Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! A blessed feast of the Ascension to you! This is our 20th episode. Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast, where we walk in the footsteps of, well, no, not giants. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight. We’ll get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So like I said, the Orthodox Church just began its great feast of the Ascension of our Lord God and Savior, Jesus Christ, and that is what we’re going to be discussing tonight on the podcast. As we saw last time with the resurrectional appearances of Christ, many treatments of his ascension are treated as little more than an epilogue to the action of the crucifixion and the resurrection. Some more diligent Orthodox examinations of the Ascension show how this feast demonstrates Christ’s divinity and also how he elevates humanity even to sit upon the throne of God.

Tonight we are going to look at the Ascension, especially as it culminates in the enthronement of Christ, and we’re going to start with footprints. No, we’re not talking about the popular “Footprints in the Sand” poem, nor the variation that notes that “The Sand People ride in single file so as to hide their numbers.” It turns out that within or just outside numerous temples for worshiping various gods throughout the earth, there are examples of something called a petrosomatoglyph. Everybody look that up on Wikipedia right now. What is that? What is a petrosomatoglyph? Well, it’s usually a footprint carved into rock. So, Fr. Stephen, take us back into 3,000 years, to northwestern Syria, to a ruined archaeological site called Ain Dara.

Fr. Stephen De Young: So, yes, today’s secret word is “petrosomatoglyph.” So, kids, whenever anyone says, “Petrosomatoglyph,” scream really loud.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes. I caught that one! I caught that reference. Footprints.

Fr. Stephen: Well, technically there are a variety of petrosomatoglyphs.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there’s various shapes.

Fr. Stephen: Any body part carved into rock.

Fr. Andrew: And I have to say—I have to take credit right now, because I posted pictures of gigantic footprints in our Lord of Spirits Facebook group yesterday, and everyone believed that we were going to be talking about giants, and so I just have to say that I’m very, very proud of myself because I totally threw them off!

Fr. Stephen: You’ve also deeply disappointed the Sasquatch enthusiasts.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Yes, there were several people who wanted to talk about Sasquatch, and I’m like: You know, Sasquatch, as big as he is, does not have meter-long feet, because that’s the size of footprints we’re looking at, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which is about three times human size. So that would make it the something about 15 feet tall.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed, yes. Dun-dun-dun! But not a giant, not a giant!

Fr. Stephen: Close, though. Right, so the most common kind of petrosomatoglyph is footprints, as you were saying, and you find these outside of temples across time and across the globe. We have a couple examples, and the one you mentioned to start with, that’s at Ain Dara—we’re assuming that’s the pronunciation.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know, we’re hanging around Arabs. I’m assuming it’s Ai-in or something like that, but I can’t do that too many times.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to do an Asian language in a minute, too, and we’ll totally get that one wrong. Like the Lutherans say, sin boldly, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, plus there’s no speakers of those languages actually around to correct your pronunciation. They’re all gone, so we can guess.

Fr. Stephen: Well… Maybe. I’ve found that the modern people descended from those people are still pretty particular about how you pronounce things.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, they do have some opinions about how their language should have been pronounced 3,000 years ago.

Fr. Stephen: But the site in Ain Dara has unfortunately now been destroyed in the current Syrian civil war, and we’re not going to get into who did it or why, because there are conflicting reports, but in the process it’s been destroyed. But it was fairly well documented before that, and there are lots of photos online and other places where you can see the remains of the temple and the giant carved cherubim and all of those things. But one of the prominent features were these two footprints, a right and left footprint, at the entryway to the temple sanctuary proper, that, as you mentioned, are about a meter long, about three times human size. And this is a temple to our old friend, Baal, or Ba’al.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and this is the Baal—Baal Hadad, is that the one?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Which doesn’t mean he’s some guy named… Because “Haddad” is a very common surname in the Middle East these days!

Fr. Stephen: It’s spelled differently. It’s spelled differently; it’s not actually related.

Fr. Andrew: Whew.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is the Syro-Hittite Baal, if you want to get fancy. There is a whole book I just discovered and just ordered—this shows you the things that show up on my reading list—that’s just a catalogue of all the different names for Baal, arranged in a flowchart of, like, hierarchy of places over time.

Fr. Andrew: This is one to read out loud when you’ve got people over and you’re sitting around the fire, relaxing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is an ideal book to take on an airplane when I don’t want to be talked to, because they’ll say, “Hey, whatcha reading?” And you show them, and then you can fly in silence for the rest of your trip. [Laughter] But, yes, this is that Baal, out of the Baals, and this temple was built around the late 11th, early 10th century BC.

Fr. Andrew: I was going say, 3,000 years, plus or minus.

Fr. Stephen: And the foundations at the base, so we could see the layout and everything, were intact, and part of what made it so important was that’s within about a hundred years or so of Solomon’s temple.

Fr. Andrew: And if people want to take a look and see what this looks like while you’re listening, you can go to Wikipedia and look up Ain Dara—A-i-n, space, D-a-r-a, and click the article that says “Archaeological Site,” and you’ll see some really great pictures of the place that we’re talking about right now—including the footprints.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but now to give you an idea, since I claimed these were across time and all around the globe, if you go to Bagan—I’m guessing that’s how it’s pronounced—which is in Myanmar, aka Burma, Bagan is one of the holy cities there, which contains several temples, and at one of them, right at the entryway to the small shrine—it’s a Buddhist shrine—is, carved into the stone, the right footprint of the Buddha.

Fr. Andrew: And also again, there is a Wikipedia article called something like “Buddha’s Footprints,” or something like that, which is kind of fun.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s from the 11th century AD, so we have a kind of symmetry there. That is from the other side of the globe from northeast Syria.

So why do we have these outside temples? Well, these footprints sometimes joined with other footprints in the temple itself and other depictions, whether in statuary or in frescoes or bas-relief or what have you, carvings on the walls, trace a path that was walked by the god or divine or semi-diving being or, in the case of Buddha, enlightened being, from the entrance of the temple structure to the place where they were seen to be sitting. So that covers both the Buddha and Baal and whoever else.

Fr. Andrew: And I think it should be noted that, especially if you start looking around for these things, and you look at pictures of them, in some places they are very realistic looking in terms of actually shaped like a human foot, although, again, very big; and then in other cases they’re very stylized. In some cases, it seems like the locals are saying: No, this is where this god or demi-god walked; this is an actual footprint that was left in the rock by this being. And in other cases, especially the stylized ones, you can see no one is saying that; it is deliberately made to be beautiful or symbolic or whatever, and it’s a footprint. They made a footprint in the rock, either as you said right outside the temple or inside the temple. So there’s some variation on this point as to whether or not there’s a claim of some kind of divine intervention that happened at that particular place. So that’s another kind of important point, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Also, some people just have weird feet, man.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true. Maybe in some cases…

Fr. Stephen: Like corns and bunions, you know.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Buddha has a foot that has flower petals and stuff engraved in it.

Fr. Stephen: You never know.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Why would this be embedded in the temple structure? Why would you do this? And it’s because… We tend to think of temples in very modern, American terms. We think of them as worship spaces. “We’re going to do this worship activity. Even if we have this concept of ritual, we’re going to do this ritual activity, and we need a space that will hold the number of people we’re going to have. And then we need certain objects to do the thing”—and that’s how we think about the space. But that, of course, wasn’t the case in the ancient world.

In the ancient world, the space itself is part of the ritual and part of the liturgics. So it’s not just a question of capacity and accoutrements. It’s a question of: How is what we’re doing embedded in the structure itself?

Fr. Andrew: Right, and you know we still have that concept. So if you walk into a theater, it’s designed to make theater possible. Or if you walk into a basketball arena, and you see the basketball hoops up there and the kind of flooring that’s down there and the seating that’s around it, all these things are designed to make basketball possible. It’s not just: Okay, we need a space to play this game in. The space and the way it’s set up is designed for what’s happening. It’s not like we don’t have that concept.

And it’s interesting—I mean, this is kind of a rabbit-trail somewhat, but it’s interesting to look at, for instance, where— There’s actually a book which I’ve never bought, but I think I kind of get the point from just the title. The title is When Church Became Theatre, and it’s basically about how church architecture altered in the last couple of hundred years in many places, from the traditional church architecture to a theatrical style space, and what that says and does with regards to the kind of thing that happens inside that particular place. So this is something that we know, but it’s not something we tend to think about when it comes to religious practices these days. It’s mostly about, like you said, capacity and décor, rather than a sense of setting up the space to do a particular thing in it, and it’s designed for… that it’s part of the ritual itself, which is how you put it, which I think is a good way to put it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the space itself is doing part of the thing. It’s doing its part in the thing that’s being done by the ritual. So this sort of path traced, using these footprints and using also the image of the god, is setting up for what’s going to be happening there. So that path is the path that the god or the divine being walked in order to go to be enthroned after having achieved some kind of victory. And that’s the broad strokes, so we can include both Baal and Buddha, who do not have a lot in common.

Fr. Andrew: It’s wonderfully alliterative.

Fr. Stephen: They do not have a lot in common.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, they don’t.

Fr. Stephen: But both of them walked a path, achieved a kind of victory, and then ended up seated at the back of the shrine, and portrayed in that way. So there’s a variety of different forms that that victory can take. If you’re talking about a Buddhist temple like in Myanmar, you’re talking about achieving enlightenment.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and you go in there and see the Buddha, an image of the Buddha, and he’s in his enlightened state: sitting in the lotus—not that I’m an expert in Buddhism, but he’s sitting in the lotus position and often has this sense of—this is not the Buddha as he’s going through his struggle; this is the Buddha after he’s achieved enlightenment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in the ancient world that we’re talking about, in the Ancient Near East in particular, so the world that the Scriptures come out of, it was not quite so placid and it was not sort of a spiritual victory in that sense. It was much more blood and guts, sometimes literally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you know we’ve talked, of course, especially in some of our earliest episodes—and I think we’ve alluded to it since then, but we’ve talked about what’s called the succession myth. And just to recap what that is: in many mythologies you have a most high god, and there’s some lesser god who goes and kills the most high god to set himself up as that. Sometimes it becomes a little more complicated, where you’ve got a father-son pairing that are in place, and another goes in to set his own dad up on the throne and to have himself as his right-hand man, and that’s what’s being talked about with Baal, that this is his defeat, as we’ve mentioned in the past, of Yam and Nahar, the ocean and river gods. So he defeats them, he walks this path, and he goes and is enthroned.

