Fr. Alexander Garklavs: Again, we welcome you today. The Lord has blessed us with truly a paschal spring day. Introducing Fr. Thomas Hopko is an easy task, because he truly does not need an introduction, but we Orthodox are formal people and traditional people, and so, being formal and traditional, in keeping with that, I would say just a few words.

Fr. Tom has done many things, accomplished many things in his life. Among those, he was the dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, and he was the successor to two of the outstanding Orthodox teachers and theologians of the second half of the 20th century, Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Fr. John Meyendorff. Fr. Tom took over in that incredible legacy and steered the seminary. He had been of course a professor of dogmatics and pastoral theology, and as such he is responsible for teaching and nurturing and facilitating the formation of hundreds of Orthodox clergymen, of whom I am honored to be one. He’s author of several books, countless articles, traveled the world over as representative of the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America, in various meetings, interfaith gatherings, ecumenical meetings, colloquiums, seminars. For several years now he’s been a regular participant and featured speaker on Ancient Faith Radio.

Church administrator, teacher, spiritual director—Fr. Tom has all these great gifts, and the special gift of synthesizing different facts and facets of our life and spiritual life and theology. He is a theologian, which is a word that we Orthodox don’t use carelessly. Fr. Tom is a theologian, and of course there are many different types of theologians. There are Church historians, there are theologians of the liturgy and theologians of spirituality and theologians of ethics. Recently reading a book review of a religious author, I came across a term that I believe applies perfectly to Fr. Tom, and that is: a public theologian. And this is the definition of a public theologian. The public theologian is the one whose authority rests not so much on the theologian’s insight, intelligence, or subtle grasp of complex issues, wonderful as they may be, but on the ability to respectfully, lucidly, accessibly show how Christ redefines human nature, transforms death, and overturns the givens of life to show what only God can do and what only God has done.

Fr. Tom indeed is that kind of public theologian, and we are so fortunate to have him with us today, and fortunate that he has chosen as his topic the Ascension of the Lord, which is something that is often overlooked and maybe even ignored in our discussions and thinkings. Please welcome Fr. Thomas. [Applause]

Fr. Thomas Hopko: Thank you very much, Fr. Alexander. It’s nice to be here in Parma again. One thing I think needs to be added to what Father said: right now I’m kind of a shaky, old great-grandfather. [Laughter] So doing these kind of things, I don’t do much any more. I ask you to bear with me in some sense in that way.

We know that the Christian faith appeared on the planet earth as a gospel, a good news, a glad tidings to the world, and it was God’s Gospel, as St. Paul said in Galatians: not man’s, not according to man, not from man, but from God. And this good news is that God has acted ultimately in history through his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Messiah Christ of Israel and the Savior of the whole world.

Now, the Church emerged as Gospel or God’s Gospel in Jesus in the writings of St. Paul before the four gospels were even written. So it was a Gospel before we had the four gospels. Usually we think of the four gospels as the Gospel, the others not, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, the Apostle Paul, to whom are attributed 13 of the 27 writings in the New Testament, that he, in the very first, earliest document written in Christian history, which is the first letter to the Thessalonians, he has that expression, “God’s Gospel in Jesus,” at least four or five times.

And that’s our faith. That Gospel is a conviction about a Person. Christianity is not first of all a teaching or a morality or a spiritual way or a theology or a philosophy or an ethics; it’s a conviction about a Person. It’s a conviction that this Jesus of Nazareth is God’s only Son, begotten of the Father before the creation of the world, and coming into the world to save the world which was made through him, by him, for him, in him, and toward him, if you put together all the things that are said in St. Paul’s letters.

One of the earliest letters is the letter to the Romans, and in the letter to the Romans, you have—we have there a statement about what we are going to be talking about all day today that I think is a good way for us to begin. In the letter to the Romans, St. Paul speaks about: It is God who makes us righteous, God who justifies us, and if that is the case.

Is it Christ Jesus who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, and who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, “We, for thy sake, we are being killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” Yet in all of these things we are more than conquerors, through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus the Lord.

Here you have this sentence that we’re going to be talking about all day long: Jesus is “raised from the dead,” and is currently, now, “enthroned at the right hand of God the Father.” And that means that he’s entered into the fullness of the divine life which he had with God before the foundation of the world and which he now takes us in our humanity and his flesh, his body, into that same communion with God, with whom we will live in communion forever and forever.

And it’s interesting to know several things right from the beginning. One is that that sentence, “at the right hand of the Father,” or “at the right hand of the majesty on high,” that is probably the most-repeated sentence in the New Testament. It comes from the Psalm 110, which is definitely the most-quoted verse of the Old Testament in the New Testament writing:

The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I put all the enemies beneath your feet.”

