Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Thank you so much, Voice of Steve. Good evening, giants-killers and— I said “giants-killers”; oh boy, like the New York Giants? —giant-killers, dragon-slayers. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Cajun country, Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in exile in Yankee country in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. If you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi, as usual, will be taking your calls this evening, which we’ll get to in the second part of our show.

Before we get to that, though, on October 26 through 29, 2023, at the Antiochian Village in western Pennsylvania, we are going to be holding the first-ever Lord of Spirits conference. Fr. Stephen and I are both going to be there; we’re going to be giving talks. And also will be there Fr. David Subu and Lucas Christensen, and—and—we’re very happy to announce that His Eminence Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) will be speaking as well. And there’s going to be an RPG tournament, which is the only part that really matters to Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen De Young: First, it’s a Dungeons & Dragons tournament. [Laughter] Don’t bury the lede. We’re not playing Mutants and Masterminds. And second, it’s the only part that really matters, period.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, the schedule’s still being worked on, but you can find all the current details and you can register by going to store.ancientfaith.com/events. It’s going to be fun! I’m hoping at least one person will be wearing a bat costume. You never know; seems possible.

Anyway, that being said, tonight we’re going to be talking about the holy mystery of ordination, the actual ritual act that makes a man part of ordained ministry. This is now the fourth in our series on the sacraments of the Church, but how many episodes will there be? Five, seven, nine, 23—who knows? So, Fr. Stephen, this episode, though, is all about the priesthood, right?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No, we did that one already!

Fr. Stephen: We already did that one. And you just said what it was about!

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but people say ordination. Priesthood: same thing, right?

Fr. Stephen: This is the latest one. We’re going to be meeting our listeners at the conference.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. They’re going to actually see us in person.

Fr. Stephen: Right! And so I feel like we need to begin now to be more transparent.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Well.

Fr. Stephen: Like, about the strains in our interpersonal relationship.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Do we get to have a blood-feud?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know if you hear the talk, but they say we’ve got nothing in common. No common ground to start from.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: And we’re falling apart.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow!

Fr. Stephen: But as we were talking about it earlier today, I said, “Hey, what about breakfast at Tiffany’s?” And you said—

Fr. Andrew: I think I remember the film. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As I recall, we both kind of liked it.

Frs. Stephen and Andrew: That’s the one thing we’ve got.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! That’s got to be, what— It was a 1995, ‘96— I’m trying to remember when that song came out.

Fr. Stephen: Somewhere around there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Man.

Fr. Stephen: You got a reference, too! So there you go.

Fr. Andrew: One-hit wonder. I did! This’ll be the one I get for the show.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] That’s got to be a bingo square: “Fr. Andrew gets a reference.”

Fr. Andrew: Right? I feel like people should get a Lord of Spirits bingo square for that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, yes, this episode is not about the priesthood as such, because we already did that. Been there, done that; available for download at your local ancientfaith.com.

Fr. Andrew: For free, by the way. All you guys who complain: this is free. No one’s making you pay to listen to this show. Just saying.

Fr. Stephen: Are there people out there complaining they have to pay for podcasts?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t think they’re complaining they have to pay. They’re just complaining about the podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Oh. Well, you get what you pay for!

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: You get three hours of free something! So you can go and listen to that one if you want a refresher. There will be some things tonight that connect with that, so that might be a worthwhile thing to do if you’re caught up, if you want an excuse to have headphones in during a family gathering over the holidays this weekend… [Laughter] And then when they ask what you’re listening to you can sound spiritual instead of antisocial. It’s a lifehack.

We’re not talking about priesthood. We’re also not— When we say that in this episode we’re talking about ordination, we’re not talking about contemporary American practice or elsewhere of how that works, like how seminaries work and how pastoral education is done and that sort of thing, mainly because none of that existed before 400 AD—and as longtime listeners know, that’s when I lose interest in the world. [Laughter]

And we’re also not— And a bunch of people may tune out now. This is also not going to be “how to get yourself ordained.”

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man! I can’t just go onto UniversalLifeChurch.com and become a shaman-pope or something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you can, and that’ll be worth the paper it’s printed on. You won’t be able to perform weddings in Pennsylvania if you’re ordained online like that.

Fr. Andrew: I think that is true.

Fr. Stephen: So, especially if you’re planning on doing weddings in Pennsylvania, not the road to take. But we’re not going to tell you what the road to take is, because that’s not what the episode’s about.

What we are talking about is ordination itself, ordination as a rite, as a ritual, as a sacrament, as a mystery of the Church. Obviously, that directly relates to priesthood, especially as we get started. A lot of what we’re going to be talking about tonight is going to grow out of Aaron and his sons, Aaron as the first high priest, his sons as priests, the other Levites. These are the first folks who get ordained in the Scriptures, and we have a lot of detail of how exactly that happened.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we’re going to go over that. It’s deeply weird, you guys.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, in great detail. There will be the fatty portions above the kidneys. They’re coming! They’re flying through the air.

Fr. Andrew: And also: pre-historic bacon buns! I’m just putting that out there. It’s true!

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: All you Lithuanian-Americans know what I’m talking about.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this actual ritual: what is being done to someone when they get ordained; when a man gets ordained, what is being done to him. So that means that our discussion is going to sort of start— One of the reasons we’re starting with Aaron and his sons—sort of; there’s going to be a little preface—is that in order to have an ordination rite, you have to have a formal priesthood as such.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because you have to be being ordained into something.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So one of the things we really emphasized on the priesthood episode was that before the Levitical priesthood, before the priesthood of Aaron, that the priestly role was a role played by the father or the head of the household or the head of a clan or the head of a tribe, that it was a role within a family structure rather than “this man here is a priest; this other man over here is not a priest.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just what Dad does.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that requires a priesthood as such, not just a concept of the priest or the role of offering sacrifice, but an actual priesthood, so that the ordination is making a person who previously was not one of those into one of those.

We probably should mention now—even though we haven’t talked about this before, but when has that ever stopped me from springing things on Fr. Andrew? [Laughter] So this series, as was mentioned, is sort of our series on the sacraments or mysteries of the Church. This is one that our Protestant friends—well, you can never say all Protestants, but this is almost all, at least—don’t have… don’t see ordination as a sacrament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I think the ones that do see things as sacraments—because a lot of Protestants don’t see anything as a sacrament—there’s just baptism and the eucharist. For a lot of them, there’s just those two and everything else is not.

Fr. Stephen: And if you’re a Lutheran you kind of have absolution as an extra one, so they have two and a half.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but I don’t think that’s super often.

Fr. Stephen: But yeah, ordination is not. That said—and we’ll talk about this a little more, later on—there is actually, though many of our Protestant friends would be loath to call it a ritual, there is actually a ritual attached to them setting apart somebody to ordained office.

Fr. Andrew: Oh sure. There’s often laying on of hands. I mean, that’s a thing that is being done in a lot of cases.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and later on tonight we’re going to talk about the difference in how ordination is seen, which is really a difference in how the sacraments in general are seen, that are probably—or at least hopefully— will make plain why you would have Protestant groups who are doing something that looks a lot like a rite of ordination but not wanting to call it a sacrament. But we will get to that as we move on.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the night is young. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As we were mentioning, the priesthood starts out as just a function—and this is sort of quick review of that other episode—of fatherhood. And fatherhood, broadly considered—because, remember, we’re not talking about nuclear families. Nuclear families are what families get whittled down to in the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, but we’re talking about broad extended families, clans, tribes. Think of Abraham and his wife and, later on, children, and servants, and herdsmen, and his nephew Lot, and Lot’s family and herdsmen and— the big extended family. And there is someone who had the patriarchal role. Patri-arche is just the first-father or the highest-father, sort of the father of the whole. And that was the one who was offering sacrifices for the family. We see that with Abraham, we see that with Isaac, we see that with Jacob, we see that with Job.

And there’s also, as we talked about, as you start to get groups of tribes and clans in Israel—so this really starts in Egypt. As that grows from one big extended family in the second two-thirds of the book of Genesis into nations, so you have tribes, clans within the tribes, families within the clans, that evolves into eldership, where the person who has that patriarchal role in a given family is then part of a group of leaders within a clan, and then groups of leaders in the tribe. So you get the elders of the people. As we also talked about in that previous episode about priesthood, until the time of the golden calf, those were the ones who were still offering sacrifices, which means there wasn’t, during that period, until we get to the tabernacle and Aaron and his sons, there wasn’t just this single sanctuary, this single place where sacrifices were offered.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it was something that was done just within the precincts of the family or the larger family unit or whatever. There wasn’t a temple or a tabernacle or a shrine that everybody went to.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when we’re dealing with nomads like we see in the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, they’re building altars in particular places and offering sacrifice there.

When these things happen that we described in that episode, where the priesthood is taken away from Moses and given to Aaron, and it’s taken away from the elders as a group and given to the Levites in particular at the time of the golden calf, there is this shift. So there is a split between fatherhood and eldership and a particular kind of priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what kind is that, then?

Fr. Stephen: Well, specifically the sacrificial priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, because there’s still a priestly role of intercession, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: And leadership and these other things. And Moses maintains the leadership of the people. We talked in that previous episode, that’s why you have that separate king and high priest—John Hyrcanus excepted—after that. Those two things are split and—spoilers for the end of that episode—those come back together in Christ.

So the elders of the tribes are no longer performing that priestly function. That priestly function is given over to the Levites. Aaron is high priest; his sons, as priests; their descendants, as priests; the other Levites assisting them are now playing the role for the other tribes, in relation to the other tribes, that previously the leadership within each tribe played for that tribe, sacrificially. And so that move is also what produces the single sanctuary, that the Levites now, who are doing this for everyone—there’s not going to be a separate shrine and a separate altar in the territory of each of the tribes, because the Levites are doing it. Or there wasn’t supposed to be, we’ll put it that way. [Laughter] Because Bethel and Dan got their calves, and that kind of thing happened.

Fr. Andrew: See Jeroboam…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, but the concept within the Torah, shall we say, that there should be this one altar where sacrifice was offered to Yahweh is connected to the idea that there’s one high priest and one central priesthood connected to it. These things go hand-in-hand.

Before— We just did all this building up to Aaron, but before we get into Aaron, we have to do that preface. We have to roll back a little bit, as is our wont, to actually all the way to Adam.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! All the way to Adam. That’s a surprise.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And this is again a reminder of some things we’ve already talked about on the show, but one of the things that’s going on in Genesis with Adam is that Adam is used as the model for priesthood. He is, from the perspective of Moses where the priesthood is being instituted, Adam represented a prototype.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although not, like, ordained.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there was not a ceremony. He was not— [Laughter] So, for example, he was the only dude, so it was not him instead of some other non-existent person.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, and then when we see Cain and Abel offering sacrifices, but there’s not a, you know— It’s not “Father Cain and Brother Abel.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, they both do it. It’s not Adam offering it on their behalf. But Adam is—and this is one of the important details in the text of Genesis that often gets overlooked—Adam is created from the ground and then taken and placed in Eden. So there is a sense where even Adam, even though he’s not called out of a mass of people, he is taken out of the world and put into this holy place, which is what sanctuary literally means—put into this holy place, this walled garden, paradise, which is the place where God is, where God dwells, there to serve. And we’ve talked about before, I know in multiple episodes on the show, how Genesis 1 follows this structure of the building of a temple in the Ancient Near East. And we’ve talked at least a couple of times about the way in which Adam’s creation in Genesis 2 sort of inverts the typical ending of that story, where the culmination of that story in the Ancient Near East—usually after a bunch of people have gotten killed and their blood has purged the newly-dedicated sanctuary, the enemies of the god and this kind of thing—but at the end of that story of the building and consecration of sanctuary, the last step is that the image of the god is placed in the sanctuary. And the ritual is performed to open its mouth or its nostrils, depending on what you’re reading, so that the spirit of the god can come in and dwell in it and it becomes sort of a hypostasis of the god.

Fr. Andrew: See the idolatry episode for all of this in greater detail if you’re interested.

Fr. Stephen: And then now you’ve got the god there in the temple, and it can be fed, watered, washed, clothed by people; and in return, if the rituals are performed correctly, it will hypothetically do things for you like allow you to have children and give you good crop yields.

Fr. Andrew: Victory! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And this is part of— The basic Jewish critique here is: It can’t wash itself or dress itself, but it can give you crops and children? [Laughter] There’s a flaw here!

Fr. Andrew: So that’s why there’s just so much anti-idolatry smack talk in the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, it tips over and you have to set it back up.

And so Adam is the reverse of that: God makes Adam as his image. Rather than Adam making an image of Yahweh the God of Israel to use instrumentally, God makes Adam and breathes the Spirit into his nostrils, and places him into the sanctuary as his image. That placement, that enlivening, that placement in the sanctuary effectively is Adam’s ordination. That may seem like a super-big stretch right now, but by the end of the episode as we go forward and look at Aaron and ultimately Christ, I think this’ll start to fit together.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Stick with us, everybody. It’s going to work.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a long road, getting from there to here. Anyway.

So when we see Aaron as the high priest, we’re immediately greeted by this imagery that is deliberately evocative of paradise and of Adam in paradise.

Fr. Andrew: It’s worth pointing out that the tabernacle—first, and then later the Temple—is not four bare walls and a sermon. It’s got a whole lot of stuff that’s supposed to remind you of Eden.

Fr. Stephen: In fact, there’d be kind of no point in preaching a sermon in there as there’d be, like, maybe one other priest.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! No one goes in there except the priest. That’s true, yeah. Don’t push my analogy too far. Come on!

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, sorry.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the four bare walls that I was really trying to emphasize. So it’s not bare walls, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, right. In the tabernacle you have the embroidered cherubim. You have the sculpted cheruvim on the ark of the covenant, who are the throne guardians in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got pomegranates, greenery, foliage.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, especially in the Temple the fruit trees, imagery of the fruit trees. And remember, there’s the cherub, the cheruv with the flaming sword at the gates of paradise. This is all this imagery.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which gets carried over into modern Orthodox churches, by the way, everybody. Just about everything we mentioned gets used in Orthodox churches, including the fruit and the vines and all that kind of greenery stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And the priests and the high priest especially, the whole purpose of [their] being consecrated and offering the sin-offering for themselves and for the people and all of this is to allow them to enter in. So re-entry into paradise is a basic element of this. They’re going to come into the presence of God, into the place where God dwells, back into paradise, from which Adam had been cast out.

