Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, all of you—dragon-slayers, giant-killers, slayers of serpents, and stompers on scorpions! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, where it's probably 100 degrees right now, and I'm Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where we still have winter. And we are live! And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, just like the Voice of Steve just said, and you can talk to us live! We're going to get to your calls starting in the second half of the show, and our own beloved Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls.

Our Catholic friends, and some of our Protestant friends—more and more of you, as I understand it—and also our fellow Orthodox Christians in Finland, the place where I quite want to be, have already begun Lent this year. And while still a few weeks away for most Orthodox, it is on our minds for sure. The Triodion is about to begin. That said, there are some Christians—and you know who you are—think that Great Lent is a medieval invention with no basis in the Scriptures, that the seasonal asceticism, of fasting in particular, is some kind of attempt at "earning one's way to heaven," although we've firmly established before in this podcast that we believe in works righteousness. But what if we told you that Lent and its constituent practices are very firmly rooted in the Scriptures? And what if we told you that its endpoint might not be what you think?

Fr. Stephen De Young: And what if we told you that Gavin Rossdale is way more talented than his ex-wife and Bush is a great band?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I would agree with that, for sure. Maybe.

Fr. Stephen: The other two questions you're shaking on, but that one…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, you know, I'm still a little— I didn't sleep very well last night, and so my Morpheus voice is not— I couldn't do the "What if I told you—" Its' just not coming for me tonight. I'm a little off my game.

Fr. Stephen: I can only assume that if you didn't sleep at all last night, you were thinking about Almond Delight.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, that seems reasonable to assume.

Fr. Stephen: I don't know if you can even still buy it, so, I mean, that might keep you up.

Fr. Andrew: I don't know. I'm going to look that up real quick. I'll get back to you.

Fr. Stephen: Live radio, everybody!

Fr. Andrew: That's right. Almond Delight cereal...

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah. There may be some folks out there, especially among our Protestant friends, who think that Lent is that special time of year when Catholics quit smoking or briefly give up chocolate.

Fr. Andrew: Friday fish fries!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you're down here in southern Louisiana, it's all of a sudden there are fish fries everywhere on Fridays. But Great Lent in all of its details as it's celebrated in the Orthodox Church, actually has a history reaching back into the apostolic period that we're going to talk about tonight. There are various reasons why it morphed a little bit in the West. I remember 20-odd years ago now there was a—I don't know if he's still living or not, but there was a Franciscan friar on EWTN, and he was from Brooklyn and very much from Brooklyn. At the beginning of Lent he was talking about Lent, and he kind of went on this rant, doing the whole "Why can't you Catholics fast? The Orthodox, they fast! Why can't you fast?" This whole thing, that I still remember. And a lot of the things still surrounding Lent, even in the West, imply more of the Orthodox practice. "Carnivale" literally comes from carnis, "meat," and vale, "farewell," in Latin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, here in the Lehigh Valley, we have something called Fasnachts, which I know exists outside the Lehigh Valley as well, and it's literally a doughnut you can get the day before Ash Wednesday. I remember seeing some news article or something, you know, one of these little human interest articles, where the writer said something like, "Some say this has to do with the beginning of Lent." I'm like: The name literally means "fasting eve." What do you mean, some say? The whole point of these doughnuts is: use up all of the lard and the butter and whatever—

Fr. Stephen: And eggs, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: —the day before.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, and of course there are some small, reserved private family celebrations down here in Louisiana called Mardi Gras...

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I've heard of that, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Which— Very religious and very pious, always. [Laughter] But that's French for "fat Tuesday" for the same reason. You didn't have refrigeration, so you ate everything through parties, and ate everything before Ash Wednesday, so that— because it wouldn't keep, and you weren't going to eat it during Lent.

That said, there's a lot of things tied up in why, for some if not many if not most of our Protestant friends, Lent seems like some kind of weird accretion, and we're going to get into that in the course of tonight, kind of understanding what asceticism is, what the purpose is, where it comes from. To begin here, though, in our first half, we're going to talk about the number 40, because of course Great Lent goes for 40 days. It's the 40 days before Holy Week, before Pascha, before the Passover. I'm sure at some point during Lent on this show I will go into my rant about why we don't just translate the word "Pascha" as "Passover" in our hymns and that kind of thing so that they will make sense to people. But that's not tonight.

We're going to talk about this number 40 and 40 days and the significance of that. This is one of these biblical numbers that, when you read through— You don't even have to get very far in the Old Testament before noticing that lots of things come in sevens and lots of things come in 40s and lots of things come in twelves, for example, and then 70 or 72. There are these certain numbers that keep recurring. One of those of course is 40.

Before we get into a big list of examples of where 40 shows up in the Scriptures and start working through and talking about some of those and the themes that emerge out of that, we have to talk for a minute about the number 40 itself. We've talked about on several occasions the number 70 on the show and how it's like 70, sometimes 72, that there is this sort of wiggle between 70 and 72, and how a lot of that has to do with when you don't have numerals, which neither Hebrew nor Greek have numerals, and those of course are the languages in which the Scriptures were written—Aramaic also, no numerals—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they just use letters to designate numbers.

Fr. Stephen: They use letters to designate numbers, and that means, de facto, even if you want to, you can't be that precise. This is one of the problems with the modernist version of a literalist reading of the Old Testament that tries to take every number literally. You very quickly find that, for example, between the Greek and the Hebrew there are radical differences every time there's a number.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, how tall is Goliath, for instance?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, 6'6" or 9'9"? And across the board, every place where you find numbers, they're different. Even— I pointed this out in another context recently. Even the Romans— Romans, kind of renowned for their record-keeping, had Roman numerals and everything. How many troops was a centurion in command of?

Fr. Andrew: A hundred?

Fr. Stephen: This is a trick question. 80!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, 80. Dang it! Etymology failed me again!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, exactly, but that's what it is! It's a commander of a hundred, and he didn't have a hundred people under him. They had another position called a chiliarch—

Fr. Andrew: A thousand, theoretically...

Fr. Stephen: He had six centurions under him.

Fr. Andrew: So, 480, plus those centurions? Man! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: All this is to say—

Fr. Andrew: Numbers don't mean the mathematical numbers the way that we mean them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. In the ancient world they didn't feel the need for that kind of precision on these kind of things. Things get rounded. They get rounded up and down a little bit. Saying 70 and saying 72—there was not a huge difference or need for precision in that regard in the ancient world.

The same is true with 40, because you also get 40 and 42 doing the same thing. Just like with 72, which is six times twelve, 42 is six times seven; it's six sevens. Seven, as we've talked about before on the show— Seven is seen to be a number that represents completion or wholeness.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why we have seven days in a week.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but the reason why seven is that number is there are seven planets, counting the sun and moon. I'll just leave that there. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Did you just de-planetize Pluto again?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I just de-planetized a whole bunch of—

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because we're talking about early astronomy/astrology.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the stuff you can see without powerful telescopes.

Fr. Stephen: And so the distinction there was between the "fixed stars" in their constellations that followed this orderly pattern, and then— Those are there, and then there are also these other objects in the heavens that they didn't think of as objects—there are other beings in the heavens—that did not follow the same kind of orderly path with the stars. Those were the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, that were observed. So they saw these moving around.

Fr. Andrew: Wanderers.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that's what "planets" means. Planetes in Greek means "wanderers." So they said, "Oh, there's these other bodies that wander through the heavens." But if you have all seven of them, that's completion. So you get the seven-branched candlestand in the tabernacle, and, later in the Temple, seven lights. That's the cosmos; that's the sky. It's that connection.

If you had seven sevens—seven times seven, seven sevens, 49—that would be sort of complete completion. But if you have six sevens, 42 or 40— If you have six sevens, then that's not so much incompletion as sort of: "We're nearing the end of the cycle. Something is being prepared for."

Fr. Andrew: "We're almost there."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Almost there, stay on target. Poor Porkins, dead too soon. And done wrong by being given the name Porkins, let me add.

Fr. Andrew: I know, right?

Fr. Stephen: How politically incorrect is that?

Fr. Andrew: And he's the overweight guy. I mean, come on. Come on, George Lucas!

Fr. Stephen: I mean, George Lucas is not exactly skinny himself. I mean, this is—

Fr. Andrew: Although back then...

Fr. Stephen: Even then, he wasn't that skinny. [Laughter] But, yeah, there is this— You get to the end of this sixth seven and then there is this anticipation, of sort of: "Now we're going to begin this final cycle. Now we're going to bring this to completion." So you have this sense of preparation and anticipation and something that's about now to happen.

So we'll start now with some examples in the Scriptures. One of the first really prominent uses of 40 happens in Genesis 7-8, with the flood story. God, of course, creates the world in Genesis1 and the first couple verses of chapter 2, in seven days. Really creates it in six and then rests on the seventh day; he's enthroned. So there is this completion there. But then with the flood, God unmakes the world. If you read the language of the flood, all of the things that happen in the first three days fall apart. First, on day three God had separated the dry land from the water; the flood comes: that is gone. On the second day, God had separated the waters above, like the sky, and the waters below, the sea; that separation disappears: the gates of the heaven are opened, the gates of the deep are opened, and: water. The world gets uncreated, but for the sort of microcosm of the creation that exists within the ark, Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives and the animals. That little microcosm of creation survives, and the flood goes on for 40 days and 40 nights. And then, once the 40 days are completed, now there is this anticipation. Now the preparation is complete. Now the world is going to be recreated; it's going to begin again with Noah and his family and the animals from the ark.

Another example of this from Genesis comes in Genesis 50:3, and that the mummifying of Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Although usually that's not the word you see in most translations. I think it's "embalming." They like to use "embalm."

Fr. Stephen: But did you claim "Mummifying Jacob" as a band and/or album name during our previous discussion?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah. That's totally my next band, yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Once you break up with that last band.

Fr. Andrew: Well. It could be a side project, like Audioslave.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there you go. Actually, Soundgarden had broken up at that point; so had Rage Against the Machine. So, complete fail: that was not a side project.

Fr. Andrew: [Sigh] It makes me very sad when say that.

Fr. Stephen: A Perfect Circle is a side project. Mr. Bungle was a side project. [Laughter] Anyway. Right, Jacob, Israel the person, has died in Egypt after going there to escape the famine that came on the land of Canaan, but Jacob had his sons promise that he would be buried in Canaan with his fathers, Abraham and Isaac. And so Genesis 50:3, Jacob is mummified in Egypt so that he can be brought back to Canaan. This wasn't typical Egyptian mummification in the sense that it didn't serve the same purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it wasn't about making him alive in some way in the world of the dead or burial in a big royal tomb. There is no pyramid of Jacob.

Fr. Stephen: It was for the purpose of being able to transport his body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because you can't— Frankly, you can't move bodies over long distances right after someone's died and the bodies stay intact.