Now, that particular text, it’s very interesting how it is used in the four gospels, how we find it in the four gospels, and especially in Matthew and Mark and Luke. Here what we want to say about those four gospels is they are very different from one another. There are certain things that are in all of them in different ways, but they are very different from one another, the way they present things, the way they are concerned about, what their issues are, and so on. And that’s very important, and sometimes even people ask, “When the gospels were finally written, which was a testimony to Christ on earth, which are hardly historical documents—they’re theological documents; they’re preaching; they’re inscription and writing of the Church’s living tradition… Because the earliest writing was only 50 years after Christ was born. It’s more than 30-some years after he was crucified, raised, and glorified. During that whole period, and certainly that period up to the point when the four gospels [were] written, which the earliest would probably be in the 60s, you’re speaking of an awful long time that the Church lived without any Scriptures, without any New Testament Scriptures as such, and the first ones were letters. They were letters; they were not constructed as giving us an image of Christ on earth.

And the Apostle Paul, who as I mentioned wrote most of his writings before these were even written, as a matter of fact, never saw Jesus. He never saw him on the earth. Never. And he, as you may know, was a persecutor of Christians, and he was a learned Pharisee. Hebrew of Hebrews, tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, according to the Law blameless; according to the Church a persecutor. That’s how he begins.

He says, “However, I count all this as dung,” and there’s a better word in English for that… [Laughter] “For the sake of knowing Christ and being found in him.”

Now we know that he based his apostleship on the vision of the risen Lord—but the risen Lord who spoke to him from heaven, from above, when he was on the Damascus road. “Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me?” Christ says. “Who are you?” And he said, “I am Christ whom you are persecuting.” And then St. Paul is convinced that he has this vision. He gets knocked down; he’s blinded. He’s told to go to Ananias. They’re all scared of him because he’s a persecutor of the Church. Ananias agrees because God tells him to baptize him, because “he’s my chosen vessel for the Gentiles, and I must reveal to him how much he must suffer for my sake.” That’s going to be a big thing for today: how much he must suffer for my sake. And then of course he becomes the apostle to the Gentiles and the leader of the foremost apostles, Peter and Paul. They were always together in Church tradition.

But this St. Paul never saw Jesus, never heard Jesus. Probably there are a lot of things about Jesus that he didn’t even know. I would guess, for example, that he didn’t know of the virgin birth. Most likely he didn’t, as a matter of fact. And what he did was, when he had this conviction that this Jesus is the Christ who was persecuted, he decided to re-read again the whole what we call the Old Testament—the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, all the literature, the wisdom literature—and then he came to the conclusion: Yes, indeed, he is God’s Son, he is the Christ, he is the Messiah, he is raised, he is glorified, he is enthroned on the very same throne as God himself who is his Abba Father from before the foundation of the world. And all this is done for us, for us and for our salvation.

And so if you know the writings of St. Paul, he never quotes any of the four gospels even once. Not once. One time he said something that he said as Jesus taught; the problem is that what he said Jesus taught you can’t find in the four gospels. If you look for it, you can’t find it. So it’s probably some traditional saying of Jesus that he heard. And then his whole argument is from the Scriptures, and that means the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets. And this is how Christianity began.

There’s a wonderful saint of our Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the first real scriptural interpreters and theologians in that sense, and he wrote a book. He made a writing in the second century, late second, end of the second century, where it’s called the Complete Exposition of the Apostolic Preaching. Never quotes the New Testament once. It’s all quotation from the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets. And here even Jesus, raised from the dead, had to open the minds of his disciples to the understanding of the Gospel.

Now a lot of times we think, “Oh, you know, we poor people, if we had been on earth when Jesus was here, how nice it would have been! It would have been clear. We would have seen him. We would know.” Well, if you read the New Testament, you understand that’s simply not true! They didn’t understand anything! Nothing, until after he was glorified and the Holy Spirit came upon them, and then they re-read the Scripture in order to present the faith. And probably the Ascension of Christ, the enthronement of Christ at the right hand—“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’ ”—that this is kind of, you might almost say, the center of the Gospel teaching. He had to be enthroned and glorified in our flesh. As Fr. Paul Tarazi used to joke, and in order to do that, he had to die and get raised from the dead and enter into the glory of God.

The resurrection of Jesus is not a bodily resuscitation, like Jairus’ daugher or Lazarus. He wasn’t raised to have more time on earth; he was taken up into the glory of God because of what he suffered, and was enthroned at the right hand of God, and thereby became the Lord of the living and the dead, the Judge of the whole universe, the King of God’s kingdom, the One through whom and in whom and for whom not only everything is made but everything is revealed. There’s nothing that can be revealed more than what we find in Christ and the Church.

Now it’s interesting that this particular sentence, if you look at it in the Nicene Creed, because, as you know, it’s part of the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only-begotten Son, begotten of the Father before the ages, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not created, who for us and for our salvation came from heaven, became human, took on flesh, was incarnate, and then he died: he was crucified, he died, he was buried, he was raised.