We see the same kind of pattern in terms of the high priest is taken, as Aaron is one of the people, Moses’ brother: he is taken and he is made the high priest and placed in the sanctuary. As we said, there’ll be a great deal of detail about that later on. That placement constitutes his ordination that we’re going to read about. And he’s now there as the image of God, and we’ll get into that more in a minute. And so the high priest is set up as a new Adam, who is now going to re-enter—only tentatively, only really enter in once a year to the most-holy place—and always with blood to purify, with offerings for his own sins and the sins of the people: all that stuff Hebrews talks about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it’s all this sense of: there’s the loss of paradise, and so there’s this kind of temporary approaching and entering and approaching… It’s sort of trying to get back to paradise is what’s happening in the tabernacle and Temple.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Hebrews thing is important, because there’s going to be a running theme through this episode, just to tip people off now. There’s probably several, but one of them is going to be that a lot of times we’re missing huge swaths of stuff in the Scriptures because we’re so obsessed with, in particular, our atonement theories. If you hear someone discuss Christ as the great High Priest in Hebrews, I’ll go ahead and say nine times out of ten—eight times out of ten may be more fair, but you get the point—they’re going to be talking about atonement: Christ making atonement, how does it work, how does Christ make atonement. And, first and foremost, they’re missing this imagery that connects Christ as great High Priest and Christ as New Adam, and the return to paradise.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot more complexly in depth going on in all of this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and not an image of paradise made with human hands on earth, like the tabernacle and the Temple, but actual paradise, the actual presence of God in the heavenly places, as Hebrews said.

So there are going to be several places here where we’re going to ultimately be connecting some of these things to Christ’s fulfillment, where that fulfillment is obscured by this focus on this or that atonement theory and trying to prove it over against other ones and that kind of thing. While that will come up several times in the episode, we’re not talking about atonement in this episode. We already did that episode, too. So we’re going to set that aside and try to look at all these other things that we might miss if we’re focused on that tonight.

But so Aaron, then, is this pattern of a new Adam, an outline, a suggestion, a shadow—this is the kind of language that the New Testament uses—and then Christ comes and fulfills that, fills it in, fills it up to overflowing, and is the New Adam in a truer sense, is the High Priest in a truer sense, and those, in some sense, mean kind of the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all of those things, including Adam himself, are ultimately pointing towards Christ, who is all of it—and something more.

Fr. Stephen: So one of the stories about Aaron that gets referenced a lot— It gets referenced a lot in our Orthodox liturgics; it gets referenced a lot when people are talking about—going to ruin your Sunday school—the “contents” of the ark of the covenant.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. It’s so hard to remember that stuff. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You may have been taught in Sunday school that there were three things in the ark of the covenant—well, technically four, but one of them is a set of two things—a jar of manna, the two tablets of the covenant, and Aaron’s rod that budded. Not actually.

Fr. Andrew: Not true. [Sad trombone]

Fr. Stephen: The only thing in the ark were the two tablets of the law, two tablets of the covenant, which, as I already previously ruined your Sunday school, are two copies of the same thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and also if you take the cover off and you put your hand in there and there’s a roil of dust, it’ll melt your face off.

Fr. Stephen: That is true. That is true: I saw it happen in some newsreel footage. Just some Germans, who seemed like pretty nasty people.

Fr. Andrew: They said it was beautiful, but no. Not 19th-century Germans! Early 20th-century Germans.

Fr. Stephen: Early 20th-century Germans—mid 20th-century Germans, the worst kind! [Laughter]

The other two things—Aaron’s rod that budded, that we’re about to talk about more, and the jar of manna—were kept in the sanctuary, in the most-holy place.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so they’re kind of nearby.

Fr. Stephen: Near the ark of the covenant.

Fr. Andrew: Near the ark, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They were the contents of the holy of holies, not the ark itself. Also, just because—I know I mentioned this in an old episode—God did not live inside the ark of the covenant; it was his footstool.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. It’s not his little house.

Fr. Stephen: So all these references to “Aaron’s rod that budded” or the “budding of Aaron’s rod which designateth the priest”—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s in the canon— It’s in the katavasies of the canon of the cross, actually.

Fr. Stephen: —is all referring to a story that’s in Numbers 17. People don’t read the book of Numbers a lot. I think if most people made a Torah tier-list, Numbers would be five out of five; it would be the lowest on the list, probably, for a lot of people.

Fr. Andrew: “Torah tier-list”...

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know why you would make a Torah tier-list…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, it’s all of a piece.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And I’m assuming that you can’t assign multiple books to the same tier, which would be hard, because, let’s face it, Genesis and Exodus, both S-tier. But you get the point: Numbers is not people’s favorite book to read. People don’t even usually get there, because somewhere in Leviticus they lose interest, so they don’t even start reading Numbers.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they lose track of all the butchering instructions and how to deal with mildew and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And if they were thinking about skipping ahead to Numbers, they saw some genealogies and punched right out, right?

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Laughter] But there’s narrative in Numbers, people; there’s narrative as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! And Numbers 17, shockingly, comes right after Numbers 16, and we talked about Numbers 16 at a couple of points—in the priesthood episode, and I believe in another episode when we talked about the sons of Korah—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the Korah rebellion. I think we talked about it in one of the episodes where we talked about the underworld, because they get sucked down into Hades, Sheol really.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but we haven’t really talked about Numbers 17, which is in the aftermath of that. Understanding that it’s in the aftermath of that is sort of key to understanding what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: You won’t believe what happens next!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So there had just been—just to really briefly summarize— At this point Aaron is already the high priest. He’s been ordained as the high priest; he’s offering sacrifices. That happened back in Leviticus. We’re going to go back there.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why Korah and company are complaining, because they’re like: “Hey, what makes him so special? Aren’t we all priests? Aren’t we all believers? Aren’t we all—?”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “Is not all of Israel holy? Are we not all holy? Why is he lording it over us?” Democracy finds its beginning… “I vote for Korah!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All the way with Korah…

Fr. Stephen: So Aaron’s already the high priest and that’s already been done, but there’s been this challenge. When you read what Korah says, it kind of veers back and forth between Korah thinks Korah ought to be the high priest or, barring that, we just shouldn’t have one.

Fr. Andrew: Priesthood of all believers.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, or at least the heads of all the clans, because he was the head of a clan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, there you go.

Fr. Stephen: The old status quo; he was a conservative.

Fr. Andrew: In the British sense.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this story in Numbers 17 is about God making a public testimony, a public affirmation, and an ongoing public affirmation that he had made— he had given the priesthood to Aaron.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the way this works, in case it’s been a while since you’ve read Numbers 17, is God tells Moses, “Talk to the heads of all the— Talk to all the chiefs and get their—”

Fr. Stephen: The tribes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the heads of the tribes. “Get their twelve staffs together.” Because they’ve each got one as sort of this symbol of authority.

Fr. Stephen: The rod, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: “And then line them all up in the tabernacle.” I’m trying to remember: in the tent of meeting, yes, the tabernacle. And then God says, “I’m going to cause one of these staffs to sprout.” And a detail I left out: write everybody’s name on each staff, so we know whose is whose. And he’s going to cause one of them to bud, and that’ll prove that God has chosen that man to be priest. So it’s this one buds out of all the twelve, and that proves it. And of course it’s Aaron’s; Aaron’s is the one that actually begins to sprout.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Moses is reminded to put Aaron’s name on the staff of Levi, not his own.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Moses, you don’t…

Fr. Stephen: Because there’s another piece of that priesthood having been taken away from him. And in the ESV it says it sprouted forth fresh almonds, so that sounds just delightful! [Laughter] Right, so this rod buds to new life, and then that budded rod is taken and it’s put into the sanctuary to be this continuing, ongoing testimony to the fact that it’s Aaron and Aaron’s line who have—

Fr. Andrew: As a kind of relic to prove the thing that happened.

Fr. Stephen: To testify. So it literally says in Numbers 17 where it says why God says he’s doing it; he’s like: “I’m saying this to stop the grumbling so that they will stop grumbling—” The word “grumbling” appears, like, three times in one sentence. [Laughter] Just like: “No more of this! This is going to be settled once and for all, and you’re going to have this symbol.”

So then the question is: Why this particular symbol? I mean, God could have just spoken with a loud, thunderous voice and said, “Aaron is the high priest.” There are any number of things God could have done; why does he choose this particular thing? And so the rod—and the reason why it’s important that it is the rod is that the rod is the symbol of judgment. And this is judgment in the sense that we have always talked about it on the podcast, not judgment in the sense of condemning people. It’s not the rod you use to beat people to death when they’ve done—

Fr. Andrew: Putting things in order or putting things in the right arrangement.

Fr. Stephen: Putting things out-of-whack back into whack.

Fr. Andrew: Totally in whack. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And sometimes you do that by whacking someone—no.

So the rod, remember, is what’s used to send the plagues upon Egypt. The rod is what is used to split the Red Sea.

Fr. Andrew: That makes the water come out of the rock. Also held up to defeat Amalek. Yeah, tons of rod action.

Fr. Stephen: So this rod is that symbol of sort of the restoration of order, of good order.

But a rod is also a dead piece of wood; it’s not alive. So a rod budding combines that order, that restoration of order, that judgment, that restoration of justice, with the blossoming forth of new life. And so this is Edenic imagery. We’ve talked before: “Fill the earth and subdue it.” The two commandments to Adam are to continue God’s work of creation, to establish order and fill it with life. Man and woman cooperate to do that. So the staff, the priest, the priest with the budded rod: this is the one through whom God is working to continue his work of establishing order and bringing forth new life.

Everybody—all those other elders from the other tribes—still had their authority in terms of order, in terms of governance, in terms of rendering judgment and establishing justice within their tribes and clans, but they did not have this special priestly authority that Aaron had that allowed it to bring forth life to fill that order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to make things Edenic again.

Fr. Stephen: And here’s the piece that again we sometimes miss because we’re obsessed with our atonement theories. As you mentioned, this is in the katavasia for the cross. Especially in St. John’s gospel, Christ repeatedly refers to his crucifixion—and the narrator, St. John refers to Christ’s crucifixion—as when he is going to be glorified.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “This is the hour—”

Fr. Stephen: When he is going to be revealed, when he is going to be glorified. And so the cross, the dead wood of the cross that blossoms forth through Christ’s death and resurrection with new life, is what marks him out as the great High Priest, as the New Adam. And so when we’re writing hymns about the cross, this is not just, like Nietzsche said, “Oh, here’s a stick of wood in the Bible; let’s say it’s the cross”—because there’s more connections than just “these things are both wood.”

Fr. Andrew: Have a little imagination there, Friedrich. Come on. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That the cross becomes this symbol and this marker, ongoing, in the same way that the rod was kept in the sanctuary, the blossoming rod was kept in the sanctuary: as this ongoing testimony of to whom God gave the high priesthood. The cross as symbol now becomes the ongoing testimony of the identity of Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is part of why we display it everywhere as Christians.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Paul meditates a lot on how that’s an inversion, because for your average Jewish person at that time, getting crucified by the Romans was the mark that you were a false messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and literally at the very, very, very bottom of society.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what happened when a guy showed up and claimed to be the Messiah and he wasn’t the Messiah: the Romans crucified him; that’s what happened. And this is why where he gets into the “it’s a scandal for the Jewish person; it’s foolishness to the Greeks.” That this symbol has been inverted in this way.

But if we understand what’s going on with Aaron in Numbers 17, then we should also understand what’s going on with the cross. This is why Christ is always kind of chastising the authorities and the scribes and stuff who come against him, like: “If you guys really understood Moses, whom you’re reading all the time, you’d get this.”

Fr. Andrew: But they don’t. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, some did. Some did.

Fr. Andrew: Some believed.

Fr. Stephen: And so Aaron, his sons, the Levites, at this point are being permanently dedicated to that particular altar and that particular ministry, that particular sense of priesthood. It’s also important here that priesthood is repeatedly characterized as a gift.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not something that Aaron got because he was the best or because he and his sons accomplished some great act.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not an achievement or it’s an award or he was just the smartest guy in Israel or he was the holiest guy in Israel or… That there is none of that. It’s given to him as a gift, and his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons or whoever happens to be born into that line. And some of them, we’re going to see later, are ne’er-do-wells. Some of them are righteous men, and some of them are wicked men. But they still have this gift that they’re then going to be held responsible for how they use.

Our last big element here in terms of Aaron and the high priest in general going forward and Israel being presented as a new Adam, as the image of God, as the one who images God or is to image God, comes in taking a look at his vestments.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is pretty involved if you look at the actual scriptural passages. This isn’t just, you know: “Wear a nice suit, Aaron, a three-piece suit.” Those are the vestments of the Baptist preachers that I grew up listening to!

Fr. Stephen: A nice set of clean clothes. Yeah. So there are specific vestments. Before we’re done tonight we’re going to get into even how those vestments were consecrated and treated, but for now we just want to talk about the vestments themselves. Those are described twice in the book of Exodus. The second half of the book of Exodus is everything twice. Frankly, sometimes people don’t even get to Leviticus, because the second time they read about what kind of goat hair was used for the tabernacle panels, they punch out. [Laughter] And the reason everything gets repeated is, first, everything gets described: “Here’s how you’re to make everything related to the tabernacle.” And then they describe making everything for the tabernacle exactly according to those plans, and so it’s just a repeat.

So the vestments of the high priest are in Exodus 28 and Exodus 39. You can go to either of those places because it’s a repeat! The overall pattern, as I know we’ve mentioned—I don’t think we went into a lot of detail on it before, but we mentioned before—is that the vestments for the high priest are strikingly similar when we read accounts of the dressing of idols in the Ancient Near East, very similar to the way in which idols were vested.

Fr. Andrew: Now how do we know—? So we’re looking at ancient pagan religious texts that describe this kind of thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And descriptions of just temples and imagery.

Fr. Andrew: So the high priest of Israel would look, to someone in the Ancient Near East, like a walking, talking idol, effectively, one of their idols.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now, these are also very similar vestments to what a priest-king in the Ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamian priest-kings, what they would have worn when they were exercising priestly sacrificial functions, but there’s a reason for that, and that’s that those priest-kings were actually considered god-kings. So they were considered a god, so, yeah, they would be dressed the same way an idol would be dressed, because in their point of view, the idol’s a god, the king’s a god: that’s how gods dress.

But this is an inversion of that, in that Aaron is not going to be sacrificed to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he doesn’t receive worship.

Fr. Stephen: He has a fundamentally different relationship. He is not a god. He is going to have this imaging role in the same way that that imaging role was given to Adam in the first place, of serving as the image of God. And so, as we go through here the elements of those vestments, we’ll start to see that in more detail. The first, probably the most famous part of the vestments is the ephod or ephod, depending on how you want to pronounce that /o/...

Fr. Andrew: It’s a sort of breastplate…

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s another thing that’s usually called the breastplate.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s true, yeah. So an ephod, I was just—

Fr. Stephen: It’s a linen thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I looked this up, and you can buy them on eBay. Like, you can go look up an ephod and there’s not only things that are designed to be a full-sized ephod or whatever, but also you can get little ephod pendants, little tchotchkes that are ephod-like. I can’t endorse any of those particular sellers; I don’t know if they’re good sellers or whatever, but I’m just saying—

Fr. Stephen: You can get darn near anything on eBay except human remains.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true! It’s true: you can buy ephods on eBay. I mean, if they can get enough people selling these things, they should have their own separate site, like ephodBay. Putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: What’s that Bible theme park? Do they have somebody dressed as a high priest walking around?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man! I bet you they do! Maybe that’s where people— They’ve got to supply those guys. High priest cosplay.

