Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast, where it’s the weirdest Bible study either. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, as you just heard the Voice of Steve tell you. Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second half of today’s show.

The appearances of the resurrected Christ are emphasized so repeatedly in Orthodox Tradition that there’s a cycle of eleven resurrectional appearances by Christ that are repeated at the Sunday Orthros gospels throughout the year, and they’re announced by the priest while he is facing the north. If you listened to our episodes on sacred geography, you know that that is the direction of God’s enemies. These are the gospel readings used as the announcement of victory against those who oppose the Lord. That’s how important they are.

Yet the resurrectional appearances of Jesus Christ are often thought of as a kind of dénouement in the gospels, an epilogue after the main action of Holy Week. Or sometimes they’re understood as the evangelists presenting evidence to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. But is that what’s really going on? And why does no one seem to recognize Jesus even when they see him?

So in typical Lord of Spirits fashion, before we answer those questions, we need to set the stage. So let’s begin with what exactly it means when we say that Jesus resurrected. Fr. Stephen, doesn’t that just mean like when you see the doctors shock a dead patient in the operating room, and he jumps up gasping and is just like he was before?

Fr. Stephen De Young: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I will never get tired of doing that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is not Flatliners, either the good one or the horrible remake. This is a completely different sort of thing. This is also not the Terminator ending of The Passion of the Christ, or any of several other popular presentations. But that’s sort of how, as you mentioned and we’re going to be trying to push back against this whole episode, the resurrection appearances of Christ have so been treated as an epilogue, that I don’t think in theatrical presentations and stuff, I don’t even think that much thought is put into them in terms of trying to figure out what’s going on or it’s just sort of like: Yeah, Jesus is alive and some people saw him, and that’s about it, if that, if it doesn’t get left out of the movie entirely, because of course our dramatic crescendo is the crucifixion really, and the resurrection even gets treated sometimes as even an afterthought, let alone the resurrection appearances.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially if someone’s theology kind of focuses on the cross as being the end-all, be-all of what Jesus came to do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we have to back up a little, but only a little this time; we’re not going back to the Chalcolithic period or anything.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right!

Fr. Stephen: As is our wont.

Fr. Andrew: Long ago, before the fossil record began… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t have to deal with any thousands of years BC dating issues. In fact, we’re only going back from Liturgy to Matins.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. You know, Matins, that service that takes place when no one’s in the church, sadly, in many cases, or you know… In our tradition—we’re Antiochian priests—it’s done on Sunday morning right before the Divine Liturgy, and if you would go to a Greek Orthodox church, you would see the same thing. In Russian Orthodox parishes, it is sometimes done on Saturday night, combined with Great Vespers, but there is a lot of variation on all of these points. But, yeah, it’s this service that happens every single weekend in most churches, and the point of this episode is not to complain to people, like: “Why aren’t you at that service?” but I do hope that by the time that someone gets to the end of this, they will be more interested in going if they haven’t been going, just because of this particular piece that’s embedded in that. These resurrectional appearances of Christ are one of the key moments in Sunday Matins.

Fr. Stephen: Also, stay off our lawn and the basketball is mine now.

Fr. Andrew: Okay… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In terms of elderly person rant: why should kids go to Matins.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: “Old man yells at clouds.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That may be our first Simpsons reference, actually, on the show; I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe…

Fr. Andrew: Anyway. So, yeah, the resurrection: What’s the difference between…?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so, it starts with really—we don’t even have to go back to Matins quite yet, because we’re starting with what we say when we say, “Christ is risen,” at least when we say it in Greek, and also at least Arabic. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily clear in the Dutch version, for example.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh!

Fr. Stephen: As much as it pains me to say, almost physically. [Laughter] So when we say that Christ is risen in Greek, we say, “Christos anesti.” And the fact that we use the verb anesti is important.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because there are other options.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the clear other option, the other biblical option, the other biblical verb that’s used to refer to Christ rising, is egeiro. We could say egeire: Christos egeire, which would be something like “Christ has…”—well, literally, “Christ has gotten up.” But something like “Christ rose,” like he got up again.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because that’s the word that you would use if I was sleeping and then I got up.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that verb is even used of Christ in the New Testament to talk about his act of physically rising. But what we profess when we’re professing that Christ is risen is more than that, not less than that; it includes that, but it’s much more than that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not just, like, waking up off an operating table, like he flatlined and then: now he’s back! Which I think… And we’re going to unpack what that means, but I think this is a really, really important point to pause at for a second because I think that that’s what a lot of people imagine when they think of the resurrection. And they think, for instance, that the stone gets rolled away… well, of course the stone has to get rolled away so that he can get out, which is the way I’ve even seen it depicted sometimes, in various dramatic presentations, as the stone has to get rolled away so that he can get out because otherwise he’s trapped in there, which, if he’s just sort of resuscitated then, yes, that would obviously be sort of necessary, but actually the stone gets rolled away so that other people can go in and have a look.

Fr. Stephen: And see that he’s not there.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he’s not just getting resuscitated; there’s something else going on here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what’s happening when, in Christ’s resurrection, is different [from] what’s happening when Lazarus is restored to life, or the widow of Nain’s son is restored to life, or the widow of Zarephath’s son is restored to life by the Prophet Elijah—it’s not the same thing, though I think a lot of people may think about it that way. They think that Christ just sort of comes back to life and then 40 days later flies up into the sky.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s not that those other raisings are unrelated—and we’re going to talk about especially Lazarus later—but they’re not the same event.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not the same phenomenon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we don’t— And this is why we don’t go around festively proclaiming, “Lazarus is risen!” because the consequences are not the same. That particular word, anastasis, that we use to refer to Christ’s resurrection, the icon that’s actually the icon of the the harrowing of Hell is usually labeled in Greek E Anastasis, that that’s what it’s a depiction of. So then that’s against the egeiro verb that I was saying earlier. So that, the verb form, anistemi, which is related to anastasis, is actually an important one in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Sorry, you guys thought you were going to escape the Old Testament for a second there. Yeah… no. That’s not a thing on this podcast. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so we have to go back, and when we’re talking about Christ’s resurrection we want to understand that we have to understand how that verb is used in the Old Testament, and it’s used particularly in relationship to the day of Yahweh or the day of the Lord, as it’s usually translated in English, which produces the interesting thing in most English Bibles, that it’s day of the LORD (in all caps) in the Old Testament and day of the Lord (without the caps) in the New Testament, as if it’s two different days. But we’ll come back to that, too.

So that day is a day that’s described prophetically in the Old Testament as when several things are going to happen, and they all come under the context of “this is the day when Yahweh is going to visit his people.” The God of Israel is going to come and visit his people, visit his creation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is a really important word, and it does not mean like “Oh, my cousin visited last week, and we had a good time together.” It’s not that. It’s the “visited” like: “And judgment was visited upon them!” That’s the visitation that we’re talking about. In English, we don’t usually use it that way; that’s more of a… I think we’d probably associate that mainly with the Bible, but we still do have that usage in English, that there’s this visitation of the Lord: God showing up, in person, or as every mother has said at some point, “Wait until your father gets home.” That’s what’s being talked about. It’s a warning. There is something really big that’s happening, so you’d better get it together.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The archetypal instance of this is in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve have broken the one commandment—they had one job, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “You had one job…”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And they’ve broken it, and then God comes walking in the garden. It’s usually translated “in the heat of the day”; it’s actually literally in the Hebrew “in the spirit of the day,” in the ruah haiyom, and it’s the heat or the spirit of the day: haiyom. [Laughter] So this is already an early allusion to this day of the Lord idea. So that’s why Adam and Eve kind of scatter and hide, because he’s now come to visit, and some things are going to happen based on him being present.

Fr. Andrew: Stuff is about to go down.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So the kids go and hide behind the furniture. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, you know, it’s funny… You know, you mention that… So I’m taking Old English among other things, and we were just doing a translation of Genesis 3 from Old English into modern English. What was interesting was to look at the way that that translation worded things. So for instance, in most English Bibles where God shows up in the garden, he says, “Why were you hiding?” to Adam, “Where are you?” And Adam says, “Well, I hid because I was naked.” In most Bibles, you see him saying, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree?” But in the Old English it says, “How did you know that you were naked if you didn’t eat of the tree?” Like, it’s this sort of accusatory… Like he’s not even giving Adam a chance at that point in the Old English, which is kind of fun. Which I think follows the Latin that the Old English is from. This is not a huge digression; it’s actually kind of a fun point about this, because there’s this idea that Dad is showing up: things are out of place and he’s come to bring justice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s… I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this in a past episode, that justice biblically is not criminal justice.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not punishment.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not “people have broken the law, so now here come the cops to punish everybody for the bad things they did.” Justice is a state of being, where the web of relationships we’ve talked about that sort of constitutes what a thing is, those are all correct and all in the right place, and everything is in proper order and everything is functioning together properly. That’s justice. And so injustice is when someone does something that throws that out of whack. And then to judge is to come and put that back into whack. [Laughter] Back into the correct order. So when God comes to visit, that’s going to happen. So that’s going to be good news for some people and not good news for some other people. So this is one of the major things that’s going to happen: when the day of the Lord comes, Yahweh the God of Israel is going to come into his creation and he’s going to set things right. This is what the prophets are saying again and again. Do you want to read an example, one of many that we have?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, there are piles of them! It’s fun. If you go to biblegateway.com and just search for instances of “day” and “Lord” in the same verse, you’ll just see—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—all these references to the day of the Lord. And here’s one example. This is Isaiah 24:21-22.

On that day, the Lord will punish the heavenly forces in the heavens and the earthly kings on the earth. They will be imprisoned in a pit, locked up in a prison, and after staying there for a long time they will be punished.

That is the useful NET Bible, which is not particularly poetically phrased, but kind of gives you the sense of what’s going on with the underlying language. Yeah, the day of the Lord: he’s going to punish the heavenly forces in the heavens and the earthly kings on the earth. So there’s that sense of the judgment of both the divine council and human beings at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and an important thing to note here is that you notice that they’re imprisoned on the day of the Lord, and then punished after this, after many days, after this long period of time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, as the NET Bible puts it, they will be put in a “pit, locked up in a prison, and after staying there for a long time, they will be punished.” So there’s clearly a span of time that happens between these two different events.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this has something to say about how we interpret Revelation 20 in light of the Old Testament, that when St. John talks about demonic forces being imprisoned or bound for a period of time, after which comes their judgment, that’s not some new revelation—pardon the pun—that he’s having about coming future events. He’s speaking out of this prophetic idea. So the day of the Lord here for Isaiah is not the last day, like the end of the world day, the earth’s last day.

Fr. Andrew: No, it’s the coming of the Lord to set things right.

Fr. Stephen: It is sort of a quintessential day. It is a day when certain divine realities are going to break into the world of human experience in a powerful way.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It is, frankly, a doomsday, to lay down doom—

Fr. Stephen: For some people.

Fr. Andrew: Well, but to lay down doom is to lay down judgment. So like the English word, “I deem,” it’s about perceiving the way things are and laying down a judgment of the way they’re going to be. So it is a doomsday. Sorry, I had to throw in a bit more Old English there.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] As is your wont.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Thank you. I can’t make all of the pop culture references that you make, so I’m going to import a bunch of Old English.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes. Different kinds of nerds will both appreciate our repartee.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So there are also a number of passages within the prophets that talk about the signs of this day. When this day arrives, here’s how you’ll know it’s that day. And we’ve got… Honestly, again, for any of these things we’re talking about, there are countless examples. We mostly talk about… We picked shorter ones so that we wouldn’t be reading all night to you.