All those sentences are in the past tense—he came, he was incarnate, he preached, he died, he was raised, he was glorified. All those are in the past tense. The only sentence in the Creed that’s in the present tense is: “And he is now seated at the right hand of God the Father in glory.” That’s in the present tense. After that sentence, the whole rest of the Creed is about what’s going to happen. It’s in the future tense. He will come again in glory, and he has spent the Spirit and we look for these things. So what we have to see is that the way we relate to Christ now in the Church is in his glorification at the right hand of God the Father, seated in glory.

Now, that sentence, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand,’ ”—it is very important to see the three ways that it is used in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s used, first of all, at the end of Christ’s life when his enemies are trying to make a fool of him. So they’re asking him all these questions to try to catch him in his words and particularly not only to discredit him but to get a reason to kill him, because they’ve decided to kill him. So they ask him all these questions: What’s the greatest commandment in the Law? Should you give tribute to Caesar? And so on. And Jesus answers all the time, puts them to shame. If a woman had seven husbands and the resurrection, who gets the girl in the kingdom? And all that stuff. They’re just trying to catch him.

And then he says, finally, “Let me ask you a question. When the Christ comes, whose son is he going to be?” And they, knowing the Scriptures, said, “David’s. The son of David,” because it was written, “From David’s seed will come the Anointed One. He will sit upon the throne. His kingdom will have no end, and he’s from the house of David, the son of David.”

And then Jesus responds—and this is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the same event is told; it’s not in John: that’s another story; we’ll get to that. But he says, “If that’s the case, why, then, did David call him Lord?” Because “Lord” among the Greek-speaking Jews, and Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew… And of course, they had the Scriptures in Greek, not in Hebrew. That’s why very often when the Old Testament is quoted, it’s different in the New Testament. One great example is the great commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God…” And in Deuteronomy it says, “With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength (all your possessions).” There’s no “mind” there, because the Jews didn’t separate the heart from the mind. The center of the person thinking, acting, willing, was the heart. They didn’t even have a concept of the mind. However, the gospels are written for Greeks, so they add: “You will the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Just so you don’t get mixed up, you know. So there are a lot of things like that that were going on in how they were used.

But in any case, he says, “Why is it, then, written—if he’s David’s son, why is it written that David called him Lord? If he’s David’s son.” And then he quotes the most-quoted sentence and referred to all 27 books of the New Testament. He quotes that line: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until all the enemies are put under your feet. And then you’re the victor over everything.’ ” He said, “David wrote that by the Holy Spirit, don’t you think? Well, you’d better think so. It’s a psalm. 110.” He says, “Therefore, if David, inspired by the Holy Spirit, calls him “Lord,” how can you then say that he’s David’s son?”

And then in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it says they didn’t ask him any more questions; they just decided to kill him. They just decided to kill him; he’s got to be put to death: he’s a blasphemer. And in John’s theological gospel, he will be put to death not because he was presenting himself as the Messiah—every other crazy Jew thought he was the Messiah at that time—but because he, being a man, made himself God, and he took all the prerogatives of God. Everything that was applied to God in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, in the New Testament is applied to Jesus as a man.

You could even say that in the Gospel every quality of God the Father is now revealed in human form in the Man Jesus. And I would even say that’s not only in the Gospel, that is the Gospel ,that is the Good News, that you have God revealing himself perfectly in human form in his Son on the earth to reveal the deepest and greatest mysteries of God, and there’s nothing beyond his crucifixion in the flesh and then his resurrection, enthronement, and so on: nothing beyond it. So you have that reference there.

Then also in Matthew, Mark, and Luke you have the second reference, and that is at the passion, when the high priests are questioning him. They were questioning him. And we know, I think, hopefully we know the stories. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they’re pretty much the same here in each of the four gospels. I’ll just look at Matthew here. It’s the same thing, pretty much, in Mark and Luke.

When they’re questioning Jesus, he’s silent. He stops answering. And then the high priest says to him, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man”—that’s the main title that he uses for himself in the gospels; it was a messianic title, by the way, taken from Daniel, where the Son of Man is presented to the Ancient of Days, who is the Father, and is seated at his right hand, and gets all dominion, power, glory, and majesty together with God, this Son of Man figure in Daniel 7, which is also a very important text in the New Testament. But he says here, “You have said so. But I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power”—with a capital-P—“and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy. What is your judgment?” And they cried out, “He deserves death!”

So he quotes the same thing. He shuts them up by this quote. He finishes all the dialogue at the passion with this quote, with these words. And then when he is raised from the dead, if you read the preachings about him, that sentence is contained in every single reference to him in the letters of Paul and in the book of Acts. Stephen, for example, sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, the Power.

This glorification is there, and this is what you find all the way, but it’s the thing that gets him killed, and then it becomes the center of the preaching. This Jesus, who was suffering, who was crucified, who died the ignoble death, who was betrayed and denied by everyone, and even forsaken by God his Father on the cross—this Jesus is the Lord and the Christ and the Savior of the world, and he reigns on the same throne as God the Father. It’s not another throne; it’s the same throne. They sit on the same throne, together, and he is at the Father’s right hand, which means the Father’s power and glory forever.