When we were talking about this during our prep period, I was reminded of playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne expansion, where the bad guy—although you’re playing the bad guy, if I remember correctly—it’s been ages…

Fr. Stephen: Arthas is the champion you’re playing there, and he sort of falls and becomes possessed by Ner’zhul, the lich-king.

Fr. Andrew: And at the very end, the last thing that happens in the game is him, having defeated all of his enemies, he sits down and is enthroned, and he’s now the guy in charge. I mean, this is a trope; you see it in a lot of literature, a lot of movies, that when someone wins they go and sit on the throne and that means that their authority has been set up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and sometimes it’s not so much they’re having to fight the last most high god and give him the boot and replace him; sometimes they’re… And even Baal is a little bit… Baal kind of mixes the two. But sometimes it’s what’s called Chaoskampf.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Another word for everyone to—this is today’s second secret word!

Fr. Stephen: Our German word for the day, Chaoskampf, straight from the 19th century, our favorite people over there in Germany in the 19th century.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which—Kampf means “struggle,” which probably a lot of people know that word, “Kampf,” because it’s the title of an autobiography by a certain very horrible person, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Kampf.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, really poorly written, too. Like, it’s not even… Yeah, anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, writing was not his forte.

Fr. Stephen: I know he was in jail… Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so Chaoskampf, the struggle against chaos, and that’s basically a god versus a chaos monster. And this takes lots of different forms in lots of different kinds of mythology, right? So you’ve got Odin with his brothers Vili and Vé. They go up against Ymir, who is this sort of primeval giant. They take him out. In Greek mythology you’ve got Kronos who takes out Ouranos or Uranus, who is sort of like the heavens. And then in Babylonian you’ve got Marduk versus Tiamat, who is a big dragon.

Fr. Stephen: And kind of his mom.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, that’s…

Fr. Stephen: How are you going to kill your own mom to make the earth? That’s so weird. Who does that?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and as you said sometimes this Chaoskampf results in the creation of the world or the creation of humanity or in some cases both. In the Norse one it ends up, it results in the destruction of the giants. There you go, everybody. [Laughter] When I think it’s blood comes out of Ymir’s toe and floods the world.

Fr. Stephen: Though usually when it does create the world/humans, especially the humans are an accidental by-product. It’s like, “Oops, I did it again. I made humans.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That may be our first Britney Spears reference. That’s good. First, maybe last… [Laughter] Never again.

So, right, there’s this notion of Chaoskampf that sometimes precedes this walking the path to enthronement.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so that’s being traced there in the physical space of the temple, in order to assist with the sacrificial ritual that’s going to take place there, and to play a part of it. As a reminder with our sacred geography, the reason you would have this traced into the physical space is that when the ritual is in process, that space and that time becomes the space and time of the enthronement of the god, of the victory and the enthronement of the God. This is what’s being reenacted in sort of your typical pagan ritual. We’ve talked about sort of the breakdown of the liturgics of sacrifice in one of our previous episodes on sacrifice, but in terms of what is being participated in, in your just day-to-day pagan sacrifice, what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, it’s this sort of recapitulation of that victory and enthronement, being reenacted and participated in again and again.

Fr. Andrew: So why would the community want to do that? Well, if you remember what we talked about when we talked about sacrifices—so we had an episode called “Eating with the Gods”—we talked about sacrifices… The point is that you’re making the god part of your community; you’re offering the god hospitality. Especially in the most ancient versions of paganism, that god is considered local to you. So why would you keep recapitulating, participating in—not exactly reenacting, because, again, the understanding is this is happening, in a sense, now by doing this ritual—why would you do this over and over again?

Well, it’s basically like welcoming Dad home, so to speak. [Laughter] It’s recognizing the authority of your god. It’s welcoming him. Often, there’s a lot of flattery and stuff that goes along with it, but it’s really this affirmation of his authority within your community and his ability to bind everybody together. So enthronement is not just like “oh, you won, you got the throne”; it’s really, that’s the center of the community’s life: that’s the throne of the god, just as the throne of, you know, your local warlord or your king or whatever becomes the focal point of the community. So that’s why this is part of the daily normal sacrifice. It’s not a special occasion in that sense, in the sense that this is something that happens once in a great while; it’s something that you’re doing all the time. They’re constantly recapitulating, constantly reaffirming the authority, the victory, the enthronement of their god. So that’s why these temples are set up this way with these footprints and other things that are involved as well.

And, you know, part of it is to keep him pleased. “Ah, here’s your big chair.” “Oh, thank you.”

Fr. Stephen: You’re flattering him. You’re participating in his alleged victory, so you’re saying, “Yeah, Baal, you totally won, man. You totally won. Totally the best. You’re great.” [Laughter] And this understanding—here’s a place in the Scriptures where this understanding lies behind what seems like an off-hand comment. In Pergamon, or Pergamos, depending on the era in which you’re talking about the city, there was at the top of the acropolis in the city, so at the highest point in the city, there was a gigantic great altar to Zeus. It’s now in the University of Berlin, but the reason it’s at the University of Berlin Museum is that it has these incredible sculptures, like human-size sculptures on the side. It is this massive thing with massive steps leading up to the top of it. Depicted in those sculptures is the gigantomachy. It’s the victory of the Olympian gods over the giants. You went up the steps to the footstool of the throne of Zeus to make the offerings.

So this sat at the top of this high point of the city, belching smoke of these sacrifices day and night, towering over everything, celebrating this supposed victory of Zeus over the giants. And when St. John attaches his sort of cover letter to the book of Revelation to Pergamon, he refers to this as the throne of Satan. And this is how he’s making that connection. Zeus is part of that succession myth. He’s the devil claiming he won in his revolt when he didn’t. This is his throne. They’re coming and buttering him up and offering him tribute, assuring him that, oh, he really did win. And he’s writing to the Christians and talking about how they live in the shadow of that every day as this persecuted Christian minority in the city. But it makes perfect sense to call that the throne of Satan if you understand what’s going on there and what the pagans understood what was going on there.

Fr. Andrew: And another aspect to this which I think is really important—I mean, I said earlier that this kind of binds a community together, but also this underlies the notion of foundings of civilizations and cities and peoples. This is a foundational myth, and myth, remember, within ritual theory, is not just a story that isn’t true; it’s a story that everyone participates in and actually shapes the community. So this is foundational. This is about the creation of this city or whatever it is. And so, again, the throne becomes the focal point. That’s what it’s all founded on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so in Athens, Athena and Hephaestus were the gods who were “assigned” that area, according to the Athenians. So that land, the land they were working for food, belonged to those gods, and those gods created the Athenians as this special race out of that ground. So it was all bound together in their minds. What kept that bond going was the ritual cycle of sacrifices. This is why Christians opting out was not seen as an option.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and also, just as a kind of side note, most kinds of paganism had this sense that their local gods had created them, and that other gods had created other peoples. It’s within the worship of Israel that you have this idea that all of mankind has a single origin, which, then, implies that all of mankind has a single God.

Fr. Stephen: Which point St. Paul makes in Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: “From one man, he made all the peoples of the world.” And he’s talking about the Most High God…

Fr. Andrew: And they would have argued with that! Like, “No, no, we were made by Athena and Hephaestus…”

Fr. Stephen: Right, “and that makes us better.” Athenian democracy was not as democratic as we might like to think.

Fr. Andrew: Alas, no. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And then another thing that was celebrated, another sort of aspect that was sometimes celebrated that has some interesting biblical echoes was the marriage of the god to the city as his bride. So that bond we were just talking about, like the one that the Athenians saw in Athens, they would talk about this in terms of Hephaestus having Athens as a bride, and the goddess Athena being a sort of personification, as feminine, of the city itself; or the city itself being a body of Athena. So that language is common all over the place in the Ancient Near East and in ancient Greece. I think we’ve said before on the show, ancient Greece was not the first Western civilization; it was the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization.

But this has some resonances, then, in the Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, this idea, where you will see over and over again Zion and Jerusalem and sometimes even Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, being referred to as the wife or the bride of Yahweh, the God of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: And then that’s the origin of the language that gets used in the Church that the Church is the bride of Christ. It comes from this notion of the community being married to the god. And here’s one—this is not “we ruin Sunday school”; this might be we ruin— [Laughter] I don’t know, modern Orthodox myth? Liturgical myth?

Fr. Stephen: Urban legends.

Fr. Andrew: Urban legends, right. So you’ll often see in Orthodox liturgical texts the people of God being described as being a city. For instance, addressing God or sometimes addressing the Virgin Mary, “I, thy city, ascribe to thee praise,” whatever, whatever. And a lot of times people, because they have this big shadow in their minds of the Eastern Roman Empire and all that kind of thing, they assume that that city that’s being referred to is Constantinople. So—it’s not.

“The city” is the Church. Now, Constantinople, in as much as it has been Christian, can be being that city, but it’s not the city of God. The city of God is the Church, and it’s the city of God that addresses God and that addresses the Virgin Mary and the saints and so forth. It’s not… There may sometimes be references to Constantinople, or other cities, great cities, in liturgical texts, as they personify this, but the origin of this language is the Scripture, actually. Other cities can participate in that reality, but only inasmuch as they are being Christian. It’s not sacrificed for all time, as in one particular city here or there. There is a religion that does that, and this isn’t that one. [Laughter] There’s a couple of them that do that, actually. This isn’t that religion.

Fr. Stephen: And when we understand that the Church is a polis, that has all kinds of ramifications that we’re going to talk about probably in some future episode, about tou politis. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, polis being the ancient Greek word for “city,” although it’s a bigger concept than that. Here in Emmaus, we pray for “this city and every city”—well, Emmaus, if you walk around, it’s three square miles; no one would call it a city in modern English. But it is a polis in that sense. It’s a community; it’s a people.