Fr. Stephen: Right, unless they're embalmed in some way. And that's actually— I don't know if you know this—fun fact, everybody—that's when embalming, the whole embalming industry really took off in the United States was at the end of the Civil War.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, because you had to move a lot of bodies.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to bring soldiers back home.

Fr. Andrew: From the battlefield to where they were going to bury them.

Fr. Stephen: But there's this 40-day preparation period where his body is prepared to make this final journey to rest with his fathers.

Then, moving into Exodus, of course, famously Israel spent 40 years wandering around the Sinai Peninsula in search of—without GPS, but that's not actually why, of course. The reason why was because of their sin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, they showed up at the promised land, and like: "Oh, giants! Yeah, we don't need to obey God."

Fr. Stephen: "Hard pass," yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] "Okay, fine. Your kids are going to get it. Off you go!"

Fr. Stephen: Even though it hadn't been spelled out yet, the fact that they were going to wander for 40 years is first mentioned in Exodus 16:35. So this introduces another element in terms of the 40-day period. We've been talking about the anticipation and the preparation. In this case, it's not anticipation and/or preparation for these people to enter the land, because they're not going to enter the land. It is for one generation of these people to die. So there is in view here the idea of atonement for sin. Atonement in what sense? Atonement in the sense that the nation of Israel, which is made up of all of these people, has to be purified of certain wicked members.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's purifying by basically making an intergenerational move.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, shift, by letting them die. And this is merciful in the sense that these people got to live out their lives, with God feeding them and clothing them and caring for them in the wilderness; they got to live out their lives. He didn't have them all killed, he didn't kill them all, the ground didn't open and swallow them all for their sin.

Fr. Andrew: All actual options in the Old Testament!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, all things that happened in the immediate vicinity in the Torah to other people who did things! [Laughter] But in this case they're given this mercy of being able to live out their lives. But the Israelites as a whole have to be purified, and that's what atonement is really about, is about purification. So they have to be purified by the deaths of these members, but that has now sin and purification in view with this 40-day— or with a 40— with the number 40 in this case.

Probably the most important example is the one we're going to talk about next, at least the most important for Lent, for what we're talking about in terms of Lent, because a lot of the future references to 40 are going to come back to this one. That has to do with Moses at Mount Sinai. The number 40 comes up here twice, because Moses goes up the mountain twice.

In the first case, Moses goes up the mountain, he's there for 40 days, he receives— he writes down the book of the covenant, he gets the tablets from God, and he comes down and he finds the people with the golden calf. We've talked about that on this show before; we won't go back into detail, but you can go back and listen to our idolatry episode to get all the gory details of what they were actually doing. The tablets are smashed, signifying that they've already broken the covenant that they agreed to. So that first 40-day period is Moses preparing to receive the law, to receive the covenant, to receive the Torah, to deliver the Torah to the people. It has this preparatory element.

But now after all that's been broken, after Moses metes out justice for the golden calf incident, we come to this point where God is at the point after the golden calf incident where he says to Moses, "You know what? Let's just wipe out these folks and we'll start over, Moses, with your descendants. You'll be like the new Abraham. We'll just restart this, and I'll give you and your seed the land of Canaan. You're descended from Abraham, so." And Moses intercedes for the people despite their sin, and he goes back up the mountain, and he spends another 40 days. And during this 40 days, in the second visit, Moses does not eat any food or drink any water for the whole 40 days. He fasts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's fasting.

Fr. Stephen: And he's fasting as part of this intercession for the people, for the sins of the people.

Fr. Andrew: Prayer and fasting.

Fr. Stephen: He is essentially repenting for them; he's taking actions of repentance for them. He was up on the mountain. He didn't worship the golden calf.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's not— Unlike his brother, he's not implicated in what went on there down at the bottom of the mountain.

Fr. Stephen: But he is, on their behalf, in his mind in solidarity with them, hoping they're also fasting and repenting—on their behalf. And what emerges out of that second trip up the mountain is a reassurance of forgiveness, is God again giving the tablets to Moses and saying, "No, this story isn't over. This is going to continue." And so there is both a preparatory element, because at that time it's: "Okay, now leave Mount Sinai and head for Canaan. We're going to do this now," so there's that preparatory, anticipatory element, but there's also that element of repentance in that 40 days. Those become connected.

In Deuteronomy 9— Deuteronomy, the book of Deuteronomy, is Moses' sort of last lengthy sermon or homily or proclamation, whatever we want to call it, to the people of Israel before his death. And in Deuteronomy 9, specifically in verses 11 and 18, he mentions these two visits to the top of Mt. Sinai, but in that chapter in general, he's narrating these events and talking about what he did, reminding them of what happened, because the people he's talking to, the generation that did that is gone, and he's talking to the next generation and saying, "Remember, this is what happened," and talking about his own fasting and his own repentance and seeking forgiveness for the people there.

So then some more examples: in Numbers 13:25—and Numbers is of course everyone's favorite book of the Bible—the spies—

Fr. Andrew: There's some cool stuff hidden in there, people

Fr. Stephen: There is! There is really important stuff in there.

Fr. Andrew: In between the numbers. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In between, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, the numbers are important, too, but it's not as obvious how and why they're important.

Fr. Stephen: There are chunks of it that are not an easy read. We'll put it that way. So when the spies are sent to go and check out the land of Canaan, they're sent for 40 days. 40 days: again, this is anticipatory, is preparatory. They're going and seeing what's there as preparation to go in. So part of the problem there, part of the short-circuit there, that's identified as sinful and a real problem is that most of the spies come back and say, "Yeah, we need to call this off." So for them that preparatory period is not a preparatory period, because what they were preparing for they want to call off; they want to abandon. It's only Joshua and Caleb who— who agree with everything else the other spies reported, but said, "No, with God on our side we got this."

So then in Joshua, Joshua 14:7 in particular, Joshua is speaking to the people, and he mentions that when he went as a spy to spy out the land, he was 40 years old. So his life up to that time had prepared him for this part he was going to play. We also see this with Moses' age, by the way. Moses lived to be 120, and that's three 40s. The first 40 years of his life, he was living in Pharaoh's household which was preparatory for the second 40 years of his life when he was living with Jethro, his father-in-law, and taking care of his herds, which was preparatory for the last 40 years of his life when he led the people out of Egypt. So leading the people of Israel out of Egypt was Moses' third act, that he started when he was 80. That's when he got down to what we all remember Moses for. But it's these three periods of 40 years.

In the early part of the book of Judges—we've talked before about the book of Judges on this show; there's no more popular topic among listeners to this show than the book of Judges, especially chapters 14-16.

Fr. Andrew: So many layers! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And we've talked about how, in Judges, the pattern of the book of Judges is that it's showing this decline, this rather steep decline, of religion and morals in Israel, to show the necessity of Israel having a king, of a king emerging, and specifically of a king from the tribe of Judah, specifically pointing to David. That's just how Judges is written. But so the early judges, the first few judges, you're still near the top of the slope.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not quite as bad.

Fr. Stephen: And then it's going to roll down from there, down the hill. That is a Sisyphus reference, and the great thing about Sisyphus jokes is you can tell them over and over again and they get funnier each time. But Judges, when you look at the first few judges—and you can see this in Judges 3:11, 5:31, and 8:28— I'm Jack van Impe-ing it up tonight, just throwing out the references! But you look at those early judges, every time they're done with their work judging Israel, Israel has rest for 40 years. That's one of the marks that this was a good judge. Things are going to go more awry later.

And speaking of people who judged Israel… 1 Samuel 4:18—this is after Eli, the high priest, has fallen over and died. He was the judge of Israel for 40 years. And if you're reading in 1 Samuel, you know that Samuel, when he was given by his mother to God and stayed with Eli, the high priest—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he becomes his mentor.

Fr. Stephen: And so Eli's term is sort of this preparatory period for the Prophet Samuel to take over and become the judge of Israel. When we talked about this earlier, Fr. Andrew was not aware of the way in which 1 Samuel makes fun of Eli.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! It's a joke that you can only get if you look at the Hebrew.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And, once again— Maybe this is where George Lucas got the idea—

Fr. Andrew: Sure, yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So Eli, the way he dies is he falls over in his chair and breaks his neck, because he is very obese.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's not a very dignified ending.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because he is quite obese. So there's a baby born after Eli dies— And the reason he fell over in the chair is because he heard the ark of the covenant had been captured. And so after we're told about Eli's death, we're told that this baby is born and is named in English, like in the King James translation, Ichabod.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like Ichabod Crane.

Fr. Stephen: Which is Ichavod in Hebrew, and we're told that he's named Ichabod, Ichavod, because the glory had departed from Israel when the ark was captured. Chavod is indeed a word that means glory, but the root meaning of chavod is heavy or weighty.

Fr. Andrew: Thus the phrase of the C.S. Lewis book, The Weight of Glory.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's this idea of substance, of heaviness. So Ichavod, in addition to meaning "the glory has departed," also means "the fat guy's gone."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Man! Can you imagine that's his name, Ichabod. Whew.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, after Eli dies. So even the Bible picks on poor Eli.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: There are lots of puns and stuff like that in the Hebrew that don't get carried over well into English, and so the English Bible: way less fun. [Laughter] It's a take-away for tonight.

Later in 1 Samuel, when Goliath is coming out with the Philistine army and cutting promos on Saul and the Israelite army, issuing his challenge for someone to fight him, he does that for 40 days. Why is that so significant? Well, the way this functions in the telling of the story, when you drop in that detail of this going on for 40 days or 42 or roughly 40—this goes on for 40 days, that's again setting up this expectation, setting up this sense of anticipation. He did it for 40 days: "Oh, something very important is about to happen."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, something's coming. That's what the 40 is an indication of.

Fr. Stephen: And that "something" in this case is David. And then David, once he becomes king, he's going to reign as king for 40 years. His son Solomon is going to reign for 40 years. That's not just important in terms of the parallel with the judges— So the judges having granted that rest, that peace for 40 years is still anticipatory because within the book of Judges, the early judges, the good judges, are pointing to what the king who comes is going to be like, in a positive way, in an anticipatory way. The later judges are going to also show us what the king is going to be like, but in a reverse way.

Fr. Andrew: It's going to be like: "Anybody but these guys!"

Fr. Stephen: Yeah: "He's not going to be like this! He's going to be like the opposite of this!" So in the same way, even now that we have David and even now that we have his son Solomon, the fact that they reign for 40 years, that it's six sevens, not seven—it's not 49 years; it's 40 years—shows that even their reigns are anticipatory of something else.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're pointing beyond. It's not: "Oh, finally, David is here."