St. Gregory the Theologian even went so far as to say he is God’s right hand. He is the One by whom God effects the victory, and so this becomes the center of the teaching in all of the four gospels and in the very first preaching of the Christians according to the book of Acts, which is the second volume of the gospel of St. Luke. St. Luke has two writings: the Gospel according to St. Luke and the book of the Acts of the Apostles. So when Peter is preaching, on the very first day of the Church’s existence, on Pentecost, he refers to this. You could read that, the second chapter of the book of Acts. We read all of this during the Easter season. He says:

Brethren, I may say to you confidently of the Patriarch David, that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet and knowing that God has sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his disciples upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades (that’s the realm of the dead), nor did his flesh see corruption—

He could not be corrupted. And by the way, that’s why he raises on the third day. Lazarus is dead four days, because on the fourth day you begin to stink. So he’s raised on the third day; that’s a very important point there.

...and he did not see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Therefore, being exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear—

Because he gives the Holy Spirit to his disciples only after he is crucified, raised, and glorified and seated at the right hand of the Father. And in the Scripture and in our liturgical services, you have that point stressed again and again. He ascends in order to send the Holy Spirit, in order to complete the saving activity of God, in order to let people, through him and by faith in him, live according to the Spirit of God. And we’re going to talk this afternoon about what that means; this morning we’re going to have a little more theoretical stuff here, and in the afternoon will be more on the practical: If all this is so, what does it mean for me? What does it mean for you? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for everything? That’s what we want to talk about. We don’t shoot low here. But anyway, it says:

For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself (David) says: The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, till I make thine enemies a stool for thy feet. Let all the house of Israel know therefore assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

And then a voice is going to come from the crowd and say, “If that’s the case, what, then, should we do? If that’s true, what shall we do?” And Peter begins with the same word John the Baptist used, the same word that Jesus used when he began preaching; the first thing he says is, “Repent. Change your mind. See things differently, now in the light of these events, the kingdom of God come into the world. Be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promise is tyou and to your children, and to all that are far off (that’s the Gentiles), everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” So this is how we see it in the holy Scripture.

Now, when we consider this fact, that Jesus is now glorified, everything that we do in our life is relating to him as seated at the right hand of the Father. We don’t pretend that we go back in time and be with him on earth and wonder how it feels and all that kind of stuff. That’s over; it’s done. He’s raised, he’s glorified, he’s divine, he’s with us in the Spirit, and we know him in the Spirit, not according to flesh. And then we can see clearly what this is all about, because he reveals it to us himself, and his apostles then, going to the Scripture, tell us what all of this means, how it works itself out.

But we have to know that this is how we relate to Christ now. Every time we go to church, especially at the Divine Liturgy, we’re related to Christ as seated at the right hand of the Father. When we have the holy Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy, we go to heaven to commune with him, seated at the right hand of the Father. We enter into the communion of God and his only Son by the Holy Spirit. That is now given to us, for which we were created in the beginning, to live the life of God, to share the communion with God, to have God as our own Abba Father. This is why we were made, and humanity blew it from the beginning! Therefore it was part of the divine plan, the mystery even hidden from the angels, according to St. Paul—it’s now revealed in us that it was the plan of God from the beginning that if there would be a world at all, and certainly a planet earth with free human beings made in the image and likeness of God, then creation is not enough. There has to be re-creation, there has to be salvation, there has to be redemption, there has to be healing. We’ve got to go through this suffering. There’s no other way for us to be with Christ in God, in God’s kingdom by the Spirit. There’s no other way.

This is— One of my students used to call it “the bad news of the good news,” because what we’re going to see is, unless we suffer with him, we don’t reign with him; unless we die with him, we don’t live with him. If we deny him, he’ll deny us. But if we are faithless, he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself. And I just quoted an early Christian hymn from the letter to Timothy in the New Testament. If we have suffered with him, we will reign with him; if we die with him, we will live with him. If we deny him, he’ll deny us. But if we’re faithless, he still remains faithful to us, no matter what, because he cannot deny himself. So this is the situation of the Christians, and this is what we see witnessed to on the pages of the New Testament.

Let’s see some others of these same testimony here, and probably one of the greatest in the New Testament is the letter to the Ephesians. I will just, again, read to you what he says about God the Father. I would beg you to read these things when you get home and have the time and so on, but this is very, very important to be able to do this. Okay, here’s what the author writes to the Ephesians—probably not Paul himself, but one of his disciples, maybe Apollos. It’s considered a Pauline epistle, but it’s pretty clear he didn’t write it with his own hand; it’s just not his style.

In fact, he probably dictated it, the Scripture, because he couldn’t see. St. Paul had— The thorn in his flesh was probably his blindness, and if you know he sometimes signs his name at the end. He says, “See what a large hand I write to you with, my own hand,” because he wasn’t able to write because he couldn’t see very well. So he had various people writing things for him, and we even know the names of some of them. For example, a guy named Tertius wrote the letter to the Romans, dictated by Paul, but he wrote it. “I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you.” You find that carefully there. But you see it in different ways.

