however they used them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're just yeah pulling out quotes…

Fr. Stephen: It sounds to me like God gave them the gift of reading the Scriptures badly, but to good end. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. I'm going to quote that, but don't look that up. I do like those words. They mean something completely new in this context.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I don't know what the point of the quote was.

So, but right—and then closely related to that verse is Romans 8:3.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which says, "For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh."

Fr. Stephen: Right. Both of these are referring to the same image.

Now notice in Romans, St. Paul says that God has done what the Torah, weakened by the flesh, could not do, because all through Romans St. Paul wants to be very careful to say he is in no way criticizing the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's just what it can't accomplish.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the problem isn't the Torah; the problem is the sinful people who were trying to keep the Torah and their sinful flesh: that's the problem.

Fr. Andrew: Because that's the Torah is from God. It is— This idea that the Torah is this bad thing and we're free from it now, thank God, means that God is really nasty! Like, you know: "I'm going to put this terrible, terrible experience on you, and then I'm going save you from it later."

Fr. Stephen: Well, and let's hit pause.

Fr. Andrew: It's creepy.

Fr. Stephen: Let's hit pause—

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: —because we do have Protestant friends listening—

Fr. Andrew: We do! We do.

Fr. Stephen: —who, for various doctoral reasons, still want to read it kind of that way.

But, on your own accounting, Protestant friends—on your own accounting—what parts of the Torah are we freed from?

Here's what I mean: we're not free to commit adultery or murder or to steal. All of that still applies; the the parts that you're going to call the moral law: that still applies to us as Christians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, usually they'll say: sacrificial stuff, Kosher, circumcision...

Fr. Stephen: Is that the onerous part? Is that the part that was really hard to keep?

Like, oh, keeping a pure heart, never committing adultery in my heart—that's easy, now that I can wear a cotton-polyester blend shirt. [Laughter] That was the super difficult part!

Fr. Andrew: That should go on a t-shirt, though, and it should be a cotton-polyester blend t-shirt.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, any— You know, anybody can refrain from hating their brother, but it takes a lot of work not to plant two different kinds of seed in your field—that argument doesn't make any sense, guys.

The parts we're set free from are not the onerous parts! The difficult parts that we can't keep, that we struggle to keep—those are the ones that still apply! So we are in no sense freed from it, on your own accounting! This is—

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there there are real antinomians out there who will say we're freed from all of it do whatever the heck you want—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they don't mean it. Go up and punch an anarchist in the face and see what happens!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: They're gonna sue you. They're gonna take you to court. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah , I know, but it is a position. I mean, you know, this is 2025. Every position conceivable is somewhere out there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, someone takes it seriously. Well, that's the point! That's the point—on this and many other issues, folks. There are lots of things that sound good rhetorically and that make sense rhetorically, as rhetoric. You know: "Oh, no one can keep the law, but now, praise God, we're set free from it." That works rhetorically; that preaches.

Fr. Andrew: Sure!

Fr. Stephen: But what did I just do a minute ago? I got down to brass tacks. Let's move past rhetoric; let's get to reality.

What am i free to do now that an observant Israelite or Jewish person wasn't free to do? And it's none of the onerous parts; it's none of the difficult parts—except maybe eating bacon. I'll give you bacon.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh, okay. That is tough.

Fr. Stephen: I'll give you bacon, but...

I have a really off-color joke about that but i'll refrain.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But so both those verses—we're at Galatians 3:13, Romans 8:3—they're talking about the crucifixion, and on the cross, Christ bearing sin in his flesh, where it is condemned, and Christ bearing the curse, specifically the curse of the Torah.

Now, remember, as Hebrews makes the point, Christ is crucified outside the city, outside the camp.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exile.

Fr. Stephen: And, of course, he's executed; he's killed, he dies—more appropriately, he dies.

He suffered these fates, bearing sin. What does that sound like? It sounds like the goat that's sent out into the wilderness, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: We're coming back to Christ is both goats, people—spoilers.

But the goat that the sins were placed upon—the sin and all the taint and all the curse and everything—he wasn't punished for that sin, he wasn't guilty of that sin, but he bore it and he took it.

And where did he take it? He took it out in the wilderness; he took it back to Azazel: return to sender.

So this imagery, when it's applied to Christ, is talking about Christ taking the sin of the people upon himself and taking it where?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where it belongs.

Fr. Stephen: To the underworld, to Sheol, to Hades, back to the devil, and leaving it there: return to sender.

This is that same imagery.

There's nothing in either of those passages we read about God the Father punishing the Son.

It doesn't say he condemned Christ; it says he condemned sin in Christ's flesh.

Condemned it to what? To death and the underworld, Hades, hell—not Christ: the sin—in Romans 8.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Christ was not damned.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We talked about this last time.

That's penal substitutionary atonement. That's what penal substitutionary atonement said, and, like we said last time, if you don't believe that, you don't actually believe in penal substitutionary atonement.

Part of what we were getting at last time is that a lot of the people who think they believe in penal substitutionary atonement really don't.

And a lot of the people who try to defend it don't believe it, because they don't understand what that means, so— but we'll continue tonight.

But so this brings us to an important point, because sometimes—and I don't know how to characterize this, I'm sorry, except as a kind of soft ecumenism—

There are folks even within the Orthodox Church who will try to say, "Well, can't we say that we believe... da-da-da-da-da, like, kind of…"

You know, like trying to offer an olive branch either to Roman Catholicism or Protestantism on some topic—or some form of Protestantism or some form of Evangelicalism, you know, like: "We can kind of say that, you know, this is true.

And it amounts to: "We can agree on these words as long as we just mean two totally different things by them."

And I don't know what the value of that kind of ecumenism is, like: okay, we agreed on some wording that we're both going to read in completely different ways and act like—what? What did we accomplish here? We're just— We're nice people?

I've never cared to be a nice person, so I guess that's why this has never appealed to me, but—

Fr. Andrew: That explains why you're so bad at it!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! I don't even try. What are you talking about? [Laughter]

Right, and so one of those is you'll get the folks who try to say, "Well, there's— You know, there's substitution, just not penal substitution." And a lot of these are good-hearted people; they're much nicer people than [I am]. They're trying to be nice; they're trying not to, you know, come down on other people.

And that's okay, to be nice, I guess—not for me, but—

But you miss something critical—miss something really critical—in how the new Testament talks about Christ's crucifixion and death and atonement in general and all of these things when you do that,

because the language that's used in the New Testament is not language of substitution; it's language of participation, and those are two very different things.

An example that is right on point: Substitution models or substitution ideas would be: Christ dies instead of us or in place of us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which makes, like— No one seems to actually believe that, because we still die. We still die.

Fr. Stephen: Right, physically.

So if you're a Calvinist who believes in penal substitutionary atonement, you believe that Christ died spiritually. That causes all kinds of Christological and Trinitarian problems like we said last time, but they at least have legit substitution there. Christ dies spiritually so we don't.

It just screws up the rest of their systematic theology. [Laughter]

Whereas so— So substitution is: Christ dies instead of us or in place of us, whereas the language that's all through the New Testament is that we die with Christ, we die in Christ, and then we rise with Christ and we rise in Christ.

In Christo language is— I mean, this is— You can't swing a dead cat in the New Testament without hitting it. I don't know why you'd be swinging around a dead cat, and how you'd do that in the New Testament—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I will say, why is this a metaphor?

Fr. Stephen: Unless this is just the most disturbing episode of "Easy Reader" ever filmed for The Electric Company. I don't know. [Laughter] But you get my point, right?

And if you're even casually familiar with the New Testament, you know that language is everywhere, and this "instead of" and "in place of"— it's just not there.

And the few places where it shows up in English translations, it's because the translator has a particular theological bent, and they're translating the Greek preposition yper as "in the place of."

That's not really what yper means. Yper means more like "on behalf of" or "with benefit toward" someone else.

To use an example that can— I can say, "I went to the store for you." That could mean "I went to the store so you wouldn't have to go to the store: here's the things you would have bought at the store, but I got them for you so now you don't have to."

That could mean: "Hey, I wanted to give you a gift, so I went to the store and I bought you this."

All it means is "I went to the store and my going to the store benefits you in some way," but that wrong translation— This is why— Here's a practical consequence of it.

That wrong translation is why people go crazy about the whole baptism for the dead reference in 1 Corinthians 15, because the "for the dead" there is yper, and if you translate that as "in place of," you get the Mormon idea, who're baptizing people in the place of dead people who weren't baptized.

So at least the Mormons are being consistent in translating it that way. I don't know if they believe in penal substitutionary atonement or any kind of substitutionary atonement.

Fr. Andrew: I don't know. I have to look that one up.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. They have interesting blood atonement stuff going on, but they translate it that way.

If you understand it's just someone being baptized that in some way benefits the dead, and you understand especially that St. Paul uses "the dead," meaning "dead" with the article, to refer to deceased Christians, then you understand, "Oh, he's talking about patron sainthood here," like it comes together and it makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there's some people— I mean, I've also heard some people try to make the distinction between "in behalf of" and "on behalf of," but throughout the whole history of the English usage of those phrases, it's never been strictly, you know, distinct, that "on behalf of" means as an agent of, and "in behalf of" means for the benefit of. Both have been used to mean both things over time.

But the point is that the text in the original languages mean "for the benefit of."

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so now a very critical element of this and this participatory aspect—we already alluded to it, but this is the major theme of the central portion of the book of Romans—is that Christ embodies Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And in embodying Israel, he recapitulates Israel's history.

Now within that, Christ, for example, goes and is tested in the wilderness and proves faithful rather than unfaithful the way Israel did when they were tested in the wilderness for 40 years. It was 40 days for Christ, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he does it all right where they do it wrong.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but undergoes death/exile. He's cut off from among the people anyway. He still recapitulates what happened to them.

But then, because Christ is righteous, he comes out the other side. And so Christ's resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection of Israel, which is the beginning of the resurrection of the whole creation.

This is why we read the dry bones passage from Ezekiel on Holy Saturday.

The dry bones passage in Ezekiel is not talking about Christ coming back. It's not talking about Christ coming back from the dead; it's talking about God bringing Israel back from the dead. That's what it's talking about.

But we read it there because Christ's resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection of God's people. It's the first fruits, which is the beginning of the resurrection of the whole cosmos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so— But Christ doesn't do this so that we don't have to. [Laughter] Christ doesn't die so that we don't, physically, at least. He doesn't repent so that we don't have to. He doesn't go through this process so we don't have to or Israel doesn't have to.

Christ does this, and then we come along, centuries later, everyone listening to this, and we participate in it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it makes it so that by entering into what Christ has done, then it becomes salvific for us, so that, for instance, the martyrs, when they suffer, their suffering and death becomes transformative for them because they're in Christ, not because suffering and death is in itself beneficial.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the way we primarily participate in this is baptism—and this is abundantly clear throughout the New Testament. But St. Paul is Exhibit A: we're baptized into Christ; we put on Christ; we die with Christ; we rise again with Christ.

Fr. Andrew: We're baptized into a death like his. We're raised in a resurrection like his.