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is part of how the idea of the Davidic Messiah develops, because you could read the covenant with David in 2 Samuel—I believe it's 2 Samuel 7— You can read that covenant with David as just: "Oh, one of your sons will sit on the throne forever," so just: "Your dynasty isn't going to have an end, period." But when you bring in this idea of him reigning for 40 years, there's this idea of incompletion but also anticipation. So it's not just that the line of David is not going to have an end, is just going to be a line shooting off into infinity, but that it is going to culminate; the line of David is leading somewhere and is going to culminate with someone. That's part and parcel of the messianism. And this understanding of the number 40 is part of how that comes into Jewish tradition later, in reflection on David and on Solomon and on David's line.

In 1 Kings 19:8, this is where the Prophet Elijah, St. Elias, had his big victory at Mount Carmel over the prophets of Baal and then falls into this kind of isolated depression where he says to God, "There's no one left but me who still serves you. Why don't you just go ahead and kill me, we'll call it a day." And God of course talks to him about the faithful remnant that he has preserved at that time and at all times. But then he goes further than that, and he has the Prophet Elijah clean himself up, wash himself up, eat a little food, take this journey of 40 days.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, with food that lasts for 40 days, too, as I recall.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to take this journey for 40 days, because at the end of that journey, God is going to reveal himself to the prophet. And then it's at the end of that 40-day journey that he has that experience where there's the fire and God's not in the fire, and there's the earthquake and God's not in the earthquake, and then there's the—in the King James—the still, small voice, the quiet, and that's the place where he encounters God. But there is this preparatory period, and this is deliberately set up with the Prophet Elijah to make us think back to Moses and the 40 days on the mountain before this encounter, but he's preparing to meet God and there's this preparatory period.

In Jonah, if you look, for example, in Jonah 3:4, where Jonah is finally preaching in Nineveh after finally getting there, and Jonah's preaching, remember, is: "In 40 days, the city's toast. Nineveh will be overthrown."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Overthrown, yes! Toast is good, though.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, I mean, what does "overthrown" really mean? Like, tossed? The city's done for in 40 days.

Fr. Andrew: And it doesn't say exactly how God's going to pull that off, either. He could Sodom-and-Gomorrah it—

Fr. Stephen: Fire from heaven like Sodom and Gomorrah, earthquake...

Fr. Andrew: It could be invasion, earthquake, yeah. Flood, fire, the sword, gnats, pestilence, bugs, rats...

Fr. Stephen: But they have 40 days. They have 40 days. And people may want to point out that Jonah doesn't actually tell them to repent, and we know from reading the book of Jonah that's because Jonah didn't want them to repent. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he wanted them to be overthrown.

Fr. Stephen: He was looking forward to the fireworks. So he didn't say that, but the very fact that God sent him there before the fact, to announce it, implies the possibility of repentance. If they were really at the point where God was just going to destroy them, why warn them? Sodom and Gomorrah didn't get a warning. God sent the angels in to get Lot and his family out before it happened, but they didn't go around warning the people of Sodom and Gomorrah what was coming.

Fr. Andrew: It's crazy that even Ahab got a warning. [Laughter] It's almost like he's super merciful.

Fr. Stephen: So in Nineveh— Well, if you know anything about the Assyrians—

Fr. Andrew: Oh yeah! They're pretty bad.

Fr. Stephen: But they're given this 40 days of warning, and so they use that 40 days to repent. They spend that 40 days repenting, much to Jonah's consternation. Jonah ends up telling God, "I know what kind of God you are! I knew if they repented, you'd let them off the hook!" [Laughter] But there's a 40-day period, and, again, this is that repentance element.

Then, jumping to the New Testament, Matthew— In St. Matthew's gospel, he structures his genealogy around three sets of 14 generations.

Fr. Andrew: So you get 42.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he has 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the exile, 14 generations from the exile to the birth of Jesus. If you go through those genealogies, you see that in order to get those three sets of 14, St. Matthew has to play a little fast and loose with the Old Testament genealogies.

Fr. Andrew: There's a few guys he skips, but, I mean, they're pretty skippable, if you look at whom he skips. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But also he's got these numbers deliberately in mind.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he wants to present a 42.

Fr. Stephen: And so he finds the most skippable people to skip. But so why does he do that? Well, again, contrary to the modernist, literal reading of the Bible, he's not trying to give an exact genealogical account.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's not trying to pull a fast one on anybody.

Fr. Stephen: No, no. He's mentioning the specific people he mentions for various reasons, and he's set up this set of six sevens, 42, preparation building up to something, anticipation. It's all leading up to the birth of Jesus. Everything from Abraham is building up to the birth of Jesus; everything from King David is building up to the birth of Jesus; everything from the return of the Babylonian exile is building up to the birth of Jesus. That's the point he's making.

Fr. Andrew: There's a lot of dramatic tension throughout the whole Old Testament if you look for all the 40s—which we have been doing, like: Something's coming! Something's coming. Okay, still, something's coming. Oh, by the way, something is coming. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and in many cases, based on what's coming, you probably should be repenting. [Laughter] One of the most famous— In fact, if I think we asked the average church-goer what's an example of something that goes on for 40 days and 40 nights in the Bible, probably the most common answer we'd get would be about Christ fasting in the wilderness, in the desert.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe after the flood. I think if you say 40 days and 40 nights, I think at least the people who know the Old Testament a little bit would say that.

Fr. Stephen: I think more people know the New Testament than the Old Testament, frankly, among average church-goers.

Fr. Andrew: I want to believe...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And so you can find this in Matthew 4:2, Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2—thanks, Rexella—where it mentions the 40 days and 40 nights. We talked a little bit in the last episode about how, on one level, Christ is here recapitulating the experience of Israel: Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. They spent it there grumbling and complaining about things like food. Christ faced these same tests in the wilderness. Christ succeeds where they failed. But this is also a call-back to Moses. This is also a call-back to Moses, specifically him fasting from food and water on the mountain. How so? Well, this is telling us something about what Jesus is about to do, because when we talked about Theophany, we mentioned all this language of the Jordan River parting and splitting and turning back, which, as we were pointing out, did not literally happen at the point when Christ was baptized, because if it had, he wouldn't have actually gotten baptized, because he wouldn't have gotten wet. But that that language in our hymns and readings and that kind of thing was intended to help us connect that event of Jesus' baptism in the Jordan to the Jordan parting in front of the Israelites with Joshua, when they came in to conquer the land; and how part of what's going on in Theophany is that, with his baptism, Jesus is entering the land to take it back, to sort of a reconquista of the land.

But this fasting period, which is in each case directly associated in the gospel narrative with his baptism, tells us something about how he is going to retake Israel, meaning what some of—at least some of—the Judeans were expecting Jesus to do as the Messiah would have been: all those people whom St. John the Forerunner just baptized, he's going to gather them up and turn them into an army and go start killing Romans, and Jewish collaborators, while he's at it. That would have been one view.

Fr. Andrew: Clean out the back rooms.

Fr. Stephen: He's going to retake the land by killing the Gentiles, killing, taking out the enemies of the people. But what this shows us, this call-back to Moses, that second time on Mount Sinai, not eating or drinking anything for 40 days— Why did he do that? Why was he up there? He was repenting for the sins of the people, sins he didn't participate in personally, but repenting for their sins.

So that shows us that this retaking of Israel that Christ is about to do is going to have a very different mode than it did under Joshua, than anything you read about in 1 Maccabees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is like Moses, like the prophets.

Fr. Stephen: He's going to come and he's going to bring the forgiveness of sins to these people, not just the Israelites who were otherwise righteous, not just the collaborators, the tax-collectors, the sinners, but even to the Romans; even to the hated Romans he was going to bring the possibility of forgiveness of sins.

Another 40 days— If we didn't say "40 days and 40 nights," if we just said "40 days," probably an answer that would be high up the list would be the time from Christ's resurrection to his ascension, among church-goers. Christ's ascension is 40 days after his resurrection. During that period of time, he is appearing to people, but that it's 40 days again tells us something. It tells us something. It tells us there's some kind of anticipatory element, that there's something more coming. And we're going to end up talking about this more in our second and third halves tonight, but Christ's resurrection itself, even the Ascension itself, is anticipatory of something else that is coming.

And then, just to sort of round out our tour through the Bible with the number 40, so we can say we went from Genesee to Revelation— In Revelation 11:2 and 13:5, the period of time where the Antichrist has power, the Beast has power, is 42 months.

Fr. Andrew: I'm sitting here counting how many verses we've looked at and hoping it's 42, but I don't think it is! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We can round a little bit. It doesn't have to be precise.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah! It can be 36, you know.

Fr. Stephen: And so, again, that's anticipatory of what's going to come after the end of that rule, that it is not the ultimate rule or authority.

So we've gone through all these stories in the Bible, all these verses, all these passages. What does it all mean? Seriously, call in with your ideas. Oh, no! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because otherwise I guess we could just go home tonight. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So the key thing here is what we've seen from all these examples, hopefully, is a couple of themes emerging. Number one, 40, 40 days, being emblematic in the Scriptures for a period of preparation, of anticipation, of something coming, something happening. And then, in addition to that, related to that, is this idea of 40 days as a period of repentance, often connected directly with fasting as a means of repentance, a discipline of repentance. And that these ideas and elements are sort of mixed together around the idea of 40 days in the Scriptures.

When we come back in the second half, we're going to start talking about how this connects to the idea of baptism, beyond what we've already talked about.

Fr. Andrew: Man, spoilers! Usually you don't give big spoilers like that at the end of the first half! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, I want to keep them! I want to keep them around. They might have been tempted to wander off somewhere—

Fr. Andrew: I know, in the wilderness.

Fr. Stephen: —change that channel. We're about to go to a commercial break; people flip channels during commercials.

Fr. Andrew: Don't adjust that dial! Yeah, no, this is actually— This first commercial's actually going to be a big announcement, so, yeah, we're going to go ahead and take our first break, and we'll be right back with the second half of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Longest commercial ever. Pretty sure Fr. Stephen went out for Cane's chicken. Did you get me any?

Fr. Stephen: No. And I still can't believe you're unilaterally canceling Lord of Spirits to do that show with that Rick-Roll guy.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know. I've had all these— [Laughter] Yes. People are excited. People get excited when we talk about canceling podcast. Now the rumors are going to fly...

Fr. Stephen: I'm just going to let that sit out there. That's amazing, man. You're going to get some emails!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Oh, totally. People will just have to check in two weeks. Is there…? Is there another episode coming, you guys?

Fr. Stephen: Like, I want to keep doing it, but you're like: No.

Fr. Andrew: No, I'm done.

Fr. Stephen: I want to hang out with Ricky Ray-hall.

Fr. Andrew: I'm going to cancel you before you cancel me!

Fr. Stephen: If that is his real name.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, it's Richard Rohlin who— The world's only living Rick-Roll. I mean, he's an actual Rick-Roll, like his parents made him into that, which, I mean, that's incredible. Well, yeah. All right, well, anyway, welcome back, everybody.