Here I’ll just read this from Ephesians. It says—he’s praying that God would give us the understanding of the mystery of Christ and so on. It’s the longest sentence in the entire Scripture; one chapter is one sentence long. He keeps adding things. I’ll read the end of it:

...That you would know what are the riches of the glorious inheritance of the saints and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might, which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand...

Got it again, right? It’s there again. It’s everywhere!

...and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also that which is to come, and he has put all things under his feet…

“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put all the enemies under your feet.’ ” Well, he has put all things under his feet:

...and has made him the head over all things…

The head over all things—ta panta, all things—not just the Church or Christians, but the head over everything, all things.

...for the sake of the Church (ti ekklesia), which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

I don’t know how you unpack that sentence. “The fullness of him who fills all in all.” Makes him the head over all things for the sake of the Church. And then he dwells on that theme throughout the entire epistle, the entire epistle to the Ephesians. Let me just read another part of it. He says, “Who is this who has ascended in glory and is seated at the right hand?” The answer of the New Testament is: “He who first descended.” He who first descended, because he does it for us, to take us to the presence of God, with his own flesh, into the very holy of holies. The letter to the Hebrews here is absolutely important. We heard it all during Lent, how Jesus as the great High Priest offers his own body to the Father, on the tree of the cross. He becomes a high priest according to Melchizedek, no longer Levi. If he was on the Church in history, he would not be a priest, because he’s not a Levite, but now there’s a new priesthood, and it’s into the sanctuary not made by human hands.

In fact, one of the things they accuse Jesus of was predicting the destruction of the Temple. And he spoke of his own body and he would rebuild it up. But it’s very, very important for Christians that the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed before these writings were even written. It was destroyed never to be rebuilt again, because the God who made heaven and earth doesn’t dwell in temples made by human hands. Heaven is his throne; earth is his footstool. This is what got St. Stephen stoned to death in the book of Acts. That’s what he says. Read Stephen’s speech, a very long speech. Not the kind of thing you’d say when they’re throwing stones at you, so it’s constructed for our sake, what all that means. This is what you have. He descended. Here’s another thing to think about here.

Grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high, he led a host of captives and he gave gifts to men.”

St. Paul changes the New Testament line from the psalm. The original psalm said, “When he ascended on high and led a host of captives, we gave gifts to God.” Now he’s saying God is giving the gifts to us! See, it’s turned around. In fact, as it says in the book of Acts, this preaching turned the world upside-down, turned it all upside-down. Then it said:

And in saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?

That was the symbol for death, for being dead, Hades, the lower pit.

For he who descended is also he who ascended, far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things, and his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets (and so on) for the preaching of the Gospel.

So it’s to fill all things, to fill all things with all the fullness of God. That’s why he came, and to do everything that was necessary.

I would just beg you at this point to realize how central this is.

Now I’d like to make just a comment, personal comment. I’ve been a priest over 50 years, and I would say that the feast of the Ascension is by far the worst-attended of all of the feasts of the Church, probably because it comes on a Thursday, and it’s always a Thursday. Fr. Paul Lazor, my good friend, who’s suffering quite a bit right now, he used to joke with his students in liturgy, saying, “How do you set up the service in church when Ascension falls on Sunday?” [Laughter] And then the students would come up with brilliant combinations of Ascension and Sunday and the tone and this, and he’d say, “It never comes on Sunday. It’s always on Thursday.” [Laughter] And we’re going to get to that in a minute, here, too. Just throwing these things out.

Maybe it’s because of the springtime, maybe it’s because of the post-Paschal season, maybe it’s because it’s the time the sun is shining, you’ve got to plant your tomatoes, you’ve got to mow your lawn, you have the kids graduating from school, you’ve got to go to the kids’ concerts, the end of the school year is coming, you’re driving all over like a crazy person, and it just somehow gets missed. And then the Sunday after Ascension, which still sings about the Ascension, very often it’s not very prominent, and very often there’s no sermon given about this very central act of the Christian Gospel, the enthronement of the crucified Christ at the right hand of God for the sake of our salvation, and that’s how it is now. Everything in the Creed was the past or the future; this is what it is now, that we live underneath, so to speak, beneath the Christ who was glorified.

Now, here also it has to be said that this conviction that you find in these letters and so on, in the New Testament itself, the four gospels, if you take them as originally written—and why I say that is because Mark’s gospel obviously has an attached chapter that was given later—but if you take Mark, Matthew, Luke, and then John, the only one that speaks specifically about the Ascension is Luke. It’s not in Mark, it’s not in Matthew, and it’s not in John, as such, as an event. Matthew, you have the risen Christ appearing. The gospel ends with him saying, “Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, doing everything that I have commanded to do.” And then he says, “And behold, I am with you always, till the end of the age.” So he’s saying, “I’m leaving, but I’m with you always,” but there’s no word or description about an act of ascension.