Fr. Stephen: There’s got to be somebody going around doing presentations, like at Christian schools and stuff. “This is how the high priest dressed.”

Fr. Andrew: I could see a little minor in history that has to have ephods supplied to it. You know, it’s a business opportunity. I’m just putting that out there for everybody.

Fr. Stephen: So what the ephod is most famous for, though, is probably the twelve stones on it, the twelve precious stones that had twelve symbols on them that represented the twelve tribes. And, yes, the colors of the stones and the symbols on them [are] related to Jewish astrology.

Fr. Andrew: Hey!

Fr. Stephen: It’s Christmastime. We have to talk about Jewish astrology. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That always gets me in the Christmas mood. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We mentioned this in our first Christmas episode, in days of yore, and talked about how you get some of this in the Testament of Jacob, at the end of the book of Genesis, where you see this animal imagery in his prophecies to his twelve sons, and the association of particular tribes with particular constellations in the zodiac. That symbolism is carried out, sort of, in these stones that are held in the ephod.

But the core importance of them is not the particularity of each of the twelve. The important element is the weight.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you know, some of these ephods you can get at Amazon and the… Holy Land Mall? [Laughter] I’m sorry!

Fr. Stephen: You’re just obsessed with it. Just get yourself an ephod, okay? Just do it.

Fr. Andrew: There’s one—

Fr. Stephen: Treat yourself this Christmas to an ephod.

Fr. Andrew: There’s one chain the guy wears it on, and it looks like Flava Flav, except it’s an ephod instead of a big clock. [Laughter] But, yeah, there are these big pieces of metal. So they do look heavy. The weight thing, I think, is playing into these modern ephods that you can get. You can become your own high priest! Get yourself an ordination on university…

Fr. Stephen: Or at least a high priestly hype-man.

Fr. Andrew: Whoo! What a world.

Fr. Stephen: You’ve gone all the way down this rabbit-trail.

Fr. Andrew: I love Bible kitsch, I’m sorry. It’s just so fun!

Fr. Stephen: But so that weight is important because—and we’ll be coming back to Numbers 18, the chapter after the budding of Aaron’s rod; we’ll be coming back to that later on. But one of the first things mentioned there and that we’re going to develop later this evening is this idea of the high priest bearing, carrying, the sins of the people into the sanctuary. So that weight of the stones representing the people is a part of that. And this ephod with the stones is part of one element of that imaging in that priestly role of the priest sort of being the representative of Israel. He is sort of the summing up of Israel there, representing Israel before God. So that’s that element.

Another reasonably well-known piece of these vestments is called the breastplate, where the urim and thummim are kept. We’ve mentioned those before on the show. No, we don’t know how they worked.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it doesn’t say, although, once again, you can buy these things online. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Of course.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s just a total guess, what did they look like.

Fr. Stephen: We know they were two stones. We know when there was some case where they really couldn’t figure out what they should do in terms of the will of God, they would cast them in some way.

Fr. Andrew: Some kind of divination going on.

Fr. Stephen: People assume it’s some kind of casting lots or something?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the description just isn’t there in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we just don’t know. But that was sort of the function. So the urim and thummim are probably better known than the breastplate they were kept in, but they were there.

Then there’s sort of the main robe that the high priest would wear, which had bells on it.

Fr. Andrew: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: You were overjoyed when I told you this, because this is I believe—correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this was one of the dumbest things you had ever heard.

Fr. Andrew: Right, this is one of the dumbest things I think I’ve heard in my life.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Okay!

Fr. Andrew: And I love learning really dumb things that people say seriously. I don’t know. It’s sort of like linguistic kitsch. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this— Why are there bells on the high priest’s robe? What are the bells for?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the kind of urban legend that I’d always heard growing up was the priest is in there, he’s got the bells jingling as long as he’s moving around, and if you hear the bells stop, then that means that God has struck him dead because of something that he did, and so then you need to pull him out by the rope that’s supposedly tied around his ankle, which, by the way, is never mentioned anywhere in the Bible, and yet it’s a thing that gets passed down; people say this. That’s the bit that I was raised with, which is probably not true.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that may have been a late Second Temple practice, but we’re not even sure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it might be kind of an ancient thing, but, again, not mentioned in Scripture. There’s no rope tied around the high priest’s ankle. But that, even if that is completely wrong, just pales in comparison to this very dumb thing that you informed me about. So now everybody else gets to know it.

Fr. Stephen: One little addendum to that. The problem with that, from the perspective of the text, is the text says that in some way these bells are to keep the high priest from dying, not notify you when he has died.

Fr. Andrew: Which, presumedly you could tell that because there would be a big thump… [Laughter] Or he just doesn’t come out after a while.

Fr. Stephen: So people—scholars. These are legit scholars [who] have put this forward.

Fr. Andrew: People with doctorate degrees.

Fr. Stephen: People with PhDs.

Fr. Andrew: Advanced degrees, actual academics, with tenure in jobs.

Fr. Stephen: The sort of folks who cite what I’m about to tell you as coming from the P source, very confidently, they say, “P says” what I’m going to tell you. So they say, “Well, so what does this mean, that the bells are there to in some way keep the high priest from dying?” Here is what these scholars say. You’re not prepared.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m not prepared even to hear it a second time!

Fr. Stephen: The bells are on the high priest’s garments so that when he goes to go into the sanctuary, God will hear him coming, because if he didn’t, and he came in there and disturbed the divine rest unannounced, God might smite him accidentally.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] See, I just made true all those reviews we get where people say there’s too much giggling. The anticipation was just too much.

Fr. Stephen: People with PhDs— People who spent a decade of their life studying the Bible in general and the Torah in particular—

Fr. Andrew: Wow. “Don’t scare God, you guys.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Don’t startle God; he might kill you. And he can’t bring you back to life or anything, even if God did somehow—oopsie—kill someone—because they woke him up out of a sound sleep.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I know that dissertations have to be written and journal articles have to be published, but, come on, guys! Come on!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This isn’t just some guy’s cock-eyed theory. People cite this as settled fact!

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: As the teaching of the P source, I’m telling you! Yes. Once again, I find myself in this weird liminal space where I accept most people’s critiques of academia, but I’m also kind of involved in it. [Laughter] But that of course is preposterous. There’s a much simpler read here. The bells are on the garments to keep the high priest attentive. Most people who listen to this show are not priests, but it is possible for a priest to kind of go into automatic mode and do things by rote.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it is possible to zone out a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, to zone out and lose focus, just like with any other human activity. And so the bells— If every time you moved there was a bell chime, there was some kind of chiming sound or rattling sound or something, that would help keep you attentive and focused and keep you on task. And if you’re in the presence of God, that can be the difference between living and death by holiness. It’s a continuation of this, by the way, that causes our bishops to still have bells on our vestments, though I have often joked that it’s to keep them from sneaking up and ordaining you. [Laughter] But I don’t think ordination by stealth actually happens that much.

So then one of the most important elements of the high priest’s vestments is what’s called the diadem. That’s sort of a crown. It had a metal band, and then sort of in the front had a plate, and on the plate was written a name: Yahweh. This is sort of the other half of the ephod. If the ephod shows us the high priest representing the people to Yahweh, having the name of Yahweh inscribed on the diadem was part of the high priest representing Yahweh the God of Israel to the people, to the people of Israel, this mediatorial role that he’s playing. This also served as a reminder to the people that Israel as a whole bore the name of Yahweh. And so the people as a whole, the people as a collectivity, had a responsibility to image who God is to the nations, to the world, in the same way that the high priest did to them, because, again, the high priest is sort of this summing up in one place of Israel.

And so this of course, once again, finds its fulfillment—is filled full, is filled out—in the Person of Christ, as the great High Priest, because Christ of course is the perfect representation of Yahweh the God of Israel, the express Image, and all the other language that St. Paul and the New Testament uses. So he represents God perfectly to the world, and he represents the world perfectly, the people perfectly, to God. Why? As Hebrew says, because he also came to share in our humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and he carries our sins.

Fr. Stephen: He does these two things perfectly.

And then the bishop, who wears vestments, whom we’ve already commented on a little bit here, that are very similar to the high priest’s vestments, and even gets called chief priest or high priest, is the image of Christ. He is vested that way to serve as the image of Christ in the midst of his people, and has the responsibility of representing Christ to us, being the image of Christ, and representing us to Christ, as he shares in Christ’s priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s all summed up in Christ, and then the bishop is the one who is the image of Christ within the context of the Church.

All right, well, that ends the first half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve! Again, if you have questions about ordination in particular, you can call us at 855-AFRADIO. So here we are: it’s the second half of The Lord of Spirits. We just wrapped up talking about the vestments of Aaron and the high priests that followed him. So what’s next, Father?

Fr. Stephen: I should say, I will also accept any and all questions about the Ordination of Aaron, the Kalamazoo, Michigan punk rock band.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Is that really the name of a Kalamazoo punk rock band?

Fr. Stephen: It was, indeed.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Western Michigan, so surprising!

Fr. Stephen: Full of Dutch glory.

Fr. Andrew: True. There are Damicks up there, by the way. I won’t out them by name, but actual close relatives of mine living in western Michigan.

Fr. Stephen: Well, is their name Damick?

Fr. Andrew: Well, the last name is Damick, it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So you kind of have.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, I guess. Well, if you run into someone up there named Damick, it’s probably a relative of mine. Not too far from Kalamazoo, in fact.

Fr. Stephen: So now I’m going to guess— No, I won’t. I’m not going to guess. [Laughter] We don’t need people tracking them down and asking them questions.

Fr. Andrew: No, those poor people! They would have no idea what you’re talking about!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “What does Fr. Stephen Damick Young say about this?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Oh, well.

Fr. Stephen: I picture Fr. Stephen Damick Young— Have you ever seen the Composite Superman?

Fr. Andrew: Maybe.

Fr. Stephen: It’s sort of this weird Silver Age comic book villain who, like, his left side is Superman and his right side is Batman.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh, yeah! Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: And they’re both green— green-skinned, for no apparent reason.

Fr. Andrew: Just sort of a chimera, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So I’m picturing Fr. Stephen Damick Young as just half of each of us, like, welded together, and green.

Fr. Andrew: That would be deeply weird because, even— Number one, you’re two inches taller than I am, which is not a lot, but enough. But we have very different body shapes.

Fr. Stephen: It’s true.

Fr. Andrew: It would be weird!

Fr. Stephen: Some of our good online folks, though, are going to meme this now.

Fr. Andrew: I know! Thanks a lot.

Fr. Stephen: They’re going to photoshop this together.

Fr. Andrew: Augh.

Fr. Stephen: And I at least am going to enjoy it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Just make it green, people. If it’s going to be canonical, it’s got to be green.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Skin has to be green, like the Composite Superman. So, yes, unless someone has called in while we were just talking about the Kalamazoo, Michigan, punk band—

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: —we’ll go ahead and move on to St. Dionysios the Areopagite, because we can!

Fr. Andrew: The original Areopagite.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So St. Dionysios is, of course, for us Orthodox folk, St. Dionysios. In the West he’s more commonly known as Pseudo-Dionysios or, for people who don’t know the difference between his name and the name of the Greek god, Pseudo-Dionysus—but don’t do that, because there’s an iota: there’s one iota of difference between the two. [Laughter] So there’s Pseudo-Dionysios, and his works have a long and somewhat sordid history in the West. They were read and interpreted in a particular way. We have in the past referenced St. Dionysios in regards to two works of his that go together, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.

Usually we’ve been coming at it from the angle of talking about angels, which he talks about the ranks of angels in his Celestial Hierarchy; and then we’ve sort of used some elements of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which he parallels with it, to help us understand the Celestial Hierarchy and understand certain things about angels. Tonight we’re going to use him in the reverse direction. We’re going to take some of the things we’ve talked about, about angels, and our understanding of how he talks about the nine ranks of angels, and apply those to the understanding of ordained office within the Church, which is what he talks about in The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.

Part of what we have to do, unfortunately—because we’re talking to all kinds of folks, some of whom have never heard of St. Dionysios, some of whom know him as Pseudo-Dionysios, some of whom have a very bad impression of him, some of whom maybe have a good impression of him—is talk a little bit about who he is and why what he has to say is important.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. The base reference, of course, is from the Scriptures, that there is a Dionysios who hears St. Paul preach on the Areopagus and is converted to Christ as a result of hearing that preaching; thus he is called Dionysios the Areopagite. So that’s the scriptural figure here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that saint is the second bishop of Athens.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think— Isn’t Athenagoras the first?

Fr. Stephen: I thought it was Hierotheos. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Hierotheos, okay, excuse me, yeah. One of those multisyllabic dactylic Greek names.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But there is that figure within Scripture and the early history of the Church. The author of the works that we’re talking about—The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and some others like The Divine Names—writes as that person. I’m expressing it that way, because that’s something everyone can agree to. We can all agree he writes as that person.

So then, there are folks who argue these works were written by that person in the first century AD. There’s almost no one in the West who does that for the last six or seven hundred years. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But there’s also the idea that someone much later wrote them and then put his name on them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is what pretty much everyone in the West has said for the last six or seven hundred years. And then, within the Orthodox world, you have sort of versions of “this is actually from the first century” and “this is later,” but— So we have a little different relationship if in fact this was written by someone later, in that we would still not call him “Pseudo-Dionysios.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that “Pseudo” idea is this notion that someone is lying, really.

Fr. Stephen: Right, essentially. And attaching the “Pseudo” in the West historically happened as a way of trying to discredit his writings because of how they were being used in the West. But it is within the realm of Orthodox belief that that first-century person who’s in the Bible is a saint regardless, but it is possible that a later person in the East, who was, for example, a monastic, who had St. Dionysios as his patron saint, wrote as St. Dionysios, his patron, as a means of displaying humility, essentially not taking credit for his own writings.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he’s not trying to lie. And there’s also another possibility, which is that these writings originate in the first century and then get added to, edited, or whatever over time.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, updated, tweaked, handed down. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Much the way Scripture did.

Fr. Stephen: As they’re passed down through time.

So in the West, the scholarly and sort of general consensus now is that they probably date to the fifth-sixth century and were probably written in Syria. Of course, this is one of the places where the “dissertations have to be written; articles have to be published” works in our favor, because there’s a thousand dissenters to that consensus. As we’ve said before on the show, this is how academia and scholarship is supposed to work. If there’s a consensus, that’s a bullseye: we all need to rip it apart, not: “Oh, it’s a consensus; we must all submit.” But so there’s everybody questioning it, sort of one way or the other.