So in the first half we talked about the number 40 and showed the many places that it shows up in both the Old especially and New Testaments, and that 40s and 42s designate preparation for something coming and are also associated in many cases with fasting and repentance and forgiveness of sins. All right, so what are we doing this half, Father?

Fr. Stephen: I forget.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay. Good night.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, no. I mean, that was a long commercial, like...

Fr. Andrew: It was! Longest one ever.

Fr. Stephen: Like, I wrote a book and got a master's degree during that commercial tonight.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] As one does.

Fr. Stephen: So now we're moving on, as mentioned, to talk about how this relates to baptism. How repentance relates to baptism, or at least the fact that it does, is probably fairly obvious to people when we first encounter baptism as such in the New Testament. And if you want more on this, you can go back to our baptism episode, in terms of the difference between baptism as such and Jewish ritual washings in general. When we first encounter baptism as such, it's St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, or St. John the Baptizer, as I see people liking to put now, just because they can't bear to use the term "baptist."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, they don't want to be a "Baptist."

Fr. Stephen: We're looking out for you, our Baptist friends! We'll still call him St. John the Baptist sometimes.

Fr. Andrew: But not St. John the Presbyterian, I'll tell you what! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Or Methodist, for that matter. So it's with St. John, and we're explicitly told, right off the bat, like in Mark 1:4, that John comes, he's preaching a baptism "of repentance and the forgiveness of sins," in those words. That's what his baptism is all about. Baptism is all about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. They say the people went down into the water confessing their sins publicly. He's baptizing sort of notorious sinners, which is why a lot of the Pharisees aren't happy about it, or at least except themselves from it because they are not notorious sinners, in their minds at least, and so they are not like those people. But that is what baptism is all about.

When— And of course there's an obvious—pretty obvious when you're reading any of the gospels—presentation of what St. John is doing as preparatory, as leading to something else. It is everywhere in the gospels presented as: This is leading up to Jesus' appearing on the scene, being baptized by St. John, Christ then having his ministry, and the gospels go from there. So that's obvious preparatory element. Calling him St. John the Forerunner kind of emphasizes that preparatory element.

But this isn't just something that the gospel writers do, and it's important to say this because the presentation you get from— even to this day for most New Testament scholarship tries to present St. John—the historical St. John—as a rival of the historical Jesus. This is what they're going to try and sell you on. And they're going to point to the Mandaeans, who were a small, obscure cult, Gnostic cult.

Fr. Andrew: Really obscure!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, small, obscure Gnostic cult that held that St. John was the Messiah, and hold that out as evidence of something in the first century. So they're going to say that what the gospels say about St. John is revisionist history, that they're sort of making these stories where St. John was like: "Oh, no, no, no, not me—him," to try and persuade people to follow Jesus instead.

All that is, of course, bunkum. There is no basis for that other than just a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think the Mandaeans— Whew, it's been a long time since I researched them, although—merchandising moment—they are mentioned in the 2017 edition of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy.

Fr. Stephen: There you go, shameless self-promotion department.

Fr. Andrew: There you go! I mean, if I'm the Stan Lee of Orthodoxy online, then… Excelsior! Yeah, I mean, the Mandaeans, as far as I recall, I think some of the earliest mentions of them that anyone knows of are medieval. I mean, it's not that far back, honestly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and there are also Gnostic sects that had, like, Hercules as the Messiah and stuff.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, there's all kinds of fun stuff.

Fr. Stephen: So I suppose this means the historical Hercules— [Laughter] Anyway. But there is of course this hermeneutic of suspicion, the practice of which was very popular in the latter half of the 20th century especially. I think people are starting— But that may be wishful thinking on my part, that people are starting to get away from it now, but I see a trend of people starting to get away from it now, which is just to say— What I mean by "hermeneutic of suspicion" is that when you read the text of Scripture, you assume that the person writing it has some kind of agenda.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they're lying to you or trying to manipulate you in some way.

Fr. Stephen: Well, even if they're not outright lying, they have a goal, and that is: "I need to convince you of X."

Fr. Andrew: I can't remember where it was, but I think it was C.S. Lewis who said something like, "If you see through everything, then you're actually seeing nothing," which— I like that.

Fr. Stephen: It's like: if Superman's X-ray vision went crazy, he couldn't see anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: So there's this story, this great Superman story, where the Joker kidnaps Lois Lane and Perry White and Jimmy Olsen, and he says, "Ah! I'm going to hide them in lead-lined caskets so Superman can't find them." But, see, that's dumb, because when Superman turns on his X-ray vision, he can't see through lead, so that's like the only thing he can see.

Fr. Andrew: But he can pull it apart with his super strength!

Fr. Stephen: So he finds them very quickly.

Fr. Andrew: "Oh, curses! Foiled again!" We actually do have a caller, by the way, who has questions.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. I hope it's not about that.

Fr. Andrew: No, no, it's— I mean, I'm trying to figure out— So this is Nathaniel, who is here in Pennsylvania. I am trying to figure out if Nathaniel's question is a Douglas Adams reference. So, Doug—

Fr. Stephen: I hope so!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was about to call him Douglas!

Fr. Stephen: I hope so!

Fr. Andrew: So, Nathaniel, are you there? Is this a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy kind of thing, or…?

Nathaniel: Yeah, good evening, Fathers. Fathers, bless!

Fr. Andrew: Good evening. God bless you.

Nathaniel: And I'm actually hailing not from Pennsylvania, unfortunately, but neighboring CBN, so extra blessings are needed down here.

Fr. Andrew: Well, your phone is from Pennsylvania; I'll just say that. [Laughter]

Nathaniel: Yeah, the phone is from Pennsylvania, that's for sure. But, yeah, I guess I'll start with a Douglas Adams reference. In light of the first half, can we determine what the meaning of life is? and that is 42.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, it seems to me that Douglas Adams doesn't know all the things we just said in the first half. If that's the meaning… The 40s and 42s are preparation.

Fr. Stephen: Or is the answer being 42 preparatory to the finding of the question?

Nathaniel: Mmm. There it is! Awesome! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Okay.

Nathaniel: Thank you for that.

Fr. Andrew: I think you had a more serious question along with that one.

Nathaniel: Yeah, I did.

Fr. Stephen: No, one question per person. Thanks, Nathaniel! [Laughter]

Nathaniel: Oh, gosh!

Fr. Andrew: Man, you wasted it! [Laughter] Six billion years or whatever, and...

Nathaniel: So the other question had to do with the number seven, naturally, and that is why the number of heavenly bodies is used as the number for fulfillment? Or, maybe better put, why does the number of the divine council use the number to symbolize fulfillment?

Fr. Andrew: I think I know what you're saying, but I'm just going to go ahead and punt.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, yeah, the number of the divine council is 70 or 72.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because of the nations, the number of the nations.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, it actually goes the other way, but, yeah. [Laughter] So those are related, obviously, 70 and seven; you have seven tens and then seven. And if you look at— So cuneiform doesn't have numerals either. You didn't know this is where this was going to go! [Laughter] But cuneiform writes— When you look at, like, a barter list or a trade document that's in cuneiform on a clay tablet, the way they do numbers is not with letters, because it's pictographic. So they put, like, hash marks. They don't cross at five. You know what I mean by hash marks, right? You do one, two, three, four, and then you do the fifth one across. They don't go across at five, so it's just like hash— tally marks, all the way across. There could be twelve of them, 50 of them.

Nathaniel: They're all working on prison time, marking on the walls?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so that's ones. And then tens were circles. So on a cuneiform tablet, seven of something would be seven hash marks; 70 of something would be seven circles. So the way these were written and expressed, and the way things were counted, made a tight connection between those two things. I think if you asked an ancient person why seven for the heavenly bodies rather than 70 for the gods, they would say some version of ¿Por qué no los dos? in Akkadian. [Laughter] They would not see why there needed to be an "or" there.

Nathaniel: I see. Okay. So when I hear "seven rings," that's the divine council.

Fr. Andrew: For the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone?

Nathaniel: That, or Marvel's Seven Rings movie.

Fr. Andrew: Oh.

Fr. Stephen: That's ten.

Nathaniel: But preferably the seven dwarves for the seven rings.

Fr. Stephen: That's ten! The Mandarin has ten rings, my friend!

Nathaniel: Oh! Gah! I'm not caught up on my Marvel lord.

Fr. Andrew: Busted! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: See, I thought you were referring to the Legend of the Seven Rings, which is digging in the crates table-top gaming right there.

Nathaniel: I'll take my dwarven rings over that, so.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, although some of them were consumed by dragons, so… Just, I mean...

Nathaniel: We'll just consider all of them fallen.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, there you go. All right. Well, I hope that helps, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel: Thank you, yes, it does.

Fr. Andrew: Good night. All right. Thank you. Okay! Well, that went all kinds of fun places! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Doesn't know how many rings the Mandarin has, though. Criminy Pete!

Fr. Andrew: I know. Total amateur.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Next thing you're going to tell me: a beholder had seven eye stalks! Psh! [Laughter] So we're talking about how St. John's baptism kind of had both elements that we were talking about with 40. It had this preparatory element, and obviously it's a baptism of repentance. But, for example, St. Paul in Acts 19:4, which is one of his defenses when he's on trial, he talks about St. John baptizing and how that was preparatory to the coming of Christ, which is further evidence, by the way, that this is part of the apostolic preaching and not the product of some kind of historical rewrite that we should be suspicious of.

But there's also this contrast made, by St. John himself, between the baptism that he's performing in the Jordan River, and the baptism that the Messiah, the Christ who is coming, is going to perform. You can see that, for example, in Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16—order your VHS copy of Mark of the Beast II from Chuck [Ohman], our announcer. There's, like, twelve people who just had flashbacks. [Laughter]

But in all of those, there is this comparison made where Christ, the Messiah, is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit and/or fire, where this element is going to be added to baptism, or there is going to be this second baptism. And what we see early on in the book of Acts, in Acts 2:38, when St. Peter is preaching, he says, "Be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the Holy Spirit." So he has drawn those two things together. He has drawn together the meaning and significance of the baptism that St. John is doing and this baptism that Christ is going to do, and pulled them together in Christian baptism. Already, very early, on the day of Pentecost, St. Peter has pulled these together.

We sometimes lose sight of the fact that baptism is preparatory, baptism itself. Being baptized is preparatory. What do I mean by that? Well, especially among our Protestant friends, there is a tendency to see salvation as something that happens at a point in time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, an event. I think it's probably more characteristic of Protestants that would be kind of defined as sort of "low-church," but still, I mean, some of the higher church ones would just use the word "justification," and it's just as much of an event as the "baptized and saved; once saved, always saved" kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then, depending on where you are in the wild, wild world of Protestantism, people will have different views of how that event, whether they call that event justification or call it salvation or call it being born again or whatever you want to call that event— how that event is related to your baptism. So if you're in a church like the Lutheran Church that believes in baptismal regeneration, they're kind of the same thing. Baptism is where that event happens. If you're in a more low-church setting, then baptism might just be a symbol or a public proclamation that the event has happened, that follows on the event. But in all of those cases, regardless of how exactly baptism is related, baptism either is the thing or it's the mark after the fact that the thing has happened and so now that part is done. That part is done.