Fr. Andrew: Once you know the pattern, you start to see it everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: But so we’ve got one of those from Isaiah, too—Isaiah as well.

Fr. Andrew: Isaiah 13:9-11. Again, this is from the NET Bible.

Look, the day of the Lord’s judgment is coming. It is a day of cruelty and savage, raging anger, destroying the earth and annihilating its sinners. Indeed, the stars in the sky and their constellations no longer give out their light. The sun is darkened as soon as it rises, and the moon does not shine.

It’s interesting how again you’ve got this theme of justice being given on both heaven and earth at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there is never a point where the Hebrew prophets are materialists, where they’re just purely talking about social justice. They do talk about social justice, but they talk about social justice as it flows from the rebellious spiritual powers, the way in which sin infects humans, and they way in which they, then, tyrannize and victimize the poor and the weak and the powerless.

Fr. Andrew: Cosmic justice!

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so when God casts his judgment, he starts with… It goes from the head down, so it starts with the actual progenitors and the actual problem. But as Fr. Andrew was reading that, you might have noticed that the description there of the day of the Lord—and you’ll find this if you do the searching in all these passages—a lot of that imagery shows up in the gospels.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: In a particular place, and that’s surrounding the crucifixion, and is depicted in our crucifixion icons of Christ: the sun and moon hiding their faces; it’s in our hymnography. We’ve talked about how the sun and the moon, them having faces is not quaint or artistic or a subreference to Mac Tonight, but is seen as though these are the spirits associated with them; these are the heavenly hosts, the heavenly powers who are being sort of blotted out.

So here’s one association where we see that the gospel writers are telling us that this day of the Lord that was prophesied comes about at Christ’s crucifixion. So then there are other things within the prophets that are going to happen when the day of the Lord comes. And one of those is the rising of the saints, of the righteous ones, of the holy ones. This is the resurrection as, for example, the Pharisees would have understood it, which comes out of… You especially find this theology laid out really well in 2 Maccabees, where, within the experience of martyrdom, that the faithful Judeans had under the Greeks, under the Seleucid Empire, where they refused to disobey God and were tortured and killed for it, for keeping the Torah, the promise to them is that… not just that, “Oh, well, you’ll have some sort of bodiless eternal well-being…”

Fr. Andrew: Go to heaven when you die.

Fr. Stephen: Some kind of paradise—but, no. The limbs that are now being tortured and severed will be restored; that there will be… Part of that justice being established is that these people who have been wrongfully slain will live again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this—for all of you Pageau fans out there—a flip that occurs. [Laughter] Those who have been being oppressed by these evil powers and by those human beings who are in cahoots with them, those who are being oppressed are going to be lifted up on high, not to become new oppressors but rather to take the place of these rulers who have abused their rule and have been harmful to others, that the fallen are going to be lifted up, that they’re going to be vindicated. And not just vindicated, like given some kind of restitution or whatever, but actually brought up to the very top.

It’s a pattern you see over and over again in Scripture. I mean, think about Joseph, for instance, who’s given into slavery in Egypt and then by the end of the story, he’s in charge of Egypt essentially. And he, of course, is regarded as a type of Christ. So it’s a cool pattern. Again, it’s really interesting because it’s not one you see in paganism. In paganism, there’s this sort of great chain of being where the important people are on the top and the lowly are on the bottom, like that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and it never changes. Peasants and slaves don’t become rulers within the pagan model, but this is exactly what happens on the day of the Lord, is that people who are slaves become like stars.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, small-g gods. Yeah. In the Roman system, it’s Caesar who becomes a god, and the slaves become dirt, which they’re only slightly above in the first place. And this is what Christ is saying over and over and over again when he says, “The last shall first and the first shall be last,” and “He who is faithful over the little has been given much. He who hasn’t been will have it taken away from him”—again and again and again.

In particular, St. Matthew in his gospel highlights this happening at Christ’s death. And that’s in that kind of cryptic and somewhat weird passage in Matthew 27:52-53, where many of the saints of old, many of the holy ones of old, these righteous ones—and it’s interesting if you read it in detail how St. Matthew describes it. Everyone reads over it very quickly, just: “Oh, some people came to life, and they were seen around Jerusalem.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, what’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: What it actually says is they arise, they come back to life, they’re resuscitated in their tombs, but they don’t come out of their tombs until Christ comes out of his. So on a very literal reading, it’s like St. Matthew is saying they sort of sat around for 36 hours or so—

Fr. Andrew: In their tombs.

Fr. Stephen: —on Friday night and Saturday, in the tombs, because they didn’t want to jump the gun, and then when Christ rose they came out. Now, that’s… I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to say. Like I said, that’s a very literalistic reading. I think what he’s doing is he’s tying their rising to Christ’s death, to the day of the Lord. This is one more piece that this is the day of the Lord, but he’s saying that they aren’t seen—they aren’t seen in Jerusalem until after Christ’s resurrection and the harrowing of Hades, etc.

Fr. Andrew: And just as kind of a sidebar on this, because some of the questions that we get sometimes are questions about literal versus metaphor and all that kind of thing. This is important, because often modern thinkers, we tend to… We put things in either one of two categories: this literally happened, or it metaphorically happened, which means it didn’t happen but it teaches us something useful or whatever. And this particular example, when we say that this is the way that St. Matthew depicts it, that’s the important very first step. We’re not going to say, “Do we need to say that these people were hanging around for 36 hours in their tombs waiting for Jesus to arise and then they could come out?” Like, we’re not saying that, but we should ask, “Well, why does Matthew depict it in this way, even though we don’t know what actually is going on inside those tombs?” The answer to that question in this case is because Matthew is connecting it to the day of the Lord. It’s saying: These are the things that happen when the day of the Lord comes. So these are signs by which we know that the day of the Lord has happened.

One can look at something and say, “Well, that’s not just a metaphor, or that’s not just a symbol,” and yet not take it literally in a materialist sense. Materialism is not the only way to take things literally, if that makes any sense. Like when we say that the sun and the moon and the stars are angels: if you take that literally in a materialist sense, then you’re saying are they not big balls of gas? Is that what you’re trying to say? But, again, taking it in the sense literally, in other words, taking it by what is written—that’s what “literally” actually means—that assuming materialism is the only frame in which to take things literally is where you get into big trouble with all of this. I know that’s a bit of a digression, but I think it’s a useful hermeneutic point to make as we move forward through some of this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you determine what St. Matthew is saying, and then as Orthodox Christians we’re committed to the fact that what St. Matthew is saying is true. But he’s not saying everything. He’s not saying every possible way you could read it. He’s not a 21st century person, so he’s not making any They Might Be Giants subreferences. [Laughter] Even if you think you see one, you’re wrong; he’s not making one. Now, the other way around—

Fr. Andrew: Now you might be making one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I might. It might be the other way around. They Might Be Giants might be referencing St. Matthew. That’s the key; the key is: what is he saying, not what can I read into that.

Fr. Andrew: So the righteous live again as part of the day of the Lord. And it’s fun, actually—and again this is not a piece of dogma, but a couple of episodes back, you heard me finish up the episode by reading from the Gospel of Nicodemus, talking about the harrowing of hell. The interesting frame that I didn’t read as part of that is that some time after the resurrection that there’s this conversation going on—and I think they actually have Ananias and Caiaphas become believers, I think within this text, if I remember correctly—that’s not the important point, though. The important point is that there was this discussion about the harrowing of hell, and—I think it’s Nicodemus—says to these other two Jewish leaders, “Well, if you want to know what happened down there, do you remember when these people rose from the dead when Jesus died? Well, two of them were the sons of Simeon who received Jesus into his arms when Jesus was a baby, and these two sons of Simeon are living in this town nearby, and they’re just praying night and day. Maybe we can get them to come here and tell us what it is that they saw down there in Hades when they were there and everything went down.” So this bit from Matthew is used as a sort of framing device for that passage which is so powerful.

I mean, I’m not saying that I believe that that is literally what happened and that whoever wrote that text is saying that that’s literally what happened, but as a way to introduce… transmitting that tradition to us, that’s the frame that’s used within the scope of that text. I don’t need to accept that as being a historical document in the sense that we think about those things now, like it’s a newspaper article, but rather the point is it’s expressing this is what happens when Christ harrows hell. And I’ve never seen it written in any better way, actually, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so all of this is going to happen on the day of the Lord, and because of that what we find in the psalms particularly—other places as well, but particularly in the psalms, because this is hymnography—are these calls for God to come and… to come out of his holiness and to come to visit, to come from his throne where he’s seated and enthroned, to come and judge the earth, to come and do this, to come and have this visit, have this day, bring about justice, restore them to life. So the way those calls are phrased is for God to arise, meaning from his throne, to arise, and in Greek it is anesti and various forms of the verb that are used in these psalms to describe this. Of course, the one that should jump to mind if you’ve been listening to our past episodes is probably Psalm 82 (81 in the Greek), verse 6: “Arise, O God, and judge the earth…”

Fr. Andrew: “Anasta, O Theos…”

Fr. Stephen: “You shall inherit from all the nations.” But there’s a ton of them, and I’m going to rattle them off. They’ll be in the transcript at some point, and you can pause the recording of this later. We’re not going to read them all, but these are just a sample from the psalms: Psalm 3:7, 7:6, 9:19, 10:12, 12:5, 17:13, 68:1, 74:22, 102:13, and then I threw in Isaiah 33:10. That’s another one from Isaiah, where it’s calling on God, using that verb, “arise.” Many of those, when you can pause it or transcript it or what-have-you, if you look those up, you’ll see that several of those are actually used as the prokeimenon, meaning they’re sung, right before we read the resurrection appearance gospels in Matins, in Orthros. So they’re done immediately before, as a lead-in, and they’re calling on this.

So this means that the day of the Lord also becomes known as the day when God will arise to come to judge. It becomes the day of anastasis. And so when, in our Pascha hymnography, which on Pascha and we’re still doing it now for the whole Pascha season, when we sing, for example, “This is the day of resurrection. This is the day of anastasis,” that means the day.

Fr. Andrew: And also: “This is the day that the Lord has made.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That doesn’t just made, “Hey, God’s given us another day!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: “Look at the trees and flowers and butterflies.”

Fr. Andrew: No, that’s: This is the day that the Lord has appointed. This is the day that he has set aside. This is the day that he made for all of this to go down.

Fr. Stephen: Which is how it fits. We have this sequence when we’re singing the Paschal verses, of God arising and his enemies being scattered and smoke vanishing and wax melting, and then it’s like: “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! That’s not like a non-sequitur.

Fr. Stephen: It’s this is the day. That’s why we’re rejoicing, and that’s why we’re glad, because God has come to visit his people and establish justice, and that’s what we’re celebrating on Pascha. We’re celebrating the anastasis.

The New Testament, particularly St. John’s gospel, really established this point, that Christ is the anastasis, that Christ is Yahweh, the God of Israel, visiting his people.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think sometimes when people celebrate Pascha or Easter, they have the sense of—again, this takes us back to that resuscitation versus resurrection thing—like “Oh, he made it!” That’s the way I think some people feel about it. “Oh, he died, but he made it. They brought him back.” That that’s the way it’s taken sometimes, and it’s often supercharged with this sense of he did it for himself or that God the Father raised him or the Spirit raised him. I mean, this is all biblical language. But still, I think it’s the sense that everything was risked, and it looked like he died, but he made it. But actually what’s going on here is this is him… I mean, we talked about the harrowing of hell a couple of episodes ago, but this is… In a sense, this is now what’s going on everywhere else all at the same time. Like there’s this great hymn that we say. It’s said by the priest during the Divine Liturgy; it’s also done at the end of the proskomidi service, and I think there’s a couple of other places, too, where we say:

In the grave with the body, but in Hades with the soul is God, and in paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast thou, O Christ, filling all things, thyself uncircumscribed.

