Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, scorpion-stompers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend Dr. Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, where it is 1,000 degrees and 200% humidity. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the cool, clear, lovely Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And we’re back live! So if you’re listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us. And we’re going to get to your calls in the second half of the show. It’s great to be live again after the latest two pre-recorded episodes in July, although next time we’re going to have to do another pre-record as I will be away. Oh well. Tonight, though—

Fr. Stephen De Young: Fleeing the country…

Fr. Andrew: I know! I know, I’m headed across an ocean. Yeah. Tonight we’re going to continue our series on eschatology. We’re talking about what is commonly referred to as the second coming of Christ—but is that the right way to refer to it, and why is the Messiah coming twice, anyway? After the Ascension, are we just sort of waiting around for him, trying to hang on until he comes back, or is there something happening? So, Father, are we just in pause mode while Jesus is off doing something else for a while?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: That was a good pause, though.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: It could’ve been a little bit more pregnant pause, but it was a pause.

Fr. Stephen: I would just like to thank all the Boomers listening for not sorting your recyclables, causing much of this part of the country to be on fire currently.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow. Is that what does it? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I’m told.

Fr. Andrew: So I’ve heard…

Fr. Stephen: Worst summer in recorded history. You guys couldn’t ride your bikes to work: thanks bunches.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We just lost some of our super… Anyways, you know who you are, those who just tuned out!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Oh, and there’s a couple groups, right. There’s the Boomers who were offended and took me literally; there’s the other people who are mad that I made a joke about climate change rhetoric; there’s another group that thinks I was acknowledging climate change: they’re also tuning out. I really fine-tune these things to alienate as many people as possible with each word.

Fr. Andrew: Well, you know, we can stand to lose a few listeners.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Even after Pasta-gate, I think we still have a few we can spare, although that was a real culling, I think.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! Yeah, I think we lost a lot of people after you said that pasta is wet bread. They were, like, deeply offended.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. You’ve got to just— Somebody had to say it; we were all thinking it.

So, yes, there’s the whole debate about whether the earth is going to be destroyed this time with fire, and while I have a certain amount of anecdotal evidence at the moment to agree with that, we’re actually talking about what’s generally termed Christ’s second coming tonight.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, some say it will be destroyed in ice… which would suffice as twice as nice. I’m blanking on the actual wording of that poem.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, ice is too close to water, man. [Laughter] Like, Zan could change both into water and into ice.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow.

Fr. Stephen: Just like Jayna could do any animal? That’s too close to the flood.

Fr. Andrew: Now we’re stepping on the whole Wonder Twins theme that Steve Christoforou and Christian Gonzalez had going on on Pop Culture Coffee Hour.

Fr. Stephen: We can go into deep cuts—or at least I can go into deep cuts—on the Wonder Twins, but I think no one wants that. But they are better than— You know, they replaced another set of sidekicks. Are you aware of this? About Super Friends?

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy! I remember watching that show a lot when I was quite young. I had a great fondness for Hanna-Barbera cartoons in those days. That was just such a ridiculous show.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a segment of our listener base that just loves this kind of stuff at the beginning of the show.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: Zan and Jayna were the hip, cool Vulcan replacement—

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, wore the purple outfits.

Fr. Stephen: —for Marvin, Wendy, and Wonder Dog.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! I vaguely remember that! I remember Wonder Dog. Man, I’m going to have to go look that up after this show.

Fr. Stephen: And if you want to go really deep cut— And the only reason I’m saying this over the air is to prove to everyone, once and for all, you do not want to mess with me in pop-culture trivia—Wendy of Marvin, Wendy, and Wonder Dog was actually Wendy Prince and was the niece of the military nurse whose identity Wonder Woman took over to be her secret identity—

Fr. Andrew: Diana Prince!

Fr. Stephen: —after the original Diana Prince died in World War II.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! Wow!

Fr. Stephen: So no one will ever come at me in pub trivia now.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: But anyway, yes, Christ’s return is what we’re talking about tonight.

Fr. Andrew: If someone does come at you in pub trivia, we know that it will be a herald of the end of days.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] If two nerds that dense come into contact with each other, I think it would open up some kind of rift that would trigger—

Fr. Andrew: We just got a comment on Facebook saying, “We can do better than Robert Frost on this podcast.” How dare you, sir? How dare you!

Fr. Stephen: I just did better than Robert Frost!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, come on. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I gave you a detailed history of Marvin, Wendy, and Wonder Dog.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that is pretty wonderful, but, you know… [Laughter] Something there is that doesn’t love… Anyway. Moving on.

Fr. Stephen: I just want to say I’m not a huge fan of Robert Frost.

Fr. Andrew: It’s okay. You don’t have to be.

Fr. Stephen: I can go without.

Fr. Andrew: But, you know, wouldn’t this be a nice time in Louisiana to stop by a woods on a snowy evening? Just throwing that out there.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not possible, so… Yeah, so it just makes you feel worse. Yeah, I was so desperate on Sunday that I said we were celebrating Holy Theophany instead of Transfiguration.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s how desperately I wanted it to be January.

Fr. Andrew: “Please!” [Laughter] It’s only, like, 85 on January 6? Man.

Fr. Stephen: A toasty 78 outside, when the AC works and can handle that. So, yes, the return of Christ, which we’re actually going to start talking about— I mean, I know we’ve now just wasted a bunch of your time with that intro, but we are actually going to start talking about the topic here in the first half, so there’s that.

Fr. Andrew: We’re balancing that out a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: There’s that. And obviously this is sort of a critically important part of our eschatology series. We’ve obviously also already alluded to it. We alluded to it back in the Antichrist episode when we talked about the Antichrist being destroyed by the breath of his mouth at Christ’s appearing. We talked about it obliquely in the millennium episode. Obviously last judgment, Christ is the Judge. But now we’re going to go head-on to this.

There are a number of issues surrounding this, to kind of give people the lay of the land of why this is something that needs to be addressed, because probably a lot of our listenership, since the majority numerically of our listenership is in the United States, the return of Jesus Christ is something that has probably been of an out-sized importance in their religious life. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. I was just saying in our priest show that I have a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and I threatened to read parts of it on air, and you weirdly said something about copyright. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I mean, I don’t believe in it, but still I can be victimized by it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but, I mean, the idea that Jesus is coming back soon— Here in America, O foreign listeners, there are billboards. You could just be driving down the road, and you will see a billboard or some random little sign or even just a bumper sticker or step up to somebody’s house and see a sign that says, “Jesus is coming back soon,” or, my favorite: “Prepare to meet thy God.” Kind of vaguely threatening. It’s not everywhere present, but it’s definitely a thing. It’s definitely part of American culture, this sort of millenarian idea.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And there are a not-insignificant number of para-church ministries out there who present the Gospel in terms of Christ’s return. They present the Gospel as: “Christ is returning soon; you need to get right with God so you don’t end up getting sent to hell at the last judgment.” That’s explicitly how they present the Gospel. Ending of every episode of Jack Van Impe Presents, both in his early mustachioed days and in his later clean-shaven days. So, yeah, for a lot of people it’s taken on an out-sized sort of importance.

But we’re going to be coming at it, as is our wont, more from the perspective of the way it’s treated in terms of discussions of ancient Christianity and the Scriptures and the Bible, where it’s treated as, first of all, this sort of weird Christian novum in the sense that it’s presumed that there’s not an inkling of this anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or even the Christian Old Testament, that the idea that Christ left somewhere in the Ascension and is going to come back was some kind of cope, basically, by his disciples to explain why Christ didn’t start the messianic age immediately.

Fr. Andrew: “Oh, he’s coming back!”

Fr. Stephen: “And then he’s going to do all that other stuff, right?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: And because— In large part because it’s assumed to be this cope, then it’s assumed that, well, they all expected him to come back during their own lifetimes, not in the sense that they thought he could return at any time, but that they concretely believed: No, he’s going to come back within 40 years or something. And then there’s this whole idea then: Well, once you assume that, well, okay, so then that means that all these ideas, like the Church as an organization or an institution, sacraments, all these things—those must all be later, after everybody got disappointed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because why would you do all that stuff if Jesus is going to come back, like, any second?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and therefore, since this was just this cope, it was until that blew up, and they said, “Well, I guess we need to lay down roots and build this institution.” And then what you would presume if any of that were true would be that the expectation of Christ’s return would go away, which, if you’ve studied any Church history, you know is not the case. In fact, there have been several significant periods of this kind of fervor that’s come around in the— came around in American Evangelicalism in the latter half of the 20th century has happened a whole bunch of times in the past.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even just the 19th century in America. My personal favorite is the Millerites who came out here to Pennsylvania and gathered in the wilderness waiting—what was it, I think 1842? Like, October 19, 1842. I’m just throwing that off the top of my head; it might be a little wrong. “Jesus is coming back on this day,” and when he didn’t, it was called—this is one of my favorite names for an event ever—the Great Disappointment. And then they coped, with: “Well, he did come back, but it was, like, in heaven kind of thing?”

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: If any Millerites are out there listening right now, I’m not sorry! Come on, guys! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that is weak sauce, man. At least Harold Camping had the decency to get out of the business, right?

Fr. Andrew: He said, “Ah! My bad! I was wrong.”

Fr. Stephen: But this was around in the 18th century, the 16th century, over and over again. If you actually go back and read some of the preaching surrounding the Crusades, if you actually look at what the Crusade preachers were preaching, from Peter the Hermit on, the Crusade preachers were preaching: We need to go and claim Jerusalem, because once we reclaim Jerusalem, Christ will return to it.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. How 1948 of them.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, exactly! So this is all through Christian history that— And around the year 1000, people were selling their land all around Europe.