But that's not really the perspective of the Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, particularly St. Paul, on what's going on in baptism. In places like Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12—and lots of other places, but those are two examples—St. Paul, in talking about baptism, talks about it in terms of death and resurrection, both the death and resurrection of Christ and then our death and resurrection, that in our baptism we die and then we rise again to new life.

But even that way of framing it, that way that St. Paul frames it means that it's not that baptism is something unto itself or that baptism is the end of something, or the testimony to something that has already happened, but that it's the beginning of something. It is precisely the beginning of a new life, a new— And not just a new life in the sense of "Oh, now you're going to have eternal life in the age to come," but the beginning of a new life lived differently here in the world, within the Church community, within the Christian community, in the world, in your family, that baptism marks this beginning of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you're not just waiting until you get raptured out or the Great Tribulation comes or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I think the common Evangelical rejection of infant baptism is precisely related to this. If you see baptism as an ending, as a culmination of something, then administering it to an infant who hasn't done anything, thought anything, agreed to anything believed anything, thought much—doesn't make a lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because what's culminating in the life of a newborn baby?

Fr. Stephen: I mean, technically they just had the culmination of gestation, but that's about it. [Laughter] Whereas if you understand baptism to be the beginning of a new life, of a new way of life, a new way of living and being in the world, of being in community, of being in a Christian family, of living as a Christian—if it's a beginning, then it makes perfect sense for Christian families to baptize their children. It makes perfect sense for their life as a Christian to begin right there, because they're living in a Christian family as part of a Christian community, going to church. Why would they live as a heathen for some period of time? It doesn't make sense if you're viewing it from that perspective.

But so let's talk more about how baptism is presented as preparatory, as a beginning. To flesh out— When St. Paul is using these terms of "death" and "resurrection," the end of an old life and the beginning of a new life, the idea of death and the end of that old life is really the idea of repentance; it's a way of talking about repentance. He's going to use this language of "putting off the old man" and even killing it. This is one of these places where kind of dumb-dumb level gender inclusivity does us wrong interpreting the Bible. There are places even in the Bible where being a little bit gender inclusive makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: Because, for example, there are different words in Greek for a man, a male human, an adult male human, a man—and the word for mankind, humanity. Now, yes, both "mankind" and "humanity" include the word "man" in them, but I don't think translating it as "humanity" is some kind of weird liberal progressive something-or-other when we're talking about anthropos. It's a way of distinguishing it in English from aner, a man, a male human.

Yeah, let me tell you my favorite story, though, as a digression, about gender inclusivity gone awry.

Fr. Andrew: Okay! Not where I thought we were going tonight, but I'm up for it. I'm here for it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I'm just going to throw this out, because I find it richly entertaining. So a lot of this, the gender-inclusivity thing, started in the 1970s. I know many of you were not alive then, but you started getting this whole thing where someone would say, "When a man does this…" they'd say, "Or a woman." You'd get that. That was sort of how the gender-inclusivity thing started. And so people kind of got trained by the culture to just say, "a man—or a woman!" "When a man—or a woman!—becomes a doctor," whatever.

And so there was this great moment where this football player named Deacon Jones, famous football player— And part of what he was famous for was he would line up opposite somebody, and then when the play started, he would just take his hand and smack the side of their helmet, to knock them off balance as the play started; it would give him an advantage. So there was this moment when an interviewer asked Deacon Jones about this, and Deacon Jones said, "Well, whenever you go upside the head of a man—or a woman—"

Fr. Andrew: Wow! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes! And so it got sort of very quiet in the interview, as he kind of realized what he said. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, see? You don't always have to be gender-inclusive. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Well, apparently.

Fr. Stephen: It could go very wrong for you.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, according to the interwebs, he coined the term "sack" to refer to that particular maneuver in football. How about that?

Fr. Stephen: So, yes, and gender inclusivity can go very badly. And it does us wrong here, too, getting back to the topic at hand, because— And I've even seen this in some recent Orthodox service books. Like, why am I going off on a little rant about gender inclusivity? Because I've seen this in recent Orthodox service books, where, like, in the baptismal liturgy it will use this language of St. Paul's about "putting off the old man," and you get people who are like: "Well, what if you are baptizing a girl or a woman?" But the point here is St. Paul is not just referring to, like, the old person, the person you used to be— And let me say, "killing off the old person" does not read well in liturgical texts. [Laughter] We don't want to sound like we're promoting euthanasia in the Orthodox Church. We're not Canadians. Ooh, cheap one.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: Right? But the "old man" in this case is a reference to Adam: the old Adam. So Adam, as we've talked about on the show, receives the garments of skin; he receives mortality, mortal flesh. We all are born in the likeness of Adam, of the "old man." We are born in his likeness. We also are mortal; we're conceived mortal. Because of our mortality comes our weakness to the sinful passions.

How does that relate? Well, because I am mortal, there are things that I need, because if I don't get them I will die. If someone is immortal, they don't need anything: they're immortal; they won't die. But if you're mortal, you'll need certain things or you'll die. So I need to eat to stay alive. Hunger, by itself, is what we call a blameless passion. It is not sinful to get hungry. It is normal, because of my mortal flesh, but the fact that I need to eat opens up the temptation to the sinful passion of gluttony. Because I am mortal, I need to sleep. Getting tired is a blameless passion; there's nothing sinful about getting tired. But getting tired and needing to rest opens up the sinful passion of sloth, of laziness. It opens up that temptation. Immortal people don't need to make more people. The world must be peopled, therefore mortal people must make more people. There is nothing sinful about a husband and wife making more people, but needing to do that opens up this temptation to the sin of lust. And we can go on and on. I need to have money to pay for shelter and clothing; that opens up greed. On and on, our mortality makes us prone to sin and to indulging these desires of the flesh.

The "old man," the old life, pre-baptism, pre-Christ, pre-death in the death and resurrection paradigm, is a life that's lived seeking to fulfill the desires of the flesh, and even go beyond fulfilling them to indulging them.

So then, if that life, that "old man," dies, then there's a new life, and that new life that begins at baptism St. Paul will refer to as the "new man." Specifically, you put off the old man; you put on the new man.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and again this is where the gender inclusivity thing messes it up, because it's not the "new person."

Fr. Stephen: The "new person" or the "new woman." "You're a whole different person now!"

Fr. Andrew: "I'm a new woman!" Yeah, no, it's Christ. Christ is the new man, and Adam is the old man. These are specific men.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so when we're "born of water and the Spirit," to quote Christ, referring to baptism, then we are born in his likeness, not the likeness of the old man. And so in Christ there is a new humanity, not new in the sense that it's a completely different species or different creatures—new in the sense that "new" is pretty much always used in the Scripture, meaning renewed. Renewed, because of course the image in which the old man— the image in which Adam was created was Christ. So that is renewed in Christ himself, and so this new humanity is a renewed humanity.

That means we get, as St. Paul will say, a new nature, which is again a renewed nature. But we've talked about what nature means. "Nature," like "body," is a nexus of powers and potentialities. And so there is a renewed and new set of powers and potentialities that a person has in Christ that they didn't have before, potentials like immortality, like eternal life.

So that culminates in a new body in the full-orbed sense in the resurrection, which again—we believe in the bodily resurrection—that new body is a renewed body, renewed, restored, but now with a new set of powers and potentialities. This new way of life, St. Paul is going to talk about as living according to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, capital-S Spirit—not spiritual in some vague sense, but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God dwelling within us—and that old life is walking according to the flesh, following the flesh, seeking to indulge its desires. And so after our baptism, the new life that begins, we have these two ways that we can follow.

Fr. Andrew: And this is made explicit by St. Paul in Romans 8, so I'm going to read verses three through 13.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh on account of sin: he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

So then, brothers, we are debtors—not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

Fr. Stephen: And so these concepts are important to understand what it means when we're talking about asceticism and when we talk about the "mortification of the flesh." "Mortification," you can probably tell if you know any Latin at all, mort- is "dead": the putting to death of the flesh. So a lot of people now, when they hear "mortification of the flesh," they interpret that as: "Oh, this is some kind of Gnostic thing."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like it's anti-body, anti-material. And sometimes it's distorted to, like: "I have to hurt myself," like self-flagellation, which is, I mean, that's a real thing that exists, especially in the Middle Ages in the West.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that's inflicting pain or suffering on yourself physically, that somehow the physical is bad, all of these things. With that understanding of the mortification of the flesh, then asceticism is looked at that way, that asceticism is about saying the material is bad or sinful or evil.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it's about handing over control to the Spirit of God versus the desires of the fleshly body.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what— When the Orthodox Church, at least, talks about putting to death the flesh, the mortification of the flesh, they're getting that from what we just heard from St. Paul. He used that language.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And it's talking about subjecting, controlling— In one place St. Paul says he beats his body with blows. He doesn't mean that literally in this self-flagellation, "inflict pain on yourself" sense; he means he gets it under control. That's why St. Paul is always using these athletic metaphors about training and physical discipline. You have to get your mortal flesh under control so that you're not indulging its desires; you're controlling those desires. This is a very practical thing.

So if we're talking about just looking at some of the examples I gave— If we're talking about food: we need to eat to live. That opens us up to this temptation to overindulge in eating. How does one overcome that? How does one begin to discipline that desire, to bring it under control, to get self-control and self-mastery? How does that happen? Fasting. Fasting is how you do that. You take control of what you eat for a period of time, and that helps build that discipline. You don't starve yourself to death. You don't starve yourself to death.

This is one of the things that you really notice when you read the Church Fathers— well, when you read some of the works of the Church Fathers that people don't normally read. Everyone wants to read the works of the Church Fathers that are about the Trinity and Christology so they can have online debates about it. [Laughter] But when you read the works of the Church Fathers that are dealing with the Christian life—

Fr. Andrew: Which is most of it!

Fr. Stephen: —and when they're comparing the way Christians live to the way various heretical groups and pagan groups live, what you find is: if your view of asceticism is harming yourself, then the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, these people have it all over Christians. These groups would literally fast to the point of death. They would walk around pale and weak, and they considered that a mark of their holiness. Modern people who get into Gnosticism, for some reason, always ditch the asceticism. [Laughter] It's sort of like— Back in the '90s there was this whole "Celtic spirituality" fad.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes.

Fr. Stephen: People just got really into Enya or something and decided they needed to make a religion out of it that was vaguely Christian.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: Stop me when I tell a lie.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Man!