I love this, and I love how… I mean, we’ve talked about this many, many times, but I just want to underline it in this case, about how all these notions that are going around the Ancient Near East about what it means to have a devotion to your god and what the god’s relationship is to your community, how all of that is fulfilled in the Scriptures and shown to really be truly about the relationship of the people of God with Yahweh, their Creator. So this is just a beautiful example of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the way it’s… The instinct that still latent to humanity that gets distorted due to a lack of knowledge and due to demonic manipulation in the other nations is sort of purified and restored and brought to its proper place within the actual polis of Yahweh the God of Israel. And, just to finish up this first half, if you were to go to the mount of Ascension in the Holy Land, and you were going to go to the site—it’s no longer able to function as a church, unfortunately; it’s in an Islamic compound—but if you go to the site of the original Church of the Ascension on the mount of Ascension, what you will find there is, in a stone, the print of Christ’s right foot.

Fr. Andrew: A petrosomatoglyph. So, yes, exactly. All right, well, that wraps up the first half of The Lord of the Spirits tonight, so we’re going to go to break, and as soon as we come back from break, we’re going to take one of your calls.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to the second half of The Lord of Spirits on this feast of the Ascension. And we’re going to start taking your calls, and we actually do have a caller here on the second half, John from Atlanta. John, are you there?

John: I am, Father. Good to talk to you.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, John, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What’s on your mind?

John: Aw, I was hoping you’d slip up and say, “Westu hal,” but okay.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, westu hal. [Laughter] “Be thou well” in Old English, yes!

John: Thank you. And, Fr. Stephen is free to know me. [Laughter] But I have long wondered about this. We read the eighth eothinon gospel last, and then, this being Ascension, we read today a gospel from Luke. And in the eighth eothinon, Mary Magdalene sees the gardener and—“Don’t touch me. I haven’t yet ascended to my Father.” And then we know, 40 days later, he ascends to the Father. And in this gospel, in Luke, he’s saying, “Handle me.” Of course, with Thomas he said, “Put your hand in my side and feel the prints of the nails” and all this. And in this gospel from Luke at the Ascension he says, “Handle me and see.” It’s long made me wonder if there is some ascension we don’t know about that occurs after he meets Mary Magdalene in the garden, when he’s saying, “You can’t touch me; I’ve just come from Hades.” And then later it’s okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So the one thing that I can say to that, because it just leaped into my mind right off, is that the hymns that discuss St. Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the Lord there, they actually give an explanation as to why he says that to her, which is that she—her mind was on earthly things, it says that, so that she was thinking… I mean, you can expand that whatever way you like, but that’s what the hymns say. So in other words it’s not that he can be handled after the ascension; it’s that she’s not… her mind is not where it should be, and so it would not be appropriate for her to embrace him that way. So that’s the way that the hymns interpret it.

The change is not that Jesus did something and changed it so he can be touched later; it’s that St. Mary Magdalene’s state of heart is not appropriate to be able to do that. Now, I can’t say I totally understand exactly what that means, but that is what the hymns say, is that she’s thinking—sometimes you’ll see it translated “carnally,” which doesn’t mean anything prurient; it just means thinking according to earthly things, according to the flesh, that kind of thing. So that’s the liturgical interpretation that I can remember off the top of my head. Father, is there something you wanted to add to that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, let me try and connect those dots for you, between the two things in terms of how you get from one to the other. It isn’t like when Christ had just gotten back from Hades he was too hot to handle and too cold to hold or something. [Laughter] And “touch” isn’t really the best translation of the word that’s used there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s like “hold” or “grab onto.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s like “hold” or “cling to.”

Fr. Andrew: “Cling to,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s in St. John’s gospel, so it comes at the end of a whole long piece that we read most of, actually, on Holy Thursday night, of teaching from Christ to his disciples. And in that, he talks about—and this is one of the major themes of that whole back half of St. John’s gospel—Christ ascending and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Remember, he teaches that it’s to your benefit that I go, because then the Holy Spirit will come. So the idea is, he’s saying, “Don’t cling to me,” because what St. Mary Magdalene is thinking is, “Oh, I’ve got him back. I thought I had lost him, but now I have him back, and I want to keep him and I want to cling to him.” And that’s why he’s saying, “Don’t cling to me, because I still have to ascend, the Holy Spirit has to come…” So it’s sort of parallel to what happens on the mount of Transfiguration, when St. Peter is like, “Hey, let’s build little tents for you…”

John: “Build three tabernacles.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “for you and Moses and Elijah, and we’ll all just stay up here.” And it’s like… No. Yes, this is this moment of joy, yes, this is this wonderful thing, but we can’t camp out here. There’s something more happening; there’s something more coming. And that was the Ascension and then what came after.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, John?

John: It does!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s only one Ascension. There’s just the one.

John: Oh, so just the one. All right.

Fr. Andrew: Just the one.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the idea behind she was thinking carnally or in a worldly way. She was thinking of “oh, I’ve got him back, and I want him to stay here with me now.”

John: Right.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you very much for that call, John.

John: Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: We have another caller, Samuel, from the God-blessed commonwealth of Virginia, my natal state! Samuel, welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

Samuel: Thank you, Father. You said something similar the last time I called…

Fr. Andrew: That is because Virginia is a blessed land.

Samuel: So… When you were talking about the depictions of pagan gods being enthroned on mountains, mountain temples, I was wondering if you guys had any insight on a particular example of that in today’s popular culture. Are you familiar with Warhammer 30,000?

Fr. Andrew: I bet Fr. Samuel is. I’m aware of it.

Fr. Stephen: Fr. Samuel?

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, it’s Fr. Stephen. We’re talking to Samuel, you’re Fr. Stephen, yeah, yeah. I do know a Fr. Samuel in West Virginia, as we both know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Which, West Virginia is the best Virginia.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the rest of Virginia! [Laughter] Sorry, Warhammer 40k, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I am somewhat, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Was there some particular thing in there, Samuel, that you had in mind?

Samuel: I was thinking about how, in that setting, humanity is ruled over by an emperor who is around 15 feet tall and now sits on a throne on the highest mountains of earth and requires regular sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how about that!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s a god-emperor. In return, he enables interstellar, faster-than-light travel.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go. I mean, you’ll see… Once you see these patterns from the ancient world, you’ll start to see them in lots of places. It just keeps getting repeated in culture, whether it’s popular culture or classical literature; it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. Does that answer your question, Samuel?

Samuel: Yeah. Well, actually, this emperor was said to have been born in the Ancient Near East.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you are. Quelle surprise! [Laughter] Thank you very much for calling tonight, Samuel. It’s good to talk to you again.

Fr. Stephen: I was actually reading Wikipedia’s article, “Buddha Footprints,” earlier today.

Fr. Andrew: How about that! [Laughter] Yeah, it’s a fun article. Thanks for calling. Next we have Hannah calling—

Fr. Stephen: Now, just a second.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry. Go ahead, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t want to bash a caller after they get off the phone, but Samuel is clearly not a careful listener, because I have made a “blood for the blood-god” reference on a past episode, and he apparently missed it, or he would have known.

Fr. Andrew: Well, not everybody can be… Okay, well. It’s okay, Samuel. You live in Virginia, so you’re great.

Fr. Stephen: We still love you.

Fr. Andrew: We have Hannah calling. So, Hannah, are you there? What’s on your mind?

Hannah: I’m here. Thank you for taking my call.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome.

Hannah: I have recently been learning and studying more about the… actually, natural family planning, and you can’t get very far in natural family planning without coming across the theology of the body. Some things that have come up in the theology of the body is that, well, a quote—is that

The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it.

My question is: How well does this fit in with Orthodox theology?

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Do you have a few hours? [Laughter]

Hannah: I do, but you don’t.

Fr. Andrew: Well, we theoretically could, but we’d lose listeners left and right after about five hours.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Hannah: I’ve heard through my Orthodox development at different times hints about the body of man and woman being changed after the fall, and so I’m wondering how much we can really take as signs of the divine from our fallen bodies.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. Yeah, there is the problem that we are in this state. So human bodies get altered… We talked about this in some detail in the bodies episodes, you may recall, earlier this year. But they, just to kind of recap… When Adam and Eve sin, God… And so they would not be crystallized in evil, God gives them mortality: this phrase “the garments of skin,” as some of the Fathers interpret that phrase from Genesis. And they become mortal; they become corruptible. And the point of this, actually, was not God being so mad at them he just had to punish them and give them this mortal state, but rather he was giving them the ability to repent, because you can’t repent if you don’t have a mortal body. St. John of Damascus says this, and he says it as a kind of sideways way of talking about why it is that demons won’t repent—because they don’t have mortal bodies. But also it’s useful to remember that when you’re parted from your mortal body, you don’t then have the ability to repent, because you don’t have it any more. It’s your mortal body that gives you that ability.

So, right, we can’t start with humanity as it currently exists now and then analogize outward from there to talk about the divine. That’s completely backwards. Human beings were created according to the image of God, so we are, as we described it, theomorphic; we’re cheap imitations of God, in a sense, and we’re in this sort of weakened state of being mortal, which was given to us so that we could repent. So any theology of the body has to take that into account. It cannot absolutize our current state and come up with a model for understanding who we are in relation to God as a result of that, because this is… It’s not just broken; it has a purpose. This broken state we have has a purpose, so that we can repent. Father, I didn’t know if you wanted to add anything to that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, a couple things. I think the quote you read is talking about the body qua physical and material, which is not always the way we use “body” on this show, but is part of it. And so the sine qua non fulfillment of that quote you just read is of course the Theotokos giving birth to Christ. It’s through her human body that the Mystery, capital-M, of the ages, Christ himself, is manifest in the world; it’s through humanity taken from her body. So that’s the sine qua non of that, and that’s what St. Paul is getting at, by the way, when he says that woman will be saved by childbirth. People come up with really bizarro-world understandings of that, that women having babies makes them saved or something.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it’s about the woman…

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the word he uses there is not a woman; the word for a woman. It’s the word for woman, like womanhood, like “woman” as a concept. The same what that, you may know, in Greek there’s anthropos, which is sort of “humanity, man/humanity,” kind of thing, and then aner, which is just “a man.” This is talking about woman is saved through childbearing. So it’s talking about womanhood: what God created woman to be, we see fulfilled in the Theotokos.