Fr. Andrew: Well, and, little-known fact as well—which is surprising to me that this is so little-known, although it was little-known to me until someone told this to me, I guess by definition. But the Reformation, there was a huge amount of millinarian fervor surrounding the Reformation. A lot of the early Reformers really thought that Jesus was about to come back.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Rome had been the great apostasy, and now it had been revealed, yeah. And so this is a constant, and it goes all the way back. We’re going to be addressing the fact that this is not a cope. There was no need for a cope. That means there’s also no need for preterism, by the way. Preterism is just basically saying, like: “Oh, yeah, Jesus kind of did return during their lifetime, in 70 AD.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Which is kind of dumb. I’m sorry. This isn’t the first time I’ve said preterism is kind of dumb on the air on this show, so if there are any preterists left: sorry, not sorry. But that this is actually— What we’re going to talk about today is Christ’s— what we commonly call Christ’s second advent or second coming, and we’re going to talk about the actual biblical language. This is baked into the cake; this is built into the package. This is in the New Testament, and specifically it’s in the way the New Testament reads the Old Testament. The New Testament sees this being in the Old Testament. Once you understand the way that the New Testament is reading this out of the Old Testament, once you understand that then there’s no reason based on that to think that they thought this was going to be a super-short period of time. It could, but there is no link in this to any particular period of time. And this is not just an issue of there being a bunch of messianic promises that Jesus didn’t keep and so: well, he’ll do that next time round. That’s not at all what’s happening.

So the first thing, as we just mentioned, that we have to kind of address is the language. We talk about Christ’s second coming or his return. Part of the problem with “second coming” is a lot of people take that as if it’s in parallel with Christ’s nativity. So the whole plot of The Omen III is that the Antichrist, played by Sam Neill, thinks that Jesus is going to be born as a baby again.

Fr. Andrew: I had to look that up. 1981 supernatural horror film. Well, that explains why I didn’t watch it! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes!

Fr. Andrew: That was right around the time of my life when, relevant to this episode, I was being traumatized by films like A Distant Thunder and Thief in the Night.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. So The Omen III I’m going to spoil for everyone. The Antichrist, whose name is Damien Thorn, inconspicuously—

Fr. Andrew: Nice! Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: —is elected president of the United States.

Fr. Andrew: Of course. Wow, that’s very Late Great Planet Earth kind of stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so he can become the world ruler, but believes that Jesus is going to be born as a baby again, and so goes around trying to figure out what baby it is and killing babies. That’s basically the plot of the movie.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. I mean, I feel like I read that somewhere already…

Fr. Stephen: And the demons are all Rottweilers. It’s a whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! It’s always some kind of demon dog, isn’t it? It’s a demon dog.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Thanks, Son of Sam.

Fr. Andrew: Ghostbusters.

Fr. Stephen: Anyway, so— David Berkowitz did that to all of us. So the end of the movie is just a complete deus ex machina. The end of the movie is just: Jesus returns. And it’s like: Duh, he wasn’t going to be born as a baby, idiot!

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Like, that’s how the movie ends! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Notably, Larry Hart of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 1.5 stars out of four, praising Sam Neill’s performance as the only thing the film had going for it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, there you go.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: But yes. So hopefully most people don’t follow that language to think that there’s some kind of parallel there between Christ’s nativity and his second coming, although there are other—I won’t go into them all in any level of detail, because that would get really tedious, I know, for even our audience. There are a number of works of fiction where that happens, where Jesus is born somewhere…

Fr. Andrew: And frankly, there are new religious movements of the 20th century that claim that their leader is that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And they’re kind of doing a Buddha-riff.

Fr. Andrew: Jesus reborn.

Fr. Stephen: Like Dalai Lama, Buddha-riff.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So I mean, it is a thing, not just in fiction.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so that makes sort of “second coming, second advent” a little misleading as a way to speak. It’s not that it’s wrong to say that, it’s just that that way of speaking can be a little misleading.

The other big one, of course, that I’m sure we’ve alluded to on this show before is that Christ’s return kind of implies that he left.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, he said, “Lo, I am with you to the end of the age,” which was not some weird, sick joke. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, said that right before the Ascension, like, immediately before the Ascension in Matthew 28, to make very clear: his Ascension into heaven was not him leaving. It was not him going away somewhere. So part of the problem here is I think an over-literal reading of the Ascension? You sometimes, especially— The Orthodox icon of the Ascension has it right; a lot of other popular paintings and depictions of the Ascension, it’s sort of Jesus jumping up into the air or taking flight like Superman. I know of at least one Episcopal church where they release balloons on Ascension Day.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Please, no. [Laughter] Gosh!

Fr. Stephen: Kind of lame. But so this idea that Christ sort of floated up into the air, and so he’s out in space or up there somewhere… Like I said, that’s a sort of goofy, weird, overly literal reading. This is pretty much, by the way, if you’ve noticed my being on the internet ever at all, this is pretty much the atheist playbook for the Bible, is you read the Bible and some kind of goofy, super-literal way and then point out how goofy it is and act like you’ve refuted the Bible and Christianity. But so that’s not what’s actually being depicted in the Ascension.

So we’ve talked a lot before on this show about Hebrew cosmology, where the earth was imagined or seen to be round, flat, supported by pillars. What’s under the pillars? Nothing. There’s water down there, but the pillars aren’t on anything. And then there is a dome of the sky above, and God’s throne, what we would call heaven, was in the heavens, was above that. As we’ve talked about on this show many times, the Bible is not making a— It never makes a scientific claim that it is true.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s just the way the language is used.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The Bible speaks to people who—that was their mental image of the cosmos, and so, just like God uses human languages—and any given human language has good and bad elements for conveying certain things, so also God spoke to them in the language they’d understand. He didn’t explain string theory to Moses. [Laughter] So this is how they view it; this is how he talks to them. If God was speaking to someone today or communicating something today to someone, giving someone a vision today, he would do it in terms that they could understand; he would use their language, and he would have the universe depicted the way they imagine it. Guess what? The way we 21st-century folks imagine the universe is not the way the universe really is either.

Fr. Andrew: What? I thought we were the most informed, the most advanced, the final chapter of history! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Thank you, 19th-century Germany. Yeah. So we’re not either. So if God came and talked to us today about the universe the way it really is, the way he understands it to be, as its Creator, we would not know what he is talking about. He would have to communicate to us in our terms in order to communicate, and God does that throughout the Scriptures. So he did that with the disciples and the apostles. And so when the disciples saw Christ go into the heavens carried by a cloud—this is why the icon of the Ascension, the Orthodox icon, depicts Christ sitting on a cloud, not just flying—this was communicating to them the scene we’ve talked about several times in Daniel 7 of the Son of Man coming before the Ancient of Days to be enthroned at his right hand.

So if you asked—jump in the Tardis, go back to that day—the angels, say to the disciples, “Hey, why are you still standing here? You guys have work to do,” staring up into the sky, and you said to them, “Hey, what happened? What did you just see?” what they would tell you they just saw was Jesus being taken up to the throne of God and seated at his right hand. That’s what they would tell you they saw. Is that what a GoPro attached to their head would have recorded? [Laughter] No. No, it is not, but that’s not the way ancient people thought. And God was able to communicate not only in words from human languages but through human imagery, through human actions. When Christ cleanses the Temple, he’s communicating something through that action.

So, yes, this is one of those places where a certain group is going to be like: “Why does he sound so condescending when he talks about this stuff?” Because this stuff seems like it should be basic, but it’s amazing how many people not only want to say, “No, no, no, no, no, this means Jesus flew up into the sky from the top of this mountain, at this time, on this date, and you need to affirm the accuracy of that historical fact or you’re not a Christian,” or something, which is not how Christianity works, is not how the Scriptures work—we’ve talked about this before. If you need more of this, go back to our “How to Read the Bible”—”How (and How Not) to Read the Bible” episode.

But so this also means that we can’t interpret— That communication to the disciples who were there at the time seeing it was clear, but we can’t now go in through our 21st-century scientific lens and try to interpret this in terms of time and space, in terms of temporal and spatial categories by asking the question—sorry, Calvinists and the extra Calvinisticum, which I know I’ve bashed a lot on the show—“Where is Jesus?” or “Where is Jesus’ body now?” shows you don’t get it. That shows that you don’t get it. Jesus’ body is a physical body, but it’s not somewhere in the material universe occupying material space. It doesn’t need to be—he’s God.

Just like God’s throne is not in a particular spot, occupying a particular space. If you asked about the measurements of God’s throne, it would show that you don’t get it. We’re not talking about a literal chair somewhere, or in this case a literal throne-chariot somewhere. God’s rule, which is what God’s throne represents, his reign, which is what him being seated represents and is, because there’s not a difference between “represents” and “is”—his rule is everywhere, which means his throne is everywhere, which means the other throne at his right hand is everywhere, and the One seated in it is everywhere. So that means that Christ is present everywhere. He’s not absent from anyplace. He hasn’t gone away where he needs to come back.