For my part, I’m not prepared to argue dogmatically that these were written in the first century, but I will say there are significant elements in St. Dionsyios’s works that portray a great familiarity with the details of Greco-Roman paganism.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is important to point that out because generally people say this dates from the fifth century or maybe even later—not later, but fifth century, because that’s when quotes start showing up. But by that point, paganism in the Roman Empire is kind of last week’s news.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, is gone. Is frankly gone, in a real way.

Fr. Andrew: Is gone. So the texts indicate that whoever wrote them knew things about paganism that you kind of would need to be there to know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that you wouldn’t know at that point. So that at least argues for something earlier than that, or there being part of the text that’s much earlier than the fifth century. You also have the issue with— I do not know of a good example— I’ll put it this way. I do not know of a good example, even though it’s very common in scholarship, to date something to maybe 30 years before the first time it’s quoted that we know of. [Laughter] I do not know of a case where that has turned out to be accurate, with something like this, because people— Ancient people weren’t stupid! If someone wrote something and then came and said, “This is 500 years old,” they didn’t buy it automatically. They knew it was something that had shown up recently. You couldn’t just walk into a bishop of the Church office one day and say, “Behold! I have found the writings of St. Paul’s disciple, St. Dionysios. Here they are,” and the bishop would go: “Wow, this is wonderful! We need to change our theology to match this, because it’s so old! I believe you.” [Laughter] That’s not how this ever worked.

And we have all kinds of counter-examples where, for example, you look at the Muratorian Canon, and when the Muratorian Canon talks about the Shepherd of Hermas, it says, “The Shepherd of Hermas is not in the New Testament because it was written in our own day,” in the middle of the second century. And it says Hermas is Pope Pius’s brother. Like, they know who wrote it. They say, “It was written by this guy; that’s why it was not in the New Testament, but it’s worth reading.” The Muratorian Canon is not anti-Shepherd of Hermas! But they know it was written recently. So if people in the fifth century are quoting it as an ancient document, that means it may not go back to the first century, but it has to go back a good ways before the fifth for them to think it was ancient, for them to think it was that old.

Fr. Andrew: And one of the big problems about all literature from that period is that, as far as we can tell, the vast majority of the stuff that was written in that period, in those first few centuries of Church life, is simply gone.

Fr. Stephen: That’s not “as far as we can tell.” It’s gone. We have lists from ancient libraries of works—that’s gone.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s just gone.

Fr. Stephen: We have less than half of Plato; we have a tiny fraction of Aristotle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s entirely possible that there’s whole worlds of people quoting things or whatever that didn’t make it. Just over the vicissitudes of history, it didn’t get to our time.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so all that is to say while it’s a modern and even a little pre-modern project, the years I gave for the change in consensus is not coincidental. It has to do with the rise of modernism, it has to do with the rise of the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant Reformation trying to weed out what were and weren’t authentic apostolic texts in the West where there were lots of forgeries and stuff, so different standards start getting applied in things, and there’s more of a suspicion and dubiousness of anything that claims to be ancient in the West. And one of the ways to try to discredit something is to historicize it in that way, to try and peg it as a late date. This is why our 19th-century German friends were always trying to put the writing of New Testament books into the second century, make it as late as possible. And then, later on in the 20th century, you had scholars wanting to try making the Gospel of Thomas a hundred years earlier than it was written, because the closer to the apostles you could you could get it, the older you could make it, the more authoritative. So anything you don’t like, you make late; anything you do like, you make old. But that’s a ploy; it’s an obvious ploy.

So even if we have no mentions— Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just for the sake of argument, that, yes, some Syrian monk named Dionysios wrote all of the writings of St. Dionysios the Areopagite in the fifth century, that wouldn’t change the way in which the Church received and has used them theologically since.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Ultimately it kind of doesn’t matter exactly when they were written, because the Church has received them in a particular way and been using them all this time. And it’s not been a blip on the radar; it’s been persistent and consistent for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. It’s not some fad.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s not the new thing any more. Even if it was the new thing in the fifth century, it ain’t the new thing now. So that is— Again, that’s why I don’t feel the need to take any kind of dogmatic stance that “no, this must go back to the first century,” because ultimately it doesn’t matter. And you know how I feel about dates anyway. [Laughter]

So why did we go into all this about St. Dionysios? Well, the place where the rubber meets the road on this is how he is read, how we’re going to read and interpret St. Dionysios. If you read— If you want the detailed version of this, here’s a footnote citation for you. You can read Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, where he talks about the Western and Eastern readings of St. Dionysios, among others. But the West—the modern West—has read St. Dionysios as a Neo-Platonist. And this was a problem for various theological reasons that we’re going to get into a little bit here for the Protestant Reformers and their children in the 17th century. And so, rather than taking a different reading of St. Dionsyios, it was: discredit these writings—by having them be from another author, having them be late, etc., etc., etc. You also have to have them be late for him to be a Neo-Platonist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Neo-Platonism doesn’t rise in the first century.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, realistically, it’s got to be at least third century for someone, especially someone in Syria, to be influenced by Neo-Platonism, because we’re talking about Plotinus and Porphyry.

Why is that important, the Neo-Platonist element? Well, as we mentioned, the two works that we’re talking about tonight and that we’ve talked about before, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy— The hierarchy, if you’re a Neo-Platonist, if you have a serious case of Plato-brain, means a hierarchy of being, ultimately. So, within Platonism, you have this polarity between being and becoming: that which is in flux, that which is changing, that which is imperfect, that which is impure on the one hand—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of lower.

Fr. Stephen: —and that which is eternal, unchanging, pure, whole on the other. Hierarchies—all hierarchies—are ultimately hierarchies of being in this sense, because if we’re talking about a hierarchy of perfection, well, then that becomes obvious. But if we’re talking about even a hierarchy of, like, good, purity is better than impurity; wholeness is better than lack. And so what ends up happening—and this happens in Western theology through the influence of Plato and the Platonic period in Western theology, which is roughly, give or take, the beginning of the sixth through probably the late 12th, early 13th century—you get God posited at the top of this hierarchy as pure being, or as being itself. And then everything descending down the hierarchy from God partakes of being, which is God, in relative degrees, and that also partakes of becoming or lack or these kind of things, impurity, purely by virtue of not being God.

If you take that kind of idea and apply it to St. Dionysios’s Celestial Hierarchy, for example, what you essentially get is a sort of Gnosticism, because the ranks of angels become these sort of emanations of God working their way down toward humans, each one less perfect than the last, each one less pure than the last, as you work your way down. But you also get a kind of pantheism, or at least panentheism, where the being of beings—not to go all Heidegger on everybody, but the being of beings becomes God, which goes further than, say, St. Augustine, who was plenty Platonist. So St. Augustine would say everything is good in that it exists, that existence is good. This is how Anselm’s Ontological Argument works for you real nerds. But he would not say everything is God in that it exists. That’s moving from just a kind of Platonism into Neo-Platonism.

That creates a deformed view. And then if you take that reading of The Celestial Hierarchy and then parallel it to The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the hierarchy of ordained offices within the Church, now you’re going to get something really interesting. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, what you get is basically that bishops are a different kind of thing, like an ontologically different thing than laymen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s also helpful to the West in particular because of course they have a single head of the visible Church, which if you’re a Platonist—one.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, oneness is always good.

Fr. Stephen: Oneness is very good. So you have this one at the peak. And so the grace that St. Dionysios talks about, that distinguishes the levels of this hierarchy, gets thought of in these ontological terms, these terms of being. And so when we’re talking about ordination, then we’re talking about the person ordained being turned into something else, into another kind of thing. And that, even though we may not have been aware of it, before we started maybe on this show for a lot of listeners, when we started talking about The Celestial Hierarchy in those terms, you may have thought, “Well, a cherubim is a different thing than a seraphim.”

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “It’s a different thing.” Well, this is where sort of that rubber meets the road. We’ll get into that more deeply here in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we actually have someone calling from Tennessee, I believe. Oh, I’m sorry. William? I don’t know where you’re calling from. Where are you calling from, William? Are you there?

William of Tennessee: Yes, I am, and it’s William of Tennessee.

Fr. Andrew: You are of Tennessee! All right! Well, all right.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Were you born on a mountaintop?

Fr. Andrew: Well, the greenest state in the land of the free.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! So there you go. [Laughter]

William of Tennessee: I was raised in the woods, but unfortunately I do not know every tree. It’s very sad.

Fr. Stephen: Did you kill a b’ar when you were three?

William of Tennessee: I was five, actually. Great things.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Late bloomer. So what’s on your mind, William of Tennessee?

William of Tennessee: Talking about ordination and of being, it sounds like, taken and set apart into something else: I was wondering how that relates to Israel being a nation of priests. And Exodus 19:5-6: is that the entire nation of Israel is ordained, or the individual people are ordained? Because to me it sounds like if Israel is a nation of priests it requires some sort of ordination to be going on with either all the individuals or the nation as a whole or both at the same time. So, first, is there an ordination going on in either the nation itself or all the people or both, and, if so, what is that ordination?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this language, this idea of a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, this gets repeated then in the New Testament to refer to the Church as well. So it’s an interesting question. My short answer is going to say: No, they are not ordained to be priest in that sense of an ordained priesthood, but there is something like that going on here, right, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Um, actually…

Fr. Andrew: All right! Good, let’s have an “Um, actually”!

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to say yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yes, but also yes! [Laughter] And yes. I mean, sort of, right? They don’t go through the stuff that Aaron and sons go through.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And, as we continue tonight we’re going to get more into this, but there are types or priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: There are different sorts of priesthood. So when it talks about Israel being a kingdom of priests, or when St. Peter talks about the Church being a royal priesthood, that’s a priesthood in relationship to the rest of the world, to those outside. That has a primarily collective meaning. So we’re used to, as modern people, thinking of things very individualistically, but if we take “priest” in the sense we’ve already been talking about it tonight, of representing God to the world and the world to God, Israel as a whole was called—as a whole, in their life as a community—in keeping the commandments of the Torah, through that communal life to represent God to the world, to be a light to the nations, to the Gentiles. And they were called, in their festivals— Probably the best example of this is at the feast of tabernacles or the feast of booths, when they offered the 70 bulls for the 70 nations.

Fr. Andrew: Right, one for each nation.

Fr. Stephen: To represent the nations to God. We, collectively, as a Church, have a royal priesthood that St. Peter talks about, where we as the Church and the way we live in community together, the way we love each other—as St. John says, “by this, all men will know, if you love one another”—that we represent who Christ is to the world, and then when we come and we gather and celebrate the Eucharist, we’re offering the Eucharist for the life of the world and for its salvation, which is Christ’s sacrifice. So there is a collective level of priesthood there.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s almost like the phrase should rather be— rather than being translated “a kingdom of priests,” rather “a royal priesthood” or even “a priestly kingdom.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Royal priesthood” is how it’s done in Greek. That’s why St. Peter’s quote gets translated that way; he’s citing the Greek.

And so a person becomes a part of that priesthood—this is that ordination part—in the old covenant by becoming a part of the people of Israel: circumcision, eating the Passover, and then everything else that goes with that: the commandments of the Torah, all that. In the New Testament—and we’ll see this in particular in the third half tonight—this is baptism, chrismation that we talked about in the last episode, that anointing; that you enter into— is in a sense an ordination in that you now enter into that collective priesthood. Does that make sense?

William of Tennessee: It does. A follow-up, though. If the nation itself is sort of the entity, is the priestly nation— I mean, ordination— A priest isn’t re-ordained every time they serve the Divine Liturgy. It seems that there’s an event that is the entrance into the priesthood. So what is the ordination event for Israel? Is it the exodus? Is it the Ten Commandments? What is that—or is there one?

Fr. Stephen: For the collective, it would be the complex of events from Passover to Pentecost, that begins with passing through the Red Sea and ends with the sprinkling of blood at the ratification of the covenant.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

William of Tennessee: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And stay tuned for the third half.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t leave! I mean, I know it means staying up late, but that’s the show you—

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or listen to the recording tomorrow of the third half, as the case may be for you. [Laughter] I don’t know your time— Well, you’re in Tennessee. But, yeah, because I know that may seem a little odd now, but we’re going to get to something where I think it’ll click.

William of Tennessee: All right. Thank you!

Fr. Andrew: All right, thank you very much for calling, William of Tennessee.

Okay, so, now that we’ve said that, and also a lengthy discursus of St. Dionysios the Areopagite and how one ought to read him—

Fr. Stephen: And don’t be a Neo-Platonist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, don’t be a Neo-Platonist! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was the negative part. The negative part was: Don’t be a Neo-Platonist. We’re going to come back here in a little bit to St. Dionysios and talk about the better way to read him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Like, it does all have a point, everybody! It was not just a rambling bit of things about Dionysios the Areopagite.

Fr. Stephen: One last little bit about Neo-Platonism also is that, of course, Neo-Platonism was an attempt to make Platonism Christian-ish.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, whereas the way it’s read a lot of times these days is that Christianity was Neo-Platonized… Actually, it goes the other way, guys!

Fr. Stephen: Right. That is, I mean— Porphyry, Plotinus, that’s what they were doing. In the same way that Gnosticism was an attempt to take the status quo ideology of Greco-Roman paganism and throw a Christian veneer on it during the early rise of Christianity, Neo-Platonism is the same kind of move by… I don’t know if Plotinus actually was a member of the academy… But anyway, by Platonism, by philosophical schools, to kind of try to appeal to the growing Christian market. [Laughter] “Don’t run after this new Christianity thing. What we’ve got is still good. What are the things that are attracting you to Christianity? Well, we’ve got those, too!”

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: “Or we can make it sound like it, at least.”

Yeah, so when you see things in very early Christian texts and you jump to the conclusion, “Oh, this looks Gnostic,” often it’s because it’s something Gnosticism took and sort of pirated. It’s like if you’ve only ever heard “Ice, Ice, Baby,” and all of a sudden someone plays “Under Pressure,” you’re like: “Oh, man! Queen and David Bowie, they went and stole Vanilla Ice’s sample!”

Fr. Andrew: Except it’s, what, pre-dated by 20 years or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, exactly. Perfect analogy. Okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I didn’t know that we’d go to Vanilla Ice tonight, but here we are!