So that’s the sort of core fulfillment of that, but also humanity is both material and immaterial, and humanity therefore, in Orthodox theology, functions as the bridge between the spiritual world and the material world, to bring the two together. And that’s sort of the basis of all of our sacramental theology, that God’s grace comes to us through the created world and through matter and through our physicality. Adam was created in the first place, visible and invisible, in order to serve as a priest and bridge those two realities and bring them both to perfection, which of course, as we know, he failed to do. But Christ, then, does that perfectly.

Fr. Andrew: Does that help there, Hannah?

Hannah: It does! It does. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome.

Hannah: And, Fr. Andrew, I’m still waiting on the edge of my seat for talk of dragons.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, you’re in luck! We’re about to mention a dragon!

Hannah: Yay!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for calling, Hannah.

Hannah: Thank you so much, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, I know we have some other callers, but we’re going to move on and start talking a little bit about a dragon. Boy, that was just a perfect segue!

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to move on through fire and flames.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. Back to Genesis 1.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we’re going to leave the pro-devil propaganda and go to the Scriptures—

Fr. Andrew: For what really happened.

Fr. Stephen: —for the corrected version. And we will see—this is an in-joke that only a handful of people will get, but we will see that there are continuities and discontinuities with the Scriptures.

So when we talked a little bit in the last half about the way the creation myth kind of got worked into the victory stories of the gods, particularly the creation of humanity, sometimes the creation of the earth, when you read Genesis 1 and the first couple verses of chapter two—because why did they put the break there? anyway—there are some striking things that you notice over against it. And probably the first one is that, in Genesis 1 at least, there’s no element of Chaoskampf. Yahweh doesn’t have to fight anybody; there’s no throw-down between him and the forces of chaos. The chaos is there in Genesis 1:2…

Fr. Andrew: And he just founds the earth upon it. Boom!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he just kind of bosses it around.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t have to have a wrestling match with Leviathan, with a dragon—there you are, Hannah! [Laughter] Like, there is this sense of God against Leviathan, but it’s mostly God pushing Leviathan around. I remember you said at one point, Father, someone asked about Leviathan, and you said, “Oh, yeah, God plays with Leviathan like a cat.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s the way he’s depicted in some of the psalms.

Fr. Andrew: That’s amazing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so there [are] these motifs from the Chaoskampf idea and the surrounding countries get picked up, places in the Old Testament. And I’ll do the quick list here so that people can pause it or look it up in the transcript when such a thing materializes, but that’s in Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Psalm 93, Job 26:12-13; and Isaiah 51:9-10. You see that imagery sort of taken over and played with. In one case, like you mentioned, rather than him fighting Leviathan, he makes Leviathan as a sort of house-pet to play with. And in another place, he catches Leviathan like a fish, apparently as a hobby. [Laughter] Right, so that’s this huge contrast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it doesn’t create the world when these things happen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, no, this is something that happens later. And in addition to there being no Chaoskampf, of course there’s no succession myth. There’s no other most high god who has to show up and he has to defeat to take over, and there’s not anyone whom he’s worried about. I mean, somebody has a go at it in Genesis 3, but he loses badly. And there’s not even a fight. It’s not like in Genesis 3, God has to fight the devil and beat him.

Fr. Andrew: He’s just cast out. “Get out.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he just throws him out and tells him to buzz off. “Enjoy the underworld.”

Fr. Andrew: Last night we were talking about—shameless plug for your new book, The Religion of the Apostles—we were talking about how your book, in a class that we’re doing here in Emmaus, and I was talking about the succession myth, because that’s in chapter four, and someone brought up… They just said, “What a beautiful contrast”—I thought this was so beautiful that they brought this up. “What an amazing contrast where you’ve got, in all of these pagan myths, there’s this divine father and son, and often what’s going down is the son killing his father, but in the worship of the God of Israel, you’ve got a perfectly obedient Son who reigns alongside his Father and works alongside his Father. It’s a picture of humility and not of struggle.”

Because, I mean, if you’re omnipotent, why would you…? There’s no such thing as struggle! And we see this in the gospels, where they’re on the Sea of Galilee and the storm is picking up or whatever, and Christ just says, “Peace. Be still,” and the disciples are like, “Who is this, that the wind and waves just simply obey him?” He doesn’t have to, like, cast a spell or wrestle against the demons of the water; they just simply obey him. Boom. What a contrast that is!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and I mean it’s stark, if you read the two side by side, that this is not even a similar story. And this is what, for example, in Isaiah, when Yahweh says, “Before me there was no god, and after me there will be no other,” this is what he’s talking about. He’s talking about—because we’re talking about Assyrians and Babylonians now—in contrast, there was no god before Yahweh whom he overthrew, and there’s nobody coming along who’s going to change the situation in the future. This is the way it is.

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s the Creator.

Fr. Stephen: And so we also see, then, in that story, as we’ve talked about before in a previous episode, in Genesis 1, that the cosmos, as it’s constructed, as it’s put in order by Yahweh, is this sort of giant temple, with Eden as the sanctuary of that temple, and then Adam created by God as his image in that sanctuary in that temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is a contrast with the way paganism works, in which man sets up a temple and creates an image of the god and puts it in there; instead, you get God creates the temple, puts his own image, which is human beings.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re going to talk about this more as we go on in this half. Things are getting inverted; they’re getting turned on their head.

So we’ve talked about that before in a previous episode, so that was quick review. But the element we want to focus on for our purpose tonight, when we eventually actually directly talk about the Ascension in the third half, which you should have expected by now, because that’s how these things work on this show…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. The third half is inevitable.

Fr. Stephen: ...is the seventh day. The seventh day, which—talk about things which are treated as afterthoughts! One of the most—even though I refuse to talk about it—one of the things that most interested/entertained me about some of the debates about the length of the days of creation in certain circles was that there were times where people were literally arguing for seven 24-hour days—not six: seven. So they wanted to say that God literally rested for 24 hours, which I always found a little amusing as an idea.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it comes from this idea that… And I think probably a lot of us were raised with this notion, like God works six days and then rests. And because we tend to think of him anthropomorphically, we think, “Ah, yes. I, too, need a weekend.” [Laughter] And so that’s what the sabbath is about, because “God needed a break, because he worked so hard.” So we need to take at least one day off.

But that’s not what is meant by, when Christ says that the sabbath is made for man; it’s actually this God entering into his rest. Entering into his rest. And so when the sabbath is given to man, it’s to do the same thing. So what that means is that, when God completes his work in creation and then goes and rests, it’s not because he needs a break—he’s God; God does not need a break. He does not need to take some time off, does not need a weekend. Again, that’s thinking anthropomorphically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the idea of Israel entering into his rest even, isn’t: “If I lie just here, would you lie with me and just forget the world, because, oh, it’s been so difficult.” [Laughter] This rest—this is rest like coming to rest, like sitting down, like we just talked about in temples.

Fr. Andrew: Sitting down, enthroned.

Fr. Stephen: This is the end of the path. You get to the end of the path, you’ve completed your victory, you have built your temple, and now you go and you go and sit down on your throne; you take your seat. So joining God in his rest is coming to be seated with him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so when the sabbath is given to man—and not… You know, the sabbath is made for man and not man for the sabbath. The sabbath is made for man: that is God saying, “Walk this path to the place of my throne, and sit here beside me.” In other words, that the sabbath being made for man is actually an image of theosis. It’s actually about becoming like God, becoming co-enthroned with him.

Fr. Stephen: So in the Old Testament, by observing the sabbath, they are, in the liturgical week, enacting the promise to Abraham, to become like the stars, that the promise to Abraham at the end. That’s why it’s at the end of the week. They’re looking forward to it, at the end of the week, that being the goal and the destiny.

And so as we were mentioning, and we’re going to break down a little more here, the story we’re told—the myth, the story you can participate in—that we’re told in the Old Testament is taking the pagan one and flipping it on its head. That’s how a pagan would have experienced it. Now, from our perspective, of course, this is the true story, and the demons have taken that and flipped it on its head and sold it as a lie to the nations in terms of reality, but a pagan would have experienced it as: You’ve taken this story that we all know—I mean, we disagree about the names of the gods involved, but we all know this story—you’ve taken it and flipped everything around.

The main way to describe that flip overall is that the pagan story makes ritual and makes worship all human-directed toward the divine, meaning it’s the human who goes and makes the body for the god so that the god will have a body and they can interact with each other; it’s the humans who have to come and feed and dress and care for and honor and celebrate and appease and please the god. So all of that motion is directed in that way, as opposed to God creating his own image, as you mentioned, as opposed to what we talked about in a previous episode, the show-bread, which is, rather than them bringing food to God in the tabernacle in the temple, God feeds his priests during their service in the tabernacle in the temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then, okay, just to extend it into the direct, everyday experience, really, of Orthodox Christians: at the very beginning of the Divine Liturgy, the deacon says to the priest, “It is time for the Lord to act,” which is why—I’m sorry for those of you who have this translation; sometimes you hear, “It is time to begin the service of the Lord.” That is exactly backwards!

Fr. Stephen: It’s actually more accurate to the original, though. I have to “um, actually…” you a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, that’s fine.

Fr. Stephen: I agree with you in terms of my preference, but.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, right, but the point is that it is an action by… The Divine Liturgy is an action by God towards us. He’s feeding us. He’s doing this work for us. It is a Divine Liturgy, for the people; it is a public service. I can hear Fr. Lucas Christensen, whom I don’t think we’ve referenced in this show before; in his head he’s saying, “That’s right. It’s not ‘the work of the people.’ It’s the work for the people.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s true. It’s definitely not “the work of the people.” Resolved. [Laughter] But so, the idea is the pagan gods need a bunch of things from humanity, whether it’s flattery and praise, like, “Oh, no, Baal, you’re the best! Everybody you fought, you won!” or whether it’s food, whether it’s to be dressed, whether it’s to be cared for—they require all of these things, and if not, they get peevish and they don’t do what you want them to do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you have to keep them happy.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s all these demands imposed on humanity. It’s literally in there. When you read Sumerian religious texts, for example, that basically humans were created to be the gods’ slaves and serve them, which—what do you expect from demons that are trying to enslave humanity? They’re being honest. They’re saying the quiet part out loud to the Sumerians.