Now, that said, there is obviously something that changes at the time of the Ascension. Christ was also, by the way, as God, everywhere during what we call his earthly life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there’s— Is it the anaphora of St. Basil the Great that says, “In the grave with the body, but in Hades with the soul, as God, and in paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast thou, O Christ, filling all things, thyself uncircumscribed”? No, that’s in even Chrysostom’s Liturgy, now that I think about it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, he’s—

Fr. Stephen: And that’s when he was dead. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. He’s still all those things, all those places, all at once.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but he was present in a different sense, obviously, with his bodily presence, in the midst of the disciples. And this is a little bit brain-breaking in terms of if you try to figure out how it works—so don’t try: we’re talking about God—but this is parallel to— Remember, we’re told over and over again, especially in St. John’s gospel that Christ’s body is the Temple. And if you look at the Old Testament, the Old Testament is completely clear that God is everywhere. If I go into the depths of Sheol, there he is; if I go to the top of the mountains, there he is; if I go… Right? God is everywhere, and it’s also equally clear that he is present in a special way among his people in the tabernacle and in the Temple.

So when St. John, in his Prologue, says, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us,” and then when he talks about, from very early in his gospel, “Destroy this Temple; I will rebuild it in three days,” and St. John adds the parenthetical comment, “He was speaking of his body,” just in case you didn’t get it, he’s drawing a direct parallel to this. It’s not that all of a sudden now the Logos of God, the divine Logos, is only present where Christ’s body is and no longer present in any of the other places. He is still present in all the other places, but he is present in a special way—à la the Temple, à la the tabernacle, à la any theophany in the Old Testament for that matter— among his disciples. And it’s that kind of presence, that immediate bodily presence where they could look with their physical eyes and see his face and touch him, etc.—that is what changes at the Ascension. So the way or the mode in which he is present changes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, I mean… Even if you just look at what he says at the Ascension, that would seem obvious, like, okay, they’re not seeing him bodily any more, and yet he says, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” So… okay, that’s pretty straightforward. We can still get ourselves tied into knots trying to figure it out, though.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] The place where this is described, as much as it can be described to us humans, is in, appropriately enough, since I just referenced the earlier parts of St. John’s gospel, the latter parts of St. John’s gospel, particularly surrounding Christ’s prayers in the presence of the disciples and then his prayers for the disciples before his arrest that we read at great length in that first gospel reading on Holy Thursday, where Christ talks about the Holy Spirit; that the key change that happens at the Ascension is that, rather than Christ being present in their midst in this physical way, this mode of physical presence, where they can see him with their eyes, hear him with their ears, touch him with their hands, that he is now going to be present among them in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit who is going to come after the Ascension makes Christ present.

And so this language that then permeates the rest of the New Testament becomes a stumbling block for a lot of people in modern translations because we get this word “spiritually,” where the “spirit” in “spiritual” or “spiritually” isn’t capitalized.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it sort of means “not real.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like some ephemeral way, or some allegorical or analogical way.

Fr. Andrew: Like being spiritual but not religious.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Just some vague: “Yeah, that’s true spiritually now, and that means not really…” And, again, in the text this is quite the opposite. In the text, this is capital-S: this is the Holy Spirit. And so in debates—and, yes, we’re going to be touching on the Eucharist here, so especially in these debates, but in others as well—this dichotomy is drawn between spiritual and real. And, again, the Eucharist is a clear place. Many debaters say, “Well, these groups—Roman Catholics or Orthodox, Lutherans—believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and Calvinists, at least the handful who follow Calvin, believe in the spiritual presence.” And maybe even some other Protestant groups will use the same language, even though their meaning is even more ephemeral than Calvin’s. And, yes, “spiritual” is not opposed to “real,” because the Holy Spirit is real and the Holy Spirit is God.

And so a place where we see, I think, or a good example of this issue in interpretation is when people are interpreting passages: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be in the midst of them.” And a lot of interpretations of this are just: “Hey, man, two or three Christians, some pretzels and an acoustic guitar: there’s Jesus, hanging out with us”—and that’s not what it’s saying, at all. The key part there is: What does it mean to gather in Christ’s name? That’s not just a random phrase; that’s not just the purpose, like: “Hey, we gathered this week to watch Breaking Bad; next week we’re gathering to talk about Jesus.” That’s not just the topic. This is picking up the language from the Old Testament, going all the way back into Genesis, of calling on the name of the Lord. And to call on the name of the Lord didn’t mean just to say, “Yahweh,” out loud. Calling on the name of the Lord meant worship, and specifically it meant sacrifice. You can read the psalm verse: “I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we sing as a Communion hymn at a number of the feasts of the Church.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is referring to the Eucharist, that when Christians gather to celebrate the Eucharist, Christ is there with them. And how is he there? He’s there in the power of the Holy Spirit. The core of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy: this is why for us the epiklesis is the most important part, more important than the words of institution, more important than anything else, because it is at that epiklesis where, just as the Holy Spirit made Christ present in the womb of the Theotokos at the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit makes Christ present on the altar in the Eucharist.

And so, again, someone will say, “Well, wait a minute. Isn’t Christ everywhere?” And we’ll say again, “Yes, just like God was everywhere in the Old Testament, but especially in the Temple, but especially in the tabernacle, but especially in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, but especially in the Eucharist.” So those aren’t at odds with each other if you understand this in the Scriptures.

So that means, hypothetically, you could describe every Eucharistic celebration as another coming of Christ, of Christ again becoming present with us. And so when we talk about what is commonly called Christ’s second coming, we again need to be more specific and make some distinctions, because what we’re talking about that comes at the end before the day of judgment, etc., is this unique event, this unique coming of Christ.

The New Testament uses a few different words to explain this. By the way, for the people listening live—this may not be relevant to the people listening to the recording, but for people listening live—yes, I am in a wind tunnel where they’re testing aircraft engines.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Speaking of live listeners, though, we actually have someone listening from Scotland tonight. So good on you for staying up late, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There we go. Enjoying your beautiful temperatures. [Laughter] So the most common term and the Greek term that you’re probably familiar with, because to deal with sort of the misleading nature of talking about Christ’s return or his second coming, a lot of times if you’re reading high popular into academic literature, they’ll just use the term parousia, untranslated from Greek, to refer to what we call Christ’s second coming.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is— I don’t know, it’s kind of a weird flex, I think, but okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… I mean, I kind of get why they do it. English translations don’t really do justice to the word, but, yeah, sometimes it’s just weird.

Fr. Andrew: Because you still have to explain it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you still then have to explain it.

Fr. Andrew: If you care whether people who read your stuff understand you.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you know, a lot of people make a good market out of muddying the waters to make them appear deep. They might get deliberately unintelligible so everyone just assumes you’re smart and nobody wants— It’s like the emperor’s new clothes: nobody wants to admit that they didn’t get it. I’m not talking about anyone’s work in particular! [Laughter] I’m saying sometimes that happens.

Fr. Andrew: Here I was thinking of post-structurallist literary theorists, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, they’re… annoying, okay.

Fr. Andrew: I suffered through a lot of that stuff when I was in undergrad. I was like: What? What?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t really have a good apologia for John Derrida.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, for so many reasons.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he was less fascist than Heidegger, but way worse read. [Laughter] And that’s saying something with old Martin!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Parousia: fancy Greek word.

Fr. Stephen: Parousia—it’s not actually all that fancy a Greek word.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true, and it’s another one of those, though, that doesn’t super work to just etymologically pull it apart because it kind of means being alongside or being with. I mean, that sort of works, but…

Fr. Stephen: Kind of, but, you know, “butterfly.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. “Breakfast.”

Fr. Stephen: So it’s pretty commonly used in St. Paul. I’m just going to Jack Van Impe you a few references that you can slow this down and look this up later if you’re so inclined: 1 Corinthians 15:23, 16:17; 2 Corinthians 7:6-7, 10:10; Philippians 1:26, 2:12; 1 Thessalonians 2:19, 3:13, 4:15, 5:23; 2 Thessalonians 2:1, and 8-9. Except he could do it faster and from memory.

Fr. Andrew: Well, he’s a real pro, you know.

Fr. Stephen: So I have to give him that. And not all of those, by the way, as we’re going to mention in a minute, have to do with Christ’s return. Some of those are other uses of the word.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, some are just about other people and not any particular special moment. “And So-and-so showed up.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or was there. So it’s also other places in the New Testament; get ready for another list! Matthew 24:3, 27, 37, 39; James 5:7-8; 2 Peter 1:16, 3:4, 12; 1 John 2:28 all use the term parousia. So in terms of what it means, in terms of really nailing down what it means, normally, almost 100% of the time, if you want to know what a Greek word means in the New Testament, you need to see what it’s used to translate in the Greek Old Testament, because literally a lot of the New Testament writers are thinking in Hebrew or Aramaic and writing in Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it’s kind of a clunky…

Fr. Stephen: They’re translating in their head. This is where a lot of New Testament interpretation goes wrong, is jumping right into lexica of general Greek and classical Greek without referencing the Greek Old Testament tradition. So that is almost 100% of the time the thing that you need to do. I’m going to go ahead— This is going to get a bunch of people mad, but I don’t think I’ve really ticked anybody off yet tonight, so here we go. Koine Greek, or “Koin-eh” Greek, as it’s sometimes called, doesn’t exist and isn’t a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Dun dun dunn! I feel I should have some kind of jingle ready for whenever you say that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. It’s biblical Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Someone get me a budget for a good sound board.

Fr. Stephen: It’s Hellenistic Greek written by Semitic language speakers; that’s all it is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s Greek as a second language.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not a separate dialect; it is not a separate language. It doesn’t exist outside the Greek Scriptures, and liturgical Greek is just the continuation of that, using that same pattern, which is overlaid in Hebrew. And if you haven’t studied Hebrew and Aramaic, you can’t understand it properly. Now—now!—our Greek listenership is picking up pitchforks and torches. But deal with it! It’s true! It is verifiably true.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How dare you? How dare you!