Fr. Stephen: That whole bit just clicked for everyone! They now exactly what I’m talking about now because of that analogy.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to go back to the book of Numbers. There’s going to be more book of Numbers tonight than most people have had in many a year. Now we’re going to Numbers 18. I said we were going to come back there. This is the chapter after the rod budding. Chapter 18 is after the rod buds, then God explains to Aaron what his job is, is the short version; it’s the very short summary of Numbers 18. And the first bit of that, as we already mentioned, is this idea of bearing the sins of the people, carrying the sins of the people. What that means is that he is going to come into the sanctuary—again, as the representative of Israel, as sort of the embodiment of Israel. He’s going to come in with the sins of the people to atone for the sins of the people, to make atonement there with blood on the Day of Atonement, to offer the sacrifices, the sin-offerings. This is going to be his task. He is going to repent for the people in the sense that he is going to lead them in repentance. Again, as we were just saying to our caller, we tend to think very individualistically. We tend to think very individualistically about sin.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. You’re responsible for your sins and I’m responsible for mine, and it’s not my fault…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And, hey, if I didn’t do anything then I don’t need to repent of it, and this kind of thing. And, more than that, we being sinful tend to justify ourselves.

Fr. Andrew: What?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “I did nothing wrong! If you just understood the situation, you would see that I did the only logical, rational, good thing I could do.” We want to defend ourselves, we want to rationalize, we want to justify ourselves, all of these things. And so part of priestly leadership is leading in repentance. Sometimes that can literally mean confessing things you didn’t do but that the other people did. He’s going and offering sin-offerings for the sins of the people—is own also, but also all the people, all the things. And he is repenting of them, and he’s working to help— And repentance, as we’ve said, means he’s working to help repair the damage done. He’s leading them in doing that. And that’s the core of what it means: enacting that healing, enacting that restoration, taking the leadership role in doing that is what it means to bear— for Aaron to bear these sins.

So, again, sometimes we get distracted by our atonement theories. Isaiah 53 is a passage in the Old Testament where people get very distracted by their atonement theories.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the one where it says Christ bore our sins—

Fr. Stephen: He was bruised for our iniquities—

Fr. Andrew: He was bruised for our iniquities, right: the Suffering Servant passage.

Fr. Stephen: One of them, yeah, one of the Servant Songs, Suffering Servant. And this turns into a whole thing about penal substitutionary atonement and this and that and how do we read it, but there is a much more basic reading of this, once again, that focuses on Christ as High Priest. Christ as High Priest, as the One who leads in repentance, as the One who represents humanity before God, can lead them in repentance without being guilty of anything himself. And if we understand that connection, if we understand this bearing of sins as the role of the high priest, then what St. Matthew does in Matthew 8:14-17 makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: In that passage, it talks about Jesus healing various people of different kinds of ailments—of a fever, of sicknesses, of demon possession—and then he references Isaiah and says, “Thus it was written: He bore our sins—” I’m blanking on the exact phrasing.

Fr. Stephen: “Our diseases,” right, yeah. He quotes Isaiah 53 and says, “Thus it was fulfilled!”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly. St. Matthew says this fulfilled it, when he healed these people.

Fr. Stephen: If you try to make that work in St. Matthew’s gospel with some kind of atonement theory, what are you going to say? Christ healed someone’s fever, and he got a fever?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or he cast out a demon and became… demon-possessed?

Fr. Stephen: It doesn’t make sense. So minimally that’s not how St. Matthew was reading the passage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, at the very least.

Fr. Stephen: At the very least, St. Matthew is not reading Isaiah 53 that way. And I think understanding “bearing sin” as part of the high priestly role makes sense of how St. Matthew reads it. So there’s this idea of, again, repentance as a collective activity, because, going back to the spirits episode, if a spirit sort of animates and motivates a collective and has agency, then it can sin; it can do evil. People do evil as groups.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there is such a thing as systemic evil.

Fr. Stephen: There is collective sin. I don’t understand how someone could read the Old Testament prophets and not see this. Was every single human in the northern kingdom of Israel guilty of all of the sins that prophets list and therefore worthy of being destroyed by the Assyrians, individually? Was their being personally innocent give you plot armor, where you could just walk past Assyrians who were gutting everyone else?

Fr. Andrew: I mean, people suffer for evils committed by other people all the time. All the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and you can structure your society in a way, you can live as a community in a way that is evil and that victimizes people.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, I mean, that’s basically human history.

Fr. Stephen: This is just abundantly obvious, until we start speaking theologically, and then we become super individualistic of who’s guilty, who’s to blame.

Fr. Andrew: And the other thing is: What is repentance? It’s not just “I did a bad thing and so I’m sorry”; it’s about putting things in the proper order. It’s healing things. Someone can do that without being personally guilty of having caused the harm. So it’s possible for a nation, generations after some evil that their ancestors did, to repent, which means that they’re putting things in the proper order; they’re making right what was made wrong, even if they’re not personally guilty of the evil. I mean, we could also look at it from another direction, which is, as it says in the Scripture, if you know the good, to do good, and if you don’t do it, that’s a sin. That you didn’t do good is a sin, not just that you did a bad thing; it’s that you didn’t do a good thing. That’s sin! And we need to repent of that, too.

Fr. Stephen: And when you’re doing evil as a collective, you have to repent as a collective, and therefore change and transform as a collective. So if you have a society where everybody at age 30 has to go on the run because they get executed—there’s a reference five people got [Laughter]—then—

Fr. Andrew: Feeling a little hungry, Father?

Fr. Stephen: —you have to dismantle that society and rearrange it, that’s murdering people at a certain age. If, I don’t know, you’ve got a society where, for your economy to function, you have to have a certain level of unemployment, and so you have some kind of central bank that deliberately drives up the unemployment rate for the health of other parts of the economy and impoverishes people and immiserates them, at some point you need to do something about that.

Fr. Andrew: That sounds fictional, Father!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I just made up two completely unrealistic examples there! Or cited Logan’s Run and then another completely unrealistic example. [Laughter] This happens at this collective level, and this is part of what we were talking about with the caller, that part of why this collective priesthood is important, because one individual, by himself, cannot show the world, let alone just a community, a completely different way to live a communal life, but a community can. A church community that becomes a real family and fulfills what, due to everything in society, families are no longer able to fulfill—when that gets fulfilled in the extended family of the church, that shows the outside world that there’s another way to live and another way to do things, that’s grounded in the love of Christ and can be transformational. But you can’t do that by yourself, as one random individual. He can protest or she can protest what’s going on in the community, but you can’t demonstrate in the way that a community can. So, slight digression, but not—

Fr. Andrew: I worthy one, I think.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so then back to Numbers 18. The second part of Numbers 18 gives the other sort of central— And there’s actually more ink spent on this than on the sin-bearing part, so this is sort of the main job that Aaron is given in Numbers 18, is essentially for the high priest to serve as a throne guardian. The idea is that he’s going to protect sacred space: of the tabernacle, in the case of Aaron, later the Temple. And it’s not coincidental that in St. Dionysios the Areopagite, in The Celestial Hierarchy, it’s the seraphim and the cherubim, the throne guardians, who are at the top, parallel to the high priest at the top.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we actually got— Someone recently asked this question in our Facebook group: Why does God need throne guardians? Like, God doesn’t need to be protected. It’s not—it’s not God being protected, because obviously God does not need to be protected. It’s us being protected, in a sense, from God, not that they’re, like, standing there, holding him back: “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” [Laughter] That’s not what’s going on. It’s that, as humans enter into the presence of God, if we do it in an unworthy manner, then it destroys us.

Fr. Stephen: Death by holiness.

Fr. Andrew: Death by holiness, right. So the throne guardians are actually there to guard us, in a sense, from the throne, just as the angel that guards paradise after the expulsion from paradise of Adam and Eve: they’re not guarding paradise from being sullied by Adam and Eve; they’re guarding Adam and Eve from destroying themselves by entering back into paradise. That’s what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, drawing near to the tree of life. They’re keeping them away from the tree of life so they won’t live forever in their evil state. And so it’s repeated several times in Numbers 18 that Aaron and his sons are going to be there to draw near to God and so that the other people won’t do that and die. This is the central job.

I don’t know if it’s just the circles I’m “traveling” in or if this is on the rise or if it’s just something I’ve seen a lot lately at random and I’m being Anecdote Andy, but there has been a lot of talk from non-Orthodox folk when talking about the Orthodox Church that something they don’t like about the Orthodox Church is that the Orthodox Church will not just give the Eucharist to anyone who identifies as a Christian. Often the rejoinder—and this is the correct rejoinder—is pointing people to 1 Corinthians 11:27-30, where St. Paul talks about the one who approaches in an unworthy manner is eating and drinking judgment, “and this is why some of you have gotten sick and some of you have died.” And so that is the right place to point people, but what we can see here in Numbers 18 is that this is a primary—I would say the primary— This is Job One of the priesthood, is that the priest is the one through whom people are able to worthily draw near to God, safely, and that others then need to be protected. Not-giving the Eucharist to anyone who I don’t know is approaching in a worthy manner is my primary job as a priest—not having meetings, not doing counseling, not leading prayers, blessing food at coffee hour. What gets called in the West, in Protestant circles, “fencing the table,” that’s Job One for the priesthood, according to the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: “Fencing the table!” Wow. Yeah, and there is within the Orthodox ordination of a presbyter, a priest, there’s a part that happens kind of after the ordination proper—the man is already a priest—but there is an element that happens after the bread and the wine are consecrated to become the body and blood of Christ that the bishop will take that consecrated bread, the body of Christ, and place it in the hands of the newly-ordained priest, and will say—I’m sure I’m going to be paraphrasing a little bit, but he basically says, “Receive this pledge and guard it and keep it until the dread day of the second coming of Christ when he will ask you to give an account for it,” or something to that effect, which has the very big long complicated Greek term, the parakatathiki, which often gets translated as “the charge.” I think in modern Greek it means something like a deposit, so it’s this same type of idea. This is a guardianship that’s being handed over to this priest, and the guardianship is not— I mean, on the one hand, it is, yes, “don’t let anything harm the body and blood of Christ; see that it’s treated with reverence and so forth,” but also it is, as you say— there’s a sense of guardianship of those who approach it, to make sure that they’re approaching God in a way that is going to be beneficial for them and not harmful for them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I don’t refuse people Communion. Anyone who wants to can come into my parish and receive the Eucharist. There are certain thing you’re going to have to do first.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: But you are invited to do those things and then receive the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if someone doesn’t want to do those things, that’s on them.

Fr. Stephen: That’s their choice, and that’s fine. It’s your own free will. If you don’t want to do those things, don’t do those things. But if you’re not willing to do those things, then I can’t give you the Eucharist because it can destroy you, so I’m not going to do it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can get sick, you can die, you can be spiritually destroyed…

Fr. Stephen: But I am here to outline what those things are for you.

Fr. Andrew: Show the way.

Fr. Stephen: So, back to St. Dionysios.

Fr. Andrew: Dennis. [Laughter] St. Dennis.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. Saint-Denis.

Fr. Andrew: I know! It is literally the French version, but, I don’t know, there’s something grander about “Dionysios” versus “Dennis.” I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Well, Dennis is a menace, so.

Fr. Andrew: There is that.

Fr. Stephen: So we noted already that this connection between high priest, at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and seraphim and cherubim at the top of the celestial hierarchy, is that they have the same job. They have the same task; they have the same role. That is a very different concept than them being the same thing, because objectively they are not the same thing. A seraphim and a bishop are not the same thing. One is a human; one is a seraphim, who is an angelic being. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re not at all the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: So at the level of being, this kind of Neo-Platonic hierarchy, they are not the same thing; they are not parallel in that way. Nor is there some kind of parallel in a kind of change-of-being, sort of as cherubim is to throne, so bishop is to presbyter, in terms of what they are, some kind of analogy of being. That doesn’t— It’s kind of hard to even figure out what that would mean. [Laughter]

So that Neo-Platonic interpretation fundamentally falls apart unless you want to take St. Dionysios completely out of the context of Christianity and the Scriptures, which seems odd. So what you have, as we mentioned, in St. Dionysios is the idea that what separates these hierarchies from each other is grace. And so a lot of what happens between West and East here, and even different parts of the West, has a lot to do with how grace is defined. Our Eastern reading of Dionsyios would be more like—because we understand grace to be the divine energies, meaning divine activity, meaning God working— So for us, the ecclesiastical hierarch and the celestial hierarchy fundamentally mean that God is working through the different ranks of this hierarchy in different ways. He is doing different things through these different beings, whether they’re angelic beings or humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it’s always God doing it.

Fr. Stephen: It is God doing it. It is God working through them. So this is why we can talk about there being kinds of priesthood, which we already did. There’s a kind of priesthood that, even after the golden calf, that the elders of the people still possessed, but there’s also a kind of priesthood, the sacrificial priesthood, that they no longer possessed. Why? God was still working to do certain things through the elders of the people, like justice, to render judgment, to resolve disputes, to keep order. God was still working through those people, just in a different way than he was working through Aaron and his sons, to accomplish different things than he was accomplishing through Aaron and his sons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a really important principle. I know I’ve said this before on this show, that every good thing comes from God. Everything good that is happening is God doing it. That doesn’t mean that the people who are doing it are not also doing it, but, as they do it, they are participating in God’s works. There’s not any independent good. So, yeah, there’s different kinds of priesthood.

Fr. Stephen: This is why God can call good works done by humans “good,” because they’re his works.

Fr. Andrew: Those are his works, yep.

Fr. Stephen: And so, just like at creation, he can look at them and call them good. When we talk about an ordained priesthood, we’re saying that God is working through the ordained man in a particular way, not that there’s this clergy-laity divide, where God works through the clergy and does not work through the laity; God works through some people and not through other people. We mean God is working through and accomplishing things through the clergy that are different than—it’s particular things that are happening through clergy. When we talk about that communal priesthood, there are things that God is doing in and through the community as a whole that are different [from] things he does through various individual persons.

This is a sort of critically important distinction, because the Western read—and this is parallel with the Western read of Dionysios—the Western read at least going into the Protestant Reformation, we should say—was that ordination imparted certain powers and abilities; it changed the character of the human person. It gave charisms, gifts—

Fr. Andrew: It gave an indelible mark.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that this person is now different than he was, in an ontological way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he became a different thing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that a priest is a different thing and then all the way up to the bishop of Rome is a different thing than even— because the papacy is a different office than the episcopate, for Roman Catholicism. And so at each of those levels there are powers, abilities—I’m using “powers” in sort of the Aristotelian sense, of dynamis—that can be actualized by the person; they can do things. So, to give just a very— And we’ll elaborate more on this, but just to give a very bare-bones example, we would say as Orthodox Christians that the Holy Spirit works through the clergy and the laity to make bread and wine be the body and blood of Christ on the altar in the Liturgy, but it’s the Holy Spirit that does it. Roman Catholicism teaches that the ordained priest—and above—has the power, by saying the words of institution, to consecrate the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why it’s indelible, because you can’t change back from being a priest.

Fr. Stephen: Even if he’s deposed, he can still consecrate the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: They would call it “valid, but illicit”—but still valid, like it still is the Eucharist.

Fr. Stephen: He has the power to do it. So that’s a sort of “where the rubber meets the road” example.