But the reality is, since God created all things—Yahweh the God of Israel created all things—everything belongs to him. He doesn’t need anything of yours. In fact, everything that you think of as yours belongs to him anyway. That’s why we say in the Liturgy, “Thine own of thine own, we offer unto thee,” because we don’t actually have anything. It all belongs to him, so he doesn’t need anything. Rather, the whole perspective of Old Testament religion, of Old Testament religion, is that God shares, out of his love, the things that are his with humans, whom he loves. The whole idea is that he moves outside of himself. He gets up off of his throne. He creates the cosmos for us and puts us in it, and then he sits back down again, after he, out of love, has left his throne to do that. And this is Old Testament.

This is what they understood in the Old Testament. This isn’t just a new thing that starts in the New Testament. So when Christ goes and feeds 5,000 people, he’s enacting what Yahweh the God of Israel has been doing all along, from the manna in the wilderness to the show-bread, and he’s showing that he’s the same God. That’s part of how that’s revealed in the New Testament.

So this changes the context of praise in worship. In Israel, praise and worship is primarily thanksgiving. That’s why we call it the Eucharist. It’s thanksgiving because we’re acknowledging all of the goods that we’ve received from God. It’s not flattery; it’s not trying to meet God’s needs or approval, like he’s insecure like Baal is. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And most, even Orthodox prayers that specifically ask God for something, the usual narrative structure that they take is to say, “God, once you did this”—and then often include a “thanks!”—“could you please do it now again for us?” That’s the way that it goes. It’s not like, “Oh…” Like you said, it’s not flattery; it’s not obsequious.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve all heard, unfortunately, from some of our Christian friends, prayers that are sort of, like: Okay, I’m going to butter God up for a few minutes, and then I’m going to read him my list of demands.” [Laughter] Like, I’m going to try to get him good and buttered up, and then I’m going to ask him for things. But that’s not… that’s not correct. That’s not how we pray as Christians. That’s not what it’s about. He doesn’t need your flattery. You’re not fooling him; you’re not tricking him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so part of, then, the way that that gets expressed liturgically, meaning ritual participation, in the Old Testament, and then, frankly, also in the new covenant as well, you’ve got these… two of the big feasts, particularly: Passover, which is a renewal of the Exodus, and that is about the creation of the people of Israel, and of course it’s also about God’s defeat of the Egyptians gods; and then you’ve also got Pentecost, which is about the giving of the law, so it’s a renewal of the covenant. So these things are baked into the liturgical cycle. It’s a participation in creation, as always being renewed by God, something that we receive from God. So both of those acts—the Passover is an action by God; the giving of the law at the end of the 50 days is an action by God, so our participation in those things is to renew our experience of them, our reception of them, for me and my generation to do the same thing, to have the exact same experience [as] those who did it first. That’s just baked in to the way that we do this.

Fr. Stephen: And those two feasts were the creation of Israel. Before that, there was no Israel, and afterwards there was.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It begins with Passover, and it’s completed in Pentecost.

Fr. Stephen: Now, as a tease, we’ve been talking about sort of this continuity between Old and New Testament, but now here’s one of those points of discontinuity, and that is that in the Old Testament with the tabernacle and the temple, God is dwelling there with the people and the people are near him, but not that many people could actually go into the tabernacle or the temple. And only one guy, once a year, could go into the actual holy of holies, the actual sanctuary, at that time. So they couldn’t actually go in. So humanity was still kind of outside, though he had been brought near. And that’s a tease for two weeks from today, when we talk about Pentecost.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed. It wouldn’t be a Lord of Spirits episode if we didn’t at one point say, “Well, we’ll talk about that in a later episode.”

Fr. Stephen: Yep, but this one is soon, T-M.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, quite soon. Indeed. All right, so there’s some cool structure stuff that goes on in the New Testament and in some of the early Fathers that we want to talk about, how we participate in God’s creation, his renewal of creation. And the thing you pointed out, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who is second century? Or am I blanking: is it third century?

Fr. Stephen: Second.

Fr. Andrew: Second, yeah, yeah, super early on, because his spiritual father was St. Polycarp, who was a spiritual son of the Apostle John. Yeah, so it’s got to be second century. He’s talking about some of this stuff, but he’s getting it, ultimately, as you pointed out in our earlier conversation, from St. John. So why don’t you talk about how that works out in St. John’s New Testament literature?

Fr. Stephen: Well, if you know one thing about St. Irenaeus, it’s probably annoying people pointing out that they think he said Jesus was 50 years old when he died, but if you know two things about St. Irenaeus, the second one is probably you have some idea that he talked about what’s called recapitulation, which literally would mean to re-head, to head-again. [Laughter] And that’s the idea that he has theologically, in terms of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and on a broader theological scale, this renewal and re-creation taking place. And he gets that from St. John; it’s baked into the Johannine literature in the Scriptures. And that’s even at the level of structure. St. John’s gospel and the book of Revelation and 1 John all have a similar structure in this way. 2 and 3 John are kind of too short to have a structure; it’s hard to structure a paragraph in a complicated way. But, I mean, I’m sure you could give it a try a few times yourself.

Fr. Andrew: St. Paul could do it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And they way they’re structured is sort of like a spiral or a corkscrew, meaning it moves in circles or cycles, but it also progresses forward, so it’s not just spinning its wheels, going around in a flat circle like time—

Fr. Andrew: Or the wheel of fortune.

Fr. Stephen: It’s moving forward, but it’s moving forward in this circular path. In St. John’s gospel, it’s structured around the three years of Christ’s ministry, and each of those three years he sort of goes through the festal cycle of Israel, the cycle of feasts, and progresses through three cycles of feasts. In the book of Revelation, this is real obvious even if you just read the subject headers in your English translation, because you get seven churches, seven lamp-stands, seven bowls, seven seals, seven trumpets. There are sort of these repeating cycles of seven, and each new cycle of seven sort of takes off from the seventh of the last cycle, so that the narrative sort of moves forward, but it moves forward in these cycles of seven. Seven because of the sabbath; that’s part of what St. John is aiming at in the book of Revelation that we’ll probably talk about more in a future episode.

So the one we want to kind of focus in on here because of what we’ve just been talking about, the creation as sort of the primary point in view of the regular, daily liturgics of the tabernacle and temple in the old covenant, is connected to specifically St. John’s gospel and the way in which in that, not just the back half that I mentioned earlier when we were talking about that question, but the Passion narrative itself, which we also, of course, read on Holy Thursday, because we read almost everything on Holy Thursday. But it’s specifically the way that St. John, when he gets to describing Christ’s Passion and death on the cross, he swirls in all of this language drawn from the Greek of the story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2.

We see this in a bunch of places that we don’t have time to develop them all right now, but you see this with the Theotokos and the parallel he makes with Eve, where the Theotokos goes from being referred to as “Woman,” over and over again throughout the gospel, to now being referred to as “Mother” in the same way that Eve’s name is actually “Woman” before Genesis 3, and then after the expulsion from paradise, her name is changed to “Eve,” to “Eva,” from “Issha,” because she is now the mother of all the living. And you see the opening of Christ’s side when he dies, like the opening of Adam’s side, when Eve, his bride, is created.

But specifically here, related to the sabbath language that we’ve just been talking about, in one of the interminable run-ins that Christ has with the Pharisees throughout the gospels, where they’re after him about doing something, or his disciples doing something on the sabbath—it comes up over and over and over and over again, because they just don’t get the sabbath—in John 5:17, this time Christ says something very particular in that he says that his Father is still working until that very day and that—and he says that, “I am working,” Christ is working, still. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that “until that very day,” that that’s the day he stopped. Let the listener understand who has questions about Matthew.

Meaning what? Well, if our understanding of the rest of Yahweh at the end of creation is that God leaves his throne, he works, and then when he is done he is re-enthroned, this is what Christ is appealing to: the work is not done. What work? The work of the creation and the cosmos. We talked before in a previous episode about how Adam and Eve’s job was to continue putting things in order and filling the world with life, to continue that work of creation, and they failed, and now Christ has left his throne in the heavenly places, is now at work to bring that to completion, after which he will be re-enthroned. And when Christ dies on the cross in St. John’s gospel, he says, “Tetelestai,” which is usually translated as, “It is finished,” but that’s the same verb that’s used at the beginning of Genesis 2 to say that when God completed his work, he rested on the seventh day. So Christ says that now it is finished, and then he rests in the tomb on the seventh day.

This is where the language that you’ll hear in the Orthodox Church and Orthodox theology about the eighth day, the beginning of a new creation, the beginning of a new cycle, when Christ rises—this is where that comes from. But that first cycle is completed by Christ, as he says several times in St. John’s gospel. “Father, restore to me the glory which I shared with you before the world began.” That Christ is going to return to the throne that he left and be enthroned again.

Fr. Andrew: And with that, that ends the second half of The Lord of Spirits for tonight, and we’re going to go ahead and go to a break. We’ll get back to some of your calls. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody. This is the third half of The Lord of Spirits, and I see we have some callers that have been patiently waiting. So first we’re going to take a call from Davíd. Davíd, are you there?

Davíd: I am here.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Davíd; welcome to Lord of Spirits. What’s on your mind?

Davíd: So I was wondering if there was anything, tying into the last episode about Christ’s body, if there was anything to the idea why his wounds are still present after the resurrection, is related to Hebrews 9 and him reentering into the heavenly temple to sprinkle his blood as the once and for all sacrifice as opposed to the annual Day of Atonement sacrifice?

Fr. Andrew: Wow, that’s a great question.

Davíd: Yeah, I don’t think I have any follow-up, so I’ll listen off the air.