Fr. Stephen: If you want to prove me wrong, give me an example of Koine Greek outside of the Greek Scriptures, because everybody else who writes at that time—Philo, Josephus—in Greek, it’s not the same dialect.

Fr. Andrew: Most of the time now, you hear people refer to it as “biblical Greek,” like: “I’m taking biblical Greek.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The common— Koine means “common.” It became the common Greek because it was biblical Greek. It was the other way. The same way that the Latin Vulgate was not vulgar Latin at the time St. Jerome made the translation, it became the common Latin due to St. Jerome’s translation. Anyway. So now that’s irritated a bunch of people. Now I got some Latin folks mad at me, too, with that last little bit, I bet. [Laughter]

So, all that said, remember how I said almost 100% of the time? This is the exception, parousia, because parousia gets used a bunch in the Christian Old Testament, the Greek Old Testament, never once used for God. What do I mean by that? I mean all the places in the Hebrew Bible as they’re getting translated into the Greek Old Testament tradition, all the places in the Hebrew Bible that talk about God visiting his people, the day of the Lord, God appearing, God coming to Abraham, God coming to Mount Sinai, God coming on the last day in judgment—none of them use the term parousia to refer to it. So there is no direct connection to using that Greek term to refer to anything related to the end of days, the last judgment, etc.

So this is the one case where you do have to go and look at how it’s used in the Greek surrounding, particularly in the Roman world in the first century AD, when St. Paul and the other New Testament writers are using it. And the way it was used was to refer to someone being present in person, them visiting or their arrival. St. Paul uses it this way to describe himself coming to visit one of the churches.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “my parousia.”

Fr. Stephen: So it’s being there in person. He makes this contrast between: oh, he seemed bold in his epistles, but then when he was here in person, when he parousia, then something else.

So often it was used to refer to the visit of the Roman emperor or another official—a senator, a general, a governor. And the idea was their rule is already present. So the understanding in the Roman Empire— Caesar, even though they believed him to be divine, or at least be possessed by a divine spirit, he was only in one physical place at a time. Nevertheless, Caesar’s rule or his dominion or his power extended over the whole empire. So that dominion or that rule of Caesar was already in Thessalonica, but then if Caesar comes to Thessalonica in person, that would be his parousia, his bodily presence.

This makes it a particularly good word for what we’re describing here, because remember: the New Testament writers do not see Christ as being absent. His kingdom, his rule, his authority, is here and everywhere, but there comes a day when he is again present in person, the way he was before his disciples on that mountain in Galilee, right before the Ascension. So parousia is helpful in that way.

There are a couple other words, though, that are used in the New Testament to describe this. One of them is epiphaneia, i.e., epiphany, which means appearing or manifestation. This one we can and should go back to the Greek Old Testament tradition. There we see this one gets used all the time regarding God. For example, in the theophanies, when he appears to Abraham, this is the word that’s used, when he manifests himself to Abraham, over and over again. And of course “theophany” is built out of the word “epiphany.” It’s just got the theos appended instead of the preposition.

But it’s also importantly not just used for those sort of general theophanies, but epiphaneia is also used in at least a few places to describe the day of the Lord, that on the day of the Lord, God is going to appear. Those are in, for example, Joel 2:11, 31; and Malachi 3:33. So you see, those are fairly late Old Testament books in their Greek translations. St. Paul picks up this language. This is where it’s often translated in English “his glorious appearing” or “his appearing in glory” or “the appearance of his glory,” depending on how the English translators chose to render it. Those are in— 2 Timothy 4:1, 8; 2 Thessalonians 2:8; and Titus 2:13, for example, use that language. So, again, it’s not that Christ is absent and becomes present again; it’s Christ is present but not in a visible way, and he appears or manifests himself.

And then, relatedly, the language of apokalypsis—“apocalypse” is the obvious English transliteration—which means to reveal or uncover. This is used repeatedly in the Greek Old Testament to talk about when God reveals himself to the prophets to commission them. So, for example, 1 Samuel 3:7, 21, when he reveals himself to Samuel the Prophet; 2 Samuel 7:27, he reveals himself to David; Amos 3:7 talks about him revealing himself to the prophets in general. This language is used— In a previous episode we talked at length about Balaam, son of Beor; he tries to curse Israel, instead ends up blessing Israel, and that’s because, in the Greek text, God reveals himself to him in Numbers 22:31, 24:4, 16. And this language is used to describe this last day and what happens with Christ, that Christ is revealed in 2 Thessalonians 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:7-8; and 1 Peter 4:13, with this idea that Christ is still present, but his presence is in some way veiled and then gets uncovered.

Fr. Andrew: Which is one of the reasons I like this particular word to describe what’s happening, because he’s there, but, like you said, veiled, and then—now he’s unveiled. He’s not any more there, but he becomes apparent; he reveals himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so you can see the other thing that this connection through the word apokalypsis brings out is that there’s this overlap between the prophetic vision of the prophets in the Old Testament and the appearance of Christ at his “second advent” in terms of what is seen and who is seen and how he is seen. This then likewise dovetails with what the Orthodox Church has called the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory, which is an experience given to certain saints by God. But one of the key elements of it, according to St. Gregory Palamas, is that they are seeing him with their eyes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not just some kind of mental vision or dream.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they’re seeing him with their eyes, which means this is the kind of presence, this is the kind of revealing, that is going to happen for everyone on the last day, and is going to constitute what we call Christ’s return or his second coming.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that’s been our first half, so we’re going to take a little break, and we’ll be right back with The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, that was pretty short and sweet for commercials, and we didn’t even have to listen to one with your voice on it, so…

Fr. Stephen: Thankfully! Yeah, I don’t know how that first book is. It’s brand-new, so of course I haven’t read it, but he has a delightful accent!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: There’s an audiobook to pick up!

Fr. Andrew: Right? Yeah, I got to talk to him a little bit as we were working on the book, initially when we were sort of deciding whether or not to accept it, and, yeah, he’s got a great accent! An actual Englishman.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I’m sure we sound like warbling geese to him, but we find his accent delightful.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! Although, you know, I’ve noticed when people from other countries, especially British people, do an American accent, they just kind of default to Texas, like that’s what an American accent is to them all.

Fr. Stephen: There is the cowboy thing, but the other thing is they sort of over-pronounce “aaah,” that sound, because they don’t do that sound. They have, like: the chimp’n'zee. [Laughter] So if they’re doing American, it’s like: chimpaaanzee.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which is kind of a little Brooklyn-y, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I listen to a lot of Dr. Who audiodramas, and when they’ve got British actors doing Americans, I feel judged, I have to admit. [Laughter] It’s judgey. Come on, big finish.

Fr. Andrew: We accept it. I mean, if there’s anything America needs to do, it’s repent and be a little humiliated. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Well, welcome back, everybody. It is the second half of The Lord of Spirits. We’re ready to take your calls if you’ve got something you want to talk about. If you feel that you’re about to be raptured, call in! We’d love to talk to you on your way up!

Fr. Stephen: And explain to you that you’re not.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! [Laughter] I’ts 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. So, right, we talked about this idea of appearing, and the various words—

Fr. Stephen: Christ appearing, not people disappearing.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, exactly! [Laughter] The various words that are used for that in the Scriptures and of course the appearance of God and all this kind of thing. So what is this, then, about a second appearing, that there’s two of them? What is that all about? Why does that need to be a thing? As you said earlier, did Jesus come and, like: “Oh. Oh, actually, I’ll do the rest of that stuff later. Bye!”? What’s going on? Why are there two?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, so, this is part of that false construct again, which is this idea that, first of all there was sort of one uniform view in ancient Judaism and that that one uniform view was: “The Messiah is going to show up one day. He is then immediately during his lifetime going to inaugurate the world to come.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and everything will be okay.

Fr. Stephen: “And the resurrection of the dead, and eternity, and all of that.” And if you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you know already that’s bunkum. First of all, there was no uniform view by “Judaism” in the first century. There are Judaisms, at best. Some people have even said you shouldn’t talk about Judaisms because that implies more organization that there was. “Judaisms” makes people think that there were different denominations or something, that had internal structures and hierarchies and stuff, which some Jewish groups had and some didn’t. And those folks say you should really just talk about the religious beliefs and practices of Jewish people during the period, which is a different kind of approach. So the idea that there was this monolithic view and that therefore the disciples would have to figure out how to defend the reality of what Jesus of Nazareth did over against that monolithic view doesn’t hold water.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So before we dive deep into that, we actually do have someone calling from— Well, his phone is from Texas; I’m not sure if he’s from Texas, but—

Fr. Stephen: Are you implying he’s using a stolen burner phone?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, you know… We recently got a phone for one of our kids and then the kid calls me, and it says that it’s in Utah. I’m like: Wait, what!? Somehow his phone number is from Utah. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Your kid’s flirting with Mormonism, Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: I know—or maybe just the phone is Mormon!

Fr. Stephen: That could be.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Anyway, we have Paul calling from Texas, maybe. So, Paul, are you there with us?

Paul: I am. Hello, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Good evening. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Are you indeed in Texas, or is it just your phone is from Texas?

Fr. Stephen: In the Republic of Texas, yeah.

Paul: I indeed am in Texas. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All righty. Well, we have recalled the Alamo.

Paul: Well, then, we can be at peace.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, good.