In Mark, if you take Mark— And by the way, here I would just say— Sometimes people just ask me… I think I’ve said this before in Cleveland, but I think it’s important. Sometimes they ask me, they have asked me in my—when I used to work—why there are four gospels. Why are there not more? Why do we have them? Why? Tatian in the third century tried to harmonize them all; he couldn’t do it. And if you take the gospels as given, take, for example, Christmas, there’s a Nativity narrative in Matthew and one in Luke. There’s no way that you can harmonize them. They are different versions of the same reality. The basic facts are the same, but the twist that’s given to them to understand is because Matthew is Torah—it’s for the Jews; it’s Law. In fact, it is the New Testament Torah. It’s even written in five books, the [gospel] of Matthew, five sets of teachings, like Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy… It’s patterning that, and it’s about how Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and the King of Israel and the salvation of the world.

Mark’s gospel, which is the first one and the shortest one, it’s what you would call in literary language an apocalyptic gospel. You have the clash between good and evil, light and darkness. Only the demons know who he is. No human being confesses Jesus as the Son of God in Mark’s gospel until the Roman soldier at the cross says, “Truly this was God’s Son”—that’s it! And nobody sees the risen Christ. It ends—the original gospel ends with these words: “And he rolled the stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he laid. When the sabbath was over, they went there. The tomb was opened. They saw the angel. He says, ‘Don’t be amazed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth. He was crucified. He has risen. He is not here. See the place where ye laid him. And go and tell the disciples—and Peter’ ” By the way, the reason it says, “And Peter,” because Peter was not in good favor at that time. In fact, in John’s gospel, Peter has to be replaced—rather, not replaced, he has to confess three times that he loves Jesus so that he could take his place as the leader of the apostles. And there’s a big trouble about Peter there in the New Testament.

And it says, “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s how it ends. That’s how the original one ends. Then it adds some appearances, obviously, to me, anyway, taken from the Life of Paul and the miracles that happened when the apostles were preaching, so then they’re added, like reference to the walk to Emmaus by Luke and Cleopas, appearing to the apostles at the supper, the new tongues that came out. But there’s no specific mention. And even in the addition, you have again this affirmation: “So, then, the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.” There, you got it again, right? “And they went forth and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it. Amen.” And that meant the signs that the apostles did, by healing, raising the dead, preaching the Gospel, casting out demons, doing the very things that Jesus himself did, now by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus; whereas in the gospels Jesus does all this in his own name. He does it himself; that’s why they killed him.

So Matthew is— Mark is, we might say, apocalyptic type of writing. Matthew is a Torah, a teaching type of writing. Luke-Acts is the chronicles; it’s the historical type of writing. That’s why you have this long thing about the 40th day, being together, they go out—that’s the one that we read in church. And why we read it in church is because it’s the only description we have in the New Testament, with the beginning of the book of Acts, where Luke, the same author, tells the same story again, and shows that they still didn’t get it. They still didn’t get it! They said to him, “Oh, are you going to now bring the kingdom to Israel?” He says, “Just forget it already, okay?” [Laughter] “Wait for the Holy Spirit to come and you’ll see something.” I mean, they still didn’t get it!

And then of course they thought he was coming soon, but then the question is: When is soon? And whenever that’s asked, it was already dealt with in the New Testament, because they thought he was coming soon; he didn’t come. Well, then the author of 2 Peter says, “Well, God has his own time table. What is soon for God? With him, one day is like a thousand years; a thousand years is like a day. And the full number has to be completed.” I still think the best answer of why he has not come yet, at least my personal favorite answer is: I’m sure glad that he didn’t, because if he had, I wouldn’t exist and neither would you. He gave us a chance to be human beings and to be Christians, until the full number is completed and until the massive apostasy takes place. And I believe the mass apostasy is taking place in our world right now, frankly. Look at Ukraine and Russia; it’s a total tragedy. And look at Christianity generally. So it seems to me we’re at the end.

So you have Apocalypse, you have Law. The Sermon on the Mountain is the new Christian teaching. “It was said of old—I say to you. It was said of old—I say to you. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you’ll never enter the kingdom of God.” So then you have Jesus teaching, and then you have John, where it’s not mentioned at all either—at all, at all, in John’s gospel—which is the theology. It’s the wisdom literature; it’s the insight into the deepest mysteries, that is reserved for those who accept Jesus as crucified, raised, glorified. That’s the center of the Gospel.