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to punt that directly to Fr. Stephen! Well, great. Fr. Stephen, I am sending that directly to you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: There we go! All right, good night, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so Christ’s wounds in particular are special, obviously, but what I mean by that is—this isn’t like Beetlejuice, where you die in some particular way and your spirit is that way forever or something, obviously. So that’s what I mean by special; Christ’s wounds are different. So he is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, and so his sacrifice has an eternal reality to it that enters into the time and space of human experience at a certain point, but is an eternal reality. What’s going on in Hebrews—and this would take a lot of time to unpack: future episode—what’s going on in Hebrews is not that St. Paul—and I’m not going to go into all that now either—St. Paul is not saying that there was this sort of… the way we tend to think of it, that there was this big transition, like, yeah, the goat blood was doing it up until now, but now this thing happened, and so now it’s different going forward.

The reason the goat blood worked—what the goat blood did, what the Day of Atonement ritual did was bring the people of the old covenant into participation in Christ’s sacrifice beforehand. So in Hebrews St. Paul is saying that his offering of his blood in the sanctuary—this goes with him being slain eternally—is an eternal reality, meaning not just a spatio-temporal reality, but a reality that is eternally, capital-T True, but that enters into human experience at various points in time. And it enters into our experience, too, so we, then, celebrate the Eucharist, where Christ’s blood is, and drink his life, and that’s us now, after the fact, participating in that, as we’re cleansed by his blood.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense, Davíd?

Davíd: Yeah. I’m glad that I was onto a little bit of something there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! That’s pretty cool. Okay, well, thanks for calling. All right, we have one more caller we’re going to take right now, and that’s David. So, David, are you there?

David: I am.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, David, to The Lord of Spirits. What’s on your mind?

David: Well, yeah, I guess this is probably the wrong place for a pragmatic question…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No.

Fr. Stephen: No, those are Fr. Andrew’s questions.

Fr. Andrew: There you go, right. Finally, something I can answer. [Laughter]

David: Perhaps. I guess the question is, kind of in a simple form: How do we know what we are ritually participating in? We make a lot of statements about liturgical bodies and ritual participation in them, with us having physical bodies and spiritual beings having other bodies. How do you know what you’re participating in, or if what you’re doing is actively or passively participating in something? I’m not sure if that makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: I think so. So let me see if I can restate your question in a way that makes sense to both of us. I think what you’re asking is essentially: How do we know that it’s working, and what it’s doing when it’s working? Is that what you’re saying?

David: Yeah, how do you know that it’s working? How do you know what you’re doing is working? And I guess, how do you know what you’re doing is… right? Coming from a Protestant background, we’re often taught that just by… if you’re lusting after somebody, or if you’re greedy, or if you struggle with X, Y, or Z sin, well, that’s really what these people who are worshiping these gods were doing. So, by de facto, you are worshiping Mars or Nike or Aphrodite. Is there any validity to that?

Fr. Andrew: So, the short answer to that is yes. Whenever we sin, we are participating with demons, in one way or another. It’s not exactly the same as a ritual participation in terms of actual worship, but it’s not totally dissimilar in that both bring you into contact with and into participation with whatever it is that you’re worshiping. So when you do good, you’re participating in the life of God, but there is a way that you participate when you receive the Eucharist that is not the same way that you’re participating when you, say, for instance, give food to the hungry. It’s the same God. It’s the same God, and you’re still participating in his life.

So to the epistemological question, the how do you know that it’s working, how do you know what it is that you’re doing… On one level, there is kind of this epistemological problem of how do you know anything at all? [Laughter] Ultimately, most of the things that we know and act upon are just chains of trust, but the chain of trust that is the Church is founded upon the revelation of God in Christ. And it’s renewed. So it’s not only that we believe because someone told us, who was told by someone, on back to the apostles; it’s because God has revealed himself, over and over again, throughout the history… throughout human history.

We don’t only have to say, “Well, I hope that this long game of telephone that went from the apostles to me got it right,” which is I think the way that a lot of skeptical, secular-minded people would see it. “Well, it’s just this big game of telephone throughout two thousand years. That’s going to be wrong.” That’s not what it is.

And at the same time, God reveals himself to us in various kinds of ways. Are they ways that would satisfy someone who’s looking for some kind of empirical experience? I don’t think so, because in the end, what exactly would that be? So, for instance, someone could say, “Well, I really feel like God is here tonight,” and the skeptical part of my brain says, “Oh yeah? What does that feel like? And how do you know that that feeling is God?” I’ve heard people say things like that.

And ultimately, if we’re going to be Christians, then the first thing we look at is Scriptures, and if we’re Orthodox Christians, we’re looking at the holy Scriptures within the Tradition of the Orthodox Church. So when God shows up in the Scriptures, I mean, he shows up in lots of different ways. Almost never does it describe how people feel, although the occasional bit of fear of trembling going on, but it’s not someone’s like: “Oh, I really just felt a sense of peace and happiness, and that’s how I knew God was here.” That’s not there. So there’s actually something much more spiritually objective about it. I as a priest, if I go and offer the Divine Liturgy, but I’ve had a terrible night and all kinds of things on my mind and I’m very worried and maybe I was a jerk to my wife and kids, am I still objectively offering the holy Eucharist? Yes, I am, and the people receiving it are still receiving it, even though I might feel like garbage the whole time that I’m doing it. It still is what it is.

So if we’re looking for something that feels or seems supernatural to us, that is a wild goose chase, and it can be, frankly, spiritually deceptive, because there are demons that would be happy to provide you with a “spiritual experience.” So I don’t know if that’s a little too round-about way about saying it, but I think ultimately we have to found it upon trust and faithfulness to Christ, and believing the Gospel. If we believe the Gospel, then we are faithful in the following ways. And sometimes we have to be faithful even if we don’t understand or know in a way that makes sense to our analytical brain, because the analytical brain, while useful, can only see certain things; it can’t see everything. So we shouldn’t expect it to be fed with the stuff that’s going to prove, for instance, that God shows up on the altar when we ask him to.

I don’t know if that helps—

David: It does.

Fr. Andrew: —or hinders. Okay.

David: No, it provides a lot of clarity.

Fr. Andrew: All right. I don’t know. Father, did you have anything you wanted to add or “um, actually…” or…?

Fr. Stephen: Not “um, actually…” but a lot of times we over-intellectualize this stuff. St. Gregory Palamas said, “For every argument there is a counterargument, but you can’t argue with life.” So if I come to you and I say, “Hey, my car’s not running. It made this noise,” and I imitate the noise, you and I can sit there all day arguing about what the right thing is to do to fix the car. We can go back and forth, we can debate it, we can hash it all out, and we can do the same thing with theology. What’s the right way to worship? What’s the right interpretation of this? We could go back and forth forever. This is exactly what St. Gregory Palamas was talking about, because he said it at the end of three debates with Barlaam.

But if I go to my car, and I say, “Okay, this is what I think will help with the problem,” and I do it, it will either help with the problem or it won’t. So I think that the most pragmatic-level answer to your question is fruit. If your habit of prayer and the worship you’re engaging in and your pattern of behavior and the things you are doing in your life are drawing you closer to Christ and are bearing fruit, you’ll know. And if you’re doing things in your life that are making things worse, and you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know.

That being honest with yourself part can be very hard. [Laughter] And sometimes we need some help from somebody else. That’s why in the Orthodox Church we have a spiritual father, who’s not me, who, when I am deluded, can point out to me: “Yeah… The fruit you think you’re getting, you’re not getting. You’re on the wrong track.” That’s also why I have a wife. I get it from both sides. And my whole Dutch family. We have people outside who can check for fruit and help tell us when we’re on the wrong track.

Fr. Andrew: And to add to that, this is also why we have the experience of the saints, saying: Okay, we have all this experience, and this is what worked. So maybe you don’t know or trust yet that that’s going to work, but throughout all of these centuries, we’ve seen this work, so… do that. It’s like, often if you’ve got kids, if they sprained their… they scraped their knee or whatever, and you say, “Now you’ve got to go clean that up or it’s going to get infected.” And they’re like, “No!”—my own kids have done this—“that’s not going to help! I want a band-aid!” You’re like, “No, no, no. You’ve got to clean it up first or it’s going to get infected, and then you may have the band-aid.” And they don’t have the experience to know that that’s what needs to be done, but I’m there. Their mother is there—she’s there for them much more than I am—to tell them, “Look, this is what you’re going to do.” And that’s what the saints do for us. They’re spiritual parents for us.

David: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, thank you very much for that call, David.

David: Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it, Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome.

Okay, well, here we are in the third half of the show, and now we’re going to talk about the Ascension—finally! [Laughter] Finally. Yes!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And we’re going to start with the first place in which the Ascension is seen and described in the Scriptures, which is the book of Daniel.

Fr. Andrew: In the book of Daniel, that’s right. It’s depicted in Daniel. Daniel 7:9-16, and then skipping ahead just a touch, 26-27.

Fr. Stephen: And if you want to know why we’re skipping, it’s because we don’t want to get into who all the beasts are and that they’re not China and they’re not Russia. No helicopters…

Fr. Andrew: People get excited when we talk about the book of Revelation as well, and Daniel. Yeah, but this is Daniel, and he’s talking about the Ascension. I’m going to go ahead and read this, because I think this is really good to just have in your head as we have this conversation. So, everybody, if you’ve got your Bible, pull that out to Daniel 7. I’m starting with verse 9.

Fr. Stephen: Sword drill!

Fr. Andrew: Yep! Aw yeah! I got that reference. [Laughter] Okay, so verse 9 of Daniel 7, and this is Daniel describing his vision.

As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool. His throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him, and a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. I looked then, because of the sound of the great words that the horn was speaking, and as I looked the beast was killed and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.

As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time. I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

As for me, Daniel, my spirit within me was anxious, and the visions of my head alarmed me. I approached one of those who stood there and asked him the truth concerning all of this, so he told me and made known to me the interpretation of the things.

Skipping ahead to verse 26:

But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and destroyed to the end. And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heavens shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. His kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

And that’s the end of verse 27. All right, so what’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] All right, so now that we’ve read that, let’s point at a few features. People probably noticed some things while you were reading, but just to point out a few things and to fill in a bit of the context that we left out so as not to be reading all night and that. So Daniel, right before this, sees this succession of beasts, and when he sees them in the vision they come up out of the sea, which should have us thinking Lotan/Leviathan, beast from the sea.