Paul: Okay, so my question is kind of a question that I’m hoping can provide some contrast. Even after the episodes about spirit and how much that’s helped, I’m still a little bit muddy on some things. I recently learned in reference to when Christ confirmed that St. John the Baptist came in the spirit of Elijah that that’s not Elijah’s return that apparently was prophesied, which I didn’t know about until recent Sunday school either; and that some of the Church Fathers believed that both Elijah and Enoch could be the two witnesses in Revelation. Now, I only referenced that to ask y’all to maybe contrast a bit more what “being present in spirit” means as opposed to being bodily present, because I do know— Perhaps y’all have seen a show called Messiah. It seems like they kind of explore the idea of somebody being, you know— returning in spirit, as though Christ returned, but he returned in some other human individual, and that’s his return.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Paul: Which obviously isn’t correct, but I was so muddy on the water that, even though I knew it was wrong, I was still really confused. It was an enjoyable show either way, but, yeah, if you could just please explain that a little bit more to give some contrast.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, so when Christ returns, it is Christ. I mean, it says right at the end of the gospels: you’re going to see him come in the manner in which you’re seeing him ascend. That’s one of the things that’s kind of funny about all these people who say, “Oh, this is the second coming of Jesus.” I’m like: Well, but we have pretty clear description of what that’s going to be like, from the angels who speak to the apostles right after the Ascension. So it’s not going to be some weird secret. But, yeah, I think it’s an interesting question, that St. John the Baptist is Elijah, but not— He’s not the second coming of Elijah. It’s not the—

Paul: I thought he was before my priest elaborated on that. I was very surprised.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there is this tradition that he and Enoch are going to be these two witnesses that appear at the end, before the second coming of— before the second manifestation of Christ? See, I have to revise my own language, because I’m sitting here with Fr. Stephen digitally. [Laughter] I don’t know, Father, you want to help Paul in Texas out here?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And back in the episode we did about St. John the Forerunner, we talked about the relationship between him and Elijah and how Elijah is more like a patron saint to him, and that kind of idea of the mantle of Elijah. Yeah, the two witnesses being Enoch and Elijah in Revelation is picked up actually from Second Temple Jewish literature that talks about Enoch and Elijah, because they’re the two figures in the Old Testament who don’t die; that they return in some capacity and either finish their life or do something. In the case of Enoch a lot of times that’s connected to— One of the very commonplace things in Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament is this connection between the days of Noah, in which Enoch is in that lead-up to when God is going to destroy the world, judge the world, under Noah, and the end of this age.

And so it’s considered sort of particularly appropriate that Enoch would come back in that context. The book of Enoch and other Enochic literature that’s written in the Second Temple period is really playing with this idea that they believed they were living in the Great Tribulation following the exile, that they were coming to the end of the age, and so it was like: Oh, all these prophesies of Enoch from the last time the world got this bad, they’re particularly relevant again now. You even see this coming in in the New Testament, when it talks about Christ’s glorious appearing, and it talks about “as in the days of Noah, people were being married and given in marriage” and all these things were happening. There are these sort of similar comparisons.

But, yeah, that it’s the actual people, re-incarnated in some sense, is taking it a little too literally, that this is about a sort of spiritual dynamic of people prophesying and living and speaking in certain situations, the parallels between those situations and those people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I don’t think it’s— I think it’s okay to say, for instance, the apolytikion that we sing for the Prophet Elias calls him the second forerunner of Christ God’s coming to us, which is in line with that tradition of him being one of these two witnesses. I think it’s okay to say Elias will come before the end. How exactly that plays out, I don’t really think we know. Is that going to be him showing up on earth again, him him, or people acting in the way that he did? I don’t think we totally know.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I mean, it is possible that literally Elijah and Enoch could show up in some capacity, eschatologically—we’re not ruling that out—but I don’t think it literally happening is demanded by what’s being said in Scripture either.

Paul: Okay. So in contrast to Christ’s bodily returning—he himself, not somebody else in some other way—would it be fair to say, kind of like what Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick just said, that maybe coming in the spirit of somebody is more about behaving in their mantle of— like their pattern of action, like the way they operate, the way they think, the way they speak?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s kind of a short way to take it. I would go back and listen to the episode about St. John the Forerunner. We go into that in more detail and the way that, you know, St. John says he isn’t Elijah, and then at another point Christ says that he was. [Laughter] So he both is and isn’t, in different senses.

Fr. Andrew: The episode, if you’re looking it up, if you haven’t listened to it yet, is called “Make Straight the Paths for Our God.”

Paul: I will check that out tomorrow. Thank you very much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome! You’re welcome. Thank you very much for calling in. All right! Why don’t we talk about Psalm 110? I mean, the New Testament does all the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! So we’re getting it back into this idea that— So not only is there not any monolithic Judaism that has one view of exactly what the Messiah is going to do when he comes, if you go back and listen to our Messiah episode, you’ll know that during the Second Temple period, a lot of different Jewish groups were expecting multiple messiahs.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Right.

Fr. Stephen: And not just—apropos to the caller— Not just some who thought, “Elijah’s going to come and the Messiah’s going to come,” but priestly messiah, kingly messiah—that they had a lot of different views. So there wasn’t some need imposed by necessity to keep their movement alive in the face of some embarrassment for the New Testament writers to come up with this idea of the Messiah coming twice. So where, then, did they get it? We’re going to talk about some of the Scriptures in the Hebrew Bible and in the Greek Old Testament tradition from which they get it. The first of those is, as Fr. Andrew mentioned, Psalm 110 (109 in the Greek). This is the most-quoted Hebrew Bible/Old Testament text in the New Testament, over and over again. Book of Hebrews is just a meditation on it; gets quoted everywhere. So it’s critically important. If the major theme of the New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, this is the key text that’s being used to describe what that means throughout the New Testament.

Also, I know we talked about this way, way back in the long-ago time, like an early episode, within the first ten episodes, during one of the episodes I remember we talked about why we say “Yahweh” live on air, and one of the key reasons we gave is that the way English Bible translations do both “Yahweh” as “Lord” and other words that mean “lord” as “Lord” makes it hard to follow some passages.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and Psalm 110:1 is sort of ground zero for that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is of course— In English it’s usually “The Lord said to my Lord—”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but in Hebrew it’s “Yahweh said to Adonai—”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool,’ ” and then verse two talks about “ruling in the midst of your enemies.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is kind of before and after the Ascension.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, reading this, Christ quotes this, of course, to the Pharisees and scribes and says, after giving them the first verse, “If the Messiah is David’s son, how does he call him Lord?” And it says they went away discouraged, unable to answer him. Well, one easy answer would have been: This isn’t talking about the Messiah. [Laughter] But that was not an option for them, apparently. So this shows that there was broad acceptance that this psalm was talking about the Messiah, that the Adonai here is the Messiah: it’s the Lord Messiah.

And what does it say? Here the Lord Messiah is enthroned—is enthroned at the right hand of God. But he’s not enthroned to rule over the now-perfectly justified and purified earth over a time of abundance; he’s enthroned to rule in the midst of his enemies: his enemies are still out there. They’re out there causing trouble, for some period of time. And then at the end of that period of time, something else happens, and in verse five—and this is another place where you read it in English and it says, “The Lord is at your right hand,” and just reading that quickly in English, that may sound like, well, is the “you” me? Like God is always at my right hand, or…? If you look at it, the “Lord” there is not “Yahweh”; the “Lord” there is “Adonai” again.

Fr. Andrew: So, Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it’s the Lord (the Messiah) is at your (meaning Yahweh’s) right hand. That’s where he was in verse one: “Sit at my right hand.” And then it describes him destroying the enemies.

Fr. Andrew: “Shatter kings on the day of his wrath.”

Fr. Stephen: On the day of his wrath—the Day. So there is this period of time between the enthronement of the Messiah to rule and the final judgment, the final destruction of the enemies. There’s a period of time, and there’s nothing here to suggest that it’s short, long, medium; nothing here to suggest length.

Another passage from the psalms: Psalm 2. “Why”—in the King James—“does the heathen rage?”

Fr. Andrew: “Why do the heathen rage?” It’s just such a great word!

Fr. Stephen: “And the nations plot in vain?” Yeah. But in verse two, they plot against Yahweh and his Messiah, or his Christ in the Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Against the Lord and his anointed, as it says in the ESV.

Fr. Stephen: And verse three makes clear that this isn’t talking about David.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it says, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us,” which—

Fr. Stephen: These are the nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. David is not in bondage to God.

Fr. Stephen: David didn’t rule over the Gentiles! David didn’t rule over the nations; he ruled over Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s the Messiah who’s going to come to rule over the nations, the ultimate Messiah, the ultimate Son of David, who’s going to come to do that. And then, verse four: “He who sits in the heavens laughs, and the Lord (Adonai) holds them in derision.” So this is the two of them laughing at— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Kind of sharing a joke between themselves.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, at the kings and the rulers of the nations. Then in verse seven, when you get the coronation language, it’s: “Yahweh said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you.’ ” So this is the Messiah’s coronation, his enthronement. It’s the Son. Verse nine is interesting. The Hebrew, the original Hebrew, has: “You shall break—” Well, okay, the Hebrew as it’s typically vowel-pointed in the Masoretic Hebrew text, has: “You shall break them with a rod of iron.” The Greek has: “You shall rule them with a rod of iron.” And you can get “rule” instead of “break” based on different vowel marks.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. A nice little Hebrew deep-cut there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So again, you have this period of time depicted, where the Messiah is reigning at the right hand of God and there are still these enemies who, at some ultimate point, are going to throw off their shackles—see battle of Armageddon, etc.—and then be defeated by the Messiah. We won’t go into too much detail on Daniel 7 again, just because we keep coming back to it over and over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: Go see our “Son of Man” episode if you really want to do all that again.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But Daniel 7, Son of Man is enthroned at the right hand of the Ancient of Days. In verses 13 and 14, it talks about how he’s enthroned over the nations, but then there’s this period of time between his enthronement and the saints taking possession of the kingdom and the beasts being judged. So there’s this period of time: see the millennium episode recently, the “Son of Man” episode. We go more into that, into Daniel 7 and the details of that there. But again there’s this period of time.