This view interacts in interesting ways in the history of the West. A lot of people don’t read St. Augustine’s anti-Donatist works. Everybody likes to read the anti-Pelagian works and fight about it. [Laughter] Fewer still, I think, read the anti-Manichaean works… But the Donatist argument gets misconstrued sometimes, because it gets short-handed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think the way that most people— Yeah, the short-hand version is that people say that the Donatists were teaching that if someone— if a clergyman is a sinner, then his sacraments don’t work, that they’re not real, that basically his moral character stops his sacramental ministry from actually working.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That would make sense if the Donatists held to, like what’s now the Eastern Orthodox view. If the Donatists held to the idea that God was doing this through humans, and they were just saying, “Well, hey, God wouldn’t do that through an unworthy human,” you could see the argument. It would still be wrong, but you could see the argument.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but that’s actually not— The argument they were actually making is—

Fr. Stephen: —more complicated than that.

Fr. Andrew: —a little bit more complicated, yeah. It’s really that if you had been given the power to perform the sacraments, then you would be holy.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The grace that came to you, that would empower you to consecrate the Eucharist or to baptize or to do these things, would have a transformative effect on you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s interesting, there’s actually an argument— Now, I don’t think it ever is official, but it is promulgated by a pope in the eleventh century, the Dictatus Papae, which says that the pope becomes a saint by virtue of his office. Again, not an official Roman Catholic teaching, but it’s the same kind of idea: the idea of by virtue of being this particular grace, there is a transformative effect on the person such that they would not sin in particular kinds of ways.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, therefore, if they sin in those ways, then that is proof that they don’t have the grace to do what they’re trying to do.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which loops back then to the kind of short-hand version of the way people talk about the Donatists.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the short-hand isn’t completely wrong, but it’s lacking in nuance. But that’s evidence. And so, of course, the big issue that precipitated Donatism was those who, under torture or under threat, denied Christ during the persecutions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they apostatized in the midst of that. And then the question is: If they repent, can they come back—?

Fr. Stephen: —into the Church at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Are they still clergy?

Fr. Stephen: And were their sacraments valid in the first place?

Fr. Andrew: Ever, yeah. There’s a kind of retroactive—

Fr. Stephen: Because clearly they would have had the grace to resist like the martyrs did, if they were holy people. So this is evidence that they were sort of frauds all along. This is what you get when you believe in irresistible grace. [Laughter]

So St. Augustine is opposing the Donatists, and St. Augustine essentially agreed that grace brought a kind of power to do these things in terms of the sacraments. He was in line with the general Roman Catholic— what later became the Roman Catholic view, the Western view. But he actually visited Donatists. He visited Donatists churches, communities. And while there he saw genuine love between people within those communities, even though they were sort of rigorous. So this caused a problem for St. Augustine because he held that view. It caused a problem with his ecclesiology, because he said, “Well, wait a minute. Humans who haven’t received the grace of God, humans who haven’t received this grace, they can’t love each other like this. And so that must mean that the Donatists, even though they’re in schism, still have something happening here.”

And so the way St. Augustine reconciled that is within the anti-Manichaean writings and the anti-Donatist writings he still expresses a lively belief in the freedom of the will. So having a power doesn’t mean you utilize that power. Having dynamis doesn’t mean you actualize it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that’s how he kind of works it out.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s part of how he works it out. So I am now… I don’t know. I feel like I’m fibbing to even say this. [Laughter] I’m going to sound briefly like I’m saying something nice about John Calvin, and then I’m not. I’ll just be honest. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That moment when our Calvinist friends actually become our Calvinist friends.

Fr. Stephen: You mean there’s a chance now?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”

Fr. Stephen: There is a quotation attributed to John Calvin—and you say you’ve seen it attributed to Luther, so it may just be a meme: who knows! [Laughter] Maybe it’s just some sort of Reformation meme. But the idea being that if the devil—and this is talking about the whole Donatist issue—that if the devil himself baptized you in the name of the Trinity, you’d be baptized.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this is the most anti-Donatist thing that whoever wrote/said this could think of to say.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which may have been John Calvin, or maybe not. [Laughter] So the idea there being that who does it is irrelevant.

But now this also, though, when you follow that out—and you can see this in Calvin’s view of the sacraments and even more so in Calvin’s successors’ view of the sacraments, because, frankly, when you look at a lot of them, I don’t think they understood what Calvin said about the Eucharist, for example; I think it confused them and so they went with Zwingli—and this is going to the sort of opposite pole where the sacraments and God working is not mediated through a human at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just… Yeah. Me and Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: So while there’s a certain sense where kind of all Christians could agree that Christ is ultimately the Minister of all sacraments, which is a sort of buzz-phrase that comes out of this, a Roman Catholic could agree to that because they could say, “Well, the priest acts in persona Christi, so yeah,” and a Protestant could agree with that, coming from this kind of perspective, by saying, “Yeah, God just does it directly. God acts; the human is irrelevant”—but they’re meaning very different things. So in between this sort of Western polarity of, on the one hand, the priest is invested with these powers to do these things, which he can then utilize at his will on the one hand, and, on the other hand, God just acts utterly independently of humans and doesn’t need humans—well, he doesn’t need them, but does not stoop to work through humans—is the Orthodox view that God acts through humans. So it is God acting, but it is through humans.

That has some consequences. That means that you being the person through whom God acts in certain ways—meaning ordination or calling to any particular thing—is revocable. That a person can be a priest and then not be a priest, because it’s not a question of a power being given and a power being taken away, that power constituting a change of what something is—again, get the Platonist thing out of here. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s a continuity from God within the Church.

Fr. Stephen: The Holy Spirit dwelt in Saul—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then left him.

Fr. Stephen: —and empowered him to be the king of Israel. God was working through him to establish justice and to exercise his reign over the people of Israel, through Saul, and then he didn’t. The Holy Spirit left.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting. There’s an interesting case that comes up, then, of laicization or deposition from the priesthood, which is when someone— when a man who is a priest or deacon, or, in some cases, a bishop, has that removed from him by the authority over him. Sometimes that’s called defrocking. And so they can no longer do the sacraments.

Now, in the Roman Catholic tradition, if that happens, then they’re not allowed to do the sacraments, but they can do the sacraments. That’s why they have this category of “valid but illicit.” So it’s real: if a defrocked priest does the Mass, the Eucharist is real, but he’s behaving illicitly, illegally, essentially, within Church law. Whereas, from the Orthodox point of view, if someone’s laicized and he does not have the blessing—he’s had his priesthood removed from him by his bishop, or, if he’s a bishop, his episcopacy removed by his synod—then he can’t do those things. I mean, he could go through the motions—he could put on his vestments and say the words and whatever—but it would not be real.

But then what’s interesting then, in both traditions there is the possibility for restoration. So you could theoretically refrock, I guess, a defrocked priest in the Roman Catholic Church—to the best of my knowledge, that’s a possibility. And they would say, “Well, he was validly a priest the whole time, but now his licitness has essentially been returned to him.” For the Orthodox, when that’s— The possibility of restoration is there, and that’s within the context of someone being deposed unjustly. So there is within the canonical tradition the possibility for someone being returned to the priesthood who was deposed unjustly. When that’s done, he’s not then re-ordained, so one could say, “Oh, well, you basically believe the same thing that the Catholics do,” and the answer to that is actually no, that even though someone can be returned to the clerical orders without an ordination, that they could not have performed the Eucharist or other sacraments in a way that would be true during that time when they were judged to be deposed, because the ministry is not something that is contained in the man; it functions within the community of the Church.

That’s a pretty significant difference. So a laicized person cannot perform sacraments during that period of laicization, even if it comes to an end at some point in the future, which is theoretically possible, although it doesn’t happen that often. But it is a thing; people do get restored if the deposition was regarded as being unjust, in some cases, probably not in every single case, but it is a thing that has happened, for sure, in the past. This particular case sort of underlines that difference in the way that ordination is understood between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this also means that any given person for any given role, including various kinds of priesthood, is interchangeable in the sense there is nothing about that person that necessitates them being the one through whom God works.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not “De Young sacraments” and “Damick sacraments.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s a gift. So if I could no longer serve as a priest, another priest would come here. [Laughter] I am not the only one— It’s a gift. There’s not something about me. I didn’t earn it; I didn’t achieve it. It’s a gift. Someone else—could be the same gift. God can do it through anyone. If I just refuse, God will do it through someone else, or just directly, if we all refuse. He’ll do what he’ll do.

And also, as you mentioned, priesthood is a role within the community—this emphasis on role and task. It’s a role within the community, so another difference between us and Roman Catholic priesthood is that Orthodox priests cannot celebrate the Eucharist by themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there is no solo Divine Liturgy. It’s not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that is because we have to have the community there. We have to have the laity there, because we’re serving that role in and for the community; it’s not just an ability that we have.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. All right, we’re going to take our second and final break, and in the third half we’ll be back, and we’ll finally actually talk about the actual rite of ordination itself. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As is our wont.

Fr. Andrew: As is our wont!

Fr. Stephen: “Three hours later…”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. And we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re continuing to talk about ordination. This is the fourth in our series on the sacraments of the Orthodox Church, and this is our final episode before the end of this year. Can you believe it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I have a calendar.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Fr. Stephen’s level of incredulity is never at the same height as mine, apparently.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. I face hard facts.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. It’s true. Yeah, we’ll be back in the new year, second Thursday of January, of course, although that’s going to be a pre-recorded episode, because you and I are both going to be in—

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to be convening in a special way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, deep in the heart of Texas, I guess. I’m not sure where Dallas is in Texas, actually, because I’m not looking at a map of Texas.

Fr. Stephen: Technically— I don’t know if Dallas is technically north Texas. If it’s not, it’s right on the edge. You go up to Denton, you’re definitely in north Texas, so I think Dallas kind of counts as north Texas.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Well. I mean, I’m just hearing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” in my head right now, but it’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: You know what that song’s actually about?

Fr. Andrew: No, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I don’t talk about that on air!

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: So you’ll look it up later. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I used to know. I don’t want to know any more now. [Laughter] Right, we’re talking about ordination; we’re not talking about Texas.

Fr. Stephen: But speaking of Dallas, when in Dallas—I’m going to do a commercial. [Laughter] When in Dallas, go by Titan Comics and say hi to Jeremy Shore, the owner and proprietor. Best comic store in what is probably north Texas, we just kind of established. [Laughter] Anyway. I’m just doing all these free commercials now!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I know! Right!?

Fr. Stephen: I’m going to have to come up with one every episode, just— potentially completely at random, for somebody I like somewhere with a business.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I should throw out some commercials of my own. I’m just putting that out there as well.

Fr. Stephen: “Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s right! So. The actual rite of ordination.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now we’re actually going to talk about the ordination of Aaron and his sons.

Fr. Andrew: Two hours and 35 minutes into this episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we get to the topic.

Fr. Andrew: That’s how we do it, people. That’s how we do it.

Fr. Stephen: You’ve got lay the groundwork!

Fr. Andrew: So to the second-least popular book of the Torah, in that Torah-tier—

Fr. Stephen: The tier-list, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Leviticus! Everybody loves Leviticus.

Fr. Stephen: Leviticus is neat.

Fr. Andrew: It’s got a lot of narrative in it actually, by the way, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: It really does. It really does. Once you get to the holiness code, less so: mostly commandments.

Fr. Andrew: But you’ve got to pay attention to that stuff, lest the earth swallow you up or that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: That is very important stuff that people should spend more time with, but anyway— There’s a commercial for the book of Leviticus!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Have you considered the book of Leviticus? Turn to chapter eight! Read the scintillation of Aaron’s ordination and the sons’!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is a great story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we’re going to go through it line by line, yes?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. —mostly unread by folks.

Fr. Andrew: All right, shall we begin the slow walk through Leviticus 8?

Fr. Stephen: Let’s begin now.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse one:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Take Aaron and his sons with him, and the garments and the anointing oil, and the bull of the sin-offering and the two rams and the basket of unleavened bread. And assemble all the congregation at the entrance to the tent of meeting.” And Moses did as the Lord commanded him, and the congregation was assembled at the entrance to the tent of meeting.

You got all that other stuff?

Fr. Stephen: What I like about the first four verses is that, if you’ve ever read a service text, like the ones that come from the Antiochian Archdiocese, there’s always this little—sometimes it’s in smaller print at the beginning, that’s aimed at us priests—that is just like this. Like: “Here’s all the stuff you need. Set a table here, and put this on it…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the bits in italics, or the red. The red print.

Fr. Stephen: “This is the set-up for the ordination ritual that’s about to take place.” And the reason for that is this isn’t just a historical recounting of “oh, isn’t this interesting how Aaron, way back then, was ordained”; this is also setting out the practice for future high priests.

Fr. Andrew: How you’re going to do it in the future.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse five:

And Moses said to the congregation, “This is the thing that the Lord has commanded to be done.”

So he’s saying, “Look, I didn’t make this up myself. This is God who said this.”

Fr. Stephen: “Now is the time for the Lord to act.” Oh, wait… [Laughter] Orthodox in-joke.

Fr. Andrew: Verse six:

Moses brought Aaron and his sons and washed them with water. And he put the coat on him and tied the sash around his waist and clothed him with the robe and put the ephod on him and tied the skillfully-woven band of the ephod around him, binding it to him with the band. And he placed the breastpiece on him, and in the breastpiece he put the urim and the thummim. And he set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Fr. Stephen: A couple things to notice here. First, that part of this is him being vested, by someone else, by Moses. Moses vests him. Moses is essentially the officiant of this ordination.

Fr. Andrew: Even though not ordained himself.

Fr. Stephen: Not a priest himself, not ordained to this priesthood himself.

Fr. Andrew: But this is God said to—

Fr. Stephen: Somebody’s got to do the first one.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve got to do it, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Aaron can do the next one, but somebody’s got to do the first one.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, if you’re going to pick somebody to do the first one, Moses seems like a good choice.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And for Orthodox folks, if you’ve ever been to an Orthodox ordination, the person is vested.

Fr. Andrew: By the bishop and those assisting him.

Fr. Stephen: By the officiant of the ordination. And for Orthodox folks, you may know that the bishop is vested every time he comes to serve. But also notice the pattern of the procedure here. He’s washed, he and his sons; they’re washed with water, and then they’re vested. You may already see a pattern emerging.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, a baptism of sorts. I mean, literally.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in the baptism service. Wash, vested—this is going to continue. But this is what I was hinting at with our caller.

Fr. Andrew: Right, a kind of ordination.

Fr. Stephen: A kind of ordination to a kind of priesthood. And if you think of Israel as a whole, they were baptized into Moses.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, through the Red Sea.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, so verse ten.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse ten.