Yeah. I mean, in all this—

Fr. Stephen: He doesn't die so we won't have to and then get raised so we won't have to.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Right. And to me—

Fr. Stephen: It doesn't make any sense.

Fr. Andrew: All of this is implied by the incarnation. Like, if he's going to do this instead of us, so we don't have to, why did he become man? You know, his becoming man means that man is now doing this.

It's not instead of man doing it; it's man doing this, in Christ, so there's even a— It's really almost a Christological problem, too. I mean, every soteriological problem is a Christological problem, I think, and it goes both ways, actually, although usually—

I mean, usually the implications of that are not obvious to those who are clinging to some of these aberrant theories, but it's true. It's true.

All right. Well, having said all that, we're going to go ahead and take our first break. And we'll be right back on this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

Voice of Steve: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of The Lord of Spirits.

Give them a call at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

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Voice of Steve: We're back now with The Lord of Spirits, with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young.

If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, we're back.

You know, Father, when I—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Trudi out there with her abandoned us for Hollywood and her commercial actress career.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know. Trudi's gotten too important for everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Putting on airs.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I didn't actually know they were going to roll that commercial when I read the bit at the beginning, so sorry to double up, everybody, but, hey, it's actually— It actually was a really great event last year. I was there. So if you come this year, I will be there.

Now, for some people, that might be a feature; for others, it will be a bug, so make your choice. So, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Are you going to teach them how to co-host podcasts?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's an idea. Maybe we could bring you up for that and, like, make them co-host a podcast with you. There's an idea!

Fr. Stephen: You want it to be Hell Week? Is that what you're saying? [Laughter] Because, I mean, you know...

Fr. Andrew: Sit down next to the ogre...

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Try and keep up with him, and try and keep him from saying anything inappropriate on live radio. Good luck to you!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Make sure you take notes as to which parts we have to cut out later.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, if you're not listening live, you're missing all my best jokes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And the thing is: they'll never know!

Fr. Stephen: You'll never know what you're missing, yes.

Fr. Andrew: That's right. They'll never know.

Fr. Stephen: This is appointment listening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It actually looks like we are getting a call in, but it's not fully in yet. Should we just take it, like—

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: You know, completely unprocessed, and see what whoever this person says?

Fr. Stephen: Do it for England!

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right.

Fr. Stephen: I have no time for this bureaucracy! Put the man through—or woman.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter] Mike, I command you to just let this person straight through on the air if they actually make it through.

Fr. Stephen: Let our caller go!

Fr. Andrew: There we go. Supposedly, they are from… Wait, okay. It's funny. It's like being in a seance. "I feel like something is coming in... I'm seeing a name..."

Fr. Stephen: "A Jay, a John, or a James?"

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, do we have Jack from North Carolina on the air right now?

Fr. Stephen: Jack!

Jack: Yep. That's me.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, welcome, Jack. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Where in the old North State are you?

Jack: Charlotte area.

Fr. Andrew: Charlotte, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Do you know where Pfeffertown is, with a P?

Jack: I do not.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Since you are from Charlotte, I have a local question for you. Are you from there, or do you just live there now?

Jack: Yeah, I grew up here.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, okay. So, is it— This is a two-parter. I'm going to ask you a question, two questions. Is it the case that all the kids from Gastonia go to Charlotte to party?

Jack: Yeah, probably. Gastonia has its own little reputation.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So, that being the case, is it then also the case that all the kids from Shelby go to Gastonia to party? Is that true?

Jack: I'm not sure, but I'm not sure why they would either.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. [Laughter] I mean, there is plenty of cow tipping in Shelby. I mean, this is not like a stereotype. I knew people from Shelby when I lived in Raleigh, and they told me this. They said, "We literally tipped cows in Shelby, North Carolina."

Jack: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay. All right. Sorry to distract you from whatever was on your mind, Jack, but, you know, as a former— see, I'm not going to say tar heel because I did not go to Chapel Hill High. I went to North Carolina State! [Laughter]

But you can say, I'm a wolf pack, but, like, that doesn't make any sense. Anyways, they'll have to work on that.

So, what is your question, Jack from Charlotte?

Jack: Okay. So, in the last episode, you guys kind of described how atonement was done, the atonement ritual in the Old Testament was done as like a mitigation for sin. It had to be done each year, and it was not just for the sins, but it was for the stain and effects of sin.

And because of this— The fact that they had to repeat it, they were anticipating—and you guys described how they were anticipating this in the Apocalypse of Abraham—there being a cosmic atonement in which the sin problem is finally solved once and for all.

So, that being the understanding, if Christ's saving acts on the cross and his resurrection do actually represent this, like, final solution to the problem, then how does that apply to our lives in the Christian era, on a personal level, but also on a sort of theological basis?

You know, I was baptized in the Orthodox Church, but I still sin. And I'm not saying— Obviously, my baptism worked—it was canonical and everything—but it's not as though, like, I was suddenly made into a saint.

Fr. Andrew: Are you sure?

Jack: And I still have to go to confession. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I'm just checking. I mean, you could be a saint.

Jack: [Laughter] Yeah, I'm still working, Father, but, yeah, so, I guess, like... And therefore, I see this, like, analogous relationship.\

They repeated the Old Testament atonement ritual every year in order to cleanse our sins, sort of on a temporary level, but I experience the same thing every time I go to confession, and it's still kind of on this routine basis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Jack: So, how does this— How does Christ's cosmic atonement act in our lives, given the daily struggle of being a Christian and repenting?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, this is the $64,000 question, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Really? So, when I answer it you're going to give me $64,000?

Fr. Andrew: Umm... I'll write you a check.

Fr. Stephen: An Ancient Faith check?

Fr. Andrew: Nope, nope! Not an Ancient Faith check. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That one might not bounce.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No. Sorry.

Yeah, I mean, it's... So, I mean, the way that I understand it, which— I don't know that this is necessarily the best way of expressing it, but I know that Fr. Stephen will just "Um actually" me if I get anything wrong or incomplete here, so that's cool.

Is that— So this cosmic atonement has happened and is happening, right? So, there is a cleansing of the whole creation that has occurred, such that we no longer have to do rituals to push sin outside of the camp. Now, in some sense, the universe is the camp.

But we still sin, just as the people of Israel still sinned, even when the atonement had occurred.

And so, there are— I mean, there are echoes, in a sense, of this, so we still use incense for purification; we still bless homes; we still bless our churches, even, because the same kind of dynamic occurs.

But what has changed is that it is now possible to defeat sin in a way that was not possible before. And also, of course, you know, theosis is possible for us in Christ in a way that, without his sacrifice and resurrection, it was not before.

But it's... I don't know. I think a "both now and not yet" is the way that I kind of understand what's happening in this messianic age. It's kind of—

Fr. Stephen: Oh! You had to drop that. You had to go there. You were doing well.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, thanks.

Fr. Stephen: Who cut in on you?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That, you know, the messianic age is about, in some ways, making pervasive, you know, what Christ has done.

I don't know. Okay, go ahead. Take me apart there, Father. You don't like that...

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, you're on the right track there when you got to theosis, especially. This is related to what we were just talking about in the first half with participation.

So, human beings... I, as a human being: my existence, right, is spread out in time. It's also spread out in space. I'm not just referring to, like they say in Texas, when you get married, once you settle down, you start to spread out. But, like, I move around in space—not as much or as quickly as I used to.

But we're also spread out in time. This is a difference between us and an angel.

And not just us individually, but us collectively, in the sense that the Church is not just spread out throughout the world in space, but is also spread out through time. The saints don't all live at the same time.

And so each of us comes to participate in the reality of what Christ has done over the course of our lifetime, over the course of our identity, over the course of our personhood.

And so while we can say, definitively, Christ did certain things at his cross, at the resurrection, at his ascension and enthronement, at his conception, in the incarnation—he did these things; they're done; he did them—but you and I— I didn't start participating in any of that until very late in 1974 when I was conceived. Like, I didn't exist before that.

But when I come into existence, sometime in early September, late August of 1974, I begin to participate in that, between then and whatever the moment is in the future when I physically die.

Fr. Andrew: Everybody's doing the math on when your birthday must be now.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's easy. My birthday is the mark of the beast. [Laughter] Anyway, it is.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it is! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You just realized it, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I never... I mean, it's so... There's two marks of the beast, everybody, so...

Fr. Stephen: But so, yeah. So our existence is spread out in time, and so we come to participate in this.

So the cleansing of sin in our life, throughout our lifetime—the healing, the cleansing, the purification, all of those things that we experience over time—all of that was accomplished by Christ already.

This is one of the points that St. Paul is making in Romans: It's already done. That's why you can have confidence. You can have confidence that nothing's going to change. It's already accomplished.

We just have to walk in it now, is the language St. Paul uses. We come to participate in it.

But that also opens up the possibility, then, that someone can reject it and not come to participate in it.

But so there's a fundamental difference between what you experience when you go to confession and what the ancient Israelite experienced when they brought a sin-offering.

And that's that they were doing something that was a stopgap and an anticipation and a looking-forward to what Christ would do, whereas you are now having what Christ has done enter into the world of your personal experience, your phenomenological world. It's becoming real for you, as you come to participate in it ever more deeply.

Does that make some kind of sense?

Jack: Okay. Yeah, it does. So in that context, should we understand baptism as the sort of starting point of that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. For us.

Jack: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: That's the point in which we're initiated into that.

Fr. Andrew: So, all right. I have one last question. I mean, I used to be a North Carolinian, so I just have to ask another question.

Fr. Stephen: I have one last question. Where's my 64 grand?

Fr. Andrew: I'll write you a check. I told you. [Laughter]

So, okay. You know, Eastern Carolina or Western Carolina barbecue: what's your preference there? Since we're almost to Pascha.

Jack: Oh, Eastern, for sure.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Jack: The salt-and-vinegar sauce.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! See, even out in the hinterlands where you live.

Jack: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: All right! That makes me feel very happy. Okay.

Jack: Also, Father, I have been to Beow's Books and Brews. I heard you talk about that on The Areopagus.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I hopped in there one day and saw one of my neighbors from Emmaus, Pennsylvania, there! It was crazy! Crazy.

Jack: Yeah. Cool place.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thanks for calling, Jack.

Jack: Thank you, Fathers.

Fr. Stephen: Thank you for having us with your B-tier co-host.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, I was there by myself. But yes, The Areopagus, I guess.

Yeah. So, we're going to take one more call, and actually, this is somebody that I met recently for the second time because he's been to The Lord of Spirits conference, and that's Dn. Danilo from Reno, the biggest little city in the world.

Dn. Danilo, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Dn. Danilo: Greetings, Father. Forgive my voice. I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller—and your blessing.

I'm grateful for your efforts, which have improved my understanding of Scripture and Orthodoxy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is the wrong time of year to lose your voice.

Dn. Danilo: Yeah, it is. I mean, I did Presanctified yesterday, and I was at a volume level of one. It wasn't good.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, God bless you. I hope you get there quickly.

Dn. Danilo: Yeah, me too. It's a big weekend and week coming up.