In other words, he was doing—he was harrowing hell, his body was in the grave, he was meeting the thief in paradise, and he was on his throne reigning with God the Father and the Spirit, all at the same time. So in some sense, this episode is continuing to talk about everything that happens in the resurrection, that it is, as you said, it’s this arising. He’s standing up now to offer judgment on the world, which, as you said, is bad news for some beings and good news for others based on where they are. Are they unjust? Then they’re going to be put in their place. If they’re just, then they’ll be justified; then they’re vindicated, they’re put back where they should be, in a good way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and one of the ways St. John really brings this out in Christ’s identity—and this is another one of those pieces that the gospel writers knew full well that they were saying Jesus is God; they were saying he’s Yahweh, the God of Israel, who… because this arising is this arising from his throne in the heavens and coming to earth to visit his people. So when St. John says that’s what Christ is doing, that Christ is the anastasis, that’s what he means.

But in John 11:23-25, there’s kind of a subtle wordplay that’s going on in the Greek that doesn’t necessarily come out in English, and this gets a little thorny, so I’m going to go through it slowly. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So this is the raising of Lazarus, and it’s the little dialogue that Jesus has with St. Martha right before he calls Lazarus forth from the grave.

Fr. Stephen: She has sort of gone out to meet Christ as he’s arriving—from her perspective, arriving too late, because she’s already said that, “If you had been here, Lazarus wouldn’t have died.” So in verse 23, Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again,” literally, “Your brother will rise,” and it’s anasti, it’s that verb. “Your brother will rise.” So St. Martha hears that and interprets it as Christ saying that St. Lazarus was a righteous man; he’s one of the righteous, and so…

Fr. Andrew: He’s going to be part of that resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: ...when the day comes, he will be one of those who will be restored, who shines like the stars. He will be one of those. And so we know that that’s how she heard it, because in verse 24, Martha says, “I know that he will rise again. I know that he will anasti,” and in English it’s “in the resurrection”: “I know that he will anasti in e anastasis”: “He will rise when that day comes, when the anastasis happens, when God visits his people, yes, I know. He was a righteous man; he will rise. He will be one of those who rises when that day comes.” And then she says, “At the last day,” so she’s referring specifically to that event. When the day of the Lord comes and the anastasis happens, he will arise.

Verse 25, Jesus responds to her and says, “I am—ego aimi”—he spells it out, which you don’t have to in Greek; that’s why it’s so important. You don’t have to put the ego there at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he could have just said aimi.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Aimi covers it. But he says, “I am,” obviously invoking all of that from the Old Testament, “the resurrection, the anastasis, and the life.” So he is. He says, “I am the anastasis.” So he identifies himself—Christ identifies himself in that verse as Yahweh, the God of Israel, who has come to visit his people, meaning Lazarus doesn’t have to wait. Lazarus doesn’t have to wait; this is happening. This is happening now.

Fr. Andrew: The day of the Lord has come. Now would it be correct to say it’s in progress, even now, 2,000 years later?

Fr. Stephen: Well… no.

Fr. Andrew: No?

Fr. Stephen: But we’ll get to that, in our second and third halves.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But so, if you understand that, if you understand that exchange and that Greek wordplay and what Christ is saying there, then all of a sudden the troparion that we sing at the raising of Lazarus, the apolytikion of Lazarus Saturday, makes a lot more sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then we sing it on Lazarus Saturday and then the next day on Palm Sunday, and it brings all of this together. So this is what it is in the version that we use.

O Christ God, when thou didst raise Lazarus from the dead, before thy passion, thou didst confirm the universal resurrection, wherefore we like babes carry the insignia of triumph and victory and cry to thee, O Vanquisher of death: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!

So you’ve got all this imagery there of not just raising Lazarus from the dead, but then it’s connected to that, to the resurrection, but then also triumph and victory, destroying death, and “blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”—cometh to do what? He’s bringing the day of the Lord; that’s why he’s arrived. All of that is coming there.

You know, it’s interesting to me: a lot of times you hear sermons on Palm Sunday where—and this is not wrong—they’ll kind of point out the irony: Well, today they’re saying, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” but in a few days they’re going to be saying, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” which is accurate, of course, but the hymnography actually for Palm Sunday is nowhere ironic like that, because I think it’s underlining: no, they’re right when they say that this is the day of the Lord. When they’re saying, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” they’re correct. Now, they don’t really understand the full import of what they’re saying, but that’s correct, so we’re going to say that with them: this is the day.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and “universal resurrection” is not my favorite translation in that, because we think of “universal” meaning: “Oh, well, when he raised Lazarus, that showed that everybody’s going to rise from the dead.”

Fr. Andrew: No, right.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s actually, like—and some translations have this—the resurrection of the universe.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s cool. The cosmic resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: So Lazarus rising is the sign, is the sign that’s given at the time to show to St. Martha and everyone else that what Christ just said about the day of the Lord having come is true, is the fact that Lazarus isn’t waiting around; he’s already risen, and that confirms that the whole cosmos, the anastasis of the cosmos now, is coming.

So that’s why, throughout the New Testament, the New Testament authors, the apostles, will refer to the time that we’re living in—that they were living in, in the beginning of, and we’re living in the second millennium of—or, sorry, the third millennium of—is the last days, the latter days, the last days, because we’re in that window that we say, for example—and there’s plenty of other prophets who talk about it, but that we saw the Prophet Isaiah talking about. Between the day of the Lord and the final judgment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re in the period where he rules in the midst of his enemies.

Fr. Stephen: And we’ll talk more about that in our next episode. We have to refer to a future episode; people playing bingo out there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: Our future episode, in two weeks…

Fr. Andrew: The Lord of Spirits bingo. Yeah, in two weeks it’s going to be Ascension, and then a couple weeks after that we’re going to talk about Pentecost. It’s going to be fun.

So the day of the Lord has come, we are now in the last days, and then there’s this final wrap-up that’s going to occur. And we’ll be doing Lord of Spirits episodes until then, God willing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I don’t want to live that long, necessarily, depending on when it happens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, who knows. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: If I make it to 90, I’m just going to wake up every morning and be like: “Really!? Seriously!?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, yeah, three-score years and ten, four-score years, what is more than that is toil and trouble.

All right, well, that wraps up the first half of our show, so we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be back and we’ll be taking your calls!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! We are now at the second half of the show, and this is where we begin to take your calls. Like you just heard the Voice of Steve say, it’s 855-AF-RADIO; that’s how you connect with us. And we actually do have a caller waiting, but I’m not exactly sure who this is. So, caller, can you hear me?

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

Fr. Andrew: Oh wait. Trudi, did you play the recording again there? What’s going on?

Mr. Steven Christoforou: ...and he will be the light of the nations and hope of those who— Should I keep going? I should keep going. No, I’ll stop.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I have to say, when you do that live read every single episode, you nail it at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: Ladies and gentlemen, the Voice of Steve! [Laughter]

Mr. Christoforou: Yeah, Calculon is a one-take robot. He can get it every time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s pretty good. You almost made me believe that Trudi was playing the recording. So, nice. Very good.

Mr. Christoforou: Yeah, long-time voice-over contributor, first-time caller. Thanks for taking my question. So before we get too deep into the giggles, which I know we can do, because you guys are talking about post-resurrection appearances of Christ, and I guess the question that I want to toss out to you is something that Fr. Stephen alluded to earlier when he mentioned Genesis 3 which includes a pre-manifestation of the Lord, the walking in the garden, the hearing of the feet, the footsteps. But the question that I have, in the hymn of Kassiani, which we sing on the Matins of Holy Wednesday, she draws a connection between the feet of Christ, the feet that the sinful woman washed with her hair, and the feet that were in the garden—into this question of post- versus pre-… What does that mean for a Lord that, in this resurrected body, walks around with a wound in his side and enters this room where the doors were locked? I’m not trying to ask a time-travel question. I don’t know if I’m asking a time-travel question, but… That’s my question.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] These are the questions that my wife hates. She actually fast-forwards through a lot of callers. No offense, callers, but what can I say? Whenever we watch Star Trek, she’s like, “It’s a time-travel episode? I’m leaving.” I’m like: “Oh. Great.”

Mr. Christoforou: They’re hard to write! They’re hard to write.

Fr. Andrew: So your question basically is: Is the God who walks in the garden—is that the resurrected Christ?

Mr. Christoforou: Is it the same body? Maybe that’s a way to phrase it. Is it the same body? Is it the same feet that the sinful woman is wiping, that Adam and Eve hear in the garden? Maybe that’s the way to ask it.

Fr. Andrew: Although even then, she’s doing that before he’s crucified, before… Obviously, there’s lots of timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly—I’m not actually a Doctor Who fan, but I know that phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you said it backwards.

Fr. Andrew: I, well, that proves I’m not actually a Whovian. I tried, and then it became too creepy for me. What can I say? Sorry, Whovians. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And that’s from one of the best episodes…

Mr. Christoforou: There’s only 70 years of catch-up to do.

Fr. Andrew: Right?

Fr. Stephen: That’s from “Blink,” which is one of the best episodes.

Fr. Andrew: Is it? Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, from season three of the new series. I think it’s episode ten. Anyway…

Fr. Andrew: Of course you can just rattle that off. Congratulations.

Fr. Stephen: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. [Laughter] So, right. So what is the relationship between… Because, I think I have some idea of this, but, I mean, lay some of it out… And part of this question is actually, just to pull the veil off a little for everybody—part of the answer to this question is: See the second half of this episode. But we can take it head-on initially. So, help us out here, Fr. Stephen; we’re flailing.

Fr. Stephen: So the question is: is it the same feet? Is it the same body? The answer is yes.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Mr. Christoforou: Thanks, I appreciate it. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: To say a couple of other things—let the reader understand, or the hearer understand, I guess, in this case—that someone keeps moving my chair.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! See, I got that one! I caught that reference! [Laughter] Captain America. I caught that reference.

Fr. Stephen: You catching that reference was a reference. Cue the inception sound. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That guy out there who hates the giggles on this show is going out of his mind; he’s going out of his mind.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But to say some more… Part of what I think is getting asked in this question, aside from the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey bits, is I think partly an appearance question, because sometimes it’s depicted that way in Orthodox iconography, like you can find icons of the creation of man, where it’s Christ, the way he looks in the incarnation, in the icons of Christ, forming Adam out of mud.

Fr. Andrew: I have one of those right here in my studio, creating the sun and the moon.

Fr. Stephen: And so, insofar as it’s a question of… or when Moses was sitting there talking to Christ, was he seeing the form that the disciples saw? In terms of the visual thing, that gets complicated. That’s part of what we’re going to be talking about in this half, because there’s this degree to which, after the resurrection, Jesus did and didn’t look like Jesus. And even more so in the book of Revelation, St. John sees Christ—it’s the same person he was leaning on at the Mystical Supper, and he’s like bronze and has white, woolly hair, but he still knows exactly who it is. So the yes is to identity. The yes is not necessarily to the way in which it was visually… he was experienced by human eyes.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, when Moses sees the angel of the Lord in the burning bush, that is our Lord Jesus, but he’s not seeing him the way that Thomas saw him when he said, “My Lord and my God.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, his act of seeing is the same.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go, right.