Fr. Stephen: What was fascinating to me about it—or one of the things, at least—was that if you actually look at Celtic Christianity, it had one of the most brutal penitential systems in the history of Western Christianity, and for some reason the Celtic Christianity folks had none of that! None of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no one's standing in freezing rivers the whole night long, reciting the psalter from memory. That's not a thing that—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. No, no, no, no. Can't smoke weed while you're doing that. [Laughter] So that tends to get left out. There's a big difference between that and not eating meat and dairy for 40 days. Those are not the same thing. They're not remotely the same thing. It's not going to harm you, especially if you live in southern Louisiana and there's seafood everywhere and it's delicious! [Laughter] And, like, crawfish season is during Lent every year. But even for the rest of you who are not so blessed to live in God's country, it's not going to kill you. Some people even eat better and healthier during Lent, and some people eat nothing but carbs. But either way, this isn't harming yourself. This is about discipline.

Sleep, laziness: you have vigils. You have going to church more; you have spending more time in prayer. Giving alms, giving to the poor, making a special effort to do that, helps you discipline how you spend your money, how you spend or waste your time. These are all means of developing discipline and self-control and putting to death the sinful desires of the flesh in order to follow the Spirit instead.

Another good place— I mean, St. Paul talks about this a lot, but another good place, part of which is I think familiar to people— He talks about this in Galatians, and he talks about these two ways that you can go in terms of the fruit that they produce, in terms of what you have in your life when you either follow the desires of the flesh or you follow the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is where the rubber meets the road, people. All right, so this is Galatians 5:16-24.

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now, the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

It's a great, great passage.

Fr. Stephen: Yep. And you also, in the middle there, described my typical Saturday night— No, I'm kidding. I don't—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Which verse?

Fr. Stephen: I don't engage in idolatry.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so baptism is about making this beginning. Before baptism, someone in Galatia, especially someone who's not Jewish in Galatia, is living a life as a pagan, following their passions and the desires of their flesh, engaging in all those things he talked about, including idolatry and sexual immorality, sorcery, all those things. Now they're coming and they're going to be baptized. That flesh is going to die, and they're going to come to new life when they receive the Holy Spirit. And they're going to begin a new life. But even after they're baptized and they begin this new life, it's going to be possible for them to yield and start following the desires of the flesh again. You may have noticed this, listeners who have been baptized, that you have been tempted and even fall into sin. And so there's still— There's still this choice that has to be made—on an ongoing basis, not just once, but over and over again—to continue to follow the Spirit and not yield to the desires of the flesh.

But as these people approached baptism, as they were going to be baptized, they were going to be beginning this new life. They were going to be changing the whole way in which they live in the world, the whole way in which they see things, the whole way in which they understand the world and other people and their families. They were going to be joining this new community. They were going to be worshiping a different God and worshiping in a completely different way. All of these things are about to change. And so that necessitated a period of repentance. That necessitated a period of preparation for baptism, to prepare to begin this new life. And that is what originally catechesis was about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it wasn't Orthodoxy 101.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it wasn't memorizing dates. It wasn't when things happened.

Fr. Andrew: It was a training in a way of living, like: This is how you repent. This is how you put aside the fleshly desires and take on—

Fr. Stephen: This is what sin is.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: This is what needs to change. This is how you worship the true God. This is what the true God is like, unlike the ones you're used to worshiping.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it's about how you live, how you live, like what makes a good Christian.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and how you see the world, the renewing of your mind, your nous: how you see the world, how you understand the world, how you understand what happens to you. All of that is going to come to this culmination at the peak of your baptism when you receive the Holy Spirit and begin to be able to walk according to the Spirit, so there's this period of preparation. And because, early on in the history of the Church, people were received into the Church—they were baptized—on Pascha, on the Passover—that's when it happened—you have this 40-day period, a period of preparation, of repentance, of purification for those who are about to receive baptism, receive the Holy Spirit, begin this new life.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, we're going to go ahead and take our second and final break and be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! It is the third and final half of this episode. Is it the final episode of The Lord of Spirits podcast? Um, yeah. I mean, it seems kind of weird to make the last episode about Lent, but...

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it would seem like this episode would be leading up to something.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, well, during our first half, we talked about 40 and 42, what all of that is about: preparation, forgiveness, repentance; and in the second half, we talked about baptism, how it connects to all of that. This episode is about Lent. You might think that it is going to end with an explication of the Christian Passover, aka Pascha, aka Easter, but that is not what we're ending it with, is it?

Fr. Stephen: No!

Fr. Andrew: The big shocker at the end! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. We're going to zig when you thought we were going to zag.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh.

Fr. Stephen: Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions. [Laughter] So, yeah, as we mentioned, right at the end of the second half, almost like it was a segue or something, the baptism— someone's baptism culminates in their receiving the Holy Spirit, in chrismation. We did a whole episode on that, too.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: But that is the culmination of the rite. In fact, the baptism is preparatory for it. The baptism is purification to receive the Holy Spirit. So if, then, as we talked about, the apostles see baptism as connected to the death and resurrection of Christ, but that is preparatory to the receiving of the Holy Spirit, then that would mean that Pascha and the Ascension are preparatory to Pentecost.

Fr. Andrew: Big reveal!

Fr. Stephen: So here in the third half, we're talking about Pentecost.

Fr. Andrew: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And we're going to look at it— I think we did a Pentecost episode...

Fr. Andrew: Uh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Or am I just thinking of the chrismation episode?

Fr. Andrew: No, we did— I'm trying to remember the name of it now. I think it's called "An Immaculate Dwelling Place," so we did do a Pentecost episode.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Andrew: But it was about tabernacles and temples and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Well, now we're coming at this from a different angle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Because we're coming at this from the angle of observance. And so it may sound weird. Pascha is the Feast of feasts, Passover is the feast— And Passover in the Torah, obviously—well, maybe not obviously—is presented as: "This will be for you the first of months." This is the beginning of the— This is the day. The idea that that's preparatory to another feast, especially one that a lot fewer attend, frankly—because it's later in the summer when they're on vacation—may seem counter-intuitive and odd.

But let me say that it maybe should not be so, because, for example, when Christ, in St. John's gospel, before his death and resurrection, is talking to his disciples, soon to be apostles, about what comes next, he talks to them about going away, and he's not talking about going away, i.e., dying and then he's going to rise again; he's talking about going away as in the Ascension, as in returning to his Father, being enthroned in the heavens. And he presents this not as: "Well, okay, then everything will be done and will be complete," but he presents it as preparatory to something else.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He says essentially it's going to be better, superior.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So, yeah, this is what he says. This is John 16, starting in verse four.

But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you, but now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, "Where are you going?" But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you, and when he comes he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment because the ruler of this world is judged.

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, but he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. Therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

He's talking about what will happen when the Holy Spirit comes, among other things.

Fr. Stephen: When the Holy Spirit comes, yeah, and that is better than him remaining in this world with the disciples. So Christ himself is presenting what he is about to do as preparatory to the coming of the Holy Spirit, to dwell in people.

Of course, the Holy Spirit comes 50 days after Pascha, after the Passover, on Pentecost, hence "Pentecost." That's where the name comes from, that it's 50 days. 50 days is— You have 49, which is seven sevens. So Christ's ascension happens on the 40th day, meaning it's preparatory to something; it's leading to something. See, we teased this third half all the way back in the first half. Christ's ascension is preparatory to something. Then we have the seventh seven, and on the 50th day… Think about the sabbath years in the Torah. In the Torah, you don't just have the sabbath day, but you have sabbath years: every seventh year is a sabbath year, when they were supposed to let the land rest and trust in God to provide for them. We know from later in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Israelites literally never did this, but they were supposed to, on every seventh year. And then every seventh seven, after every 49 years, the 50th year was to be the jubilee year.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where all the slaves get freed, all the land goes back to whoever it belongs to, all the debts get canceled. Big reset.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so after the seven sevens you get this day. So the cyclical pattern of years in Israel, if they had followed this, would have culminated in this 50th year. So the idea here is that the Holy Spirit coming is the culmination of all of this.

But, of course, the feast of Pentecost, the feast that's celebrated there, is not a new one. This isn't the Holy Spirit came 50 days after Jesus rose again, and so there came to be this feast of Pentecost—this is a Jewish feast.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, just like Pascha is, aka Passover.

Fr. Stephen: Just as Passover. This is a feast from the Torah. And so, to sort of fully understand what's going on here, we have to understand the first Pentecost. That will help us understand the second Pentecost, in the same way that if you understand the first Passover, it helps you understand what's going on with the second Passover and second Pascha and Christ's death and resurrection.

The first Pentecost is 50 days after the exodus at Mount Sinai when the Israelites received the Torah. It is the liturgical reenactment and participation in that event, when Moses first received the Torah. Again, we talked about this event back in the first half and how sort of paradigmatic this is, and about Moses fasting before the second time that he received it. But this annual celebration brought the people back to that. Well, how did the people participate in it? So we've talked about on the show before, with the way the Passover was celebrated, and "How is this night different than every other night? This is the night that God brought us out of Egypt."

Fr. Andrew: Right, not "them"—us.

Fr. Stephen: Not our ancestors, us. So they dress like they're about to go on a journey, they make unleavened bread like they're about to go on a journey and they don't have time for the dough to rise, all of the things.

Fr. Andrew: They stand, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So they are participating in that liberation from slavery in Egypt by celebrating the Passover. So what were they participating in, in particular? They're not participating in going up the mountain with Moses, because the people didn't go up the mountain with Moses; they were terrified. What they were participating in was when Moses read to them the book of the covenant and they said, "All of these things you have said, we will do."

Fr. Andrew: Which they didn't.

Fr. Stephen: Which they didn't—spoilers—but when they agreed. And your average Israelite or your average Jewish person in the Second Temple period, likewise had, at many points in their life, agreed that they would be faithful to God's covenant with them, that they would be faithful to the Torah. And guess what? Spoilers—they hadn't been.

But on that day, the day of the feast of Pentecost, by participating in that feast, they could come back and reaffirm: "No, I am going to reaffirm. I am going to rededicate myself to living my life according to the Torah, to doing those things that God has commanded me to do, to not doing those things that God has commanded me not to do, to being faithful. As God has always been faithful to us, I'm going to commit now, again, to be faithful to him." So there's this kind of renewal of the covenant or reaffirmation of the covenant is what they were participating in.

So the second Pentecost, the Pentecost that's related to us in the book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit comes and indwells all of the followers of Christ— It's described in Acts using language from the new covenant passages of the Old Testament—Jeremiah 31, Joel 2, Ezekiel, other places—that talk about there being a new covenant. Again "new" here really means renewed, made new again. But that's connecting this idea. A very important part of that new covenant language was that the Spirit would write the Torah on people's hearts. Instead of the Torah being written on tablets of stone, instead of the Torah being written on a scroll, the Torah would be written on the human heart. And that's a move from external to internal.