I'm grateful for all the things you've illumined me on, and one of the— probably one of the more significant ones is that the Flintstones is actually set at a post-apostolic age. I didn't understand that, so I'm grateful for that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Dn. Danilo: All seriousness aside, I seek your understanding of St. Athanasius writing in On the Incarnation and the Life of Anthony.

St. Athanasius says when he's explaining the crucifixion that the devil "wanders about our lower atmosphere" and "tries to hinder them that are going up," and further, "The Lord came to cast down the devil and clear the air and prepare the way for us up into heaven."

And then in the Life of Anthony, he relates a vision that Anthony had of looking up: looking up in the air, someone being borne upwards. This is regarding the passing from death to life of a Monk Amun.

Later he writes about Anthony's vision of himself, that a certain bitter and terrible being stood in the air and wished to hinder him from passing through.

So, given this and all the things, many other things about the crucifixion, is one to understand that Christ being lifted up was victorious in subduing aerial spirits, thereby opening up the way for us up to heaven? Is that the way I should look at that?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Father, is there something about being lifted up in particular that has to do with this?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's St. John's Gospel, right? St. John's gospel in particular, Christ uses that language over and over again to refer to his crucifixion: "When I am lifted up." "When I am lifted up, I'll draw all men to myself."

That's why it always cracks me up when I hear those Evangelical hymns with choruses that are like: "Lift him up!" And I'm like: Uh...

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Maybe you ought to look at how that's used in Scripture.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah...

Fr. Stephen: But, right. And so, there is an element of that, and in the Fathers you'll find meditations on this in particular, when they're talking about the shape of the cross, particularly the vertical axis.

They'll talk about the vertical axis of the cross or the horizontal axis of the cross, where the vertical axis is going— it's, you know, in the ground, like the underworld, and then up into the air.

And then the horizontal axis of the cross is going, you know, to the east and to the west: toward the end of the earth.

And they connect this to the idea— and we use this on feasts of the Cross: we use the psalm verse, "He has wrought salvation in the midst of the earth" as a prokeimenon.

And that "in the midst of the earth" is literally in the middle, the center, and this has to do with Jerusalem being the navel of the world, like, it's the sort of dead center. And then you have this cross that has this vertical axis and this horizontal axis.

And so they'll connect the crucifixion to Christ uniting not just the earth and the heavens, but even the underworld, even Sheol or Hades—the grave—to the heavens. "He who descended, also ascended, so he would fill all things, as St. Paul says, the same St. Paul who calls the devil the prince and power of the air.

So the idea is that Christ is crucified sort of in this center point of the whole creation, thereby drawing all of this that was disparate, that was separated, that was shattered and broken apart, drawing it back together through his death, and then in his resurrection, he then gives all of it rebirth.

And part of that death—and we're going to get into that more here in the second and third halves—has to do with the overcoming of the evil spiritual powers.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Dn. Danilo?

Dn. Danilo: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Just to kind of summarize it— So Christ being baptized in the waters, he's victorious over the demons in the waters, sanctifying the waters, and then being lifted up in the air, he's victorious over the aerial spirits, and thereby opening up the opportunity for us to make it to heaven.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And he goes into the underworld and is victorious over the spirits there.

And there's even an element in some of our Ascension hymns. They'll quote the psalm about "Lift up your heads, O ye gates," which is that Baal language we've talked about.

So there's even— in his enthronement, he sort of kicks all of the demonic powers who might have been in high places out of their town.

Dn. Danilo: Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. Go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I was going to say, thank you for calling, and I hope you feel better real quick, you know, lots of tea and honey, as they say, of course.

Dn. Danilo: Yeah. Right, and one last pitch. We at St. Anthony, the great Greek Orthodox church here in Reno, are eager to receive Fr. Andrew on 10 and 11 October.

And, Fr. Andrew, my own agenda is that I invite you to my home for a meal and we can watch Wrath of Khan together.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes! Although the thing with the ears and the worms in the ear freaks me out.

Fr. Stephen: Bible, Wrath of Khan, you know.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Kind of the same thing. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Anyway. All right.

Dn. Danilo: Thank you. Take care.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. God bless you. Have a good Holy Week and Pascha.

All right. So let's learn a new word, or maybe a new word for a lot of people, Fr. Stephen. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Manumission!

Fr. Andrew: Man? U mission!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no.

Fr. Andrew: No?

Fr. Stephen: Neither is this men on a mission, for the fans of old school wrestling, or, "M.O.M.," as it

was abbreviated.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes!

Fr. Stephen: Manumission, which is to release someone or buy someone out of slavery.

And this is an important word because when the Scriptures talk about Christ's death—

We were talking about the Day of Atonement last time; we've talked about the day of atonement a little bit this time. We're not done, but here in our second half, it's important that we make clear that that's not—

The Day of Atonement and atonement in general is not the primary way that the Scriptures talk about Christ's crucifixion and death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Isn't it mostly— It's Passover stuff.

Fr. Stephen: It is far and away primarily Passover, Pascha.

That's the— And obviously, right, that's what we celebrate, we're about to celebrate at Pascha, but it's Passover language. And Passover was about what? It was about a bunch of slaves in Egypt being set free.

So this is the primary metaphor. The atonement stuff is there—Christ is both goats—but this is more primary.

And so if your view of the atonement does not hold this as primary, there's a problem with your view of the atonement.

And so, but we have to understand how slavery worked in the ancient world, specifically the Ancient Near East.

There were two kinds of slaves and indentured servants. One was, you know, people taken in war and enslaved, and that's not primarily the kind of slavery that is being talked about.

Primarily, the kind of slavery that is being talked about in these metaphors, in this language, when it's used in the New Testament to talk about Christ's death, is talking about debt slavery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where if you owe too much money that you can't pay back, then you might sell your kids, you might sell your wife, you might sell yourself.

Fr. Stephen: The whole family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the whole family. And then they have to work until such time as the debt is paid off.

Fr. Stephen: Right, for some period of time.

Fr. Andrew: But it's not— It's not like getting a part-time job. As a slave, you are at the bottom of society and subject to all kinds of horrifying mistreatment. So, like, it's a pretty scary institution.

Fr. Stephen: In the Roman world, primarily sexual mistreatment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, right. But it's making this analogy to debt slavery. And part of this analogy is understanding sin as debt, sin being compared to debt, and that happens a lot. You could probably think of some examples right off the top of your head in the New Testament, but just to throw out a few:

Of course, Matthew 6:9-13, when St. Matthew in his gospel gives us the Lord's Prayer, he refers to forgiving our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's what it literally says, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and it's talking about sin, but it's using the language of debt.

Fr. Andrew: Of debt, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And Luke 11:4, St. Luke has "forgive us our trespasses" in the Lord's Prayer, but in Luke 11:4, Christ says if we do not forgive our debtors we will not be forgiven, so he uses the same kind of language, just separate from the Lord's Prayer.

You can look at Matthew 18:23-35; Luke 7:36-47.

You think about parables like the unmerciful servant. This man has his debt forgiven and then goes and is violent towards someone who owes him a much smaller amount.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah. I mean, and if you have your debt forgiven, then you don't have to be a slave and you don't have to pay the debt anymore.

Fr. Stephen: You're now free! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you're free, which is why— I mean, it's interesting.

Like, sometimes people might say, "Well, you know, if God forgives my sins, why do I keep sinning?"

And, I mean, to me, one good way of understanding that is like: "Well, you're in the habit of paying the debt, the debt to sin, which is, you know, you're sinning, but you don't have to sin anymore! You don't have to pay the debt anymore. You know, you can stop.

Fr. Stephen: And as St. Paul says, the wages of sin is death.

So through sin, you become enslaved to sin, and when you're enslaved to sin, the payoff you get at the end of the day is death; the consequence is death.

For St. Paul, he says this explicitly: If it's wages, it's not a reward. If it's wages, it's not a punishment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's what you're owed.

Fr. Stephen: If it's a wage, it's what you're owed, it's what you've earned. It's the result.

And St. Paul makes this extended argument in Romans chapters 6-7, talking about using this idea of debt and debt slavery to sin. And that's why he'll say— He says it there explicitly:

You don't owe the flesh anything that you need to make— You don't owe your flesh, you don't owe your passion something that you have to pay off. They're not entitled to anything. He uses this metaphor in an extended way.

And forgiveness, of course, starts out as a financial term.

We now think about it primarily, again, like we talked about before, we think with corruption, we think about it in its metaphorical usage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We think that forgiveness is like a religious word, but it's really a financial word. Like you can have a debt forgiven: you don't have to pay it anymore.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Uh, wouldn't it be nice if student loans were forgiven for those of us with student loans?

For those of you without student loans who don't want them to be forgiven, stop being a hater.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Just declare bankruptcy like Michael Scott.

Fr. Stephen: You can't declare bankruptcy on student loans.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I know.

Fr. Stephen: Thanks to a certain senator who later became president, whom I guess I can't mention on this show, because you'll delete it.

Fr. Andrew: That's why it's a joke, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Even though it's a factual, factual statement. Anyway. [Laughter]

Yeah, so within this extended metaphor, the devil, Satan, is presented as the party who sort of comes and presses the claim of the debt, a debt collector, as it were. That's suitably demonic and devil-lous—diabolical. [Laughter]

And this is the idea of the devil or Satan as an accuser. He's the one who wields the power of death, and so he comes and he points to the sins of the righteous, accuses them to try to claim them for death.

So if you want to think about Exhibit A of this, that would be the episode with the body of Moses that St. Jude refers to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That's Jude 9, because there are no chapters in Jude. There's just the one chapter.

"But when the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you.'"

Fr. Stephen: Right. So as cool as it might be to imagine this isn't about the Archangel Michael and the devil having a sword fight—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: —next to Moses' corpse. This is about the devil trying to claim specifically his body for corruption, accusing Moses of his sins, and the Archangel Michael defending Moses.

And ultimately Moses' body is taken; it's taken up into heaven.

But this idea that sin gives the devil some kind of claim, and that claim allows him as sort of the lord of the underworld or the lord of the dead to lay some kind of claim to the center, this claim of corruption, of curse, is found a lot in the New Testament.

So we've got a small pile of examples here for you. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Okay, so from John 10:17-18—this is the Lord speaking:

"For this reason, the Father loves me because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father."

Fr. Stephen: So this is Christ making clear that he dies voluntarily.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. No one— He doesn't owe it to anybody.

Fr. Stephen: He can't be killed. He is not, strictly speaking, mortal, because he is not sinful.

Fr. Andrew: Right. And it's— I mean, it's notable that the detail, a really interesting detail, is how on the cross it says he bows his head and then he gives up his spirit, which is like the opposite of the way it would be for most of us.

Fr. Stephen: He performs an action, yes. He actively dies.

Fr. Andrew: For us, the spirit goes and then our head slumps over.

Okay, so John 14:30-31—again, this is Christ speaking:

"I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise; let us go from here."

Fr. Stephen: And this is buried in that first gospel reading on Holy Thursday night that's super long.

But notice the ruler of this world, the devil, is coming. He has no claim on Jesus because he has not sinned, but he is going to go and lay down his life. The devil's coming. Why? To kill him. He's inhabiting Judas at the moment, according to the earlier text.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It says the devil entered him.