Fr. Andrew: Dragons.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Dragons, Hannah; dragons.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] These are described by the angel whom Daniel asks to explain it to him as being a succession of empires that are going to come. So these are not any modern-day contemporary countries; it’s not the EU. This is—

Fr. Andrew: Aw man!

Fr. Stephen: I know, I know. Sorry, Hal Lindsey. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: What about the third eagle of the apocalypse?

Fr. Stephen: This is the Assyrians—or, sorry, the Babylonians; and then the Persians; and then the Greeks, the Seleucids; and then the Romans finally. And there’s another vision in Daniel with similar content of these four empires. And so, in the period of the Roman Empire, something is going to happen, which Daniel is foreseeing, and that’s when this scene is convened. Now, it’s interesting that we noted Leviathan. In the part we skipped, where the angel explains to him that part of the vision, he describes them as “four kingdoms that will arise from the earth,” so the beasts-from-the-earth symbolism is more Behemot, Behemoth. So between the vision and the interpretation, you get these empires as a combination of both. They participate in both of these sort of demonic forces.

So in response to this, when we’re in the period of the Roman Empire, we read that the thrones are set, or in the description that the court will sit, and this is a description of the divine council. So the divine council happens. Yahweh, the God of Israel, comes and takes his seat, the Ancient of Days surrounded by his divine council. Note that his throne has wheels, because it’s a chariot-throne. But this meeting is convened to deal with this last beast, to deal with this beast, and to judge it and to destroy it. And in this context, then, this other figure arrives, who is described as “one like a son of man.”

Fr. Andrew: Like a son of man.

Fr. Stephen: A person who looks like a human. There is, throughout the book of Daniel—maybe we’ll do a whole episode on the book of Daniel at some point in the future—but there is in the book of Daniel, at several points, a heavenly Man. He’s encountering these heavenly beings, and several times this Man who was there comes and talks to him. So—spoilers—that’s Christ. And so is this figure who looks like a son of man, this human-looking one, who comes riding on the clouds and is brought before the Ancient of Days.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, who’s described as looking like an old man: long white beard, the whole nine yards.

Fr. Stephen: And then the Ancient of Days, Yahweh the God of Israel, because he possesses this, gives all of the authority and dominion to the Son of Man. So he, then, has this power to rule over all the dominions: the territorial spirits who had been governing the earth are now subject to him. He now rules everything.

But notice also in the description in the explanation of the vision, it says that the kingdom is received by “the people of the saints of the Most High,” is how it goes, how King James translates it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s verse 27.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s both received by the Son of Man and by the saints, the people made up of the saints of the Most High. So those are just pointing out some features. So what those features would have clued in, to an ancient reader, in the Ancient Near East, is that this is sort of a remix, again, an inversion in many ways, of a story from the Baal cycle. Here comes our old friend Baal again. And that is the scene of his enthronement, which we’ve told a couple of the stories in a little more detail from the Baal cycle. This one we haven’t gone through in the same detail. So this story involves Baal, the son, and his father, El, who is depicted in Canaanite depictions of El as—a very old man with a long white beard.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so the Daniel language for the Ancient of Days is basically saying: the Most High God who is the Father is not El; it’s Yahweh; and is taking the El imagery and applying that to Yahweh. I think it’s important to realize that this is not syncretism. This is not syncretism in the sense of saying, “Oh, we’re going to take this El language, and we’re going to worship him. We’re going to change his name, but we’re actually worshiping the same god.” Just like, for instance—and we didn’t mention this in this episode, but the priests of Israel, the way that they’re dressed, the way that God commands them to be dressed, is basically the way that Baal idols were dressed, that that same… this idea that: well, that’s the way you treat an image of your god; well, actually, we’re the image of the one true God, and so the imagery is being co-opted, not in a syncretistic way, but actually to make a polemical point, really. So this is another example of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is saying… All those things that you keep saying are true of El aren’t true of El; they’re actually true of Yahweh. And likewise, the imagery that’s usually attributed to Baal, who’s… one of his primary titles as a storm god is the Cloud-rider; he’s the one who rides on the clouds. So not only is the real Most High God is not El, it’s Yahweh, but the real divine Son in the council, the one who really rides on the clouds, is this human-looking one.

Fr. Andrew: Son of Man.

Fr. Stephen: Who is the Son of Man, who is the true Son of God, who appears human, and who is also Yahweh. He doesn’t have a different name.

Fr. Andrew: And another thing that’s a big contrast is the relationship between the two figures within each narrative. So in the Baal story, Baal shows up to El and demands, “Give me a palace. Give me a temple to reside in so I can be enthroned,” and El is actually kind of afraid of Baal, because he remembers how he got in that position! He’s like: “Uhh, yeah… uh…” He’s afraid of giving it to him; he’s afraid of setting him up and having him be powerful. And note, again, the contrast between the Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who simply approaches his Father, and his Father gives him the dominion. There’s no struggle; there’s no rivalry. It’s just love and humility. It’s completely different, completely different.

Fr. Stephen: And here’s where the Baal story really goes off the rails—this is the fun part. So, since El doesn’t want to give Baal this palace-temple, Baal goes and talks to his wife, who also happens to be his sister and El’s daughter, who is named Anat. And Anat, as you can imagine, if you’re going to have the main goddess of an Ancient Near Eastern pantheon, is a fertility goddess, seen as a fertility goddess, and there’s sort of a parody there, where you’ve got Baal as a storm god, sends the rains, and then those rains are received by the ground, and fertility brings forth crops.

So you’ve got a certain parallel there; that all seems nice, except Anat is also a goddess of brutal warfare, who is described and depicted as wearing a necklace made of severed human heads and a belt made of severed human hands. So I hope if we ever have a Lord of Spirits convention that we have it in November so that people can hit up the Spirit Halloween Store clearance sale before it closes down and get their Anat cosplay together, because that would be great.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We just lost a bunch of parents amongst our listeners.

Fr. Stephen: Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: Turn that off! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So she goes and—again, this is kind of awkward—but uses her feminine wiles on her own father to convince him to give her brother-husband what he wants in terms of the palace, and El sort of finally agrees. I think it is probably not coincidental the way the story of the beheading of St. John the Forerunner kind of mirrors this.

Fr. Andrew: But that’s another future episode.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll leave that to Pedro. [Laughter] And then it says, in the middle, Baal then has all rule in the heavens once he’s been enthroned. And now, contrast this with “all dominion in heaven and on earth” in the Daniel story, because El and Baal don’t have control over the whole earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re local, relatively speaking.

Fr. Stephen: But this is related to the way… the whole kingdom-of-heaven language that comes up in the gospels, in particular the synoptic gospels. We tend to, because it’s translated with the word “kingdom,” that’s very reified; it’s a noun. We think of “kingdom” as an object, but the word is really more about the rule or dominion of heaven or of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “kingship,” even.

Fr. Stephen: It’s about that extension of power and authority. So when we, for example, in exclamations of worship, say, “Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,” we mean “thine” as opposed to anybody else’s who may claim that it’s theirs.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s so much language in Scripture and in the Orthodox liturgical tradition that is precisely expressing—I was going to use the word “rivalry,” but it’s not rivalry because God has no rival! But it’s… you know, it’s offering these corrections. Like, for instance: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” The earth is the Lord’s and not anyone else’s. “Thine is the kingdom,” not anybody else’s.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so then when we get to the New Testament—so if you understand Daniel’s vision and you understand how it’s reworking and inverting this Baal story and what’s going on there in Daniel’s vision, when you read about—we’re finally getting to the Ascension, when you’re at the end of the episode—when you finally get to the descriptions of the Ascension in the New Testament, in the gospels and in Acts, you find that they’re deliberately connecting what’s going on to what Daniel saw.

Fr. Andrew: So, then, the most probably obvious would be in Matthew 28:18-20, and this is part of—is it the whole thing? I don’t think it’s the whole thing, but part of the first eothinon gospel. Of course, also some of this is read at a baptism. Chapter 28, starting with verse 18:

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

This is what the Lord says right before he ascends into heaven. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” So he’s entering into his rest; he’s going up to his enthronement. And so, because he’s taking that position, he says, “Now you go out now and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, teaching them to do all these things, teaching them to become faithful. And I am with you always, to the end of the age,” which is not an ironic statement because he’s about to ascend and go away somewhere; it’s actually: “I’m going to go and be enthroned, and now you are going to participate in my rule. You are going to co-claim this. You are going to do the thing Adam failed to do, by bringing the paradisaical experience of God’s presence into all the world and driving out the demons who have been oppressing it.”

Fr. Stephen: And that “has been given to me” we gloss over really quickly to get to the rest of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, past tense.

Fr. Stephen: “Has been given to me”: by whom? By the Father, which is exactly what Daniel saw, the Father giving Christ all authority and all dominion in heaven and on earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, we’ve got a passage from Acts. Father, do you want to address that one?

Fr. Stephen: Sure. So in Acts 1:6-11, which also describes the ascension, this is—St. Luke has a brief description at the end of his gospel of the ascension, very brief, but then, at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, he fleshes it out a little more. So in Acts 1, beginning in verse 6:

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

So, a couple things there. One of the most obvious and important ones is that cloud that shows up. So this isn’t a reverse of the opening to The Simpsons, like Christ goes up into the sky and a cloud drifts over and you can’t see him any more. [Laughter] This is talking about… the cloud taking him away is actually carrying him away. He is riding on a cloud, which is exactly how Daniel sees him arrive in heaven. So, same event.

And you notice that that “kingdom” language is here, too. “Is now when you’re going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” That’s not saying, “Oh, are you going to give us our own king now?” [Laughter] “Are we going to be an independent kingdom from the Romans again, like we were with John Hyrcanus?” That’s not what this was like, because, remember, “kingdom” is this rule, the power of God. That’s what Israel’s been missing. That is what Israel has been missing.

So he says, “Look, you don’t worry about the big-picture stuff. Here’s your assignment.” And the assignment he gives them is actually how that dominion is going to be returned to the Israel of God, which is going to be them, the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, now we’ve got one from Mark 14. This is again from the Ascension account.