Fr. Stephen: But the way he describes that experience is different, but there’s still an identity there. We are in a very visual age, where for us identity—one of the big factors in identity: your ID card has a photo. That’s how you prove you are who you say you are, is a photo ID. Here’s a picture; here’s me. They look the same; take your mask off. But that’s not… When you have a society that can’t even think of a camera, that’s not how you identify people. That’s not… Your sense of identity isn’t what you look like. When you’ve seen a not-very-good quality reflection of yourself on occasion, your image is not who you are. I would say now today—and I think social media has really brought this home—that the image we put out there is not who we are, and we kind of know it. But it sort of never was.

But that gets into another aspect of what we’re going to talk about in this half. So if you want to just hang around, Steve, for the next 45 minutes, I’m okay with that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We could spend another half of the show just answering questions from Steve!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Mr. Christoforou: Well, I’ve got to talk you guys into the next commercial break, so, look, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, I’m just going to leave you unmuted. If you want to just… If you have something really important that you want to ask about… But remember, this is not your show, okay, Steve…

Mr. Christoforou: I know boundaries. I appreciate boundaries. That’s fair.

Fr. Andrew: And I don’t want people to think that we’re starting to have “guests” on the show. It’s just a caller. [Laughter]

Mr. Christoforou: A persistent caller who’s overstayed his welcome.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go, yeah. [Laughter] So, Voice of Steve, everybody! Great to have you.

Fr. Stephen: Round of applause.

Fr. Andrew: [Audience cheering simulation] Thank you, thank you. All right, okay. All right, Father. Christ’s resurrection appearances. We mentioned these are in the—these are in what are called the eothinon gospels that are in the—there’s eleven of them—Matins on Sundays, and we hear them over and over again. We do all eleven and we do all eleven again, and we just keep doing it until Lent starts. Actually, it even continues into Lent, if I remember correctly. So this year’s Lent is actually affected by last year’s Pascha; the same cycle continues on and on, and then it finally resets, then, when you get to Palm Sunday; that’s actually when it finally resets.

So, okay, Christ appears. Let’s actually talk about some of those… What’s going on there when Christ appears.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we’ve covered the prokeimena; we’ve covered the setting the stage for what was going to happen. And we covered a bit of what happened, and so now this is the next thing. This is the next thing that happens, but these are resurrection appearances; these are resurrection gospels. So what’s going on in these series of stories in the final chapters of the gospels and in these appearances is part and parcel of what anastasis is. It’s part of that reality.

So we have—actually, before any of the gospels were written, St. Paul was already writing his epistles.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re older.

Fr. Stephen: In his first canonical epistle to the Corinthians, which wasn’t the first one he wrote, because in it he refers to a previous one, in chapter 15—this is sort of well known, I think, by people as sort of the resurrection chapter; this is the anastasis chapter; this is the chapter where Paul is talking about Christ’s resurrection, our resurrection, and sort of laying all that out. So he begins that discussion in verses 3-8 by laying out what a lot of people think is an early credal statement, sort of an early statement of, an early encapsulation of the Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. I’m going to read this to you, everybody, so you can get what we’re talking about. This is 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.

For I delivered to you, first of all, that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas, then by the Twelve. After that he was seen by over 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present but some have fallen asleep. After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then, last of all, he was seen by me also, as one born out of due time.

And it’s interesting, because he says, “Now I’m going to deliver to you this Gospel that I received,” and he lists off four things: he died, he was buried, he rose again, and he was seen and he was seen and he was seen and he was seen and he was seen. Like, for Paul this is part of what the Gospel is, that he was seen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and actually most of the text—

Fr. Andrew: ...is about that!

Fr. Stephen: —characters or words, is about these resurrection appearances. He covers Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and rising in two verses, and then spends three on listing these—sorry, spends four or five listing these appearances. So, clearly, these appearances are of greater import to St. Paul in terms of his argument about the salvation of humanity. St. Paul sees the resurrection appearances as playing this important role, which would explain why we read them over and over again in our Sunday Matins services. This is that the Church, in her liturgical worship, has carried on this sense of importance that St. Paul already saw in the 50s AD.

Nonetheless, the way this is read, this list is read by most modern people, regardless of their sort of background or theological commitments or otherwise, is this is read as St. Paul is presenting a bunch of evidence. So St. Paul says this, that Christ was crucified and then he was buried; he doesn’t think he has to prove that. That’s a matter of Roman record; nobody’s disputing that. But then he says Christ rose from the dead, and so he’s expecting that there’s going to be some people who dispute that, and so he’s like, “Well, I’m going to give evidence. I’m going to give all these witnesses, to prove my case, that Christ rose from the dead.” There are examples for this sort of across the ideological spectrum when it comes from the Bible. One on what we would call the more liberal side—now, Rudolf Bultmann is not a 19th century German liberal—

Fr. Andrew: But he might as well be, sort of.

Fr. Stephen: He’s a mid-20th century German neo-liberal, yeah. [Laughter] But he said about this passage, and his comments on this passage were that he found it very strange and surprising that St. Paul thought that giving evidence for Christ’s resurrection would help prove his case. Like he thought that was weird. [Laughter] And this comes from something we talked about—I don’t remember if it was last time or the time before; I bash 19th century German liberals so much it’s hard to keep track—

Fr. Andrew: It’s like breathing for you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sort of. [Laughter] —this positivist… This 19th century positivist view of history, where we can have this scientific understanding of exactly what happened, and you apply this methodology, and we determine what happened. So you can look at that and say, “Well, look. We’ve read David Hume. No testimony can ever prove that a miracle happened, because a miracle is so far outside the bounds of nature that the amount of evidence you would need to believe it could never be supplied by fallible humans, so therefore we can’t believe it.” So Bultmann looks at it and says, “Well, listing a bunch of people who claimed they saw Jesus doesn’t prove anything. This can’t be a historical event, because people don’t rise from the dead, so this has to be a spiritual—some kind of spiritual event or metaphor or something in the immaterial realm that St. Paul is talking about, and so why is he talking about evidence?”

So then we also talked about how the response to that, from most conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars, Bible scholars, has been, rather than staking out another position, is to take that same definition of history and then just to insist that, no, what the Bible gives us is exactly that kind of objective, perspectiveless sort of mathematical, scientific kind of history.

Fr. Andrew: “St. Paul is trying to satisfy the historical critical method.”

Fr. Stephen: And so Josh McDowell and son—I’m not meaning to pick on them; they’re just… they’re the highest profile people who have done this, who have taken this evidential approach to Christ’s resurrection appearances, very publicly, and are famous for it—say, “Well, okay, no, St. Paul is giving evidence, and this is good evidence! And this testimony is good, and this proves Jesus rose from the dead!” And that’s not a solution to the problem either, because St. Paul was not a 19th century German and didn’t understand history that way, and isn’t here trying to give evidence. That’s not why he lists this.

As we were already talking about and as we’re about to talk about further, there are other reasons why St. Paul sees these appearances as crucially important to the Christian message.

Fr. Andrew: As part of the Gospel.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think a lot of this, then, is… We can kind of wipe away that whole question of evidence by asking this question: Why does almost no one seem to recognize Jesus after he rises from the dead?

Fr. Stephen: As a way in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, as a way into describing this. Because if this is supposed to be “evidence” for the resurrection of Jesus, then why include the detail that they didn’t recognize him? That undercuts that argument. “Well, they saw somebody. Who knows who that was…”

Fr. Stephen: If you were manufacturing stories, if you were manufacturing evidence, testimony, there are all kinds of things in these stories that you would definitely not include. And this element of people not recognizing Jesus after the resurrection—I mean, this is basic, right? Like, your whole idea of testimony would be, if you’re going to have someone testifying to the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, it would be: “Yeah, I saw Jesus die, and then later I saw him alive.”

Fr. Andrew: “That’s the same guy.”

Fr. Stephen: That’s your basic… It’s the same guy, I’m testifying.

Fr. Andrew: Put him in a lineup and identify him. Yeah, but that’s not what’s going on. Over and over again, you get this detail that some people are like: “Who is this?” or that they have no idea who he is, even though they totally knew him before. Over and over.

Fr. Stephen: You have in Matthew 28:17 all of these people are gathered on this mountain in Galilee where Christ is, they all see him there, and it tells us in Matthew 28:17, “they worshiped him, but some doubted.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, that’s another one of those phrases where you’re just like: “I don’t know what that means. I’m just going to keep reading.”

Fr. Stephen: Some doubted? He’s standing right there! Why would anyone doubt if he’s standing right there?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s something about him that is not the same. It’s not the memory that they had.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see… Now we have to do a brief—I’m not going all the way down the rabbit trail, I promise. But St. Mark’s gospel is the gospel that, if you go with what’s called the shorter ending of Mark, where it ends in Mark 16:8, there are no resurrection appearances in St. Mark’s gospel, properly speaking. The second eothinon is from St. Mark’s gospel, but it’s the women, the holy myrrh-bearers, coming to the tomb and seeing that Jesus isn’t there, and then that’s it. There are another twelve verses that are referred to as the “longer”—there’s some other stuff, too, but anyway—that are referred to as the longer ending of Mark. This is going to get really granular. I’m fighting my urge to get into it, because I’m a nerd, and this is hard. [Laughter]

There are these other verses that are referred to as the longer ending to Mark, these other twelve verses, and those other twelve verses, when you read them, are sort of a summary of… I mean, it’s not like clear narration of resurrection appearances; it’s sort of a summary of a bunch of resurrection appearances, some of which are in other gospels. Like it refers to Christ appearing to two of them while they were walking on the road, which seems to be a reference to the road to Emmaus in St. Luke’s gospel, and that kind of thing. So there’s all this back-and-forth in scholarship about whether that’s part of St. Mark’s gospel or not, but there’s a really simple solution to it if you’re familiar with the Orthodox lectionary, because those extra twelve verses are the third eothinon gospel. So they come after Mark 16:1-8, which is the second eothinon, and before the beginning of the ones from St. Luke’s gospel. So there are actually several little pieces of Scripture like this: the woman taken in adultery is one of them. There are little passels of verses, where in our early New Testament manuscripts they show up in different places. Sometimes they’re omitted, sometimes they’re in a different gospel, sometimes they’re in a different place in the same gospel. So your typical practitioner of biblical scholarship among our Protestant friends will say, based on that, “Well, it’s not ‘original.’ Just ignore it, get rid of it, it’s not in the Bible.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s this concept that the Bible consists of a series of continuous texts known as “The Gospel According to St. Matthew,” “The Gospel…” whatever, rather than the way these texts were actually used initially, which is as lectionary readings.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and just shy of half—a little over 40% of the New Testament manuscripts we have today are lectionary manuscripts. If you buy a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, there are precisely two of them that were incorporated into it. Not 2%. Two. Like one, two. So there are literally thousands, like 2400 or so, a little more than that, of New Testament manuscripts, whose readings you do not find in critical Greek New Testaments. The patriarchal Greek texts that the patriarch of Constantinople put out in 1904 (and it was revised in 1912) used 250 of those lectionaries to put together its text. So even with that, there’s thousands of lectionary texts not taken into account.

If you’re copying from a lectionary into a continuous text—so someone wants a copy of the Bible for themselves for their own study, or we’re going to be giving a copy of the Scriptures to someone: a bishop comes to visit the monastery, and so we’re going to have one of our copyists make him a beautiful copy of the Scriptures to give to him as a gift to take back to his cathedral—that the texts you have to copy from in a lot of cases are your lectionary texts. You’ve got the gospel book, the epistle book. So when you take and copy from those, you run into things like the third eothinon. Well, where does that go? Well, we can’t shove it into the middle of Luke to put it before eothinon four in Luke’s gospel; that wouldn’t make any sense in the reading. But if we put it at the end of St. Mark’s gospel, it kind of makes sense, because he doesn’t have any resurrection appearances. And so if, for example, at different monasteries or different churches, the gospel reading about the woman taken in adultery was read on different days, it would fall in different places in the lectionary, and so when a copy of the gospel of St. John was made from those lectionaries, it would occur in different places when you copy it.