Um, okay. You've also got Acts 2:27: "For you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption."

Fr. Stephen: That's a quote from a psalm, but it's there being applied in Acts 2 by St. Peter to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: To Christ, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That he sort of couldn't stay dead.

Or his soul couldn't remain in Hades and his body couldn't decompose and become corrupt, because he is righteous and holy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Or as I love how St. Basil puts it in his anaphora, where he says that "the Author of life could not be held by corruption." It's just a very memorable phrase.

Yeah. Okay. 1 Corinthians 15:3: "For I delivered to you"—this is St. Paul speaking.

"For I delivered to you as of first importance, what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures."

So yeah, this is— What does it mean that Christ died for our sins?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is— You'd be amazed the number of times I get this verse quoted at me as if this is teaching penal substitutionary atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Christ died for our sins—there: penal substitutionary atonement. Wait, what? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What does it mean that Christ died for our sins?

Fr. Stephen: So you have to look, and this is a perpetual problem with, to some extent, New Testament scholarship; to a greater extent, New Testament translators, and that's that they will go and try to interpret the Greek of the New Testament based on Greek—just other general Greek sources.

I've said before the dialect of Greek—people want to call it Keeny or Koine or something—oh, it's the common Greek. There's no other example of it outside the New Testament. Sorry. It's biblical Greek. It's New Testament Greek.

And new Testament Greek relates to Greek the way Yiddish relates to German. It is a Jewish dialect of Greek the New Testament is written in that is based on the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

So if you want to understand what a phrase, a word or a phrase, means in the New Testament, the first place—and really the only place you need to go—is the Old Testament, because that's where they're getting their language.

And if you look for this language of dying for sins, what you find is places in the Greek Old Testament all over the place where it talks about people dying for their own sins: "He will die for his sins."

Sometimes those passages are, are translated, when they occur in the New Testament, as: "he will die in his sin."

So the idea is when I die someday, I will be dying for my sins, for my own sins. That is what will bring about my death.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: All sin, therefore all die. Romans 5: "Death comes to all men because all men sin." [Laughter] That's it. I will die for my own sins.

Christ doesn't have any sins of his own. So when he dies, he doesn't die for his sins; he doesn't die as a result of his sins. He dies for our sins; he dies as a result of our sins.

That's what that's saying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It's because of our sins.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Our sins kill us and they also— Well, he gives up himself because of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But that's why he died.

This is why all of the Church Fathers are clear who speak on this topic.

So you've got to take a subset, and you've got to take the subset of Church Fathers we still have, but when you find Church Fathers speaking on the subject, speculating about what if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, they generally agree that in that case, Christ still would have been incarnate, but they generally agree that he wouldn't have died—because we wouldn't have died.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Death would not be a thing.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? For humans, at least, it wouldn't be a thing. So that's what that's saying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Oh, you know, it's funny. It's interesting, actually. I was just kind of curious, and I found St. Ambrose of Milan commenting on that particular verse.

He says, "The Son loses nothing when he bestows upon all, just as he also loses nothing when the Father receives the kingdom, nor does the Father suffer loss when he gives what is his own to the Son."

So, I mean, like, this idea that Christ gets damned makes— I mean, obviously that would be crazy to St. Ambrose—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That would be blasphemous to St. Ambrose, yes.

So then, final verses on this topic.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Hebrews 2:14.

Fr. Stephen: We've alluded to this already a couple of times, but—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

"Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that, through death, he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery."

Which, I mean, this goes all the way back to Genesis 3, that the serpent is going to eat dust; he's going to eat dead humanity. That's the one power left to him, and now even that is going to be destroyed by Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so Christ dies to defeat the one who has the power of death and to set free from slavery those who were enslaved to death by sin. It's kind of just spelled out there, all of that language in one place.

And note, we've talked about one aspect of the first half. Now we're talking about a different aspect of this in the second half. But notice: both aspects involve the evil spiritual powers.

Both of these have. And guess what? We're going to talk about a third one in the third half and—spoilers—it will, too.

So this isn't some kind of "Christus Victor" model of the atonement or whatever, starring Gustaf Aulén.

I greatly support his attempts to continue— Well, I don't think he's with us anymore, but the attempt of people to reform Lutheranism and get it closer to the truth.

But this isn't Christus Victor model of the atonement. This is just the fact that all through the Scriptures teaching about the death of Christ is the idea of him defeating, subduing, disempowering, etc., etc., the hostile spiritual powers. That's just everywhere in this. It's not a "theory."

So, this then— That language of being set free from slavery to sin and to death— also, then, that metaphor spills over into the language of ransom, the kind of ransom, redemption, purchase language.

Fr. Andrew: Right. You know, another way of putting it is that you're buying a slave and letting him go, like you're paying off his debt on his behalf.

You know, I mean, the existential point is the freedom. That's what's actually happening is the freedom from slavery, but there's various images used.

Yeah. So in Matthew 20:28, and then Mark 10:45, you get almost identical language. I didn't look at the Greek, so I'm not sure if it's actually identical, but it's translated about the same here.

So in Matthew 20:28: "Even as the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." And then Mark 10:45 is the same.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so you have that ransom language.

We can roll through these kind of quickly, but this is ransom from slavery.

Fr. Andrew: From slavery.

Fr. Stephen: Not a hostage, not a kidnapping. This is not Mel Gibson yelling, "Give me back my son!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay.

1 Peter 1:18-19: "Knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot."

I mean, it's notable there. You're ransomed from what? From the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, from this way of sin that has been going on all this time.

Fr. Stephen: And Christ is like what? A lamb. Passover.

Fr. Andrew: That's Passover language, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Freedom from slavery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Passover is freedom from slavery in Egypt, everybody.

So yeah, 1 Corinthians 5-7: "Cleanse out the old leaven—" There you go. This is Passover language. "—that you may be a new lump—"

Yeah, be a lump, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Be a new lump.

Fr. Andrew: Be a good lump. It's lump!

Fr. Stephen: It's in my head.

Fr. Andrew: I caught that reference too!

"—as you really are unleavened for Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."

And then Revelation 5:6: "And between the throne and the four living creatures"—four cherubim—"and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth."

Don't literalize that, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the Quinisext Council forbids it, as a matter of fact, explicitly.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. People get excited. Seven horns, seven eyes!

Fr. Stephen: And we don't want to go around doing things that are forbidden by the Quinisext Council, because if you start down that road, what's next? Clerical celibacy? Come on.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man! It's not even past nine o'clock here in Eastern time! You're already taking some shots.

Fr. Stephen: People catching strays.

Fr. Andrew: That's right.

Fr. Stephen: But you see there, just over and over again, that language, directly connected to Passover, whenever that ransom language is used, tying it back to this idea of manumission, of being set free from slavery.

What slavery? Slavery to sin and death, of which the slavery in Egypt was an image.

And so what we're talking about here, this element, this redemption—and redemption, again, this is a financial term.

This is a financial term. People are always talking about how there's juridical language in the New Testament. There's very little juridical language in the New Testament; there's lots of financial language in the New Testament.

This redemption, buying back: that's what redemption means, to buy back. So: buy back out of slavery.

This redemption language. Redemption is the element of salvation that is universal.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, everyone gets redeemed, but not everyone gets saved.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Our universalist friends have trouble separating different elements of salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, but Christ doesn't—

Fr. Stephen: They take all the language about salvation and try to throw it all together, and then—

Fr. Andrew: I mean, Jesus is pretty explicit that there's— that everyone will be raised, but that some will be raised to life and some will be raised to damnation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So everyone rises from the dead, everyone. Everyone is resurrected.

Fr. Andrew: And some will have a resurrected body with a resurrected soul enlivening it, and some will have a resurrected body—with a dead soul, en-deadening it.

Fr. Stephen: "Someone takes these dreams away. / They'll point me to another day. / Materialistic house of prayer. / Conquistadors who took their share."

Fr. Andrew: Nice. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So everyone rises from the dead and Christ judges everyone, because Christ, when he descends in Hades, he takes back everyone. Death and the devil have a claim over no one. Christ has it. But that means Christ is going to judge everyone.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he's— Yeah, this is part of that language of him— "All authority in heaven on earth has been given to me." Like he has no— Everything is his territory; he has no limited territory.

You know, he can judge everybody because he's the local magistrate everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: And for the people desperate for it, this is why you can't take the toll house thing literally, because demons don't have any authority to condemn or judge you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Notice I didn't say it's all wet. I just said you can't take it super literally.

Fr. Andrew: So, John 5, Christ says explicitly in verses 22 and 23: "For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him."

Fr. Stephen: It's pretty clear.

Fr. Andrew: It says in multiple places that Christ is the Judge. He's the one who judges everything.

Fr. Stephen: Christ the one who judges everyone because they all belong to them because he has redeemed everyone.

Everyone has been brought back from the power of death.

This is why you get all the language we're about to hear at Pascha: "Not a single soul remains in the grave. Not a single—" Everyone. Everyone is raised. Everyone is raised.

That's all true. It's just, you know, some of our friends want to leave off the, then the judgment part, which is taught equally clearly in Scripture.

And so all of this has prepared us to understand Colossians 2:14.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which says this: "… by canceling the record of debt—" which in the King James is "the handwriting of our sins." That's a very literal translation. "… by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross."

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, yeah. So as Fr. Andrew mentioned, the King James Version translates that word as handwriting because they're being woodenly literal. It is a Greek compound word. It's the word for hand, heir, and then the word for writing, graphitos, literally hand. [Laughter] It's literally "hand" and then "something written."

Fr. Andrew: The records.

Fr. Stephen: But that doesn't always work. Like, what's a butterfly?

Fr. Andrew: It's a butter… fly.

Fr. Stephen: It's a fly with butter on it, what?

And that word, in and of itself, is a word that was used at the time that St. Paul is using it to refer to a promissory note, like a record of debt. So the idea here is that's why it's translated— What is that, ESV that you read?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That's why they just translate it record of debt now, because that's what the word was used for to refer to a promissory note that stood against us, this claim that the devil had on us based because of our sins, Christ set it aside, nailing it to the cross.

He set it aside. Debt— If you are the holder of the debt, you can cancel it. You don't have to pay yourself.

If I am the holder of the debt— There have been people who have done this. I'm trying to remember who it was. There was some celebrity who went and took a bunch of money and bought up a bunch of people's medical debt, like from collections agencies—and then he just canceled it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He just said, "I'm not going to make you pay me."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Because you can do that if you're the one who holds the debt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there are whole foundations out there that you can do that through because people will sell off debt for less than the total amount owed.

Fr. Stephen: Because they figure they're never going to get it. [Laughter] So someone else will get the debt.

So if you hold the debt, if you hold the promissory note, you can tear it up. You don't have to pay your— again, yourself.

And slaves, if they're your slaves in the ancient world, you can set them free!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don't have to make them do it anymore.

Fr. Stephen: You— Again, you don't have to pay yourself for them. You can just set them free.

And so the fact that this sounds bizarre to people is in itself bizarre to me—that Christ could just forgive your sins!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. There's this— I mean, there's this idea that a lot of people have, that Christ has to cooperate with some metaphysical principle that—

Fr. Stephen: Yes. "God has to pay himself."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That like he—

Fr. Stephen: "Before he could dismiss the debt."