Now, it’s very interesting that the Church Fathers, as well as our liturgy, our Orthodox Church liturgy, point out that what has been proclaimed about Jesus, particularly in the book of Acts and so on, is what could be publicly proclaimed, what could be preached. And what could be preached, basically, is nothing more than that he was crucified. It’s the only thing we can say about him without faith. And according to the Scripture and the Fathers and the liturgy, the Incarnation—the birth of the Virgin, his childhood—it’s all passed over in silence. All the Gnostic writings, which there are many of them, they tell every little detail about his childhood, which is just fabulous stupidity, basically. But the canonical gospels say practically nothing, except that he was obedient to his parents, he worked, he didn’t open his divine mouth till he was 30: and by the time he was 12 he knew he was special; by the time he was 30 he knew he was the Messiah. And probably didn’t understand the full impact of that even until he was raised from the dead by God the Father.

And it’s interesting that the Scripture always says, “God raised him from the dead.” Why? Because he identified totally with us, and we don’t have the power to raise our self. It isn’t as if Jesus said to God, “Okay, I’ll die. You can forsake me on the cross. I’ll love you anyway with all my all my heart and soul and mind. I’ll love all the people who kill me. I’ll forgive all of them. But if you don’t act to raise me up on the third day, I’m going to raise myself.” [Laughter] No. The identity with us is complete, total. Total. God had to act to vindicate his Son and to prove that he was his own Son and to seat him at the right hand, forever, and to allow us to have the same relationship with God that he has. That’s why he came.

So we don’t have a kind of a graphic picture of the ascension of Christ except in the end of St. Luke and the book of Acts. It’s the only place in the New Testament we have it. Now, if we just take a look at what it said there about this, this is what we find. He says to them—these are the final words of Luke’s gospel—

“These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to the understanding of the Scripture, and he said to them, “Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses to these things, and behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

That means the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit.

Then he led them out as far as Bethany. Lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into the heavens. And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God.

Now, the book of Acts, by the same author, puts it this way:

In the first book, O Theophilus—

And, by the way, “Theophilus” may not be an actual historical person. It may mean “the one who loves God”; Theophilus means “the one who loves God, God-lover.”

—I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days—

There you get the 40 days. That’s why it’s on Thursday, 40 days after Pascha.

—and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, “You heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days, you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (Pentecost.)

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It’s not for you to know times and seasons, which the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

And “the ends of the earth” probably meant Rome. Rome: that’s why Paul had to get there.

And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and the cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold: two men stood by them in white robes and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gawking, gazing into the heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

So the same way he disappears, the same way he’s going to reappear at the end of the age.

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath’s day journey.

And so they go there and they elect a successor to Judas, and then Pentecost happens, which is not only the apostles, but 120 were in the room, including Jesus’ mother, Mary, at the day of Pentecost. So this is how it’s given to us in the Scripture.

Now, there are several things here important to look at, to realize. Number one is that the preaching of the crucifixion of Christ and the crucified one has been raised and glorified, that’s the center of the Christian faith, and that’s where we begin, with that particular conviction. And then we can be initiated into the other events, like the Incarnation at Christmas, like the Transfiguration on the mountain, like the Ascension into heaven. These are things that nobody saw. They were not historical in the sense that if somebody was hanging around they could see it. For example, the Transfiguration which is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but not in John. It’s clearly the teaching that this was revealed to Peter, James, and John, with Moses and Elijah, the Law, the Prophets; the living and the dead. But you can’t say if there was someone hiding on Mount Tabor—and, I don’t know, they were hunting up there or something—they’d say, “Gee, there’s something going on over there. What’s going on? Let’s go take a look. Oh my God, this guy’s shining like light! These other guys are sleeping—” That can’t happen; nobody saw that. Nobody saw that. They couldn’t see it.

They couldn’t see it, and it’s the same thing with the Ascension. In Luke, for example, a cloud covered him, he was hidden, and it was over. It was over. That was it: the only description we have. Now, it’s very clear in our Church Tradition that that was not something that some passerby could see. That was only for the eyes of faith. In other words, if a guy was drinking coffee near the mountain of olives, on that Thursday, if it was a Thursday—40 days simply means a completed act; that’s what it means in the Bible. Everything takes place 40—it means the completed act is over and we’re at a new point now. So you have that 40-day symbolism there.

But you can’t imagine that somebody would be sitting there and saying, “What the heck’s that?” [Laughter] They didn’t have airplanes in those days, you know. It’s not a drone to bomb innocent people. And then one says to the other, “I don’t know… Kind of looks like that guy Jesus.” “Yeah, I wonder what he’s doing.” [Laughter] “Yeah, it looks like he’s going to heaven.” Nobody saw that! Nobody saw that. They saw that. They realized that. And as a matter of pure fact, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, Jesus was raised into that glory of God on the very day that he was raised, on Pascha Sunday itself! He appears in glory to his disciples. They don’t recognize him at first. He comes to show himself. He comes to show that he has flesh and blood. He tells Thomas, “Touch my side,” and then Thomas is the only one in the whole four gospels who calls him God. My patron saint. “My Lord and my God”—the only one.