And it’s that period of time that we talked about in the millennium episode but that also represents why that ultimate judgment by the Messiah is described as a “second coming,” because it’s after his enthronement and this period of time. So the fact that Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father becomes an important statement in the New Testament and then subsequently in the Creed and in Christian theology. The first place it comes up is in the gospels, in Matthew 26:64, Mark 14:62, Luke 22:69—these are all parallel passages; these are all Jesus speaking to the high priest. He says, “From now on you’ll see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power,” or “coming with his angels.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which makes them super unhappy when he says that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this Son of Man sitting at the right hand and coming to judge: that’s the important part here, that this is a thing. So I know friend of the show, Bart Ehrman, based on the, shall we say, less-than-nuanced way he’s made some of his arguments in his popular-level books, has convinced a lot of people that the title, “Son of Man,” was not referring to any kind of heavenly or eschatological figure ever. So there’s a period of time when people took—any time the phrase, “Son of Man,” appeared in the New Testament, it was referring directly to Daniel 7 and everything. Obviously, you’re going to be able to find exceptions to that, so obviously we’re going to have to say, “Well, no, not always.” But, due to the way Bart Ehrman—and others; Bart Ehrman is just one of the most well-known ones, and the “friend of the show”—the way he made that argument, he’s now convinced a lot of people that it never means that. Well, here’s three examples, parallel passage, where it clearly means that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, Bart, you know, you’re a friend of the show. Why don’t you go listen to our “Son of Man” episode?

Fr. Stephen: Or just call in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Call in! I would love to hear you talk to him. It would be so fun…

Fr. Stephen: If friend-of-the-show Bart Ehrman ever calls this show, he will go straight to the front of the line.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why not?

Fr. Stephen: We will immediately take the call. We will devote the rest of the show to talking to him if necessary, as long as he wants to talk.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow, that is the biggest invitation you’ve ever given on this show!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Yes. And I mean it. So, then, after the Ascension, what we find through the rest of the New Testament are just repeated references, some of them seeming almost off-hand, to Christ— the fact that Christ, that Jesus, is seated at the right hand of God. So here’s another Jack Van Impe list: Mark 16:19; Acts 2:33, 5:31, 7:55-56; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 1:3 and 8:1, 10:12, 12:2; 1 Peter 3:22. Those all refer to Christ being seated at the right hand of God. This, of course, is part of the Nicene Creed that we recite, not only that Christ ascended into heaven but that he is seated at the right hand of the Father.

So when we confess this, make reference to this, there are a number of levels here. The first level, the most immediate maybe level, is that we’re identifying Jesus as the Messiah by identifying him with the existing Messiah traditions of the Messiah, the Lord Messiah, being enthroned at the right hand of God.

But this also—the fact that Christ is enthroned at the right hand of God—speaks to the activity of Christ as the Ruler over the nations, meaning over the world, which is a rule that he shares with the saints, his role as High Priest, as you can see in the references I just gave from Hebrews, which he shares with the saints as priests. So there’s an activity here; there’s something Christ is doing. So this period of time is not just like a pause; it’s not just like: “Well, Jesus did half of the Messiah stuff and then took a break, and then he’s going to come back and do the rest of it.” It’s this is part and parcel of what the Messiah does: he rules in the midst of his enemies for a time. He rules over the nations while his enemies—these spiritual enemies, these kings and rulers of the earth, these beasts in Daniel—are still active in the world. This is part of what the Messiah was going to do; Jesus is doing it is the idea here. This is necessary, according to the Old Testament. So it requires that there be these two different manifestations of Christ, one which culminates in his enthronement, and then the second one where he appears to render judgment on the enemies.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So this has been the second half. It was actually very brief compared to the first one.

Fr. Stephen: For us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for us. That’s true. That’s true! There are some other shows— There are some much more concise shows on Ancient Faith Radio, but this is not one of them.

Fr. Stephen: This was originally going to be a one-hour show.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, that is true! This was, in its original conception— But I don’t think we’ve ever done, with the exception of some of your little brief ones that you’ve done, like when I’ve been traveling or something like that, that you did solo, I don’t think we’ve ever had one that’s actually been under an hour. So, yeah. All right! Well, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we’ll be back with the third half.

Fr. Andrew: All right, why are we advertising that book?

Fr. Stephen: That was awful.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it’s been out for four months! [Laughter] I think it’s because we said something about the first one, the first commercial break not including you, and Trudi’s like: “I’m going to get him on this one!”

Fr. Stephen: Bad enough I’m boiling in a bag, but now I’ve got to hear this!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, well. I mean, the book came out four months ago: shouldn’t you have another one by now?

Fr. Stephen: It’s coming.

Fr. Andrew: It’s coming, it’s coming. All right, well—

Fr. Stephen: Actually, there’s a .15 coming, and then another one coming.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true!

Fr. Stephen: I’m not going to elaborate on that any more.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. Yeah, I don’t want to reveal that to everybody, because what you’re talking about has not been released.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I will just let that sit, let people puzzle over it for generations.

Fr. Andrew: “What does that mean?”

Fr. Stephen: “What was he referring to with the ‘.15’?”

Fr. Andrew: Let’s do some gemmatria on that—or ghemmatria?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, it’s the third half. I read in our group recently, someone was really bugged by that. They’re like: “Why do they say ‘third half’?” It’s like, well, training you to deal with a little bit of ambiguity is one of our side-missions here on The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you can’t roll with us on that, like… we’ve got a lot of stuff in this show that you’re not prepared for.

Fr. Andrew: One person was like: “Will someone please explain this ‘third half’ thing to me!?” Look, it’s a show and a half, what can I say?

Well, in the first half, we talked about appearing: coming, appearing, parousia, epiphaneia, whatever, apocalypse. And in the second half, if you’re just joining us, we were talking about the idea that there’s this period between Christ’s enthronement at the right hand of the Father and then the second appearing, that he’s doing something in the midst of that time. So, yeah, what does this have to do with the end the end end?

Fr. Stephen: Right. If people went and read Psalm 110 and Psalm 2, they know that Christ is going to return and fill the earth with corpses.

Fr. Andrew: Right, very Christ-like behavior, because he’s literally Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But, no, that’s talking about the defeat of the spiritual enemies, like we mentioned. But, yes, there are other realities tied to this, to Christ’s glorious appearing, and not just the other topics we’ve talked about in other eschatology episodes. Part of the key to understanding this is understanding some things about the way Christ’s resurrection is described, which of course precedes his ascension and enthronement. That centers around the language that’s used concerning Christ of him being the firstfruits of the resurrection.

For example, one of the identifiers of who Christ is in Revelation 1:4— There’s a whole series of titles there and the surrounding verses, but one of them is the firstborn from the dead. This same language is used in Colossians 1:18: “He is the head of the body, the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.” That’s “firstborn.” 1 Corinthians 15:20, 1 Corinthians 15, the whole chapter, is St. Paul talking about the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection in general. In verse 20, he calls Christ “the firstfruits of them that slept”; that’s more King James for you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] I just never get tired of that language. It’s so good.

Fr. Stephen: And in Acts 26:23, in St. Paul’s sermon there, he refers to Christ as “the first to rise from the dead.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which, you know— Someone might be thinking, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, okay, “first to rise from the dead”—didn’t Lazarus rise from the dead? Didn’t Jesus raise a couple of other people?”

Fr. Stephen: And that kid Elijah raised?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the son of the widow of Nain, Elias. I mean, there’s— The unnamed guy whose body got dropped on the bones of Elisha, because relics do that sometimes. Right, so, I mean, that’s— I think that when people think that—which is a natural question to have, right? I think that they believe or they conceptualize that rising from the dead means simply coming back to life.

Fr. Stephen: Resuscitation. They hit you with the paddles, you start breathing again, which isn’t actually how those paddles work, but I digress. That’s the way they work in TV and movies.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ve never had them used on me, so I really— I don’t know. But, yeah, it’s—

Fr. Stephen: I’m waiting. Eventually there will be some trend where people will just use them on each other at parties or something. We’ll get there. [Laughter] We got to Tide Pods; we’ll get there, too. Defib parties.

Fr. Andrew: This is the darkest timeline… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this is where that firstfruits language becomes important, because when St. Paul is talking about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he’s talking about something different than just that kind of resuscitation, just that kind of biological life being restored as it is now, but you’re still mortal. So Lazarus died again eventually, as did all of those other folks that we mentioned. And St. Paul uses specifically agricultural metaphors. So a seed goes into the ground and it dies. What it was dies: it breaks open, it breaks apart, and then it becomes something else; it grows into something else. And that’s his kind of language for describing the resurrection at the end, so there is this element of transformation, of growth and transformation, that requires the old to die, to wither, to be broken away.