Fr. Andrew: "He must do this. He must punish sin. He must— you know, whatever it might be." Like, you know, if there's something that God has to be obedient to, that's God; you should worship that, that higher whatever.

Fr. Stephen: And you can say to me, "Well, you're taking that metaphor too literally." Well, this is the metaphor God gave us to understand it. He didn't give us another metaphor!

The way St. Paul talks about it—nailing it to the cross, setting it aside—that's not language of paying somebody. That's canceled. He canceled the debt, which anyone can do who is the holder of debt.

So this is very basic. God can just forgive you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And we also have a passage from Isaiah 43, which I think maybe a lot of people don't take into account when talking about this kind of stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because we have to look for this language in the Greek Old Testament to understand what they're doing with that language in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So this is what the prophet Isaiah says in Isaiah 43:3-7, and this is from the Lord. That's why it starts out this way:

"For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."

Listen to this, everybody.

"I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Sheba—" Is that Sheba?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: "—in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you. I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.

"Fear not, for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, 'Give up,' and to the south, 'Do not withhold.'

"Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who's called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

So you've got this image of bringing in everyone from everywhere—

Fr. Stephen: Right. The prophetic element is God is promising a second exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, saving all those people.

Fr. Stephen: He's promising another Exodus, that people are going to be brought back, because there's been this exile, this disbursement of the people all over the world, but there's going to be this second exodus.

And so at the beginning of this passage, God refers them back to the original exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, "Egypt as your ransom."

Fr. Stephen: The original Exodus. And, notice, he is called "your Savior."

So you want— Here's your salvation language. What is salvation?

And here he describes the original exodus as giving Egypt—and Cush and Sheba, meaning the whole region: This is what's now Ethiopia and Sudan, that whole region— He gave them as a ransom. Now what does that mean?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, like, okay, who— It's funny how a lot of people obsess over the question of: "Well, who is the ransom being paid to?"

I mean, I think the Church Fathers—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Whom did he give Egypt and them to? He gave them to the devil? No, no. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, as I recall, when the Church Fathers address this question head on, like, whom is the ransom paid to, especially the ransom of Christ, they say it's to death. Death is the one that the ransom is given to within this— It's something that's—

Fr. Stephen: In the sense that, yeah, we're ransomed from death.

Fr. Andrew: From death, right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But yeah, so he's not saying that. He didn't give Egypt to someone in order to free Israel in the Exodus. That didn't happen.

He didn't punish Egypt for Israel's sins. He punished Egypt for their own sins.

Fr. Andrew: That's right!

Fr. Stephen: Remember? Because they're going and killing— Exodus 1, they're going and killing the male Israelite infants, and then the ultimate plague at the Passover is they lose their firstborn sons. So they're not being punished for Israel's sins so that Israel could go free from Egypt. So what does it mean?

Well, it seems pretty clear that what it has to mean in terms of the story of the Exodus, the only thing that makes sense is that what he's saying is that Egypt suffered—Egypt suffered so that Israel could go free.

Fr. Andrew: Which is literally the story of the exodus, all those plagues—

Fr. Stephen: Right. Egypt suffers so that Israel can go free.

Now, if we take that same language and we see how that's being used in the New Testament, when that same language is applied to the death of Christ, what are St. Paul and the other New Testament authors saying? They're saying Christ suffered so that we could go free.

This is manumission; this is freedom from slavery.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, you've spent another perfectly good hour of your life listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We'll be back in a second with the third half of this episode.

Voice of Steve: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of The Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Announcement: The centuries after the Protestant Reformation brought about a radical reinterpretation of the epistles of St. Paul, disconnected from any historical reality, but Paul operated, during his entire life, as a faithful Pharisee within the Roman Jewish world.

In Saint Paul the Pharisee: Jewish Apostle to All Nations, Fr. Stephen De Young surveys Paul's life and writings, interpreting them within the holy tradition of the Orthodox Church.

This survey is followed by De Young's interpretive translation of St. Paul's epistles, which deliberately avoids overly familiar terminology. By using words and ideas grounded in first century Judaism, De Young hopes to unsettle commonly held notions and help the reader reassess St. Paul in his historical context.

Available now at store.ancientfaith.com; again, that is store.ancientfaith.com.

Voice of Steve: We're back now with the Lord of Spirits, with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen de Young. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346; that's 855-AF-RADIO.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. What do you think, Father? Should we all buy a copy of that book?

Fr. Stephen: Sure.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it's good. It actually, I mean, you cover some of the stuff in there!

Fr. Stephen: I'm not capable of self-shill, but—

Fr. Andrew: I know. I know.

Fr. Stephen: A lot of people seem to like that book.

Fr. Andrew: Well, this is why you have me, the Stan Lee.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I am the Jack Kirby slaving away.

Fr. Andrew: Excelsior!

Fr. Stephen: Producing content a mile a minute, beyond what anyone could imagine. And you're out there selling it to the masses. See? A cooperative venture.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean—

Fr. Stephen: Of course, Stan Lee also took credit for all of it. So, you know, you should probably try to refrain from that.

Fr. Andrew: I don't do that. Yeah. I only take credit for the stuff that I do. Although, I do sometimes suffer you being given credit for stuff that I have done.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah. Well, there's people all over recommending, you know, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick's book, Religion of the Apostles, so.

Fr. Andrew: That's right. And Fr. Stephen DeYoung's book, The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Stephen: It works both ways.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. When they say that, it's just because my foreword is the best part of the book. That's what they're getting at there.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, That 750 words is the best 750 words in a 68,000-word book, for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, I kind of— You asked me to do a foreword, I'm like: okay, follow that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay. I mean, yes. Let's talk about it.

Fr. Stephen: No calls?

Fr. Andrew: Well, there was one that was leaking in and then it disappeared. Somebody calling from New York, and then it just went away. I don't know. They ran off. Yeah. I don't know.

If we get somebody that looks promising, that's not, you know, asking about basketball scores or something...

I don't know. Are you a big basketball fan, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. I didn't think—

Fr. Stephen: And March Madness is over.

Fr. Andrew: Is it?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it's April, so, I mean, you know.

Fr. Andrew: But doesn't it even—?

Fr. Stephen: It would not be March Madness.

Fr. Andrew: At the beginning of— I know, but—

Fr. Stephen: Definitionally.

Fr. Andrew: There's an April insanity, I think, that follows March Madness.

Fr. Stephen: Okay! But March Madness is over. Why are you quibbling about this? You're just being fractious now.

Fr. Andrew: For the alliteration!

Fr. Stephen: Recalcitrant.

Fr. Andrew: The assonance. [Laughter] What did you say, young man? Welcome—

Fr. Stephen: Churlish! You have veered into the churlish, sir!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] "Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" "I do bite my thumb at you, sir!"

Okay. Yeah, we're talking about the cross, we're talking about Christ's offering.

I mean, I don't want to belabor this point, but what— Is "atonement" even the right translation for a lot of the stuff that—?

Fr. Stephen: Not really.

Fr. Andrew: Not really—

Fr. Stephen: But, yes, now we return to the other piece of bread in our atonement sandwich. [Laughter] We have moved past the beef of manumission.

Fr. Andrew: The bread that is not corrupt.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. To the final element. And, yes—

So it's becoming increasingly popular, as we've talked about in the atonement episodes in the past, the word "atonement" is just a neologism coined for translating the Bible into English from at-one-ment, and then we've talked about all the cool, weird things like mercy seat that happen in the translation process.

But underlying that of course are KPR verbs, as in the kippur in Yom Kippur, that are translated "atonement." And, more and more, pretty much everyone is agreeing that a better way to translate those verbs is something like "purification" or "purgation."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it means literally— I mean, we covered this in the atonement episode, but, I mean, it literally means like wiping or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: To wipe or to smear, yeah. And so the idea of something being purified or purged or wiped away, like covered over, those kind of ideas.

So you'll find a lot of stuff, like if you start reading scholarly literature about atonement, what you find— you'll start finding a lot of references to the Day of Purgation instead of the Day of Atonement, or the Day of Purification.

So we talked in the— way back in the first— way back in the long-ago time, when this show began, tonight— [Laughter] We talked about—

Fr. Andrew: Eight minutes ago!

Fr. Stephen: In the first half, we talked about the goat that's the goat for Azazel, the goat that's sent out from the camp. Just to lay our cards on the table, this third half now, we're talking about the second goat; we're talking about the goat for Yahweh, we're talking about the goat that gets offered as a sin-offering.

And to that point, St. Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 5:20.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, where he says: "For our sake he made him—" So the Father made Jesus. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him (Jesus) we might become the righteousness of God."

Fr. Stephen: That's how most English translations read, something like that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That Christ was made to be sin. And this is— Again, this is one of those verses that people have been trained to read in this penal substitutionary atonement way.

But here's the thing they're missing. We've been talking about the Greek of the New Testament already. If you back-translate this into Hebrew or Aramaic, there's a word play that underlies this, what St. Paul is doing here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's a pun.

Fr. Stephen: Because the word for "sin" and the word for "sin-offering," hatat in Hebrew, are the same word.

So beyond the word play, what this is actually saying, if you translate the Greek, knowing the Semitic language that it represents, it's: "For our sake he made him to be a sin-offering who knew no sin" or "He who knew no sin was made to be a sin-offering so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

So this is saying Christ who was sinless—we've already talked about Christ's sinlessness—becomes a sin-offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, as I recall, from our discussion earlier that we were having off-air, St. Cyril of Alexandria says this. He makes this point; he interprets it this way.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This isn't just: "Oh, you know, I'm showing up with my new-fangled Hebrew knowledge that none of the Church Fathers had and reinterpreting all these things." The Church Fathers maintained this interpretation, even though most of them didn't know a lick of Hebrew.

Now, St. Cyril of Alexandria happens to have been involved with the Jewish community in Alexandria in various ways, so he has a lot of knowledge of Jewish stuff at a relatively late date in the early fifth century.

Fr. Andrew: Whether he can actually read Hebrew or not, he knows people who can.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But so this is in the Church Fathers. They've maintained this. So this isn't just a point about the Hebrew.

So Christ makes himself a sin-offering. What does that mean? How would that have been understood by someone to whom St. Paul is writing or to St. Paul, someone in that milieu?

Well, it helps if you've read 2 Maccabees, which I know a lot of our listeners haven't. I'm not here to chide you for it, but—

Fr. Andrew: But hey.

Fr. Stephen: You've read a lot of junk, man, in your life. Why haven't you read 2 Maccabees? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I love a good Maccabees.

Fr. Stephen: I'm reminded of one of my Protestant seminary professors. So you've got to take into account this is like 1999, way back in the long-ago time before many of our listeners were born. [Gagging]

Fr. Andrew: It's true. It's true, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. He publicly shamed all of us by saying— Now, you've got to remember this is in a Protestant circumstance.

He said, "How many of you could get up here and recite the Nicene Creed right now?"

And he's like: "Yeah, but I bet you all know the lyrics to, like, five Britney Spears songs!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: —he said with some disgust.