Then Moses took the anointing oil and anointed the tabernacle and all that was in it, and consecrated them. And he sprinkled some of it on the altar seven times, and anointed the altar and all its utensils and the basin and its stand, to consecrate them. And he poured some of the anointing oil on Aaron’s head, and anointed him to consecrate him. And Moses brought Aaron’s sons and clothed them with coats and tied sashes around their waists and bound caps on them, as the Lord commanded Moses.

So there’s this anointing. So far, in some ways, this is just like an Orthodox baptism service.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they get chrismated, literally.

Fr. Andrew: The washing, and then the clothing, and then the chrismation.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is also the— We’re going to see this pattern play out as we move on through the chapter, where something is done to the altar, and then to Aaron and the sons. So the altar is anointed, the altar is chrismated—we talked about this a little bit last time, the chrismation of the elements of the tabernacle—and then Aaron is also, connecting Aaron to the altar and the accoutrements of the tabernacle, so that Aaron effectively is being made part of the tabernacle. He’s being linked to it.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s worth pointing out the things that are— the physical stuff, kind of the holy hardware, they’re not turned into a different kind of thing than the things that they’re like on the outside, like utensils. So utensils are utensils, but these utensils are set aside for use in the tabernacle. But they’re still utensils; they’re still made out of whatever they’re made out of, just as Aaron does not become a different kind of species or whatever by being ordained. He’s still a man, but he’s set aside now for this task.

Fr. Stephen: And dedicated to this purpose. So the chalice not different from my Star Trek: Wrath of Khan collector cup because it’s mine, mined made from metal out of the holy mountain. [Laughter] It’s the purpose for which it has been set aside.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the function; it’s the way it’s being treated.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because if it’s about innate holiness, I mean, come on: Wrath of Khan?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t know. I mean, there’s stuff I like about Wrath of Khan for sure, but…

Fr. Stephen: It’s virtually a relic of Shatner.

Fr. Andrew: The earworm thing… [Earworm noises]

Fr. Stephen: Great moment of cinema. It wraps itself around your cerebral cortex.

Fr. Andrew: [Earworm noises] It’s very, very creepy!

Fr. Stephen: Making you suggestible.

Fr. Andrew: Super creepy. Okay, verse 14.

Then he brought the bull of the sin-offering, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the bull of the sin-offering.

So what’s going on? Are they putting the sins of the people on the—

Fr. Stephen: Don’t get excited!

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: With the atonement theories!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Leave off the atonement theories! [Laughter] They do not say anything!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a sin-offering, but it doesn’t have any sins on it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they just put their hands on it.

Fr. Andrew: As if to say: this one.

Fr. Stephen: They’re designating this bull for this purpose: designating, again. Lots of bulls; this one is going to be the sin-offering. And that’ll become even more clear here as we move on into the next bit.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse 15.

And he killed it.

No big, fancy ritual.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, we don’t know how, we don’t know where, we don’t know with what.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just: the bull is now dead.

Fr. Stephen: But you have to kill it in order to—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter]

And Moses took the blood, and, with his finger, put it on the horns of the altar around it, and purified the altar, and poured out the blood at the base of the altar, and consecrated it to make atonement for it (the altar).

Fr. Stephen: Yes, for the altar. He’s making the atonement for the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Because that altar did bad things—no, wait! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There’s no sins that the altar committed—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: —that are being put on the bull, and the bull’s being killed instead. That doesn’t make sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s to clean up the altar from the sins accumulated of the people.

Fr. Stephen: It’s part of setting it aside to be the altar of God, that it must be purified. As we said before in previous episodes, life stuff kills death stuff.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: So blood is life stuff. It takes care of, smears away, wipes away, absorbs—however you want to see it or argue about it in your journal article, but it takes care of it.

Fr. Andrew: All right, verse 16.

And he took all the fat that was on the entrails and the long lobe of the liver—

I love alliteration!

—and the two kidneys with their fat, and Moses burned them on the altar. But the bull and its skin and its flesh and its dung he burned up with fire outside the camp, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Fr. Stephen: An important element of this for what we were saying before, about not putting sins on it, is that, notice, there are clean parts of the bull and unclean parts of the bull. The dung, the excrement, being obviously unclean. The unclean parts of the bull cannot be put on the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t give God that garbage.

Fr. Stephen: That gets taken outside the camp and burned. It’s not even kept in the camp. It is the good parts— So if you put sins on the bull, the bull is now unclean and impure. If it has sins on it, you can’t put any of it on the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, remember, when you’re offering something to God, you don’t give him some dirty, sinful thing; you give him what’s good and pure.

Fr. Stephen: And without blemish.

Fr. Andrew: All right, verse 18.

Then he presented the ram of the burnt-offering, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the ram.

Fr. Stephen: This is not a sin-offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, again.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s still the laying-on of hands, and there’s two rams there. This one’s being designated for the burnt-offering.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

And he killed it, and Moses threw the blood against the sides of the altar. He cut the ram into pieces, and Moses burned the head and the pieces and the fat. He washed the entrails and the legs with water, and Moses burned the whole lamb on the altar. It was a burnt-offering with a pleasing aroma, a food-offering for the Lord, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Fr. Stephen: So this is a whole-burnt offering.

Fr. Andrew: That means that God gets all of it.

Fr. Stephen: God gets the whole thing. The whole thing’s going to get burned up, but look at what Moses has to do in the process. In order to offer the whole thing, he has to wash and clean the unclean parts before he can offer it.

Fr. Andrew: So it can all be purified. Again, you don’t give God something with sin in it.

Fr. Stephen: Which is the opposite, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, continuing on, verse 22.

Then he presented the other ram, the ram of ordination. And Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the ram, and he killed it, and Moses took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. And he presented Aaron’s sons, and Moses put some of the blood on their right ears and on the thumbs of their right hands and on the big toes of their right feet. And Moses threw the blood against the sides of the altar.

So this is kind of weird.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Really? You’ve never had that done?

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: Must not have joined Skull and Bones at Yale.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, weirdly, I didn’t go to Yale. I don’t know…

Fr. Stephen: So we have— Base-level, we have this same sort of motif again of something being put on the altar and on Aaron and his sons, connecting them. The particularity here with the blood— Well, first of all, it should be noted that this is unusual.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, usually you don’t put blood on people in the rituals of the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Blood is not put on people; blood is put on things, normally. On the Day of Atonement, the blood is used to purify things, not people. The places— There’s a few places, a handful of places, where blood gets put on people in the Torah. One of them is when the covenant is ratified, Mount Sinai. They get sprinkled with blood. Remember what I said to the caller? Here in the ordination ritual: and one is here. So here in particular the blood that’s getting onto the altar is put on the right earlobe, the right thumb, and the right big toe. The earlobe is— The earlobe was pierced with an awl to make a slave, when that slave was being made sort of a permanent member of the household.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is a kind of ritual wounding, sort of, but they’re not actually piercing Aaron’s ear, but it’s a ritual piercing, so to speak, but not an actual piercing.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s being made a servant of that altar, and he is being brought into the household of God, the oikonomia of God there in the tabernacle, which is another piece of this kind of angelic role. So that’s the earlobe. The right thumb: your right hand is the dexterous one, pun intended. [Laughter] So that represents the things you do: your hands. And your feet are where you go, so your right big toe is— So it’s what you do, where you go, he’s a servant and he’s part of the household of God—and his sons.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right, this is part where you get to the bacon bones. I’m just telling everybody now. Verse 25.

They he took the fat and the fat tail and all the fat that was on the entrails and the long lobe of the liver and the two kidneys with their fat and the right thigh, and out of the basket of unleavened bread that was before the Lord he took one unleavened loaf and one loaf of bread with oil and one wafer, and placed them on the pieces of fat and on the right thigh. And he put all these in the hands of Aaron and in the hands of his sons and waved them as a wave-offering before the Lord. Then Moses took them from their hands and burned them on the altar with the burnt-offering. This was an ordination-offering with a pleasing aroma, a food-offering to the Lord. And Moses took the breast and waved it for a wave-offering before the Lord. It was Moses’ portion of the ram of ordination, as the Lord commanded Moses.

So what’s the deal with wave-offerings?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they’re throwing their lunch in the air and waving like they just don’t care.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: They do care.

Fr. Andrew: They do!

Fr. Stephen: So in a normal wave-offering—and Moses, the Moses bit in verse 29 there is the normal kind of wave-offering—is that the priest’s portion of an offering, as we said before when we talked about sacrifice: when the sacrifice is offered, there’s a portion of it that goes to the priest. And the priest’s portion, nonetheless, before the priest took it to eat it, it was offered as a wave-offering, which was a—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of give it to God and go and eat it.

Fr. Stephen: —and receive it back, yeah. It was the idea that even this, that is my portion, really belongs to God, and God is giving it to me, to feed me. And so with Moses this is sort of the normal procedure. In the particular of the ordination rite, the portion that would’ve been normally Aaron’s and his sons’ gets burned and offered to God and not taken back.

Fr. Andrew: So Moses gets to eat some because he’s not being ordained.

Fr. Stephen: He is the officiant.

Fr. Andrew: But the ones who are being ordained, their portion essentially gets given to God and burned.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if Aaron ordains his grandson, he would get the breast, as the officiant.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Verse 30.

Then Moses took some of the anointing oil and of the blood that was on the altar and sprinkled it on Aaron and his garments, and also on his sons and his sons’ garments. So he consecrated Aaron and his garments, and his sons and his sons’ garments with him.

So this is another connection to the altar: the blood from the altar and the oil. Blood and oil now, mixed together, and sprinkled them on their garments.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we have this sprinkling, like the covenant ratification. So from the perspective of the preceding portions of the Torah, Israel’s history of passing through the sea and the cloud and being sprinkled with blood at Pentecost at Sinai, it’s sort of being recapitulated in the ordination ritual, because, again, the high priest is the representation of Israel, sort of Israel summed up in one person, including in the case of Christ—most fully in the case of Christ. And then, from our perspective, we’re looking back at our baptismal ritual, which is also based on the same thing, and seeing those connections there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it’s worth pointing out, now there’s, what—I didn’t count, but four or five ways that a thing is done to the altar and done to Aaron and sons. So there’s this deep, deep connection between them and this altar. This persists even into the priesthood of the Church, where people are ordained—men are ordained for particular altars. Actually, it’s my understanding that the earliest ordination rites, especially for bishops in particular—I think this is still the case with bishops, but even with priests and deacons, part of the ordination rite was actually to say which altar—I mean, it’s usually the one that they’re at—that the man is being ordained for: it’s this altar in particular. Early early on, there weren’t transfers of clergy at all: you were ordained for one altar, and that’s the one you served for your life. Later on, the idea of transferring clergy—but they’re still transferred: they’re taken from one altar and they’re attached to another altar. So they’re only attached to one altar. There’s no such thing as priests or deacons or even bishops at large.

Fr. Stephen: Roaming free. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there’s a lovely Latin term for it.

Fr. Stephen: There are some, but there shouldn’t be.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lovely Latin term for this, which is episcopi vagantes, wandering bishops. But, yeah, it’s not a thing in the Orthodox Church where— A priest does not exist without an altar; he does not exist without a bishop. That’s not a thing. Because, again, we don’t believe that the priesthood is a kind of power that a man holds on his own. His connection to the altar is a significant piece of the way that we understand priesthood to work and ordination to work, as functioning within a community and for the community, by the community. There’s no at-large clergy; it’s just not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: There are large clergy…

Fr. Andrew: There are large clergy.

Fr. Stephen: But not at large.

Fr. Andrew: You and I are are not small, my friend.

Fr. Stephen: I am not, compared to most other humans.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. I am slightly smaller, but not a huge amount! I wish I were more smaller, but I’m not. So, okay, verse 31.

And Moses said to Aaron and his sons, “Boil the flesh at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and there eat it, and the bread that is in the basket of ordination-offerings, as I commanded, saying Aaron and his sons shall eat it, and what remains of the flesh and the bread you shall burn up with fire. You shall not go outside the entrance of the tent of meeting for seven days, until the days of your ordination are completed, for it will take seven days to ordain you. As has been done today, the Lord has commanded to be done to make atonement for you. At the entrance of the tent of meeting you shall remain, day and night, for seven days, performing what the Lord has charged, so that you do not die, for so I have been commanded.” And Aaron and his sons did all the things that the Lord commanded by Moses.

Seven-day ordination!

Fr. Stephen: Weeklong!

Fr. Andrew: That’s a long ordination service!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so they stay and they live there, and verse 34, “to make atonement for you,” we have to understand in the same sense as making atonement for the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re being purified.

Fr. Stephen: They’re being purified and they’re sort of being fully removed from the world and attached to the tabernacle in the way the various objects and other things in the tabernacle are. And so, seven: it’s the number of fullness and completion, et al., because of the seven planets (see previous episodes).

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Jewish astrology, everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we commented on our way through on some of the continuities with later ordination. We see already in the pages of the New Testament this setting apart of people by the laying-on of hands by an officiant. And this is connected to that laying-on of hands, as we talked about last time in the chrismation episode, was sort of the original means we see in the New Testament of conveying the Holy Spirit. And we see the hands being laid in Aaron’s and his sons’ ordination on the animals to designate them for this particular purpose. And so both of those are tied together in this idea of God acting through people, in the case of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God is going to act through them in this particular way and they are designated for that through the laying-on of hands.

So, some summary kind of comments. Clergy are expected to be separate in the sense of holiness, as we discussed, but in our contemporary world what that actually means can sometimes be ambiguous.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because people take the word “holiness” to mean being super-good or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Or separation. So sometimes people think that means being weird, especially people in seminaries.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Seminaries are full of weirdos, especially when I was in one.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! Be normal!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And the kind of holiness that clergy should at least aspire to is not making a pretense of piety.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, looking big and priestly-ish.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, from first-hand experience, you are sometimes given that impression in seminary, that it’s about appearing priestly when in public, in talking and walking in a priestly way. [Laughter] And, number one, that reads as pretty phony to just about everyone eventually, and also if you want something that is criticized continually by the Lord throughout the gospels it’s publicly acting pious.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “They have their reward.”

Fr. Stephen: “Say their long prayers, wear the phylacteries…” Going and making a public show of your piety—nothing positive is said about that anywhere in the Scriptures, but especially not the gospels. So that is definitely not what any clergyperson is called to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so what is it about? Number one, it’s that the clergy are held to a higher standard not in the sense that there’s different standards, but rather in the sense largely that the enforcement is stricter.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the same rules.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not things that are sins for the laity and not sins for the clergy, or that are sins for the clergy and not for the laity. Sin is sin. But clergy are… The penalty is stricter. There’s a number of canonical “crimes,” as it were, that it says if a layman does this, let him be excommunicated, but if a clergyman, let him be deposed. In order to understand why what the clergyman is getting in that case is more severe than the layman, you need to know that excommunication is temporary and the purpose of it is to bring someone to repentance, and then they can be returned to communion; whereas deposition, unless it’s unjust, but deposition is permanent. Your vocation is over. That’s it. It’s over.