So, then, this is pointing to— This language itself points to the difference between Christ’s resurrection and those other people being brought back from the dead in that Christ is raised and his body is transformed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also—I mean, this seems like an obvious point—but all those other people died again, whereas Christ will die no more, because—not because, like, “surprise, let’s just keep waiting and see if he dies again”—it’s that the way that his body functions, his human body functions, is now significantly different after the resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so the firstfruits is the first of the crops to spring up. If you’re familiar with the Torah, there’s an offering of fruitsfruits. You go and take those firstfruits and you offer them to God; you burn them up. And this isn’t— We have to, in order to understand ritual, a ritual like this— We have to understand what is the state this induces in the participant, how does this affect— what does it do and how does it affect how the participant experiences the world. If I’m a subsistence farmer, if the survival of my children depends on me having a good crop this year, then when I get that first crop that springs up, my natural inclination is going to be: “Okay, harvest this. Keep it, because a lot of things can happen between now and the rest of the harvest coming that could wipe out all or most of the rest of it, but that at least I would have this. At least I would have these firstfruits.” And God says, “No, you take those and you give them to me; you burn them up,” which requires that person then, who is offering that to God as a thank-offering—he’s offering thanks for a harvest that hasn’t come yet. This requires the ultimate kind of trust within faithfulness, that the rest is going to come.

And so St. Paul, describing Christ as the firstfruits, is especially apt here. His resurrection is not only the place where see what ours might look like insofar as we can possibly understand it, but it is also the guarantee to cause us to then trust that the rest will happen in the future. Also, this connection to firstfruits may be the first inkling that some of our attentive listeners might have that this is just a sneaky Transfiguration episode.

Fr. Andrew: [Gasp] [Laughter] I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

Fr. Stephen: It’s going to get less sneaky as we go through the rest of the third half.

So when talking about the resurrection—because of course what happens at Christ’s second coming is the resurrection of the dead, and in talking about that resurrection in 1 John 3:2, St. John says, “Beloved, now we are children of God; what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” So the appearing of Christ triggers this transformation of humanity, both the humans who are alive at that point and those who have died. So Christ’s appearance, then, triggers St. Paul’s harvest, if that’s the resurrection, the rest of the crop coming in.

But St. Paul in Romans, in Romans 8, goes even further than that, than just talking about humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So you’ve got, what, Romans 8, starting in verse 19—we’re not going to read the whole chapter—St. Paul says this:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption our of bodies. For in this hope we were saved.

Now, hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul has— If we look at this as dominoes from St. John, Christ’s appearing triggers this transformation of humanity—this transformation of humanity, the revelation, the appearing of the sons of God, this triggers the transformation of creation as a whole.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the whole creation is groaning for the revealing of the sons of God.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul is talking specifically about the redemption of bodies, of the material world, of the transformation and transfiguration of the world.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, not-sorry, Gnostics.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Of the creation. Plug Robin Phillips’ book here.

And this in keeping with what St. Paul says, for example, in Ephesians 1:13-14 about the Holy Spirit being the down payment on our salvation, a sort of deposit. So, to go back to something we said all the way back in the first half, 1 Corinthians 15, St. Paul famously talks about us having a spiritual body in the resurrection. Again, as we said, some people take that to mean: oh, spiritual, like ephemeral, like woo-woo.

Fr. Andrew: Like a Star Trek episode where they become—they “evolve to be pure energy.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And, no. Again, this is capital-S Spirit. So this is a body that is permeated by the Holy Spirit. And so what we’re talking about is not just with humanity but with the entirety of creation being suffused with the light of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. And so we can say in a certain sense that the Holy Spirit is the atmosphere of the world to come.

Since now we’ve probably pretty clearly outed ourselves to everyone as sneakily doing a Transfiguration episode, the Transfiguration is kind of a weird feast in the sense that a lot of people don’t know what to do with it. It’s not sort of part of the— Christ is born, he ministers in Galilee, he goes to Jerusalem, he’s crucified, he rises, he ascends into heaven, and he is seated at the right hand of God, that sort of storyline. The Transfiguration is just sort of dropped in there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like: Wait, wait, he’s doing what? [Laughter] It’s funny because I recently saw— And a lot of people, I think, think this way. I actually recently saw— Not that I’ve watched this show, although I actually had someone contact me recently and say, “You should watch this show!” But that show, The Chosen, I haven’t seen it, and frankly I don’t intend to see it, but I saw— And I saw this, I checked this to make sure that this was real, because I posted about this and a lot of people said, “That can’t be real!” and it’s like: No, no, no, it’s real. The guy who directed that, he said something to the effect of: “All these people are asking me: Are we going to have the Transfiguration on our show?” And then he said, “What would that really add to our story?” [Laughter] I was like: What!? Now, maybe he’s messing with everybody—I don’t know—but I think that’s an attitude that a lot of people have. What is this here for? Is it Jesus saying, “Oh, hey, by the way: I’m God”?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or if you could even do that with it. [Laughter] So it’s not— In most church circles, it’s not a heavy focus. In the Orthodox Church, it’s one of the Twelve Great Feasts, but you go outside the Orthodox Church, it’s not as well-emphasized, shall we say. In getting into why it’s so important, obviously one of the first places we go is in the hymnography surrounding the feast, and the hymnography surrounding the feast makes it clear that this is happening, that Christ takes Ss. Peter, James, and John onto the mountain before the Passion, so that this has something to do with the fact that they’re about to witness his suffering and crucifixion and death. So we can take it at kind of that surface level, then, and say, “Oh, well, okay, they’re about to witness that, so Christ is sort of revealing his divine identity to them so that they won’t fall into despair.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is one of the tacks that our hymnography takes—it’s not the only one, but it’s one of them.

Fr. Stephen: At a very surface level.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says, “Thou didst reveal thyself to the disciples—“I think this is in the kontakion—“so that when they would see thee crucified, they would know that thy suffering was voluntary.” Like, if that’s who he really is, then, yeah, he’s accepting crucifixion.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Now, if that’s all that’s going on there, it kind of didn’t work, because we know that those three disciples did lapse into despair. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s only John, really, that hangs around.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and even he ultimately… I mean, he was with them, hiding in the room. He was there, disbelieving the women.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he wasn’t out preaching. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But there’s sort of more to it than that, because this isn’t just a question of having Christ’s identity confirmed, but they’re seeing—again, with their physical eyes—Christ in his uncreated glory, which means they’re getting a glimpse of the resurrection. So they are beholding with their eyes the resurrected Christ before he died.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Think about that one for a second, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Time and space aren’t real, guys.

Fr. Andrew: But if you understand resurrection correctly, not just where he says, “I am the resurrection,” also a little mind-bending if you think too much about it—but if you understand the resurrection as not just about coming back to life but as about the fullness of what a human is destined to be, equal to the angels, all of that kind of stuff, then that makes more sense. It’s about this elevation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is a glimpse of the resurrected Christ. Christ’s appearances after his resurrection, his resurrection appearances, are a glimpse of the world to come. They’re a series of glimpses and images. We did an episode about them; you can go back and listen to it. But they’re a series of glimpses of the world to come. It’s going to come after the general resurrection, which is— The general resurrection isn’t just the resurrection of all the people—it is all the people, but it’s the whole creation, the whole cosmos.

And what does that look like? On one hand, we don’t know. We can’t understand the details. But what we have confirmed to us here in the New Testament and in Christ is that the world to come is an actual world. It’s a material world, a material universe, in which we will have bodies. And it is an actual life. It’s not just staring intently as a disembodied orb at a glory cloud.

Fr. Andrew: No harps on clouds… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s actual life in an actual world, and beyond that we can’t understand. Don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. Don’t know what it’s like to be a resurrected human in the world to come. It’s not just this world with all the bad stuff gone: this world with no pasta and a bit of honey.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re going to trigger all those people again!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Someone’s throwing their phone against the wall even as we speak.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not just this world with the bad stuff taken out; it is a world that is transformed and suffused with the Holy Spirit, filled with people who are filled with and suffused with the Holy Spirit—and I don’t know what that’s like. We can’t know what that’s like until and unless we get there.

Fr. Andrew: All we get is— We see little visions. We see little glimpses of it sometimes, but that’s not the same as being there, of doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so we’ve said all this now about this being the whole cosmos being resurrected and all the people being resurrected, and this actual life in the actual world to come, but what about—what if there’s somebody who looks at that and says, “Nah,” who doesn’t want to be a part of that? That’s what we’re talking about next time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s our next episode. Well, this turned out to be a relatively short one. It’s kind of— I’m a little shocked, honestly.

Fr. Stephen: It’s still over two hours!

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but, you know. I guess if there’s going to be any episode where no man knows the day nor the hour, this would be the one.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: When I get to go home and go to sleep. [Laughter] So, right. I’m not going to read from Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, as tempted as I am to do that, but I did want to talk a little bit about the— You know, we ended up with the Transfiguration in a lot of this, and I think that there’s another angle from which to understand the Transfiguration that makes a lot of this clear or maybe gives us just another way to contemplate this amazing, amazing reality that we’re talking about, and that is if we think about the garden of Eden, and we think about also the fact that Moses and Elias are standing there with the Lord on that mountain. So if you think about Eden—and we’ve talked about this before on the show, but just to keep— Maybe you guys didn’t listen to the spiritual geography episodes, which I recommend you do—sacred geography, I should say. Eden is on a mountain, which is not maybe super obvious from the Genesis text, although there’s talk about four rivers flowing out, which means at least that it’s an elevated place, because rivers flow out from elevated places—that’s how gravity works—but then if you get to—I think it’s Ezekiel 28?—Ezekiel 28 speaks about when the devil is thrown out of paradise. It says that he’s on Eden and that he’s thrown down from the mountain of God. So it’s very clear that Eden is a mountain in that text. So Eden is a mountain, and it’s a garden on a mountain where God dwells with his people. It’s the way that God created everything to be.