So, you know, if we take into account everything you've read in the last year, did you really not have time for 2 Maccabees? But anyway. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But there is, it so happens, some martyrdom going on in 2 Maccabees.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this central element of 2 Maccabees, sort of the hub of the text of 2 Maccabees, is the martyrdom of a woman and her seven sons and an old man named Eliezer, where the Greek Seleucid forces, overlords, try to force her and Eliezer and her sons to violate the Torah in various ways, mostly by eating pork.

And they refuse, and so she has to watch her sons, one by one, be tortured to death in front of her to try to get her to violate God's commandments, and she refuses.

And so this is important. This text is probably written in the first century BC, the early first century BC. But it's important for understanding at the time of Christ how this idea within the variegated Judaism of the time, how martyrdom was kind of understood.

This is Exhibit A, the Maccabean martyrs, who are also saints in the Orthodox Church, by the way. You can find icons of the Maccabean martyrs. The shrine where their relics were in Antioch was taken over by Christians and St. John Chrysostom preached sermons there.

But so within this martyrdom story, if you read the prayers that are being prayed by the people being tortured to death and by their mother and by Eliezer, the prayers talk about them asking God to receive their deaths, sort of receive their lives that are being taken from them, to receive them as an atoning offering, as a sin-offering on behalf of the people of Israel,

because they have this awareness that, hey, we're suffering these things—in the case of the Maccabean martyrs, we're suffering these things because of our sins. The reason why we have these horrible overlords who are persecuting us and everything is because we have sinned.

We have done wrong. We have not kept the commandments. We are under the curse of the Torah.

And so they're asking God to receive their deaths, where they're attempting to die faithfully—to receive their deaths as a sin-offering and to offer forgiveness to the people and thereby freedom from these overlords. And so this is sort of this understanding of martyrdom.

Now, if the Messiah—which is what Christos, which is what Christ means: it means the Messiah— If the Messiah himself offers his life to God, the Father, as a sin-offering, this would be sort of the sine qua non, the ultimate example of this that could be conceived of, and this is sort of the idea that St. Paul is working from when he talks about this. So this is like the Day of Atonement sin-offering.

Now, remember, sin-offerings in general did not require killing because they did not require an animal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there were some offerings that were not animals.

Fr. Stephen: Sin-offerings that were wheat cakes with oil poured on them. And you could kill a box of Little Debbies for sure, but that's metaphorical.

Fr. Andrew: They're already dead. [Laughter] And they may kill you.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. And after you're done killing that box of Little Debbies, you will feel dead in your sins and trespasses and wonder: What have I done? Be filled with shame.

Fr. Andrew: I loved those in high school, though. I used to sneak out during lunchtime—I should not have been leaving campus—and get a box of Little Debbies, and then that was my lunch. It was very, very bad for me. Probably still suffering from that 30-something years ago.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So don't necessarily require killing, but it's something that's being offered to God.

So that offering has an important step. That thing is taken, and it is consecrated to God; it is set apart for God.

This is what the general— So there's this particular act that's performed on the goat that's sent out into the wilderness, where, when hands are laid upon it, the sins of Israel are pronounced over it. The text says that in Leviticus 16.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. That's the goat for Azazel.

Fr. Stephen: All the other places where hands are laid on an animal, it says nothing about that.

Now, if you want to come to me and tell me, "Oh, well, they just understood that when they were laying on hands, it meant that," then why does Leviticus 16 have to spell it out?

Fr. Andrew: And not say, "And henceforth, when you lay your hands on an animal, it means this."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That's the only place you're told to do that. That doesn't make sense as an explanation.

It's the only place you're told to do that. That means that's the only place they did that.

The other times when they lay hands on an animal, they're consecrating it. They're setting it apart for God.

Just like someone is ordained by the laying on of hands of the bishop: they don't then take him and kill him.

Fr. Andrew: You didn't have the bishop speak his sins or somebody else's sins over you.?

Fr. Stephen: But people's sins— I have enough of my own! I didn't need anybody else's put on me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Usually quite on a man's mind as he's being ordained actually are his sins.

Fr. Stephen: You're consecrating it. You're setting it apart. You're saying, "Out of all the goats in Israel, this goat is the goat we're going to offer to God as a sin-offering, or this bull or this ram or this sheep or this lamb. This is the one that we're setting apart for God." You do that through the laying on of hands.

Likewise, ordination: I lay hands on you. You are now set apart for this particular purpose, this holy purpose.

And so this explains the language that we get in Scripture, particularly—here's an example, though there's several places—John 17:19—that talk about Christ consecrating himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— if you think that "consecrate" means "make this into a holy thing"—that's not what it means. It means—

Fr. Stephen: Christ was already holy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, obviously. It means set apart or set aside for this purpose. Like, literally, although you would never talk this way, I could say, you know, when I was making my cup of coffee before the show, I consecrated one of the mugs from my collection to be the one that I would drink my coffee from.

Fr. Stephen: Because that is not a holy purpose. You don't even get good coffee—like Rootless Coffee from Flint, Michigan.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I do have good coffee, actually. I received three different bags of very good coffee during my many, many travels over the past few months. Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: I don't buy it. Rootless is better. Anyway. [Laughter]

But so, yeah, John 17, you have to think of when that comes in the narrative. John 17 is where Christ is giving his long prayer before he's arrested.

So he says he's consecrating himself, meaning he's preparing to offer himself as a sacrifice. He was already holy. He was holy through his whole life. He was pure through his whole life.

He definitely didn't mean he was putting all of the people's sins upon himself at that moment in John 17 before he was arrested. That doesn't make any sense. So there's that first—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say before you go on for that, we actually have gotten a couple of calls.

Fr. Stephen: All right!

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah. So we've got Brian, who is from Pittsburgh, and he has a question about relics of the cross. At least that's what he told Mike "Spick-and-Span" DeGan.

So, Brian, are you there? Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Brian: I am, Fathers. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we hear you. What's up, Brian?

Fr. Stephen: How is your life, Brian?

Brian: [Laughter] I try not to watch that movie at this time of the year.

Fr. Andrew: Ideal. [Laughter]

Brian: Yeah. So, actually, my question was about relics of St. Dismas's cross, if there is a tradition of relics of St. Dismas's cross and how they interact with the true cross, if at all, or is that something that is sort of, like— In Church tradition, is that sort of— Is that there, or is it known? Do they exist? Are they—? And, yeah, how are they viewed? Do they—? Yeah, that's kind of an open-ended question.

And then after you answer that, I actually have something I wanted to shoot back to a previous episode real quick, but since I'm from Pittsburgh, I had some Pittsburgh trivia I wanted to answer that you guys brought up in a recent episode, but—

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: I will briefly stall for time while Fr. Andrew does Google-Fu.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I can do some Google-Fu, I guess, but I'll say right off the top of my head that I've never heard of— I've never heard of relics of St. Dismas's cross.

Fr. Stephen: I would bet cash money they exist in Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there are—

Fr. Stephen: There are a ton of traditions about St. Dismas in Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. I'm actually seeing now that there are— It is said that there are relics of St. Dismas in a reliquary chapel in— at Notre Dame University! Yes, yes, believe it or not, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Where did the British steal them from? That's the question.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, including a piece of his cross, it says. So, I don't know. I mean, I don't know anything about those relics.

It wouldn't surprise me, though, because when St. Helena found the cross, the cross of the Lord, it was buried along with two other crosses, and so there was the question of which one is the Lord's cross.

And there are these stories about there was basil growing over it, but also that they— I can't remember if it was a sick person or a dead person that they touched to the—

Fr. Stephen: Dead person.

Fr. Andrew: Dead person. —that they touched to, you know, them and came back to life when touching one particular set of these relics of the cross, and they were able to determine that that was it.

But, you know, those other crosses were there, so it wouldn't surprise me that they wouldn't have kept that kind of stuff. I just never heard of that before.

Fr. Stephen: There are icons of St. Dismas. He is on the calendar for Holy Friday, actually.

And there are, in Egypt, there are a bunch of traditions about his relics, including that, that he and the other robber tried to rob Ss. Mary and Joseph and James when they were on their way to Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah! Yep, yep.

Fr. Stephen: Like earlier in Jesus' life. So there are some sort of expansive St. Dismas traditions out there.

Fr. Andrew: Such as, for instance, there's a town in California named San Dimas after him, which, as they say, "San Dimas high school football rules."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, although I hear strange things are afoot there at the Circle K.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So I don't know if that answers your question or not, Brian, but I would say you asked how they're related to relics of the true cross.

I mean, I would say that they're related in the sense that any relics are related, but they're not— They're not considered pieces of Christ's cross. They're very clearly designated as, you know, something else. Yeah.

So what's your Pittsburgh stuff that you've got?

Brian: Very good. Well, I think it was two episodes ago. Oh, I'm sorry. I think it was two episodes ago. You guys were joking that you could give the Presbyterians credit for producing one saint, and that was Fred Rogers.

Fr. Stephen: I wasn't joking. I'm serious about that. [Laughter]

Brian: Well, so in Pittsburgh, though, there's a little bit of contention about whom he ended up belonging to denominationally.

Fr. Andrew: Really?

Brian: Yes. Catholics will claim that he converted on his deathbed, and it's a jealously guarded— not jealously guarded secret anymore, but I actually knew the priest who claimed to be there and confirm him into the Catholic faith on his deathbed.

That priest has now himself passed away, God rest his soul, but if you get into the weeds of this, in the Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, there is a lot of claiming like: Well, actually, we got him, and he's one of ours.

Fr. Stephen: When's the pope going to canonize him? [Laughter]

Brian: Ah, you know what? I'm just going to refrain from saying anything about the current presidency.

Fr. Stephen: What could anybody of any political stripe have against Mr. Rogers? Here's what I'm saying.

Fr. Andrew: Well, I see. Okay, so I am doing a little Google-Fu, and it is the case that, at the very least, there is an article on— It's called uscatholic.org, and the article is titled, "The Saintliness of Fred Rogers."

Brian: Well, there you go.

Fr. Andrew: I don't know. I think— I mean, the idea that he— Yeah, did he have a deathbed conversion to Catholicism? We may never know!

Brian: Well, no, we probably won't really ever know, but it is interesting, though, that in the cemetery he's buried, which is a Presbyterian cemetery, there is a stained-glass window of St. Uriel, the archangel, over his tomb, which is kind of surprising for a Presbyterian burial.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: Those Northern Presbyterians, man, they get up to some stuff.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They let you do just anything here in Pennsylvania. It's a land of freedom—religious freedom, anyway.

All right. Well, thanks very much for calling, Brian. Interesting question. Interesting little Pittsburgher Yinzer lore there.

All right. We're going to take one more call, and we've got Roger calling all the way from the great

white Zaphon. So, Roger from—

Fr. Stephen: Woge-oh, to continue a joke. [Laughter]

Roger: Hello, Fathers. Thank you for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, you're welcome.

Roger: It's still cold here, but my question is about the grammar. I've always been intrigued about the ancient Hebrew, like the first Hebrew. They used to use, like, symbols, and then it kind of evolved.

Is there a book that shows the grammar that they used to use back then, or it was kind of evolved later on?