So there’s really a simple explanation for that. All that is to say that there is in Mark 16:14—so if we take this longer ending, or, if you’d rather, if you want to be super-dogmatic about it, in verse 6 of the third eothinon—Christ basically upbraids his disciples for not believing that he was risen from the dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is an interesting point, because it says in that verse: He rebukes them because they did not believe, those who had seen him after he had risen. So what you’re getting is this bit that’s stuck at the end of Mark, where it’s referring to things that didn’t happen anywhere else in Mark’s gospel.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but so even in St. Mark’s gospel, if we take that longer reading, here again we have this weird thing where people who have seen him and they don’t believe it. St. Luke’s gospel, the road to Emmaus is probably a famous one of these, where Christ is walking on the road with two people. Those two people are talking to Christ about Christ. [Laughter] They’re talking to Jesus of Nazareth about Jesus of Nazareth and don’t recognize that they’re talking to Jesus of Nazareth.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this is the one that I refer to as the feast day that comes to our church in Emmaus once every eleven weeks. [Laughter] And actually we have… So, folks, if you ever come to St. Paul’s here in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, you will see on the outside of the church a great big icon of Christ sitting down at the table and eating with Sts. Luke and Cleopas, breaking bread with them there. And that’s the moment that they do recognize him, after having this whole conversation with him on the road. I always get these jokes: “So, do you live on the road to Emmaus?” I’m like: “No, I live in Emmaus. I live on the roads in Emmaus, not the road to Emmaus. That’s known as Allentown.” [Laughter] That’s the road to Emmaus. But, yeah, they have this whole chat with him and then it’s only at the end that they finally recognize him for who he is.

Fr. Stephen: After he’s explained the whole Bible to them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right? Right. And not just explained the Bible, but how the Bible applies to him: all the things in the Scriptures concerning himself. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so you see this again in another well known one, John 20:14-16, where St. Mary Magdalene turns around and is looking right at Jesus, thinks he’s the gardener, and asks him where he put Jesus. So asks Christ where Christ is, while she’s looking right at him. And it’s only when he then says her name, all of a sudden she recognizes him.

And then you have it in the next chapter. This is one of the weirdest ones in terms of how it’s phrased. In John 20—or, sorry, John 21:4, Christ is walking on the shore, they’re fishing, they see him, they don’t know that it’s Jesus. Then in verse 12, once they’ve come ashore and they’re getting ready to eat with him, there’s this phrase that St. John uses, “No one asked him who he was, because they knew it was the Lord.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which suggests that, on the one hand, they are not sure who this is; that’s why no one dared ask him. Like it’s on their minds, like: “Should we say, ‘Who are you?’ ” And yet they somehow know that it’s the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Like no one says on Sunday after Liturgy at my parish, they wouldn’t say, “Well, none of us asked who the priest was because we knew it was Fr. Stephen.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s kind of an odd thing to say, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It would just be: “Yeah, our priest is Fr. Stephen.” So even though they now know it’s him, it’s not because they recognize him. And it’s not until verse 20 in the same chapter—it says, “Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” So they know it’s him, but they haven’t seen it’s him yet, for six verses.

So, yes, this is this pattern that we see in the resurrection appearances of Christ through all the gospels that is weird, and especially makes no sense if these are supposed to be evidence that he rose from the dead, because if you were to present this as evidence, any cross-examining attorney worth their salt would look at this and say, “Uhh… They weren’t sure it was him.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right: “This is bad evidence.”

Fr. Stephen: “This is not a good ID. This is not a good witness ID.” If you told them that, “Yeah, we had a line-up and at first they didn’t recognize him, but then all of a sudden they did, and now they’re totally sure,” that would not go over in court.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the Emmaus one is the worst, because they literally spend all this time having a conversation with him, and they’re like: “So wait. So you’re saying, counselor, that your witness here had this whole conversation and only later said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was Jesus’?” [Laughter] Like, it’s terrible evidence!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So why are the gospel writers presenting us this shift between seeing Jesus and seeing the Lord; seeing this person standing in front of them and seeing the Lord? And where do we have a parallel for that in the gospels? And that’s one place that’s the mount of Transfiguration.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that’s where they go on the mountain. Peter, James, and John go up on the mountain. They know they’re there with Jesus. They’ve been with him; they went up there with him. And then he was transfigured in front of them, and they see him for who he is. They actually see the Lord of glory in his glory.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that is what is being described in these resurrection appearances. They’re glad when they see the Lord because Christ reveals his glory to them. This is talking about his divine identity. That’s what’s at issue here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they saw some kind of blinding light, like it doesn’t say that, but he reveals himself in glory to them, because his glory is, as you said, it’s who he is. It’s his identity.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this isn’t ID-card identity. This isn’t a picture; this isn’t what the person in front of me looks like, the shape of their nose and the shape of their eyes.

Fr. Andrew: These resurrectional appearances are—and we’ve hammered this 20 times now—they’re not evidence that he rose from the dead; they’re revelations of who he is. It is a revelation of Christ, and this is one of the reasons… You could say that he spends 40 days with them. Clearly, he appears to them many, many times that aren’t mentioned in the Scriptures. He’s with them for 40 days and appears to them many times and then ascends into heaven. So there’s revelation that’s going on here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, this is Christ presenting his divine identity to them. So it’s after—on the road to Emmaus, they understand the Scriptures and what the Scriptures say concerning Christ, after the breaking of the bread, which is pretty obviously to everybody eucharistic symbolism. This is when they see that Christ is Yahweh the God of Israel, which means God has come to visit his people, which means the day of the Lord has come.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You know, I wanted to give a fun detail. So there was a senior Ukrainian priest who lived here in our area for a while named Fr. Basil Zawierucha. It took me years to learn to pronounce his last name and then, God bless him, he died. I loved that man, and one of the things that he told me about which I had no idea… When I first met him he said, “You’re the priest in Emmaus?” and I said, “Yeah.” He said: Did you know that a lot of the Byzantine churches in southern Italy during that period, that the icon that was in the apse of the church—so in other words, if you don’t know where the apse is, everybody, that’s the usually curved wall that is right behind the altar, so if the priest is standing at the altar and he’s offering the Divine Liturgy, he’s looking across the altar and the apse is sort of what’s right in front of him—that the icon that was placed in the apse, rather than being what you see in many churches, the communion of the apostles or sometimes the crucifixion or the resurrection, various things like that, that often it was the supper at Emmaus? And so you think about that as being not just a eucharistic image, but this is a revelation of Christ in his glory that’s right there in front of the altar. That’s pretty cool. So I just wanted to share that image and his memory.

Fr. Stephen: And you can’t present evidence that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh, the God who created the universe. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Like, what evidence… on what basis would you say this is the right evidence to show that?

Fr. Stephen: But these people saw that he was.

Fr. Andrew: They saw that he was, but if you’re a forensic investigator or whatever, it’s not like you can pull out your book and say, “Okay, so this is what we’re looking for if we’re expecting to see Yahweh, the God of Israel, that Jesus is him.” There’s no book for that. It’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but what you have St. Paul doing instead is he says Christ is crucified and dies according to the Scriptures. He’s buried and rises again according to the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: He repeats that phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then he appears, he appears, he appears. So when he says “according to the Scriptures,” what’s he saying? He’s saying that Christ is back there—he’s talking about the Old Testament; the New Testament hadn’t been written yet. Christ is back there in the Scriptures, and the testimony to the fact that Christ is the God who revealed himself to the fathers of old, in the Old Testament, is that he was seen to be that: that the day of the Lord has come, that the fulfillment of those Scriptures has come, specifically in Christ. And the places where—the sort of key places where people see the Lord, have this experience of seeing the Lord, in the Old Testament, are when prophets are called as prophets.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, and that vision is stuff… The way it’s actually described in the Scriptures are scenes where it’s unmistakable what they’re seeing. For instance, Isaiah sees God enthroned in glory. So it’s clear that he’s seeing God. Or Moses, for instance, sees him up on top of the mountain, and he understands that’s where you meet God. Or the vision of Ezekiel, God in his chariot-throne. They’re seeing God enthroned; they’re seeing God acting as God. It’s unmistakable whom they’re seeing. This is the prophetic experience that is what makes them prophets.

Fr. Stephen: And the vision is then accompanied by them being sent.

Fr. Andrew: Sent, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And that verb in the Greek of these prophetic commissions is apostelo; that’s where we get the word “apostle.” That’s where we get the noun “apostle,” that that’s what makes someone an apostle: they’re sent on a mission. This idea is preserved really well in the Arabic language, at which I am at best a dabbler, but this bit I know. [Laughter] And that’s that there are actually two words in Arabic—I mean, there are probably more, but there are two main words—that are used for a prophet. Those words are nabi, which is from the Semitic root that in Hebrew it’s navi. If you’ve studied other languages beyond English, you know that the b sound and the v sound tend to be the same consonant in most languages. So it’s navi; in plural it’s the naviim, the prophets that are part of the Hebrew Bible. But it’s nabi in Arabic. But then there’s also the word rasul, and that word is also used for the apostles.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s used for both the prophets and the apostles. You could say, “Elias ar-Rasul, Elias the Prophet,” or “Boulos ar-Rasul, Paul the Apostle,” but it’s literally the same word in both cases in Arabic.

Fr. Stephen: And the way this has been distinguished in Arabic is that a nabi is someone who brings a message. He comes and he brings a message. Whereas a rasul is someone who receives a message from God himself, who has this direct contact with God himself and then conveys it. So all of the rasuls… Every rasul is a nabi, but not every nabi is a rasul. [Laughter]

And so by using that word for the apostles, that word contains the idea that the apostles saw the Lord and received the message and the commission directly from the Lord and then went and brought it, that it wasn’t second-hand. So they are able to convey, through that terminology, a lot of what’s going on with St. Paul when he’s defending his claim to be an apostle, that he didn’t get it second-hand, that he received it directly from the Lord. But also what he’s doing again in 1 Corinthians 15, that the apostles are those who had this prophetic experience, this apostolic experience, of seeing the Lord face to face, and that that happened in these resurrection appearances.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. All right, that wraps up the second half, and we will be back in just a moment with the third half of The Lord of Spirits. We’ll be back.

Fr. Andrew: You know, now I’m not sure whether that’s Steve or whether that’s Steve.

Fr. Stephen: Is it life or…?

Mr. Christoforou: It’s mysterious.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed. Well, we actually do have another caller. Alex is calling in, and he has a question about life after death. Alex, can you hear us? Alex, are you there? I think we might have lost Alex.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe it’s Alex Kidd and he got lost in Miracle World.

Fr. Andrew: See, that’s a reference I didn’t get, but I giggled anyway, just, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, humor me.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all right. Oh! Alex, are you there?

Alex: I am. Hello?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! He made it. All right.

Alex: Yes, thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Alex, to The Lord of Spirits. What is your question, comment, insinuation, accusation, etc.?