Fr. Stephen: The Church will go on. God will continue to do what he does, but he’ll be doing certain elements of it through someone else. And sort of the Exhibit A of that is probably divorce.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s always a sin…

Fr. Stephen: It’s always a sin because you’re always doing harm to yourself and to other people, and it’s the product of sin. If people weren’t sinners, they wouldn’t get divorced. Marriages that last also contain two sinners! [Laughter] So it’s always a sin, it’s always an issue, it’s always a problem, it’s always something that requires healing and forgiveness and restoration, but if you’re clergy and you get divorced, that is treated more seriously, and you’re going to be deposed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there are sometimes—I’ve known of exceptions that are made, but the standard thing is: deposition.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, those are exceptions for a reason. They’re exceptional instances.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a number of things that clergy can do that get them laicized, things that they would justly be laicized for. We’re not going to list them now.

Fr. Stephen: “Because you did that, now you can no longer do this.” Think of King David not being allowed to build the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t mean that clergy who commit those sins cannot be forgiven. They can be forgiven, but forgiveness does not mean restoration to your priesthood. You can become a saint. You can even become a saint—but that’s not the same thing as serving as clergy.

Fr. Stephen: King David is a saint. He was forgiven of his sins when he repented. He was not the one to build the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, Moses, right? Moses has his priesthood removed, and he’s clearly a saint.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: And he was removed because of something bad that he did!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, there are consequences for these things, and repentance is not the stuff you have to do to not face the consequences. Part of repentance is facing the consequences of your actions, not a way to get out of them. Yes. And so, as a final note, because we want to end on a very non-controversial note—

Fr. Andrew: I knew you were going to say exactly that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. When the issue of women’s ordination comes up, it is important— This is a place where it’s especially important that we focus on the kind of Orthodox view that we’ve outlined here, because, in a lot of Protestant circles, the discussion surrounds women’s ability.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, can they do the things that a priest does?

Fr. Stephen: She can actually preach really well, or she’s a really good Bible teacher, or she’s a really good counselor—the things that a certain ordained office does, this person is good at, so why shouldn’t they do it? Because the things they’re good at are gifts given to them by God, right? So it’s key to remember it has nothing to do with any ability anybody has. Anyone who can read can serve the Divine Liturgy, and if you didn’t know how to read, you could memorize it, so it’s not a question of ability, who has the ability. It’s not something achieved, it’s not something—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even as it is, it’s not like there’s a singing contest, and if you—

Fr. Stephen: I wouldn’t be a priest.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] —and if you win the singing— I wasn’t going to say anything, but— [Laughter] “Only those who win the singing contest get to be ordained.” Like, that’s not…

Fr. Stephen: I am the William Hung of Orthodox priests over here.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh man!

Fr. Stephen: While Fr. Andrew collects himself… So the issue of women’s ordination, again, in Roman Catholic circles and in some Protestant circles, because, again, you can’t generalize about Protestantism; it’s not just one thing—

Fr. Andrew: It’s many things.

Fr. Stephen: —it’s an issue of authority and power, that the church is investing authority and power in males and not females. And so, again, if your understanding is not that, that it is not based on some granted authority or power, then it becomes about God has called particular people to do particular things. And different people are different. I mean, this is St. Paul with the spiritual gifts: God has called different people to do different things. And he has called men to—not just men in general, but specific men—to do specific things, and specific women to do specific things. There are areas where those don’t overlap, and one of them is being a spiritual father or a spiritual mother. Those two things require you to be one or the other sex.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I can’t be a spiritual mother, and a spiritual mother is not simply the same as a spiritual father but female. They’re two different things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now I’ll really get canceled. A biological male can’t give birth.

Fr. Andrew: Well, I mean, you say that and we’re just going to renew your contract, actually. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. I didn’t say canceled by you. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: There is no contract… This is at-will—no. And it’s also worth pointing out— I mean, this might be an uncomfortable thing to say, but it’s worth pointing out that God never ordained any women. Like, you don’t see in Scripture that ever happening.

Fr. Stephen: He could’ve given the priesthood to Miriam instead of Aaron.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he totally could have. He could have ordained his mother; Christ could have ordained his mother. But it’s not because these women are lesser than men or anything like that; that’s not what it’s about.

Fr. Stephen: God did some pretty amazing things through the Theotokos, like the Incarnation that we celebrate in a couple days.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, better than everybody else!

Fr. Stephen: She’s the one human through whom God did that work, took flesh. So, you know, compared to doing the Liturgy, kinda wins. [Laughter] But celebrating the Liturgy is a very high honor; I’m not demeaning that, but I’m saying women, particularly—again, it’s particular women and particular men—particular women have been called to far greater works of God through faithfulness than particular men have.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Well, let’s wrap up. I remembered very clearly when we talked about, for instance, earlier, the parakatathiki, the pledge, where the bishop places the body of Christ into the hands of the newly-ordained priest. When I was ordained, which now is a little over 16 years ago, to the priesthood, someone—it was really very nice—someone took an actual photo of that moment, and so I have a photo of Bishop Antoun, God rest is soul, putting the body of Christ into my hands. I look at that photo a lot, and I will often re-read the prayer, the words that he said. I remember Bishop Antoun: he had a particular way of saying that bit about where you’re going to be called to an account. I think Bishop Antoun would say it: “He’s going to ask you about it!” From a personal point of view, I remember being scared of my mind at that moment! [Laughter] I don’t think I was shaking or whatever, but I just remember hearing Bishop Antoun say that and thinking— and looking down there at this consecrated body of Christ and just trying to imagine what all of that means.

I recall also the first time that I celebrated the Divine Liturgy, which for me actually it just so happened that it was on the feast of St. Raphael of Brooklyn; that was the very first time that I celebrated the Liturgy as the celebrant. Obviously, I celebrated it—I concelebrated it—with Bishop Antoun for the rest of the day that he ordained me, but the first time that I actually celebrated it myself was on the feast of St. Raphael of Brooklyn. I remember thinking a number of times in the course of that event, those events, feeling like a fake. What do they call that? Impostor syndrome. I have to imagine that a lot of clergy actually feel that, especially initially. And I will say in the more than a decade-and-a-half since then, I’ve not felt any zap come out of my hands as I serve the Liturgy or any magical energy or whatever.

But I remember having the feeling of “I can’t believe that I’m standing here and doing this. I can’t believe they let me do this?” And I try to remember that, not so I can just sort of go through the psychological journey again, but rather precisely for the point— One of these points we’ve been making is that it’s God who does this; it’s not me. I mean, when a priest communes himself, or even when he’s being communed by the bishop, he refers to himself as “the most unworthy presbyter.” I’m not worthy. The fact that I was ordained did not turn me into a worthy thing. I’m still the most unworthy. I say that not to sort of display my humility or whatever; it’s just an actual fact that none of us are made worthy in the sense of becoming super Christians or saints or whatever. We are simply set aside to do a particular task.

I revisit those thoughts and I look at those photos and I think about the things that Bishop Antoun said precisely to remind myself that this does not belong to me. It is Christ’s priesthood, and he functions through those who are ordained to this work.

Now, I imagine most of the people listening to this are not ordained clergy and never will be. Those who are ordained were not necessarily special—I’m definitely not. I have known some very holy priests in my day, but I’m not one of them. But if you’re listening to this and you think, “Okay, I just listened to them talk about ordination for the last three hours and 17 minutes; what does that have to do with me?” I think one of the big take-aways is that God is always working, and he can work and is working through you.

So the question always is: In what way do I need to cooperate with what God is doing right now? And it’s usually not a big mystery: it’s the good thing you have in front of you to do. That’s the thing you should be doing. As Fr. Stephen mentioned, while we’re not all ordained as deacons, presbyters, and bishops, we all are, in a sense, ordained into a kind of priesthood. I mean, we saw in the ordination of Aaron and his sons basically the basic elements of a baptismal service—the washing, the clothing, the chrismation.

All Orthodox Christians receive all of that. That’s all part of who we are, and we’re all brought into the order of the laity—and that’s not something that clergy leave behind. The most basic garment that we wear, the sticharion, is the baptismal garment. That’s what that is. It shows that we are brought into the communion of the Church to function as the Church, to be the Church.

As we’ve talked about many times on this podcast, what is the Church? It’s the body of Christ. We are Christ’s powers, his actions, in this world, inasmuch as we cooperate with the Holy Spirit. And that is awesome. That is awesome. Ordained ministry in the clergy is part of that. It’s not apart from that; it’s not a radically different thing from that: it’s simply a part of that. It’s a particular role within that, and it’s meaningless without it. Clergy don’t function without the Church.

Again, that’s why we don’t have priests at large; that’s why we don’t have bishops at large; we don’t have deacons at large. None of us are at large. With every single canonical Orthodox clergyman, he can point you: “This is my altar. This is my bishop. This is the synod that this bishop belongs to.” These are not big mysteries. And that’s because it’s God working through us, not God handing a special power over to us. That’s one of the most important concepts, I think, from this episode. Father?

Fr. Stephen: So St. [James]—famously, I guess? Everything he said in the Bible, because it’s in the Bible, is famous, I guess?—said that “not many of you should presume to be teachers,” and he had to say that because many people were presuming to be teachers, and that has continued down to the present day, I think undeniably.

We as humans have a tendency to follow our desires, to follow the things that we at least think that we want, the things that we think will fill something that’s lacking in us or give us some— be instrumental to give us something we want, whether that’s power, control, or freedom. We see people and choices we make as instruments to gain those things that we think we want, that we think will make us happy and feel fulfilled.

And one of those things within the community of the Church is ordained office, and that’s envisaged in different ways by different people, that some people view it, either because it’s the teaching of their church or just the way the community functions or even if it’s against the way the community is supposed to function—they view this as a position of power; they view this as a position of authority; this is a position— Sometimes in some communities you have an impoverished community with a local pastor who is— at least presents the image of being quite well-off and having quite the lifestyle. So this can mean money; this can mean a way of out poverty. There are all kinds of things that this can seem to entail.

Maybe someone is deeply struggling with sin and thinks that devoting themselves more fully to the life of the Church is going to be the thing that breaks them out of that and gives them victory over that, just sort of de facto, as a sort of trade. “Well, if I dedicate my life to God, he’ll deliver me from this.” And then if, God forbid, those folks do receive ordained office, they find that that struggle just gets worse and real disasters happen.

But all of these things are sort of the pursuit of desire. In the first place, none of them are what the priesthood is actually about. I’ve never met anyone who has said, “I want to be ordained as a priest because I want to shoulder the burden of the sins of my community, because I want to go home at night have trouble sleeping because I’m worried about what’s going on in this person’s marriage, or with their kids. Or someone whom I deeply respected and looked up to came to me in confession today and told me something that I don’t even know how to process that they did it, let alone what I should tell them to do to try to help them.”

Nobody seems to desire that. Nobody seems to desire the reality that I as a priest—let alone what a bishop—will face at the Last Judgment when we stand before Christ and have to give an answer not only for ourselves but for everyone we’ve served, and how we interacted with them and how we helped or failed to help and advised or failed to advise those other people. People don’t want that responsibility part, and that’s what St. [James] was talking about when he said, “not many of you should presume to be teachers,” because of the judgment. That’s expressly what he said.

But, more importantly, as much as it’s been bred into us, sort of post-Freud, that we should all follow our desires or “follow our bliss,” that we should go out seeking that thing that will make us happy, that will fill in our lack, finally make us complete and perfect us—that doesn’t work. It never works. When you get the thing you desire, it doesn’t make you complete; it doesn’t fill the lack. And so one of two things happens: you move onto the next thing, the next most-powerful position, the next level of influence, the next amount of wealth, the next promotion, the next trophy spouse, the next whatever. And eventually, after that’s happened a few times—it’s different for different people—that’s when you get truly black-pilled. That’s when you realize: “You know what? Nothing is going to make me happy. Nothing is going to fix this. Nothing is going to make me feel complete. This quest is endless and will never be satisfied.” And that can be a very dark place to end up if the only way of living life you’ve ever known is pursuing the things you desire.

The flip-side of that has to do with the Holy Spirit and the way we’ve talked about spirits in general and the Holy Spirit in particular in the last several episodes of the podcast, and that’s that the Holy Spirit himself—God—has agency. God is at work in the world and can be at work through us. And so, rather than trying to figure out what it is we want—and sometimes we don’t even know—rather than trying to figure out what it is that we want, what it is that might make us happy, becoming more sensitive to the Holy Spirit feels a little bit more like doing what we feel compelled to do, doing what we know is right, doing what we know should be done.

And in most cases, we do actually know that, because it is true, as we talked about last time, that the Holy Spirit has written the commandments upon our heart. We know when we see someone struggling we should help. We know when we see someone being belittled we should intervene. We know what we need to do about suffering, about the impoverished person who’s asking us for help. We know what we should do. But because we’ve become insensitive to the Holy Spirit, we don’t feel compelled to actually do it. We don’t feel the push. We don’t feel the drive. And that is what, first and foremost, fostering that sensitivity is about. We do that in prayer. We do that by doing hard things, forcing ourselves, even when we don’t feel like it, even when we don’t feel compelled.

But ultimately the best advice I got in terms of how I ended up being a priest was from actually a Roman Catholic priest who was the—who had the same last name as me, no relation—who told me that before you become a priest, before you become clergy, you should try and do everything else. You should try and work any other job that you think you might enjoy that might work for you. You should go and get a nice car. And in his Roman Catholic context, he said—he told me he tells people that want to be Roman Catholic priests they should go out and date. Do all those things, because if God wants you to be a priest, if that’s the particular role he’s calling you to, if that’s the work he wants to go through you, you won’t be able to do anything else. Ultimately, you’ll be compelled to do it. You’ll be driven to do it. And you’ll find yourself doing things, like shouldering burdens and responsibilities and sins of the people, that you never would have said you wanted to or desired to, but you’ll do it because it’s the only thing you can do.

This isn’t isolated to the priesthood, because, as we said, there’s lots of different kinds of priesthood. There’s a certain priesthood that’s practiced by parents in a family. There’s a certain priesthood that’s practiced as a leader in various other community areas. Even within the Church, there are different priesthoods and different ministries. But in all of those, we need to be looking not for the thing we want, the thing we desire, the thing we think will make us happy, but what we feel compelled and driven by the Spirit of God to do. Those are my last thoughts.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get through to us live, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, except the next one, which will be pre-recorded.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, you can join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings in all the appropriate places, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend who will be edified by it.

Fr. Stephen: Heck, leave some in inappropriate places! [Laughter] And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. But if you listen to those other podcasts, don’t tell me, because I get a little bit Gengis Khan.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you very much, good night, God bless you—and hey! Everybody remember: subscribe to The Wolf and the Cross. It’s my awesome documentary that’s going to release any time now.

Fr. Stephen: Free commercial.