And about the Greek Dionysus [Thrax]. Did—? Was the grammar from Dionysus kind of imposed its grammar to the New Testament writers, or— It seems a little bit complex for me to go into and study all that with philology and etymology, and I just want to know if any...

It seems a little bit misleading sometimes if I go too much into it, because it's like a new area by itself. So, I don't know if you can comment on that a little bit?

Fr. Andrew: Well, this is definitely your question, Father Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, so, Paleo-Hebrew, which is what that's called, has basically a different way of writing the same alphabet. It looks very different.

So, the Hebrew alphabet you're used to seeing if you've looked at Hebrew writing, like modern Hebrew, or even a biblical Hebrew text, that is actually the Aramaic block lettering. That is an Aramaic writing style, not the way Hebrew was written.

Paleo-Hebrew is the way Hebrew was written through most of the period of the Old Testament, but that is— again, that's a different alphabet. That's a different writing style. It doesn't really have different grammar.

Now, Hebrew grammar, in and of itself, is a completely different beast than Indo-European language grammar. So, like, Greek and Latin follow very similar structures, and those are structures that continue to exist in languages like French and Spanish and English, even, but Hebrew really doesn't do that.

They don't really have verb tenses. There are two things that are called tenses, but there's only two of them, and neither of them has anything to do with time, so either of them can be used.

They're called the perfect and the imperfect, but that's confusing, too, because that's not what "perfect" and "imperfect" mean in English grammar or Greek grammar, and they can be past, present, or future, depending on context.

So the kind of structures we take for granted in grammars don't exist in Hebrew and most other Semitic languages.

By the time you get to, like, Arabic, especially modern dialects of Arabic, there are things that are a lot closer to the kind of structures we're used to, just because of the give and take culturally in the development of languages.

But Hebrew, in particular, and even into Aramaic and even into Syriac, has a very different kind of grammar.

And so then that is part of what I'm talking about with the New Testament, is there's chunks of the New Testament that the words are Greek and the letters are Greek, but they're using Hebrew and Aramaic grammatical constructions that are not correct Greek grammatical constructions.

So, I've told this story, I think, before on the show, that when I was taking Classical Greek— I was at a Classical Greek graduate seminar, and on the last day, as a prank, the professor handed out some pages from the Gospel of John, and the students all freaked out and didn't know what to do.

They were like: this isn't Greek! Because, like, it doesn't follow the rules of Classical Greek at all. It's— I mean, it's Greek words, and it's Greek letters, but the grammar St. John uses is mostly Semitic grammatical forms.

And so, you can— even by somebody who, you know, wants to buy into this whole Kini / Koine Greek thing, that this is a real Greek dialect beyond just the New Testament, like, Wallace—

Compare Wallace's New Testament Greek grammar, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics— compare his Greek grammar to, like, Smyth's Classical Greek grammar. They're completely different. It's like two different languages, because it's two different languages.

So, I've said before, and I'll say again: you can't really understand the New— If you just go and learn Classical Greek, you cannot understand the New Testament. You will misunderstand the New Testament over and over and over again.

You have to know some Hebrew and/or Aramaic to really understand the New Testament. If you can't do that, then you just need to go and take a look, like I've said tonight several times: take a look at the Old Testament Greek, how they translated the Hebrew into Greek, and you can derive—

From the Greek Old Testament, you can derive the kind of rules that you need to understand the Greek of the New Testament, but that's kind of an after-the-fact thing, because what you're really learning by looking at the Greek Old Testament is you're really learning Hebrew grammatical principles, just through this lens of Greek translation.

Fr. Andrew: I don't know if that helps you, Roger, or it makes you think, "Oh, that's just too much." [Laughter]

Roger: No, absolutely. I find it intriguing that the Jews and the Dead Sea Scroll or other, they never wrote, like, a grammatical book. And I'm like: this is like— There must be something why they didn't do that. Either it was simpler than what we think, or— I don't know, but—

Fr. Stephen: Or it's very flexible. Very flexible. Like in Greek and Latin, especially Latin, there are tons of rules. Hebrew grammar, there are far less rules.

And what that lets you do is— It's great for poetry. Like in the Psalms and stuff, you could just put words near each other. You could put words in different orders. You can move things around. You can have words and phrases that mean two different things, and you could do that on purpose: just kind of mean both of them at the same time.

And so the Hebrew language has its own beauty in that way, like, they exploit the ambiguousness of their grammar—but you don't have the kind of precision. So if you try to approach it the way you'd approach Latin, which is a very precise language—that's why it's still used for things like law, like jurisprudence, and medical terminology and stuff.

Latin is very precise language. Hebrew is not, and Hebrew authors and poets use that to their advantage, turning that into— It's more of an artistic language than a precise language.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for calling in, Roger. It's good to hear from you.

All right. We're going to roll on.

So we were talking about Christ's consecrating himself—I don't want to say "concentrating"— consecrating himself and what exactly that means, that he's set aside for the sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that's sort of the first movement of offering a sacrifice is you consecrate the thing.

Fr. Andrew: Right. This: this thing.

Fr. Stephen: But then, once the thing has been consecrated and offered as a sacrifice—and this includes like food that's offered as sacrifices; this includes incense—then the product of that offering—

so if it's an animal that's being sacrificed, it's blood; if it's incense or a wheat cake that's being sacrificed, it's the smoke: the product of the offering, the sort of by-product of offering that as a sacrifice— because that is being produced from this now-sacred thing that has been consecrated and moved into sacred space, that now, that blood or that smoke, is now holy and has the ability to purify.

And so the smoke from the altar of incense, the incense is taken, put into censors, carried around to purify, as we've talked about on the show before. The blood from the sin-offering on the Day of Atonement is taken and used to cleanse and to purify the sanctuary.

And in 1 John, 1 John—short letter, but it's actually the book of the New Testament that uses the term translated "atonement" the most times in the New Testament,

and it's fascinating to me that despite that— despite the fact that it talks about atonement more than—and more and more clearly—than any other book of the New Testament, when atonement conversations come up and conversations about Christ's cross, almost no one refers to 1 John. It's all the passages at St. Paul that we've already gone over tonight.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay. So this passage we're going to look at right now from 1 John 1 is verses seven through nine.

"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. And the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

So note the "cleansing" language there. I mean, this is atonement language.

Fr. Stephen: Attached to the blood of Christ, like the blood of the goat that's given as a sin-offering.

Fr. Andrew: Washed in the blood.

Fr. Stephen: So this, of course, brings up the word "propitiation" in Latin.

We've talked about this before the atonement episodes, but there are folks out there who want to say propitiation always means someone's angry, that propitiation means to turn aside wrath.

And we'll see how much people have been paying attention so far this episode. When they try to argue for that interpretation, they'll point to the Greek word, and they'll say, "Well, look, okay." Well, they'll say, "Well, look, every case we have of these words being used in Greek outside of the New Testament, it's referring to some spiritual being..."

See, we're getting vague here. That's that should be your first tip-off.

"Some spiritual being that is angry or wrathful in some way being appeased."

So as soon as you start hearing vague terms like "spiritual being" instead of "God," and you start hearing terms like "angry" or "wrathful in some way," quasi quaedam, and appeased in some sense: those kind of vague words, you should you should think to yourself:

"Okay, they just said all the references, and then they got real fuzzy here at the end, because they're trying to include a whole bunch of different things under one heading right and trying to kind of blur them all together."

And there are a bunch of things they're not telling you, like none of these words are used in any extra-biblical sources outside of the Greek Old Testament and the New Testament until the third century AD.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Yes. I mean, clearly the way that we use English words now determines how you should understand English from 200 years ago.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! No, no, no. Better than that—the way pagans used a term 200 years later tells you how you should interpret Jewish people using those words 200 years before.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah...

Fr. Stephen: And then when you go and investigate the reason they have to say like "supernatural beings" is there's stuff about ghosts, there's stuff about— They're taking all these very disparate stories and trying to pull them all together.

Fr. Andrew: One of the things about this that always comes to my mind… There was— I think it was— It was very memorable. I think it was Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) who talks about, at least for this one thing,

he says that the problem with the idea that what humanity is trying to do is to make it so God is not mad at us is, he says, that this suggests rather than man needing the therapy—and he means that in the most literal sense of "therapy" not—

Fr. Stephen: To be healed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to be healed. Rather than man needing the therapy, that we think that God needs the therapy: it's God who needs to change, you know, God is the one who needs to calm down.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, God changes his attitude toward us, and we don't change anything—doesn't sound like the New Testament to me...

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it turns out that repentance actually is a thing that humans have to do.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But, so, yeah, propitiation very simply means something aimed at rendering someone propitious, which means pleased or happy with you, something that is pleasing.

So that can involve wrath. If I stop and get flowers on the way home it may be because my wife is mad at me for trying to build a shelf ziggurat in my library. [Laughter] True story. She was very upset at me about this.

Fr. Andrew: Take photos next time you do that.

Fr. Stephen: I had plans, but— Did i tell you I invented the library island?

Fr. Andrew: Uh... Oh! I vaguely— Yes! I remember this now!

Fr. Stephen: I invented a piece of furniture: the library island. It's like a kitchen island, but it's for your library. I got four short bookcases, identical, set them back to back at a rectangle, got a piece of wood, made a flat top, put it on top. So there's shelves around the outside of the island, and then you have a work table in your library.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, and there's shelves.

Fr. Stephen: But I was threatening to turn it into a shelf ziggurat by getting a slightly smaller layer of shelves above that, and then possibly— and she became quite irate.

So it might be that's why I'm buying her flowers on the way home.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The great or lesser ziggurat of Lafayette!

Fr. Stephen: To appease her wrath at my at my Tower of Babel-esque library activities.

Fr. Andrew: I was about to say: descend and scatter the nations!

Fr. Stephen: I will get a stack of books that reaches to the heavens! [Laughter] Or—

Fr. Andrew: This is the most on-topic digression ever on the The Lord of Spirits podcast!

Fr. Stephen: Or she might have gotten over the whole shelf ziggurat thing, and I may just be buying her flowers because I love her and I think it will make her happy if I come home with flowers for her.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, make her propitious.

Fr. Stephen: Either of those are possible. The fact that she's angry is not implied by the fact that I'm trying to do something to please her. It doesn't even imply that she's displeased

So, yes, Christ's self-offering to God the Father was a propitiation: he offered himself as a pleasing offering to his Father: his faithfulness, his righteousness, his holiness are pleasing to God the Father.

It doesn't mean he's angry, certainly not at Christ! but not even at us.

So once again we come back to see some of the themes here tonight: participation rather than substitution.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how do we participate in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? Every time we have the Divine Liturgy particularly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that's in two ways. So the one that we've hopefully made clear in a few past episodes is eating: that's how you participate in a sacrifice, by eating part, so the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, by the way, I have to tell you that your wife has weighed in—

Fr. Stephen: On the shelf ziggurat?

Fr. Andrew: On the YouTube chat. Yes, she says, "I'm not over the ziggurat." [Laughter] So you may need to have to do a little more propitiation.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there may be some more propitiation required.