Alex: Yes, my question is about our experience of afterlife or the age to come. As far as I know, my question kind of blurs the two together. So I was raised Catholic, so I have the image of the lake of fire in my head for hell, and the garden for paradise, both just part of what, as far as I know, we’re going to experience. As I was chrismated and have been Orthodox for a while, what I’ve been hearing was, no, our experience of the age to come is not going to be of created fire, but instead hell is going to be those who hate God feel the presence of God in a hellish way, and those who love God experience that presence of God in a way of paradise. But then, listening to the spiritual geography, that doesn’t quite mesh well, and then I’m back to the lake of fire and garden of paradise.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So you’re kind of wondering what is the deal, right?

Alex: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, so there… This is something you see a lot on the internet, this idea that hell is heaven differently experienced. I think that’s the way I’ve seen it summarized, that view. I don’t know. I mean, I… I think the thing that I’ll say about this before I hand it over to Fr. Stephen, is there are different ways of trying to describe exactly what the experience of the life of the age to come is, and they get at it from different angles sometimes. Some are wrong! Some are right and can be, even if the particular images don’t… aren’t reconcilable with each other, they can still be right but simply looking at things from different angles.

Certainly, as we know, hell and death do get cast in the lake of fire—that’s in the Scripture; that’s not a made-up idea from somewhere else. That is part of the picture, so we can’t just throw that out, because it’s in Scripture. But then again the idea that there is this cartoon set of caverns that are with lava in them and there’s demons sticking forks in everybody’s butts and that’s what damnation is about—that’s not really true, because that is a sort of materialistic understanding of what the age to come is about. Anyway, that’s what I have to say about that. Father, why don’t you go ahead and help us all out here.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you don’t know what it’s like to be a dead bat. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s the problem!

Fr. Stephen: That is. That really is the core of the problem. So when we talk about the life of the age to come, where we’re going past a period where our human soul, consciousness, our life will be separated from our material body for a period, we don’t know what that’s going to be like, because we haven’t experienced it, and then we’re going even past that to the renewed heavens and the renewed earth that have been transfigured by the grace and glory of God and what that’s going to be like, and then what that’s going to be like for whoever it is—hopefully very few—who experience eternal condemnation. We have no idea what it’s going to be like for the demons at that point in their condemnation, because we don’t know what it’s like to be a demon now.

So, because we can’t know that, the Bible presents us with a lot of imagery, but I think deliberately, to keep us from being able to take any of it too sort of materially literally, a lot of it is contradictory. A lake of fire and outer darkness are contradictory. These are two different images. And then we have this other image of weeping and gnashing of teeth, which is actually an image of madness. So there are competing images. I mean, they’re all bad—they give us a negative idea of what this experience is like—but they can’t convey this experience, because there’s not an analogy; there’s not a way across the gap of our human experience in this age and that until we get there. This is why it says, “What we will be has not yet been made known.” We know we will be like him, because we will see him as he is, but… And St. Paul talking about seeing through a glass darkly now—so we can’t fully know it.

The problem with this sort of material, like the fire thing, is it’s taking one image over the others and overly materializing it and literalizing it. There are other… A lot of that imagery is related to… for example, that we use in the Orthodox Church, in addition to God’s going to be all in all, so what does it even mean that someone is going to be outside of everything? What does it mean for a person to not exist in the sense of madness and chaos? An imagery you’ll hear is that in our salvation we become more truly human and more fully human. And then the opposite of that is applied to what happens in eternal condemnation as people losing their humanity. Well, what does it mean to lose your human nature and not take on the nature of anything else?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’ll add this. One of the problems that I’ve seen is taking these things that are in Scripture, which, remember, is given to us by God through the apostles and prophets for our salvation, taking a certain image in Scripture and using it essentially to negate something else, so, for instance, the idea that God is going to be all in all: there are some people who use that to say, “Well, then that means that there can’t be any damnation. That’s not a thing.” And yet it clearly says in other places that that is totally a thing.

So the point is that attempting to use human reason to reconcile these things—and usually the way it’s done is they’re not reconciled; it’s just one part is pushed to the side—it’s just simply not going to work. So we’re not trying to fall back on the bat thing, although it sure is fun. [Laughter] But it’s true. It’s true: we don’t know what that’s about, and there’s places in Scripture that explicitly say to us we don’t know what that’s about, or where we have these images but we can’t go past that.

Fr. Stephen: And this is related to the hermeneutic issue we were talking about earlier in that—and this is true quite literally from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation: the Scriptures weren’t written to answer our questions and our curiosity and explain the mysteries of the universe to us. God didn’t write, or, you know, inspire, give the vision to the Prophet Moses, to write Genesis 1 and 2 to explain to us how he created the world. That’s not why that’s there. And that the last chapters in Revelation are not there because God wanted to answer our curiosity and explain exactly what the life in the age to come is about. So we’ve got to go with not just “How do we reconcile these images in a rationalistic way?” but “What is each of those images being used to say?” Quick rule of thumb here: All of these images are to say: “Don’t let this happen to you!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. Repent!

Fr. Stephen: “Don’t let this be you.”

Fr. Andrew: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” I mean, that is the message of Scripture: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” “The day of the Lord has arrived.”

Fr. Stephen: “That road of sin seems awful nice now, but here’s what’s at the end of that road, where you will end up if you go down it. It’s this very bad place.” So it’s not to give you all the details about exactly how bad it’s going to be; it’s just to say, “This is really bad; don’t go there. Take this other road instead.”

Fr. Andrew: Does that answer your question, Alex?

Alex: Both yes and no.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right? “I’ve got new questions now…” [Laughter]

Alex: I might follow up on Facebook.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Great. Good to hear from you.

Alex: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Well, we also have Pedro on the line. So, Pedro, welcome to Lord of Spirits podcast.

Pedro: Hello, Fathers. Christ is risen!

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen!

Fr. Stephen: Note the exact verbiage.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly, yes.

Pedro: It has a certain euphonious quality.

Fr. Andrew: It’s euphonious, yes, to say he truly is risen.

Pedro: So you touched on this, both in your answer to the last question and previously when you were talking about, for example, Bultmann. My question is largely about the value of—and, Fr. Stephen, I apologize if this sounds like a loaded question, coming from me, but I promise it’s not [Laughter]—

Fr. Stephen: I’m not talking about toll houses.

Pedro: No, no, I’m not trying to go with that today!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Okay, okay.

Pedro: That was a long shot, you know. The value of engaging in that sort of secular, materialist approach to making sense of the data of Scripture and spiritual reality. You have people like John P. Meier who wrote a five-, soon to be six-volume, thousands of pages on the historical Jesus, who in this process he says that this is an impossible figure to reconstruct; or people like Goldsmith who kicked off a great deal of research in the same area. And you have people who try to make sense of what that historical data might actually tell us about sort of “the true story” behind what Scripture has to say. Is there value in engaging with that kind of scholarship, and, if so, what’s the benefit for us as Orthodox Christians who are…? We don’t know what it’s like to be a dead bat, and hopefully most of us are trying not to know what it’s like to be a 19th century German materialist philosopher. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: This is all you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay!

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I could say something, but whatever. You go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: Let me start by heaping further condemnation on 19th century German—no. [Laughter] Well, I want to be clear before I say part of what I’m going to say in answering your question. I want to be utterly clear in just how vain, void, and worthless I think that whole project is, in case I haven’t been enough. But this modernist thinking infects even very conservative Orthodox people. There are plenty of well-meaning good scholars, good Orthodox scholars out there, fine Orthodox Christians, holier than [I am]—that’s not saying a lot; I’m a low bar, but still—who take this approach to the faith or take this approach to the Scripture that, for example, each biblical text means this one thing, and if we apply the right methodology to it, this sort of pseudo-scientific methodology, we can extract that one thing. Or they may not even apply the methodology; they may just pick a favorite Church Father or a favorite group of Church Fathers and say, “Well, they said it means this, so that is what it means.” No further anything necessary; each thing has one meaning and we can establish it. So the Orthodox faith is: I have my spreadsheet, and the columns are different areas of theology, and I need to fill out the correct values in each field and then I am truly Orthodox.

Fr. Andrew: There’s going to be a test.

Fr. Stephen: And where you find those people, there’s that same kind of modernist thinking. And going back and trying to reconstruct… Like: “I’m going to go into Church history, and I’m going to reconstruct the history of this, and that will tell me what the accurate Orthodox belief is, that I can then fill into my field, and anyone who doesn’t share it, I will batter for not really being Orthodox.” And so I have no love for this approach. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to actually exercise this approach in any field of scholarship at all. So let me be utterly clear on that.

Now. [Laughter] That being said, in terms of why would I… Say somebody was doing a master’s thesis, and I recommended a bunch of books to them by scholars using this approach: why would I do something like that?

Fr. Andrew: Much as has literally happened between the two of you, yes. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Why would I do something like that? Well, because, despite the flawed methodology, what that methodology teaches you to do is basically to go in and tear apart a text and go in there and try and look for all of the archaeological data, all of the inter-textual data, all of this stuff. And then, based on your bad methodology, you will draw a lot of dumb conclusions from it—but you’ve also compiled all of that data, all of that information surrounding the text and related to the text, and there are things that… I have ideas or chains of thinking about parts of Scripture and stuff that have really opened things up for me that I’ve gotten from some horrible, radical, nut-bag scholars. [Laughter] But they said something where I was like: “Well, wait a second…”

Fr. Andrew: I feel like there should be some reference to stealing the Egyptian gold here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, plundering the Egyptians. Where they take it to the total wrong place and I come to a totally different conclusion, but they help me see some piece of data, or they help me make some connection between some extra-biblical piece of literature and Scripture, or some ancient custom and some culture, or something. And so they’re doing a lot of work. You said this yourself. Meier basically says, “I’m about to embark on an impossible project,” and then spends decades and thousands of pages on that impossible project.

So, yes, he’s right. It’s an impossible project; his methodology is wrong. It’s not going to bear any fruit at the end. But you’ve got all those pages of research and material that you can take and do something else with, something better with, that is related to what God is actually saying in Scripture. Does that make sense?

Fr. Andrew: Well, there you go, Pedro.

Pedro: Yeah, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: You still have to read that stuff. [Laughter]

Pedro: Two quick calls: one, I guess I’ll keep slogging through the Meier book, and, two, so outside of people who hypothetically are working on a master’s thesis, what is the…? Is there the same value for people who aren’t engaged in academia or scholarship, the general Orthodox layman?

Fr. Andrew: You know, what I would say to that is there can be, but it’s super important to have someone help you who knows what they’re doing, because it’s so easy—it’s so easy if… And I doubt that this applies to you, Pedro, because I know you, but it’s so easy… I did this when I was younger a lot. You read some book, and it blows you away, because it’s talking about stuff you’ve never heard before. And then that becomes your skeleton key for everything else. You judge everything else; you’re like: “Wow, now I have the key to the Scripture, now I have…” whatever it might be.

And while I wouldn’t devalue the experience of having your mind blown by something you’ve never seen before—like, that’s really cool and helpful—at the same time it’s important not to let it take you into really weird places. Like, I’ve watched people, otherwise smart people, utterly go off the deep end because they became obsessed about aliens or about trying to figure out what it means that God can… predestination, whatever. They pick some piece, and then their whole theology becomes about that thing.

Pedro: Right, that’s when you sort of get to the name-worshipers, as an example, in Orthodox heritage.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I mean I’ve seen people do this. They’ll pick a particular Church Father, for instance. “Everyone should be reading this Church Father!” And I’ll be like: He’s great. The stuff he says is good. But what you just expected every Orthodox Christian to do, the vast majority, 99.999% of them throughout the history of the world, could never have done that. And even now, most of them still couldn’t and never would.