If you don't understand this in the new covenant prophecies, you won't understand what St. Paul is doing when he talks about the Torah, this move from external to internal, because for St. Paul that's the difference. You may have noted in the second half, when Fr. Andrew was reading those passages from Romans and Galatians, the Torah kept coming up? I think in that translation it said "law," but that's the Torah—the Torah kept coming up. And St. Paul says: Look, if you're living according to the flesh, if you're living to gratify your flesh, you can't keep the Torah. Why? Because if you're following the desires of your flesh, it's impossible for you to please God. So St. Paul's assuming that keeping the Torah is pleasing to God, kind of because God said it was. [Laughter]

So you can't do it. You juxtapose that with what he says about the fruit of the Spirit, all of these things that will come into your life when you're following the Spirit, against which things there is no law; there's no commandment against them. You will keep the Torah, without trying, not as a list of rules, written rules, the letter of the Torah that is external to you, trying to just follow these observances as best you can, but because it's written in your heart and you're following the Spirit, and he's leading you to produce these things. At one point, St. Paul says the one who loves keeps the whole Torah. That's just the first of the fruit of the Spirit, but that's at the core.

And St. Paul is not saying something really new there. Deuteronomy says that, and Christ quoted Deuteronomy saying that. "This sums up all the law and the prophets: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength." And then from Leviticus: "Love your neighbor as yourself." St. Paul's just saying the same thing. But that makes this distinction, and that was a distinction that was already present in the Torah itself when it talks about, in Deuteronomy, circumcising your heart. You contrast: yes, you have this external thing; you've been circumcised in the flesh—if you're male and you're an Israelite—you've been circumcised outwardly, but that's not what's important: it's the circumcision of the heart that's important. This is just these same ideas.

Even though— When you read St. Paul, he makes this clear distinction and talks about following the Spirit is the way you actually fulfill what the Torah demands of us, the narrative of the Holy Spirit coming and indwelling people on Pentecost, that we read in Acts, is saying the same thing if you understand this background, this background of the feast of Pentecost, that that's when the Torah was given, and the idea of the new covenant, and this move from external to internal.

The importance of this feast and its celebration, that it had already been seen in its practice as a sort of culmination—not as sort of— It tends to be looked at as an epilogue to Pascha.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. The end of the festal cycle, now back to "ordinary time."

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. That's how a lot of people tend to look at Pentecost. I mean, it's harder to look at it that way in the Torah, but, I mean, I think people managed to do it, looking back on in retrospectively, to say that, well, Passover's the really important thing. I think when you're reading through the book of Exodus that it's pretty clear that the giving of the Torah is what the exodus from Egypt is building up to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the narrative— You leave Egypt, not so that you leave Egypt: you leave Egypt so that you get to Sinai.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But so that was seen in how Pentecost was celebrated, and this was testified to by the fact that when we get to Acts 2 and the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, why are there thousands of Jewish people in Jerusalem from all these other countries and other places and Roman provinces?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, because Pentecost is a big deal.

Fr. Stephen: Because it's a big deal, so thousands upon thousands of people came to Jerusalem for that feast. While we may be able to look back and see that clearly in Exodus, it's far rarer, I think, that we understand that in the New Testament, that we understand that Christ's death and resurrection and ascension are building up to the coming of the Holy Spirit, that the coming of the Holy Spirit is the climax of that story, not an epilogue to it. The Holy Spirit coming and dwelling in us is not something to tide us over until Jesus comes back. I say that very confidently because Fr. Andrew read Christ saying that in St. John's gospel. I'm going out on a limb, I know, but I'm going to say: Christ was right.

What, then, is going on with our annual celebration of Pentecost—or at least should be going on with our annual celebration of Pentecost in the Church? As opposed to seeing it as an epilogue, we should be seeing this as the climax of the feasts. And if Pentecost was being celebrated as the renewal of the old covenant, then we should understand Pentecost as the renewal of the new covenant, not that we receive the Holy Spirit again and again and again once a year, after we were chrismated, any more than they received the Torah over and over again, but that we recommit to living according to the Spirit, to walking according to the Spirit, year after year after year. Because—guess what? Just like those Israelites, you and I commit to that a lot and don't pull it off. We go after the indulgences of the flesh over and over again, and need to come back and recommit.

So just to give some examples— And a lot of this is because our audience, I know, likes learning about obscure Second Temple Jewish stuff. [Laughter] Some stuff about the importance of Pentecost in the Second Temple period, the great importance. In the book of Jubilees, Pentecost is presented as the most important feast of the year, which might be surprising, meaning it's presented as more important than Passover, more important than the Day of Atonement: it is the most important feast of the year. And it was celebrated by the taking and renewal of oaths related to the Torah, but a lot of Jubilees takes place before the Torah was given. That's why it's "oaths" in general.

But the way Jubilees presents the feast of Pentecost is that the feast of Pentecost is eternally happening in heaven. That is the feast that is eternally happening in heaven, is the feast of Pentecost. Well, what does that mean, the giving of the Torah is eternally happening in heaven? Well, what they meant by that is that God's commitment to be faithful to the Torah, God's commitment to be faithful to his covenant, is eternal. Remember what we said—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he's always doing it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Remember what we said about the divine energies, a few episodes ago. God is eternally faithful, eternally committed to his covenant. We obviously are not. We obviously are not, but he is. So it's eternally happening in heaven, and that eternal celebration in heaven touches human time and space reality. In the view of Jubilees, that happens at particular points in time. Like when God makes his covenant with Noah, that is Noah coming to participate in this eternal covenant faithfulness, eternal chesed of God. And then all of the other covenants— Obviously, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai is a preeminent example of this. But this is also true at the celebration of Pentecost every year in the cycle. Humans enter into this moment, where God is eternally faithful, and then we again pledge to be faithful to God in response, at those manifestations in time and space, those points of connection. So that's how Jubilees presents— the book of Jubilees presents Pentecost.

As you might expect, based on that, from the documents have at Qumran, because Jubilees is the fourth most prevalent text in the Dead Sea Scrolls, had a major influence in the community in Qumran— Scholars argue whether it was the most prominent feast in Qumran. There's an argument to be made for that; there's an argument to be made for Passover. Those are the two. Those are the two big ones, and then scholars argue which one was on top.

But we have actually— It's fragmentary, but we have some fragmentary prayers that they used at the feast of Pentecost, that all involved this reaffirming, not only of the covenant with God related to the Torah and other covenants, but also the sort of internal covenant of the community. The bond that that particular community had and its structure was seen as sort of an internal covenant that they were party to, and that was reaffirmed on the day of Pentecost.

Philo talks about a group, a Jewish sect, in Alexandria called the Theraputae, which, if your Greek is really, really bad, I will tell you means "healers." [Laughter] This group that was focused on healing, again, for them Pentecost was the greatest feast of the year. And what they would do on that day is they would have a massive meal, just this ongoing feast throughout the evening and the night, and during that feast they would have this marathon Torah-study and exposition match, people just reading and preaching on the Torah and studying and arguing about the Torah over this huge expansive meal.

Fr. Andrew: Big preach-off! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because that's when the Torah was given. So those are all windows into the popularity, and give you some background into why those thousands of people were there in Jerusalem.

So there is this emphasis at Pentecost. There's this reaffirmation of repentance, of the putting-off of the old life, of the death of the old man, the crucifixion of our sinful flesh, in community together. There is a reaffirmation of our baptisms—not only that death but also the new life that comes afterwards. That death and resurrection, not only of Christ but of us in Christ, through baptism. There's a reaffirmation of the new covenant, as we pledge ourselves again, to walk according to the Spirit, to live according to the Spirit, not according to the flesh and its sinful desires.

Already in Second Temple Judaism, these kind of community reaffirmations were accompanied by public fasting—public fasting is when people fast together, as opposed to private fasting, which is when I fast about something by myself—periods of community fasting. And we can see how this idea and these understandings get incorporated into Great Lent, i.e., as we talked about at the end of the second half, there's this 40-day period of preparation, of repentance, of purification in which those about to be baptized engaged before this whole cycle of events, beginning with Christ's death and then his resurrection and then his ascension and then the receiving of the Holy Spirit. They already receive the Holy Spirit in their chrismation on that day, sort of proleptically, but this is preparation for that.

Now we can see, hopefully, now that we've talked a little more here in this third half about this sort of public and communal act of reaffirmation, of concelebration, of Pentecost, how the Church as a whole began to join in solidarity with those preparing. This was a natural thing coming out of Judaism at the beginning of the Church, that this would be understood in this way. That, well, yes, I was baptized X years ago. I'm not preparing to be baptized this year—these people are—but I'm going to join with them in their fasting and in this period of purification and in this period of expectation, in order to renew and reaffirm what happened in my baptism and what happened in my chrismation and where I'm supposed to go after that, the life that that was intended to begin, that I have faltered in.

Fr. Andrew: This is one of the reasons why it's a good idea to go to baptisms and chrismations, even if it's not somebody that you know. I'm sure a lot of people, like a lot of married people, for instance, have had the experience of going to a wedding, and it sort of reconnects you to your own wedding and it makes you think about your marriage and all that kind of stuff. That's all there. You're re-participating in that for yourself.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Let me be controversial. Baptisms are not family events.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They are community events.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because a person's being introduced into the community.

Fr. Stephen: Your whole parish should be there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, I mean, just on a practical level, for a lot of— most Orthodox Christians, I think this is probably correct to say— Most Orthodox Christians get baptized when they're little babies, and so they have no conscious memory of the experience. And that's another reason why it's a good idea to go, is to renew that experience, so that you actually do have a conscious memory of what that's like, and you will hear again those words that were said when you were baptized and know that that has been done to you as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that's no obstacle to receiving a sacrament, by the way. I have, like, zero conscious memory of my wedding.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Those of you who are married may be able to identify. I remember— I have grueling near-PTSD about the wedding planning, and then the day itself is a blur, and then I was married. [Laughter] So, yeah, even if you've had an Orthodox wedding, you need to go to another one so you can actually hear the prayers and think about them. So that's not something unique to babies being baptized. There's lots of sacraments that go by as a blur!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Ordination… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I don't remember that either. I remember that the people were singing "Axios" too fast. This is my only memory of my ordination to the priesthood: the people were singing "Axios" too fast, and so I was, like, desperately struggling to keep up in putting on the pieces of vestment.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They're going to be all "Axio"d out!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that's the only conscious memory I have, is that people were moving way too quickly and the bishop kept handing me pieces of vestment, and I was like: Aaah!

Fr. Andrew: "I'm still tying this!"

Fr. Stephen: Trying to get them all on.

Fr. Andrew: "Where's the subdeacon!?"

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. So lots of them are a blur. But, yeah, so this is something we do together as a community, in solidarity with the people are getting baptized, as this reaffirmation, this recommitment, as a group—as a group, as a whole.