And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

And in our pre-show discussion, Father, you pointed out that the verb about them seeing him is a little odd, and it kind of means “from now on,” so: “I am, and from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And again, this is the exact same imagery of the Ascension as depicted in Daniel. He’s the cloud-rider; he’s seated there at the right hand of power. Everything that’s about to proceed after that, with the apostles going out into all the world and the expansion of the Church, all of this is about the extension of the rule of God into the world. Mark, of course, much more terse as always in his gospel. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And of course this is also, if you want an Old Testament verse that’s talking about this, Psalm 110 (or 109), verse 1: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ ” This is the most-quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament. Over and over and over again. Christ quotes it to the scribes and the Pharisees; a big chunk of the book of Hebrews is based on interpreting it. It shows up everywhere, and that’s because this is the place where the apostles and the other New Testament writers found themselves, that Christ had ascended and was seated at the right hand of the Father and now was ruling for this period of time until the ultimate defeat of his enemies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Cool. So, okay, the last one we’re going to look at is from Revelation—

Fr. Stephen: Time to disappoint all the Baptists.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah! Woohoo! I was a disappointed Baptist once. [Laughter] Revelation 20:4-6.

Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands; they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

Right, so obviously this is the—I say “obviously.” Obviously, if you’ve listened all the way to the 20th episode of this podcast, you can see that this is the divine council. [Laughter] These thrones set up—plural, notice again it’s plural—and that these who have been—these martyrs!—those who have been beheaded, they come to life and they reign with Christ. They are given this authority to judge. They are participating now in the Ascension, because the Ascension is not just a matter of going up; it’s a matter of this path. This is where we started, with the big footprints: the path to the throne, the path to the enthronement, the victory at the end of all the works being done. And now these saints have participated in that; they have been doing the works of God. They have walked the same path with Christ, and they are now seated on thrones beside his, and they reign with Christ. And this is, as St. John says here, the first resurrection, this experience of these saints.

They are priests, as it says, of God and of Christ, reigning with him. What does it mean that they’re priests? Well, priests basically have two jobs: they offer sacrifices and they intercede for others. And we see them, especially there in Revelation, interceding before the throne of God. So this is the telos of mankind’s possibility, that he join Christ in his ascension and that he reign with him, next to him, that he participates in those same works, having participated in those works along the way, having walked the path, with the big footprints, the path of God himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and St. John here… I mean, it’s beyond doubt. He’s using the same language Daniel used about the thrones being set. And right after the passage you read is where the dragon is judged, just like the beast is judged in Daniel. So St. John is describing the same scene that the Prophet Daniel is. So this isn’t Daniel talking about one thing and St. John talking about something else in the future; this is part and parcel of the ascension and the enthronement, and this is part and parcel of he’s drawing on what Daniel was talking about when he was talking about how the vision was interpreted to him, that when the kingdom is entrusted to Christ, when he receives the dominion, that dominion is also received by the people of the saints of the Most High, and they reign and rule with him for this period of time in the midst of his enemies, and the live to serve as priests and intercede, and they rule with him until the time comes for the end.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, that’s the end of our third half. Just to give some final thoughts… So there are a couple of things that struck me in this discussion. One, of course, is what we were just talking about, where these visions that exist, that are seen in the Old Testament, and these actions by God in the Old Testament, are not just predictions of something that’s going to happen in the New Testament or at some other time in the future; they are participating in the same reality. So, now, there is a change; I mean, we pointed out a couple of discontinuities between the Old and the New Testaments, or things that are transformed along the way. So what you get with the coming of Christ into the world is fulfillment of the Old Testament. And as Fr. Stephen loves to point out, fulfilled does not mean that there was a prediction and then it came true, nor does it mean, like in the case of the Mosaic law, it’s abolished; it’s over. But rather, fulfilled is what it actually says: it’s full-filled; it’s filled up to the full. So the cup has something in it, and then it’s filled up to the full in the end.

So Daniel sees the Ascension. I mean, he’s… He’s not predicting the future. He sees it happening. He’s participating in it in his way, in his time, if we need to talk about it that way. And then St. John sees it as well, and he’s also participating in it in his own vision, even though, if we think about it in terms of timelines, he’s seeing it after it’s already happened. But he’s not just seeing the event of Christ ascending into heaven, but he’s also seeing what that means in terms of his enthronement and the saints enthroned alongside him, where St. John himself now is one of those as well, participating in the first resurrection.

So that was one thing that really occurred to me, and the other one was: I was really just struck by the sabbath imagery, that God enters into his rest after creating the world; that Christ enters into his rest after completing the creation. It’s not that the creation gets completed multiple times, once in Genesis and once later; there again, they’re participating in this same, singular reality of the acts of God. It doesn’t work out in terms of chronological timelines and time travel and whatever; it doesn’t work out, because that’s not the way to understand the way that these things work.

But then also, I mean, this for me was actually sort of almost a personal revelation, really, because I had never heard this before, but looking at all this now, it’s so clear: that the sabbath, that it was made for man, it’s not, as we said earlier, it’s not “man needs a break so he can take the weekend off, or one day”; the sabbath that’s made for man is the ascension and the enthronement and the participation in God’s rule that was made for man. That’s what was made for man.

And so that’s astonishing to think about on the macro level. But if you think about it just in terms of your own daily, “mundane” life, you might think, “Well, that’s not what I do on the weekend. I don’t… I’m not ascending into heaven and ruling with God.” Well, actually, if you’re going to worship, then you are. You are. You’re walking that path. You’re going to the place where the Lord is enthroned. You’re participating in his rule.

And the beautiful thing is that the sabbath is not just a day on the weekend. Now, that’s one of the ways that we ritually participate in it, but really we’re being called to extend the sabbath outwards so that all of our lives involve this. Now by that I don’t mean that your whole week becomes a weekend; that’s not what I’m saying. [Laughter] Again, that’s a very sort of material way of reading this, but the point is that we turn the world; by participating in God, we turn the world into participation in his rest, in his harmony, his creativity, his beauty, his rule, his love for all mankind.

There’s a reason why, when a parish community is working well and it’s at peace and everyone’s serving one another, that there’s this warmth of love that’s there, and the reason is that the people are actually experiencing this rest, this ascension, this enthronement, this rule, this order, this beauty, this harmony of God. That’s what they’re experiencing. They are participating in it, and so it changes them. And then they are sent, at the end of the Divine Liturgy, just as the apostles were sent: to go into all the world and to bring this sabbath everywhere that they go. And it’s not the only way of looking at the Ascension, but to me it is now just an utterly astonishingly powerful way of looking at it and then being inspired to participate in it.

So, yes, we go to church and celebrate the feast of the Ascension, but in doing that we’re actually seeing, on a day, what it is that we do all the time and what it is that we’re called to do every day and what our final destiny in Christ, through faithfulness, actually is. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So when Daniel had his vision, and that vision was recorded and given to God’s people, and when the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were written and described Christ’s Ascension, and when St. John received his vision and wrote the book of Revelation, and they wrote about this reality we’ve been talking about tonight, they did it to people who were suffering. Not people who were suffering from insecurities, not people who were suffering from sort of low-grade inconveniences and minor problems, but people who were suffering, people who were enslaved, people who had family members being killed, sometimes in front of them, sometimes tortured to death, for trying to be faithful to God.

And in all of these cases, what this vision proclaims very powerfully is that, regardless of who claims to be lord, whether it’s Nebuchadnezzar, whether it’s Cyrus or Darius, whether it’s Antiochus Epiphanes, whether it’s Caesar—whoever claims to be lord—isn’t. Whoever claims to be lord is a pretender and a fake, just like the gods they worship, because the one who is truly Lord is our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who has all dominion and authority on earth.

The only thing the fake lords can do it kill and destroy. They’re sort of like Jannes and Jambres, the magicians in Egypt, who come to—this sometimes gives people problems, because they’re like: “Well, how could they replicate what Moses did?” Think about what they replicated. Through Moses, all of the drinkable water in Egypt is turned into blood except for a very little bit, and the magicians show up and turn that last little bit into blood and make it undrinkable. Thanks. And then, you know, Egypt is infested with frogs and vermin, and they’re like, “Hey, we can make more frogs and vermin!” So, yeah, they can destroy; they can kill—they can’t create; they can’t do what God does.

So in their anger and to try to prove that they’re really lord, they will come and they will inflict suffering. They will come and kill the people of God. They will come and attack them, at the behest of the gods that they worship. But what we see in the saints and the martyrs, is that they had had this same vision, like St. Stephen had this vision, the vision we see described, of Christ enthroned—they would literally in some cases mock the people who were torturing them to death. They would make jokes as they were being fried on a rack, that they were done on the one side and needed to be flipped over, like St. Lawrence. They would ignore the sufferings; they were unimportant, because the truth is that no one can harm the righteous man. The person who loves Christ and belongs to Christ, the worst they could do to you is kill you, and when that happens you go to rule and reign with him, including ruling and reigning over and eventually judging that person who murdered you. That’s the promise that we have in this vision.

So if we really understand what the Ascension is about, this should give us a lot more confidence in the way that we live our life. This is where St. Paul got his confidence, despite the shipwrecks and the beatings and the persecution and the hatred and the mocking he took. He knew that for him to live was Christ and to die was gain, and so he didn’t have to be afraid of anything or anyone. Anything anyone did to him would ultimately work for his benefit, for his blessings and his glory, and blessings and glory that are eternal, over against sufferings that are temporary, even if they go on for our whole lives here on this earth.

So that, to me, I think, is sort of a take-away. If we really have this vision before us, then all of a sudden we don’t have to worry about who’s president. We don’t have to worry about whether certain bills pass Congress. We don’t really have to worry about anything any more, because we serve and more importantly are loved by the God who rules over all of it.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen.

Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in and listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but cannot respond to everything—you guys send us a lot of email; we love it, though! We do save a lot of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And I’m back on Facebook, but “never again” is what I swore the time before. [Laughter] 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, like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group. Leave reviews and ratings everywhere; most importantly, though, share this show with a friend whom 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.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless you, and happy feast of the Ascension.