So to make one particular teacher, one particular approach, whatever it might be, whatever is rocking your world at the moment, and make that the thing by which you judge everything else—a single canon—that’s a problem. Scripture says that there’s wisdom in many counselors, if I remember the quote correctly. So that’s what I would say about that. I don’t know if Fr. Stephen would have any addition or correction to that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. It’s partially just an addition to that idea that Orthodoxy is having the correct values in the correct fields. So people will, before they read a book, be like: Well, is this book Orthodox? Is it fully Orthodox? Is everything in it Orthodox? Is there anything in it that’s problematic? And if there is anything, they won’t read it. Or if they find out it is, then they’re just like: Okay, I’m going to believe every word; this is the truth, then. So it’s either the Bible or it’s nothing. I’ve said a few times that a lot of Orthodox folks read the Fathers the way Evangelical fundamentalists read the Bible, and read the Bible the way Evangelical fundamentalists read the Fathers. [Laughter] It’s either this or nothing.

Pedro: It’s bad that that happens, but that’s a great phrase.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that the Orthodox Church is not here to teach you the precise and accurate meaning of each text of Scripture; that the Orthodox Church, however, will help you learn how to read Scripture. It’s not what to think; it’s how to think.

Fr. Andrew: And since we’re on this long, wonderful—it’s a digression, but this is actually a perennial thing we discuss in this show. An article I read by Fr. Georges Florovsky really beautifully described… and he said that these categories overlapped, but he described three categories, that there’s dogma, there’s doctrine, and there’s theology. With dogma, everybody needs to be exactly on the same page. These are the core things of our faith: that Christ is God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God. These things are core. Doctrine is the way that you teach those dogmas, and there could be a little bit more flexibility on that. Teaching changes over the years, in terms of the way that you teach something. And then theology is reflection on those other two categories. And the truth is that most of the things that are said by Orthodox theologians and writers are in that third category, which means it’s okay to disagree, as long as what you’re saying is consistent with the dogma of the Church. It’s okay to disagree. It’s all right. It’s okay, everybody. It’s okay!

Even this particular program, we’re saying a lot of things that could be wrong. People maybe never heard some of them before, certainly stuff I’ve never heard before, and that’s okay. Take what’s good, leave what doesn’t help you, get on with your life. So anyway, that turned into a rant. [Laughter] But is that helpful to you, Pedro?

Pedro: Yeah, absolutely.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God.

Fr. Stephen: One last cryptic note that I won’t expand upon here, just to tantalize everyone—maybe at some point in the future I will—if you understand the Church Fathers correctly, they never disagree about the interpretation of Scripture.

Fr. Andrew: There we go. So, dun-dun dun. Okay, thanks for calling, Pedro. Good to have you on the show tonight. Thank God.

Okay, so let’s talk about… We’re going to finish up in this third half; we’re going to talk about some of these appearances that St. Paul lists off. So the first one that we want to talk about is the myrrh-bearers. Of course, in most Orthodox churches, two Sundays after Pascha is the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearers. So we’re talking about these women who came to the tomb of Christ to come and anoint his body, and then they discover that he is not there, that he is risen from the dead. And then they go back and they tell the apostles, and they don’t believe them. St. Mary Magdalene, of course, is called the Apostle to the Apostles, because she goes and preaches this resurrection to them, and they don’t believe her.

My favorite bit is where, when Christ is talking to Sts. Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus, and one of them says—they literally are talking about the resurrection—that some women of our company amazed us and said that they’d even seen a vision of angels that told them that he was alive, but these words seemed to us an idle tale. And as the one detail you pointed out to me, Father, when we were doing our prep is like: one of the women who is one of the myrrh-bearers is St. Mary, the wife of Cleopas. And Cleopas is one of the two that are on the road with him to Emmaus. So he’s literally saying, “So my wife said… but that seemed to me to be an idle tale.” It’s like: Dude, your own wife! Your own wife! Come on, man! [Laughter]

But there’s something deeper in here, actually, right? Why is it that the women get this first?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this may not… We’re modern people, and so we want to… It might not be apparent to us why it would be so shocking from an ancient perspective that the first people to see Christ risen would be a bunch of women.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and again if you were trying to write a propaganda piece favoring Christ’s resurrection from the dead, if you’re in the first century, you do not put women as your primary witnesses, because women can’t give witness in the ancient world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they could not testify in court; they could not testify to the truth of the matter, because people’s attitude toward them is exactly what you see reflected by the disciples—by the male disciples. “Uh, yeah, some women said this. We were kind of amazed. Kind of crazy… You know women, right?” So that wouldn’t be something you would construct. Well, so why is it in Scripture? Well, this is part of a pattern that you see repeatedly in the Old Testament.

Probably the most famous one—and people get super happy about me talking about the book of Judges [Laughter]—is with the Prophetess Deborah and Barak, where Barak is called to be the judge of Israel, meaning he’s not called to sit on the bench and hear cases; he’s called to be the man who steps up and restores justice to the people of Israel from their foreign oppressors—and he chickens out and wimps out and fails. And so God does not leave his people to suffer because Barak failed, but raises up the Prophetess Deborah and another woman, Jael—this is the whole “tent-peg through the temple” thing. He raises up these women to deliver up Israel instead; he does it through women, and this is to embarrass Barak. The idea is they looked down on women, considered women to be weaker, considered women to be less than, and so the fact that he wimped out and then this woman came and did his job for him is sort of putting him back in his place.

You see the same thing with Moses when he’s confronted by his wife, Zipporah, about not having circumcised his children, where Zipporah has to go and do it, which was his responsibility, and she has to do it to keep God from killing Moses is actually how it’s presented in Exodus, has to save his life.

And so it’s not coincidental that while the myrrh-bearing women, while the holy myrrh-bearers are on their way to Jesus’ tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, the male disciples are all hiding in a room with the doors locked, because they’re scared to death, that they were going to get executed, too, and so they’re in hiding. Whereas the women embark to go and do and give honor to Jesus, and even though they don’t have a good plan—they’re kind of half-way there and they’re like, “Hey, who’s going to roll away the stone from the tomb for us?”—but they go and they get to work. And so if what’s happening, as we’ve just said, is that when Christ is appearing to these disciples, he’s making these disciples apostles; he’s sending them on a mission—then who are going to be the first people you send? Well, the ones who take their duties seriously and who aren’t scared. So the women disciples are given this gift of being the first disciples to become apostles.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Awesome. So the second one that we wanted to talk about is when Christ appears to St. Peter. If I remember correctly, if you’re looking at the eothinon gospels, this is the very last one, isn’t it? The one in St. John?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Where Christ restores Peter by asking him, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” And so you might ask the question: Well, why does he ask him three times, “Do you love me?” Well, number one, the question, “Do you love me?” is not, “Peter, how do you really feel about me?” [Laughter] That’s not… That is not what love is. That is not what love is…

Fr. Stephen: “Do you think I’m a good guy?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “How is our friendship, Peter?” That’s not what it is. Love is to sacrifice yourself for the other; it’s about loyalty. So basically, he’s saying, “Peter, are you going to be loyal to me from now on? because you left.” And so he asks him three times, and as the Fathers say, why does he ask him three times? Because Peter denied him three times. So it’s to bring him back.

But there’s something—there’s some fun textual stuff lurking under there. In English, it says, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” Some people look down and they see that there’s two different Greek verbs in there that refer to love, and they say, “Oohh, there’s something going on here rather than just the English word ‘love.’ ” Is that true, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so if you weren’t mad at me about the Judges thing, get ready to get mad at me now!

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: Because, I mean, this preaches like crazy. People have preached beautiful sermons on this, and unfortunately it’s not true.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and C.S. Lewis kind of writes a whole book about it. This is where we’re going to make people hate us. C.S. Lewis writes a whole book called The Four Loves, which is a lovely book! A lovely book.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you can make distinctions about love. I’m just saying they don’t hold up grammatically and linguistically. So the idea is something along the lines of when Christ first asks St. Peter if he loves him, he uses the verb agapao, which is agape.

Fr. Andrew: Agape in the noun form.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which, you know, they want to say this is divine love, and then he uses phileo in the second two times. He also switches “lambs” and “sheep,” and sometimes some people draw something out with that, too, but the “love” one is the one they tend to focus on, and they say, “Well, Christ is kind of being condescending by switching the verb,” because they want to say that phileo is sort of love like friendship.

Fr. Andrew: Brotherly love, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and like Philadelphia. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Just like in Philadelphia!

Fr. Stephen: So it’s always sunny there, I heard. [Laughter] But anyway…

Fr. Andrew: It is, in fact, not always sunny in Philadelphia.

Fr. Stephen: So here’s the problem with that. If you’re going to argue that linguistically, if you’re going to argue that contextually with St. John, you have to show that St. John uses those terms different ways consistently in his writing, or at least in his gospel. At least in St. John’s gospel, you’d at least have to go through and say, “Well, look, when he uses one verb he means this, and when he uses this other verb he means that,” and that’s not what you get when you read St. John’s gospel in Greek. What you get is that he uses the two words interchangeably, all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then sort of Exhibit A is that phrase, again we see in English, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” That gets described with those different verbs.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “loved” in there… You don’t see it in English, because they both get translated “loved,” but he alternates the verbs. And that doesn’t mean that there’s one disciple whom Christ loves with divine love and then another disciple whom he’s just friends with. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Or that his relationship with John—

Fr. Stephen: Deteriorated.

Fr. Andrew: —is going back and forth between… [Laughter] No, it’s literally a synonym. It’s literally a synonym, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and this is reflected by the Fathers. St. John Chrysostom—don’t take my word for it—St. John Chrysostom’s Greek was a lot better than mine. He says very explicitly that Christ asked St. Peter the exact same question three times. So it just doesn’t work. And I’m sorry I had to do that to people. [Laughter] I hate that… There are some Sunday school and homily things I hate ruining for people. There’s also no linguistic relationship between eleison in Kyrie, eleison and olive oil. But anyway… I won’t go into that now.

But so that the key here is that St. Peter here is being contrasted with Judas. Both of them betray and deny Christ. St. Peter repents and is restored by Christ; Judas goes and destroys himself.

Fr. Andrew: Hangs himself.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the key contrast that’s going on here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, honestly, that to me is a much better homily than the agape-philia one.

Okay, so the next one we wanted to talk about, we’ve sort of already talked about a little bit, so we don’t have to say too much about it, I think, is the eleven who—Christ appears to them, finally. What were they spending most of their time doing? Hiding, and then later fishing. Like, literally they saw the Lord and then they went back to their boats. “Guys? Guys? You have a job to do here!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, and you can say, “Well, Christ told them to wait for the Holy Spirit.” It’s like, yeah, he told them to wait there, in Jerusalem, which is where Pentecost happened, not to go back to Galilee and fishing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and again if this is apostolic propaganda, this makes them looks bad, so it’s badly done propaganda, if that’s what the claim is, that this is all just propaganda.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because our defense attorney would say, “Oh, he appeared to you, risen from the dead, and sent you to go baptize and make disciples—and that’s why you went back to fishing.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter] Okay, another major appearance is to the saint who’s called the Brother of the Lord, and that’s James, St. James, who was the first bishop of Jerusalem. Why do we know that he appears to St. James? One mention of it: 1 Corinthians 15:7. St. Paul says that he appeared to James. Doesn’t say what that’s about, but there actually is context from the ancient Church which does say what it’s about. So what is going on there, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, so we have these data points about St. James in Scripture. We have one data point which is in the gospels it says that he and the other brothers of the Lord did not believe that Jesus was the Christ during his earthly ministry, before his crucifixion. We then have this data point from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians that Christ appeared to him after the resurrection; there’s a resurrection appearance to St. James. And then we have in the book of Acts, he’s just in charge of the Church in Jerusalem. So even if we had no historical record about what happened from our forefathers in the Christian faith, it seems like a pretty good, just Occam’s razor way of working out what happened, is that in that appearance after the resurrection Christ put St. James in charge of the Church in Jerusalem. I mean, that would seem to be a basic assumption.