Fr. Andrew: And that brings us to Great Lent. [Laughter] Although, I mean— To me, if you've listened to the last two hours and 25 minutes and you didn't connect any of that to Lent, we have to lay that out for you, I question whether you were really listening.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so go back and listen to the whole thing again.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, it's… Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, to bring some thoughts in here at the end, I remember years ago reading for the first time Fr. Alexander Schmemann's lovely book called Great Lent. And also— It's been a long time since I've read it, and it's been a long time since I've read his book, For the Life of the World, and so I might be mixing stuff up, but they have a lot of common themes between them, as I recall. I think one of the things that he says in one of those books, and maybe in both of them, is that a lot of people have the sense that the purpose of Christianity, of "religion," is to help—he uses that word: to help. If you ask a lot of people, even a lot of Orthodox people: What's the purpose of Lent? What's the point of it? They might say something like: Well, it makes be become a better person, something like that. It's about becoming "better."

I mean, on a certain level, that's not wrong. I hope that people emerge from the other end of Lent in a better state than they were at the beginning. But I think that the problem with that framing of that's what's going on is that it looks at it like a kind of program that fits within the story of my life. And I understand that. I mean, we're all living in our own lives, and the modern world trains us to think of our lives as being a story about ourselves, that I am the main character; I am the hero of this epic tale. But that's just not true! It's just not.

One of the things about learning to live the Torah in the heart is learning to live in humility. Humility is that key, key virtue from which all the other ones flow. If you learn in humility, then you know that— If you live in humility then you know that the story's not about you, it's not about me: it is Christ's story. And so seeing that Lent is pointing towards Pentecost, that it's preparatory towards Pentecost, towards being enlivened by the Spirit, that it's this great sweep that is about what Christ is doing for us—to us, for the world, atonement for the whole world—that it's that, that gives a different understanding of what's going on. Then the question is not, "How does this make me better?" but rather, "Where do I fit into this story that is happening without me?" It's happening whether I'm in it or not, but I can become part of it; I can participate in it.

One of the experiences that I have had—and I know other people have had because I've served in pastoral ministry for 13 years and I still work with people, because I'm a member of a parish and I'm still a priest in the parish—is that when you conceive of Great Lent or any of the disciplinary practices of the Church as being about getting better, as being about self-improvement, it's really easy to get bogged down and discouraged, because you try and you try, and you might see some progress, maybe, but you might see none; you might see back-and-forth, one step forward, two steps back; and it's easy to become discouraged. This is true not just in Great Lent; it's true in the other ascetical stories of our life—marriage, probably number one for those who are married; and I've never been a monk, but I've had monks tell me, nuns tell me, that it can be that way for them; parenting often feels like one step forward, two steps back, or, you know, one step forward, two steps left, three steps right, whatever it might be. [Laughter] All kinds of relationships, all kinds of pursuits can become very discouraging when we think of it in terms of: "This is my story," but it's not my story.

Listener, it's not your story. Actually, it's much better— I have much better news: it's Christ's story, and that means that even if in my life, whether it's my experience of Lent, my experience of marriage, my experience of parenting, my experience of friendship, my experience of ministry, whatever it might be, whatever it is, whatever is your experience, even though at certain points or maybe even the apparent overall arc can be discouraging— I mean, it's likely that most of us, when we die, will feel like there's a lot left undone—didn't win at the end, not winning now, whatever it might be.

However that goes, the point is so that we can enter into preparation for life in the Spirit, in this life and ultimately in the life of the age to come, in the resurrection. This life is about getting things in order so that we are prepared for that life, but it's not about simply waiting until that life starts. It's about becoming righteous now, through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit who gives us the ability to do that, having the Torah, the law, the way of God written on our hearts. A big piece of that is to know the Scriptures. I mean, if you had to ask me what the point of our whole podcast is about is that people would want to know the Scriptures. The more that you know the Scriptures, like, way deep down in your bones, the more the path opens up clearly in front of you. It doesn't make you walk the path—you can learn about this book and not actually do what's in it—but it becomes clear as to what you should do.

But also, it's not just a manual on the things that you should do; it's the story—the story, the great story, the last story, the first story. It's all those things all at once. As we are, most of us, probably most of you listening to this right now, still a few weeks away from Lent—this year in 2024 it starts on March 18—as we begin to enter into that journey, look through it. Look towards Pascha, yes, that, but also toward Pentecost, the life in the Spirit. And know that that's the point of renewal, true renewal, and now we're preparing ourselves for that.

I think that you will discover that whatever ups and downs, whatever detours, whatever sidetracks, deviations, failures, your experience between now and then—and I hope to God you experience triumphs as well; God give you that consolation—that whatever happens, even if we have to drag ourselves across the finish line at a cost, that we know that we are doing it because we want to participate in Christ and his story, and his kingdom shall have no end. That's what I have to say about that.

Fr. Stephen: So one of the things I have to tell people over and over again in confession during Lent—and you get a lot of people who come to confession during Lent who don't always come to confession other times— One of the things I have to tell them over and over again, that surprises a lot of people at first, is when I tell them that Lent is set up for you to fail. And they kind of say, "What?" [Laughter] Because invariably those are the first things you get confessed when you're hearing confessions. It's: "Well, I messed up keeping the fast, and I didn't—" etc., etc. And so I point out that it's set up for them to fail.

What would succeeding even look like? I mean, hypothetically there could be a person out there who keeps the fast perfectly every moment of Lent, comes to every single service in their parish community, empties out their savings account and gives it to the poor, prays during every waking moment for the entirety of Lent, sleeps three hours a night because they're keeping vigil, staying up late praying for all of Lent. Hypothetically there could be such a person. I don't think I've met them. They'd have to do it all in secret, too, so, I mean, maybe I have, and they don't come to confession because they don't sin. But I don't think that person is out there.

But let's say, hypothetically, that that person did exist and that was you. Would keeping Lent perfectly like that be good for you? It would at minimum present a great temptation to pride about how well you've kept it compared to everyone else. At the very least, there would be that temptation. Also that kind of prompts the question: If it's set up for us to fail, then why would you set up rules that pretty much everyone is going to fail in some way? In different ways and to different degrees, but everyone's going to somehow fail.

Well, we have to ask again: What is the goal? And we talked about this sort of in the middle of the show tonight. The goal here is self-mastery. That's really the goal of the Christian life: to master yourself so that you can be mastered by the Holy Spirit, because you can't really, as much as we say it over and over again in the Liturgy— To really offer our whole selves to God, to really be able to do that, we have to first master ourselves, because if there's some part of my life, some part of my heart, some part of my soul, some part of my mind that is out of my control, I can't offer that to God: it's out of my control, meaning it's probably deep into following the sinful desires of my flesh. So self-control, that last fruit of the Spirit— I think may be why it's listed last, because it's the hardest one. It's the hardest one.

How do you develop that? How do you take control of these things? Well, we talked about that, too. My gluttony is out of control; how do I counter that? Well, by fasting. If my laziness is out of control, how do I counter that? Well, by vigils, by staying awake, by denying myself the kind of rest and leisure that I want to indulge in. How do I discipline my spending habits? How do I discipline how I waste time? Lent gives us opportunities to do all of that and to fail at it. And by giving us that opportunity to fail, it shows us the areas where we're weak; it shows us the areas where we're still out of control. As an example, one of the questions I get about fasting, invariably, is: "Oh, when it says we can't we have wine and oil, does that mean no alcohol or just no wine?" And I always tell people, "That means all alcohol, regardless of what the Russians say. That means all alcohol." [Laughter] And I say to them, "Here's why I say that: because if you can't go 40 days without alcohol, that'll tell you something about your relationship with alcohol. You will learn something about yourself," because self-mastery begins with self-knowledge.

So does repentance. If we don't really know ourselves, we can't get control of ourselves and we can't really repent. And you say, "Well, how can I not know myself?" We're in denial about a lot of things. We lie to ourselves a lot. But when it comes down to it, I can say, "Oh, I'm in control of myself," all I want. "I can make my choices. No, I'm not controlled by passions. I'm not mastered by anything." And then you ask me to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch instead of a ham and cheese sandwich, and I'm like: "I can't do it!" I've been lying to myself.

Lent gives us this opportunity to see all of our weaknesses, to see just how much our life the rest of the year is out of control, and by gaining that knowledge, to begin to get a handle on controlling it. I sometimes, when I'm talking to people, compare Great Lent to boot camp in the military. No one in the military continues to keep the level of discipline that they have in boot camp for their entire military career. It would kill them. You can't do it. Boot camp is deliberately this ultra-intense period of time, in the same way that we don't tell people, "No, you need to keep Great Lent all year round." That would not be a good thing. That would not be a good thing for you.

But if you go through boot camp in the military and then when it's over you forget everything that you learned about yourself and you discard all of the discipline that you developed, completely, and go to seed, then it was a waste. It was a waste of time; there's no reason to do it. The same is true of Great Lent. If you get to Pascha— And we all feast at Pascha; we all have a party at Pascha. Nothing wrong with that: we're celebrating. But if everything you learned about yourself during Lent, if all the weaknesses you learned about, if all the places you need to do some work, you forget about it, then Lent was a waste and you shouldn't have bothered. But on the other hand, if we remember that, we now have sort of a spiritual curriculum for the next year. We now have a better idea of what's wrong, where we need to work, where we need to ask for God's help, where we need to focus our attention. And we have this curriculum to get us through to the next year, and the next year there will be Great Lent again, and there will be another test. Sometimes we'll find out we're still weak in some of the areas where we thought we were doing a lot better. And in some cases, we'll do better in some areas and then worse in others, because this isn't a one-time thing where: "Okay, now I've got it licked. No more sin in my life!" But it is an ongoing thing, of struggling to continue to walk according to the Spirit and not walk according to our flesh. And Lent is this time of focus, of renewal, of recommitment, that can shape our whole year, and, through shaping the years of our life, end up shaping our whole life.

You will get as much out of this Great Lent and every Great Lent as you're willing to put into and commit to it. If you decide to ignore the fast, if you decide to ignore the extra services, if you decide to ignore all these things, you're not going to get hit with the lightning-bolt, you're not going to go to hell for it, but you'll be missing out on a whole set of blessings that you could have in your life. You'll be missing out on the fruit that living according to the Spirit can bring in your life: you'll be missing out on peace, you'll be missing out on joy, you'll be missing out on love that could be in your life, if you were working to follow the Spirit.

So each of us has a choice to make, a series of choices, during Great Lent. Hopefully, what we've talked about tonight in various ways will help all of us as we come to this Great Lent to make the right choices and the harder choices and help us all commit to failing, sometimes failing spectacularly and interesting ways, in order to learn about ourselves, to continue to grow and to recommit to following the Holy Spirit who's leading us to Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. If you didn't happen to get through to us live tonight, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits. And if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: And 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. "If I saw something new, I guess I wouldn't worry; if I saw something new, I guess I wouldn't care."

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night. God bless you, and a blessed Lent to you.