And then let’s think about Moses and Elias for a minute. So Moses, who appears with the Lord on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration, he has spoken with God in the Old Testament, in the Torah, on Mount Sinai. In the hymns for Transfiguration, there’s references to the mountain covered with smoke. Well, that’s not Tabor—Tabor doesn’t get covered with smoke—that’s Sinai, where there was smoke and all of these other signs that they saw there. The Lord shows to Moses the vision of the creation and gives him the Torah, and he brings it down to the people of Israel. His face is shining: he is transfigured such that the people can’t look at him and he has to be veiled in order for them to be able to look at him. So that’s Moses with God on the mountain, sharing this communion with him.

And then also think about Elias. He’s on Mount Horeb, and he also has a vision of God on the mountain. It’s a little bit different. Moses speaks with the Lord face to face, as a man speaks with his friend, but then also has this vision where he can’t look at him; he can’t look at his face. And then Elias’s vision is more like that, and he experiences this mighty wind, there’s earthquake and a fire, and then this gentle breeze or still, small voice, depending on which translation you’re reading, and he hears him there. He comes out, and he has to wrap his face in his mantle, because he can’t look at God and live. So Elias also meeting with God on the mountain and having this experience with him, this vision, this communion.

So on Tabor, Christ is there, and again it’s Moses and Elias, and they’re on a mountain together, and Peter, John, and James are there as well. Well, one of the hymns— So if you come to matins, which— People! Come to matins! You do not know what you’re missing. Please, come to matins, or orthros, which, if you’re at an Antiochian or a Greek church is on Sunday morning before the Divine Liturgy; if you’re at a Russian-tradition church, it might be, if they’re doing it, on Saturday night, paired with vespers, as vigil—but come to matins. One of the hymns of matins says that—and I’m paraphrasing a little bit here, but it says that on Tabor, Christ appears in glory with Moses and Elias to show that in the age to come, that he will stand in the midst of the gods. That’s what it says in that hymn! So if you look at the Transfiguration, that’s what you see that is going on, that it is Christ ruling over the divine council. There’s a reason that we chose the icon of the Transfiguration as being part of the sort of logo of this podcast, because this is what’s going on in the feast of the Transfiguration.

If you understand all these mountains in the right way, and you understand what it means for human beings to be resurrected and to be transfigured and to become truly like Christ, to be adopted sons of God, then you understand that, as Father said, that we’re looking at the resurrection; we’re looking at the kingdom. This is the kingdom of God. And what do you know? In the chapter right before it, Jesus says that there’s some standing here who will not die before they see the kingdom of God coming in power. St. Theophylact of Ohrid, and I’m sure probably lots of other saints—I know that he said this because I just read it this past week—he says that the reason Jesus said that in the chapter before is because of what he was about to do on Mount Tabor, meaning that what we see on Tabor is the kingdom of God; that’s what that is.

So, as we think about Christ’s glorious appearing, the Transfiguration is not an event that happens in its deepest sense before it; the Transfiguration is actually the moment when we see it revealed to us in a partial way. It’s not in its total fulfillment as yet, but there is a very real sense in which what is visible at the Transfiguration—Jesus standing there on Mount Tabor, Moses and Elias there with him, Peter, James, and John with them, who, as some of the Church Fathers say, they themselves were transfigured somewhat, because that’s what enabled them to see the Transfiguration—that all of this together is what the second appearing of the Lord is about, and it is what we’re aiming towards as Christians. That’s what Christianity is for, is for that.

This kind of millenarian thing that a lot of Christians have, including, I’m sorry to say, some Orthodox Christians who should know better, like they have this sense of: “Oh, it’s the time of Antichrist!” I mean, we talked about this on our Antichrist episode, but do you know the Scripture, people? It’s in John’s epistles: “Antichrists have come and are…” It’s always— It’s been the time of the Antichrist, because, wow, this is the time when the Lord is ruling in the midst of his enemies, so it is the time of the Antichrist and has been, for all this time.

And the problem with thinking that the end of the world is going to happen at any second—now, that is literally true. It could happen. But if you orient yourself towards that, not in a way where you are oriented to really repent, but instead you’re oriented to try and make other people do stuff, whether it’s condemning them or pushing them or whatever it might be, trying to cause schisms, messing with parishioners in their churches, all stuff happening right now—if you’re doing that, then you’re not doing it right. Now, if you are oriented towards the second appearance of Christ, such that it’s like: “Oh, I need to repent. I need to repent,” then you are doing it right. But the reason that we’re repenting is not just “Oh, wow, there’s something big and bad happening; I don’t want that happening to me”—although, okay, I mean, again: see our next episode—but, really, it’s: “Wow, the Transfiguration! Wow, the resurrection! I want to be part of that, and I can be part of that, and the reason I can be part of that is because I’m saved by grace through faithfulness.” So be faithful. Be more faithful. Increase your faithfulness. That’s what the project is.

As Christ is ruling in the midst of his enemies, as he’s driving them out from every corner of the earth, we participate in that by driving them out from the corners of our own hearts, not by treating other human beings as though they are the enemy—they are not. If they are acting like the enemy, then that’s because they’re slaves; they’re slaves to the enemy, and we want them to repent, too. We want them to be brothers and sisters, too. We want them to be with us, too. That’s what it means to be Christian. Do we love them? Do we love them? It’s a good question.

So, yeah, there’s so much going on here, and in a real sense, all those mountains—Eden, Sinai, Horeb, Tabor, and we could also add in Hermon and Zaphon and some other stuff if we want to get really deep and weird, but long-time listeners to the podcast know what I’m talking about—all of those mountains and these meetings with God, these dwellings with God in a real sense are kind of all happening at the same time, the same place, because whatever is truly righteous enters into eternity and becomes, in a way, eternally present—past, present future: beyond time. It’s awesome. It’s awesome to think about. We should be truly looking forward to the second and glorious appearing of the Lord, but not in a way that’s about fear and anger and hyperactivity and hyperventilating and other hypers. That’s not what’s going on here. So it’s time to repent. It’s time to repent. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So, dovetailing off that a little bit, one of the major important things I think that hopefully we got across tonight is that this period between Christ’s ascension and his glorious appearing is not sort of him hitting pause on accomplishing the Messiah stuff; that Christ is— that this age in which you and I were born and will live out our lives is a part of what Jesus does as the Christ, as the Messiah, ruling in the midst of his enemies— He is active. He is at work in the world, continuously. And that means it’s also not a pause for us. It’s not a waiting room; it’s not about doing our best not to commit any sins too horrible before we check out. It’s not about… It’s not even just about repenting of our sins in this world.

A lot of times we lose sight, even as Orthodox Christians— In the Orthodox Church, there’s a lot more emphasis placed on theosis, for example, and anyone will tell you that, yes, we believe theosis is salvation, theosis is salvation. But we still tend to fall into talking about our salvation in mostly negative terms. I mean, there’s a reason for that. For me, most of what I’m at work on doing right now in the present moment is repenting of my many sins. That’s the major way in which for me the positive aspect of drawing closer to God is happening, is I’m still working my way out of the mud. I’m not at the getting cleaner and cleaner stage; I’m at the extricate yourself from the pit.

But there is that other stage, there is that positive element of our salvation, and that is that, contrary to what some of our non-Orthodox Christian friends at least have in their theology books, glorification, as it’s called, is not just something that happens after we die. It’s not just something that happens after Christ returns, but it’s something that is beginning now; it is something that is active in the world now. The Holy Spirit is active in the world now. And while he has not yet fully suffused the whole creation and my whole being as a person, he is still here and he is still active. So this life is not just a question of repentance or of enduring suffering and hardship—both of those are realities for us—but it’s also a life in a world where moments, where days, where friendships, where marriages, where all kinds of spiritual relationships can be suffused with the light and the love and the peace that the Holy Spirit brings, where these glimpses of the resurrection are possible and when they happen they are real.

Just like St. Peter got turned down when he wanted to build the booths on the Mount of Transfiguration and stay there forever, those moments don’t last for us forever, and you can go and read the lives of St. Seraphim of Sarov, St. Symeon the New Theologian, saints who received the vision of Christ in uncreated glory, talking about the fact that even for them as a great saint, far more holy and closer to God than I will ever be, that vision did not last their entire life. It was fleeting experience—a powerful experience, but a fleeting one. And these other realities, of repentance, of suffering, and of joy in this world, all returned afterwards.

So I don’t want to leave off this episode, especially given the topic of next episode, which is going to be kind of a downer, without that positive aspect, that the Holy Spirit is the deposit and the down payment of that world to come, that he is here now, that we do receive these glimpses and these moments, and that we can be about trying to infuse, through love, through joy, through making peace— we can go out and actively suffuse moments of our life and parts of our life and areas of our life with that grace of the Holy Spirit, even if it is fleeting. But those glimpses we get of glory are what then empowers us to deal with the other, harder things that we have to do and we have to endure in this life.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. Well, even though it’s been two hours and 16 minutes, that’s our show for tonight! Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t happen to call us and get through live, we’d still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you could message us at our Facebook page; you can send me reviews of all the works of Hal Lindsey; leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: I mainly want to review Barney Miller. Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, you can follow our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere—and memes, naturally—but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air, and Fr. Andrew stays in the air as he travels from country to country.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and may God bless you and keep you.