But the fact is that we have all kinds of historical records, both in sort of pseudepigrapha, in Eusebius in his Church histories and other Church histories, that say precisely that, that when Christ appeared to St. James, he put him in charge; he made him the overseer, the episkopos, the bishop of the Church in Jerusalem. And then we see that he’s in charge in the Church of Jerusalem, unquestioned by anybody, in the book of Acts, that he’s the one in charge.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think that the last point you made is a good one. For instance, when the Apostolic Council comes up, and he’s the one who kind of gives the sentence at the end: if he had just been sort of appointed there by the apostles, like if he were a successor to the apostles, you couldn’t… He wouldn’t be presiding over them. They would have said, “Well, that’s nice, St. James, but sit down. The older brothers are talking here,” or whatever. But, no, he’s clearly the local—to use the common English term—he’s the local ordinary; he’s the bishop of that place, so he’s the one who’s going to give the sentence.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s a—here’s the part we alluded to in answering Pedro’s question, where for some reason… Well, I know why; there’s a historical reason. But we’re at a state now where a lot of our Christian friends will believe everything pagans write about ancient history, but nothing that Christians write about ancient history outside of the Bible. So if anything about the apostles, anything about the Theotokos, anything about any biblical figure or the early Church that’s written outside—“Well, that’s not the Bible, so I don’t believe any of it, but Plutarch’s Lives, oh yeah. Julius Caesar: stabbed 23 times, floor of the Senate, yeah, yeah, yeah. All that happened.” [Laughter] So the pagans are all telling the truth and the Christians are all liars doesn’t make a lot of sense as the Christian perspective on historical trustworthiness.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay, so a couple more appearances that we wanted to go over. So here’s the one that’s numerically the biggest, where Jesus appears to 500 people at a time. What’s that all about? This seems like the best candidate for being “evidence” of the resurrection. “Look at all these people he appeared to!” But that’s not what’s going on there, because again it’s just not attested in a way that would sort of hold up in court. There’s something else happening.

Fr. Stephen: He would have had to name three. [Laughter] You can’t just say, “Oh, he appeared to 500 people!” Who?

Fr. Andrew: “He appeared to 500 people—and here are their names.” Right, again, it’s bad evidence. It’s not evidence. That’s not the purpose of it. So, okay, it’s this vision of Christ being given to all of these people at the same time. This goes back to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about before, about prophets and also about the people of God gathering, for instance, on a mountain to worship him. So, yeah, unpack this for us a bit.

Fr. Stephen: We went through a short list of people who saw God in the Old Testament, and it was a short list. It’s these few prophets. And a similar list—not to tease too much our Pentecost episode, but in four weeks… But that list is roughly the same as the list of people in the Old Testament who we’re told had the Holy Spirit dwelling within them: prophets, the king, maybe the high priest but not all of the high priests, some of them. It’s this few, these select few, whereas what we see here and what St. Paul is emphasizing is now it’s: Hey, 500 at a time! So there is this new accessibility. The vision of God—and we’ll be talking about this much more in the Pentecost episode, with the coming of the Holy Spirit—this is something that’s now available, and this commissioning to be sent out is something that’s now available to everyone in Christ, not just to the select few.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, there has been this big change that has occurred, that everyone can now receive the Holy Spirit. Everyone is sent out as the emissaries of God to retake the world on his behalf. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Okay, last but almost certainly, certainly not least. The chosen vessel himself, St. Paul the Apostle, the patron of our church right here in Emmaus. He describes himself… What you get in English Bibles, he says, “And to me, last of all, as one born out of time,” or “one out of time,” which is, frankly, a really sort of euphemistic way of saying an abortion; he describes himself as being like an abortion, like a child that is miscarried. That’s how he describes himself in comparison to everybody else. He doesn’t just mean “oh yeah, I was one of the last ones.” It’s actually this very negative and kind of visceral image. Why would he use that word?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is St. Paul taking something that was used against him by his opponents and owning it.

Fr. Andrew: Much like the word “Christian,” right? Which was like “those little Christs.” They were like: “Oh, yeah, we’ll take that. We’ll be called Christians.”

Fr. Stephen: And so he takes… This was both a way of mocking his physical appearance… We have a couple of places, extra-canonical, of course, that describe St. Paul’s personal appearance, and it’s not pretty. So it’s partly that, but also this was a contrast between… This familiar language is what’s being used in the early Church; we see this in the book of Acts: “the brethren.” The way of saying Christians in a place is “the brethren of” that place. “Brothers and sisters” because of the importance of the sons of God as what salvation is about. So if the other apostles are sons, St. Paul is this abortion, this rejected child, this lesser sort of… So St. Paul, rather than being angry and “oh man, I’m going to take them down, I’m going to…” from his opponents, just takes it and owns it in his humility and says, “Yeah, it was me, last of all. Yeah, I am, compared to them. I’ll use the word ‘abortion’ about myself.”

But in the next verse, that we didn’t read earlier, he says, “Because.” The reason he accepts it is because he was out there killing the brethren. He was out there persecuting the Church; he was a murderer. He’s like, “Yeah, you know what? I wasn’t worthy of it. I’m least of all worthy of it. So, yeah, I’ll take that. I’ll take that. I’m still a child, but I’ll take the ‘unwanted.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: It’s extreme humility, which is interesting how it’s coupled with his great boldness at the same time.

All right, well, those are the… we could say post-resurrection, but that’s not really the right phrase. These are the appearances of the resurrected Christ in glory to various people. And again, if your one take-away is “Wow, I really need to go to Sunday Matins,” then we have succeeded. But we just want to offer some final thoughts about this.

For me, as I said, one take-away is: okay, go to Matins on Sunday. It’s such an amazing service for lots of reasons, but the gospel readings are particularly powerful. And to keep having them over and over again is really an amazing experience, and it’s a ritual participation in those events, that we are there with them. And so what is that experience, then? Well, as we said, this is not just a sort of epilogue to… “Oh, the big action already happened. He suffered, he died, he rose from the dead. Yay!” That’s not what’s going on. It’s not just a dénouement; it’s not just evidence, like, “Oh, yes, Jesus really did rise from the dead and here’s the proof,” because as we showed it’s not very good proof; it’s not very good evidence. So what actually is going on?

One of the central claims of the Gospel is this question of who is Jesus Christ. Who is he? And these resurrectional appearances of Christ answer that question. Now, they don’t give all that you could say about it, but they answer that question. He is the Lord of glory. He is one with his Father. He is the one who sends his apostles out into the world to baptize, to teach, to exorcise, to make disciples—all of these things. That’s who he is. And so we should really regard these gospel passages as very precious to us, because they reveal to us the risen Jesus Christ. Not just reveal to us that he is risen, but who he is, that he is God, that he is truly the first-born from among the dead. That is the one that they reveal to us.

And the whole point of doing this thing we called Christianity is to know Jesus Christ, to know him who is sent by the Father, and that Father who sent him. That’s what Jesus Christ himself says: “This is eternal life, that they may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” He said that. We don’t learn who Jesus Christ is like a set of data, like: Okay, I’ve got this Jesus stuff down now; now I’m going to move on to other things about Christianity. This is Christianity: to know him, to see him, to have this vision of him.

Now, it may be the case that you’re not having miraculous visions of him the way these people did, but there are certainly people throughout the history of the Church who have, and we trust their testimony because it’s consistent with the stuff that came before and because we see the fruit of what happens in their lives as a result of those visions. It may not satisfy those who are using the historical critical method. But, let’s face it, that method, while useful for certain things, is not useful for everything, and it’s certainly not useful for determining: Is this person truly the Son of God? It can’t cover that; it’s just not a good tool for that. It’s a good tool for other stuff, but not for that.

So what I would encourage you to do is not just to read these gospels—although, yes, to read these gospels—but as you read the Scriptures and particularly as you look at those particular four books—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—that you look there to meet Christ, to know Christ. That is the point of what we’re doing. Again, it’s not just Christianity 101: okay, I’ve got that down; now let’s do something else. That’s not it at all. This is the whole of what it means to be Christian, is to seek for the face of Christ, to know him, to see him as he is.

So those are my final thoughts. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: We see this dynamic play out in Vespers and Matins that we’ve kind of been talking about, the Matins part of it especially tonight. Vespers is the service where at least some of the time we have Old Testament readings. And then we come into Matins, we come to that prokeimenon before the gospel, and we’re calling out to God to arise and judge the earth. We’re calling for the day of the Lord to come, for Christ to come. And then we read in the gospel about it coming, about Christ coming and visiting his people, about the anastasis, and about how the anastasis, how the day of the Lord entered into the lives of these people who had these experiences after Christ rose from the dead.

But all of that is preparing us for what’s about to happen in Liturgy, for us to have that same experience. In Liturgy, just like on the road to Emmaus, we read and have explained to us the Scriptures and Christ in them, we have the breaking of the bread in the Eucharist, and then after the Eucharist we sing, “We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit.” We have the opportunity to have that same experience, but that experience isn’t an end in itself. We don’t pursue this vision of Christ as an end in itself; we don’t pursue coming to experience Christ’s resurrection as an end in itself—because it wasn’t for the apostles. It’s what made them apostles. It’s what started something new. This is why we start reading the Acts of the Apostles at Pascha. This is the sending-out.

And so every one of us, at the end of the Liturgy, is sent out into the world. The reason we read the eothinon gospels, these resurrection gospels, to the north is not just to tell the demons that they’ve lost; it’s because the apostles are proclaiming a warning that Christ has risen. He’s warning the demons and the spiritual powers of evil that you’re coming; that you and I are now going out into the world, and they’d better look out. So this is what the resurrection gospels call us to, call us to when we’ve had that experience of seeing the true light, when we’ve received Christ, when we’ve come to receive him and know him and know who he is, to then go out into the world and change it and execute judgment and start to restore and transfigure it, to change it.

And how do we do that? Well, we go out and when we find that there’s strife, we act as peace-makers. Where there’s despair, we come with love and with hope. Where there’s loneliness, we come with companionship and compassion. Where there’s joy and God’s blessings, we rejoice with them. When people are mourning, we provide comfort. When we actually go out and do that, we can literally change the world the same way the apostles did after they saw Christ and went out into the world in the Acts of the Apostles.

But most of the time we, myself included, don’t do that. We go to Liturgy, we celebrate the services, we have this beautiful experience, and then we go home and watch some TV and maybe drive past a few homeless people on the way home and ignore them. We don’t, then, follow through. And the place where we experience salvation is not in the beautiful experience; it’s not in the fulfilling spiritual experience. It’s in faithfully answering the call that comes with that experience.

So those are my final thoughts for tonight.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Father, and thank you, Voice of Steve.

Mr. Christoforou: I’ve been listening here, and this has been amazing. I’m just in awe.

Fr. Andrew: Again, Steve was not a guest; he was a caller. [Laughter]

Mr. Christoforou: No, I’m a hanger-on who just offers good feedback. Awesome.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you everyone, for listening. If you did not get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, but we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you’re on Facebook—and Fr. Stephen is weirdly back on Facebook, but it’s just to flog his book—you can like our page and join our discussion group.Leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and Christ is risen! He truly is risen.