So, see, this is verifying that this is true. This was a scheme I actually— [Laughter]

So there's the participation of the Eucharist, and that's what eating the body and blood of Christ is all about. It's St. John's gospel. This is something that when people are interpreting John 6 they never bring up, is all of this sacrificial language related to Christ later in St. John's gospel. You've got to take the whole thing. What are the themes in St. John's gospel?

So we participate in the Eucharist, but the whole course of the Divine Liturgy, we repeat this over and over again—again and again we repeat it—that we are offering ourselves to God. And our whole lives and our whole selves and each other, our whole community, our whole family we are offering to God.

So we participate in Christ's self-offering eucharistically; we also participate in Christ's self-offering by offering ourselves and our lives to God, just as Christ offered himself and his life to God the Father.

He doesn't do it in our place so we don't have to. We do it in and with Christ.

And this is exactly what St. Paul is talking about in Romans 12, which, even though it comes after a "therefore"—some of our Calvinist friends start ignoring Romans after chapter 11… [Laughter]

Chapter 12, verse one—it's right after there, though! And the "therefore" means this is the result of all the stuff I was just saying. Having said all that stuff in the first eleven chapters, now in verse one—

Fr. Andrew: It says this: "I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present yourself your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."

Fr. Stephen: There you go. The result of those passages we quoted earlier from Romans as arguments from Romans in the first two halves. What does that lead to? That leads to us, as Christ consecrated himself and offered himself to God, we do the same.

Fr. Andrew: As we finish up this episode, the thing that struck me the most, of course, is this sense that it's not substitution; it's participation. Christ, who is the first born from the dead, the first, first, first, in so many ways, that we then follow him. So he's made a way, and then we walk the way.

And so we live the life of Christ, meaning we do the things that he did and live the way that he lived. And then this ultimate thing that St. Paul says here, that "we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."

And I think— This, of course, is a very well-known verse in the Scriptures. And I think in a lot of ways, it gets kind of evacuated of meaning, because of the way that worship is understood here in modern America as meaning any kind of religious thing that you do or religious feeling thing that you do.

I mean, I've said this before, and I don't know, in other places probably, but I don't remember if I've said it on this show or not, but, I mean, I've heard— obviously, you know, singing songs is called worship, hearing sermons is called worship, but I've even heard, you know, getting together with a group of friends and having a beer at a restaurant called worship, meaning that—

What does that word mean in all those contexts? Well, it means we got together and felt religious, whatever that means exactly.

And so, you know, when you say, then, "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God," then that means nothing. If sacrifice doesn't have any positive content, spiritual worship that doesn't have any positive content just means getting together and feeling religious or something like that.

But I think— I mean, one of the problems that we have in the modern world is that a lot of times we've taken these words that do have a literal sense, and then there's a metaphorical sense, which is perfectly good, but we've forgotten the literal sense and we keep only the metaphorical sense. We've talked about this a lot of times on this show.

And this verse is talking about human beings being a sacrifice in a metaphorical sense, that this is a spiritual worship in a metaphorical sense.

Now, metaphorical does not mean unreal, because the literal sense of our bodies being a sacrifice would mean that we are being killed and put on altars and burnt before God, like, that is what a sacrifice is. It's about foodstuffs being put on an altar and burned up to God. I mean, read Leviticus.

So obviously, that's not what St. Paul is advocating here. He's not talking about human sacrifice.

And he clues us in, he says: a living sacrifice. So he's saying: Hey, I'm using a metaphor here, you guys.

So what is that? What can we take away from that metaphor then? Well, I mean, number one, everything we've just said for the last three hours.

But also in terms of application, understanding all that we've just said, connected to what, like, one of the callers said, he says, "Well, there is this cosmic atonement that's occurred, but I have to live my life, and what does that mean for my life?"

So what exactly is a sacrifice? So understand the literal so that the metaphorical makes sense.

So a sacrifice in the literal sense is this food that is put in front of your God as a shared meal with your God, and it's unitive between you and your God. It's this offering of hospitality to your God, and you are connected.

And of course, part of what's going on in the Christian sacrifice, the Christian Eucharist, is that it's God who's actually the one offering the hospitality. He offers himself and shares himself. That's all going on there. He is the priest; he is also the one who's being sacrificed and so forth.

So if we understand that that's what it is, is a shared meal with your God, so when he says, "Offer your bodies with living sacrifice," and it has these same purposes, then that means that the way that we live should function as a unifying movement between not just us and God, but obviously, number one, between us and God, but also between each other,

that the way that we live ought to bind the Christian community together, because that's what sacrifices do, among other things.

The way that we live should be a hospitality that invites people in and makes them part of our community.

And the reason why we can do this, and it's effective, is because Christ has done it, and he's doing it in us. This is why we say Christ is in our midst. He's not just in our midst so that we have this presence; he's in our midst to enliven us to live his life in this world, to be in the world, but not of the world.

And the point is, as Christ did not come to condemn the world, but to save it, we are here living the life of Christ, not to condemn the world, but to save it.

And so this language of "living sacrifice" is actually much more potent when we understand what the sacrifice of Christ is, and this is everything we've just been talking about in this episode.

And we understand more broadly what sacrifices are, what the general category of sacrifice is, which we have spoken about many, many, many times throughout this whole podcast for almost five years now.

Bringing all of that together, then, that should invigorate us, number one, so that we have a clear vision of what this Christian life is,

and then, having that vision, then to live it in such a way that passes on that vision to other people, but most especially invites them in, so that our act of love is joined to what Christ did and is doing and continues to do in us, through us, in his saints, through his saints.

And that's the way that this cleanses the whole world, is that he's— just as he sent out the apostles, as he was about to ascend into heaven, he has also sent us out.

Now, we may not all be preachers, we may not all be called to baptize, but we are all called to participate in that Great Commission. And the way that all of us are called to participate in that Great Commission is to love one another.

Christ said, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples, that you have love for one another." This is a powerful, powerful thing.

And I think, especially here in 2025, where we know that people feel more and more isolated, people feel more and more alone, and people— there is a real meaning crisis that has occurred, people looking for meaning.

Well, meaning is not just something that lands, like, in your head; t's a life that you live. Like, you can become convinced of a truth, okay, but you've got to live somewhere. And what is it that we have as the Church? We have the life. We have the way, we have the truth, we have the life, Christ himself.

And so, as we look upon the cross— And I mean, and not just the things we've said in this episode, but we're inches now from Holy Week when we're recording this episode.

As we look upon the cross, as we look upon the suffering of Christ— I mean, this is part of why we timed this episode for right now, because we're about to enter into that suffering in a ritual, liturgical way.

Let it transform you. To the extent that you're able at this point in your life, let it transform you so that, when we sing that line, "Glory to thy long-suffering, O Christ," that we are there and joining our suffering to his suffering, joining our love to his love, joining our sacrifice to his sacrifice, for the life of the world and for its salvation.

Father?

Fr. Stephen: So, hopefully, this episode was a suitable answer to folks about— We kind of get asked, you know: "Well, you've kind of torn apart penal substitutionary atonement and this other kind of atonement view. What's a more positive view, then, of Christ's cross and what it does?" Hopefully, we've kind of provided that in tonight's episode.

So, what I want to talk about now is sort of the, "Therefore, brethren," proceeding forth from that. And to do that, I kind of want to talk about another passage that talks about the cross that we haven't mentioned yet tonight, where Christ says:

"If anyone would follow me, he must take up his cross and follow me. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Or what would a man give in return for his soul?"

I think this is a text that gets misunderstood a lot. Maybe it gets interpreted in some odd ways, but I think we need to see it in light of a passage we did talk about this evening, in Hebrews,

that talked about the devil being the one who wields the power of death and that our slavery, our slavery to sin, is a product of the fear of death, because the reality is, every one of us who's born into this world is going to, at some point, if we live for very long, at least, going to face suffering and eventually, is going to face death.

We're going to face struggles. We're going to face difficulties. We're going to face hardships, both from our own sin and from the sin that's out in the world.

And we can't avoid it. It's not like we can just opt not to do it.

Sometimes people talk about taking up the cross as if the other option is: "Oh, well, I just won't suffer. I'll just have a happy, nice life." That's not reality.

The reality is the actual alternative that pretty much all of us, I think, and especially me, fall into is the fear of that—the fear of suffering, hardship, and struggle, and death—and therefore the avoidance of it at all costs.

And we find different ways to avoid it. Some of us think, "Well, if I could just get enough money, then I'll be safe. I can protect myself. I won't have to suffer. Maybe I can even keep myself alive forever. I won't have to think about it. I won't have to worry about it. I can pad everything."

Or we think, "If I could just get enough control of my life," or we think, "Well, I can't get enough money, or I can't get enough control of my life to stop this stuff from happening, but I can forget about it. I can drink or drug myself into oblivion.

"I can immerse myself in entertainment to avoid at least thinking about it for hours and hours at a time. I can shut everything off and just avoid thinking about it until I'm absolutely confronted by it, and then I will escape from it and the thought of it as quickly as I possibly can."

But that doesn't work. We don't actually gain the whole world.

Christ is asking that as a rhetorical question. Even if that was successful, even if you got all the money in the world, you're as rich as Croesus, Jeff Bezos was coming and asking to borrow money from you—what does that do for your soul?

What does that do to stop you from having to face death, from having to face trouble and struggle and difficulty and suffering? Nothing. And you can't be blitzed out of your mind all the time, not without dying, and then you've run right into the thing you were running away from.

So what Christ is presenting to us is a different path, and that path begins when we take the suffering of this life, we take the fact that someday we're going to die, and we shoulder it. We own up to it. We

bear up under it. We accept it. And we go forward nonetheless.

We remain faithful to God in what we do nonetheless. We engage in the struggles. We suffer the heartbreak. We suffer the pain and the difficulties of life, because we're following Christ.

We know the path that Christ took led him through unbelievable suffering—not just talking about the cross—the rejection and alienation he faced his whole life, the ridicule by people, culminating, of course, in the kind of death we talked about at the very beginning of this show, the horrific, nightmarish, torturous death that he suffered voluntarily.

But we know that that's not the end of his journey; that's not the end of the road he walked.

The other side of that death and that pain and that suffering was glory, was consolation, was joy—that doesn't have an end, that exists in the world to come.

None of the things of this world can save your life. And when the time comes that you face death—because you have to, and there's no way around it—you can't exchange all that stuff you've accumulated to try and get your life back.

But if we follow Christ, through the difficulties and pains of this world, through the struggles and the hardships that are all very real, and we continue following him, we will follow him through to the other side and enter into the light and the joy of Pascha and the resurrection and of a life that has no end.

So those are my final thoughts for tonight.

Fr. Andrew: That is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening.

If you didn't happen to get through us live this time, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspiritsandancientfaith.com. You can message us at our Facebook page, or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

And if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity, or you need help to find a parish, head over to orthodoxintro.org.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for a live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. "Am I wrong? / Have I run too far to get home? Have I gone / and left you here alone?"

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Good night. God bless you all.

Voice of Steve: You've been listening to The Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young, a listener-supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio.

"And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the beasts, and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,

"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing" (Revelation 5:11-12).