And you have these appearances of the risen Christ in various ways to various people. First to the myrrh-bearers at the tomb: Mary Magdalene, who tells the others. Peter and John go there according to John. They see it’s empty. John already starts to understand what’s going on; Peter’s still in darkness. They go back. They’re wondering. They’re afraid. They’re hiding. I always think about the sons of thunder, Zebedee: James and John. They’re cowering in the upper room, afraid of the Jews, and their mama’s out on the street with myrrh, going to anoint the body of the corpse of Jesus that she thinks is dead and is going to start stinking pretty soon. She didn’t think she’d find an empty tomb! And probably that’s why the women were the first to witness it, because they loved him even when he was dead and had nothing to give. You’ve got to love him as a corpse. You’ve got to love him as a corpse, when he was nothing to give you, or is not giving you anything, at least the things you want. That’s what faith is, that’s what love is, that’s what obedience is. And they loved him; they loved him to the end. And then of course the others come along in due time, the men.

But they’re there, and they see that it’s empty, but then he appears to Mary in the garden. He appears to Luke and Cleopas. He sits with them, he eats with them, he opens their minds to the Scriptures. He goes to the shore; they’re fishing. And then they realize—Peter realizes: It’s the Lord! I always wonder why he was naked, he puts on his clothes and jumped into the water. If you’re naked, why’d you put your clothes on, then jump into the water? But he was kind of upset, I would say. Sometimes I think those apostles thought, “Oh, no, here we go again!” [Laughter] “What’s going to happen now?” But they didn’t recognize him. But he eats with them; he’s with them. But then he vanishes. Like with Luke and Cleopas: he vanishes!

So he’s coming already in the glory of the kingdom. You might say he’s coming already, being enthroned with the Father and here on earth revealing himself to those who see him. But that’s not anything you can preach to anybody outside. You can preach that he was the Messiah, he fulfilled all the messianic signs, he was put to death and he was killed, and then some say he was raised—but you can’t verify the resurrection except by faith.

And that’s why Jesus doesn’t bother revealing himself to people who are not going to believe in him. They go to Pontius Pilate and say, “Hey, Pontius, it’s me.” Or to Caiaphas or Annas. They would think they’re nuts and not accept him anyway, because that’s not how it works. So these things are hidden. They’re part of the mystery of faith—the Incarnation, the glorification, the enthronement, the coming of the Spirit, the life of the Church, the holy Eucharist, the worship of the Church—all this is part of the inner life of the Church. It’s not something you preach to people on the street—the virgin birth or the Holy Trinity.

These, according to our Church Fathers, they’re mysteries of the life within the Church. They’re not things that you can announce publicly. St. Basil made a distinction. You have kerygma, which you can preach to anybody, and invite them to hear his teaching, to witness his passion, to come to believe that really he was God’s Son. Then they can be baptized and enter into the resurrection, receive the Spirit, and live the life we were created to live from the beginning, saved by Christ to do so. But if that order is violated, it can’t happen. So you’ve got to begin— I’m going to say this in my sermon tomorrow about the blind boy. He first says the man called Jesus did it. Then he calls him a prophet. Then he calls him the Son of God. You’ve got to go through those stages. You can’t jump in with theosis and Holy Trinity and virgin birth and Mary’s womb. That’s actually in some sense a blasphemy. Even to talk about it outside the Church… There’s that wonderful kontakion, the most ancient one in Christianity, about Mary: “Let no impure hand touch you, O Theotokos.”

We don’t blab about these things on the street to people. The Eucharist—got to eat his flesh, drink his blood. The problem is: the toothpaste is out of the tube. And all of this has been so screwed up that you can’t even do— You despair of it ever being put back into order—at least I do. But there was that order. There was that way that it was done.

Now here I would like to point out something very important for us Orthodox, especially in this church of yours—the building, I mean, with all the icons—is that when we proclaim our faith, not only in words but in images, there is an iconographic device that shows us that there are things that only the eyes of faith and the faithful can see. They’re not historical in the sense that anyone hanging around could see it. Now, the entrance to Jerusalem on a donkey: anyone who was there could see it. Jesus being lifted up on the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem: anyone around could see it. But as our liturgy even says, the Incarnation in the cave of Bethlehem was in secret, wasn’t—didn’t— Jesus didn’t appear publicly until his baptism of John in the Jordan, and where he showed that he was the Messiah who came to die, because baptism was a sign of death, and that he had to go through his passion in order to bring the kingdom of God to the world. There was no other way it could be done. He had to be crucified, he had to die, he had to die the way he did die, and that’s extremely important.

So there are things that anybody around could have seen, but then there are others that not everybody could see. And when these things are depicted for worship in the truth as a confession of faith, you had this particular device called the mandorla. See?

Fr. Alexander: Right behind you.

Fr. Tom:: Yeah, there’s a mandorla there. That’s right. Because nobody saw Jesus pulling humanity out of the tombs. Nobody saw that. In fact, nobody saw the risen Christ except believers. But when you have that— And by the way, that’s probably better than this one—this one’s round, but that one, that mandorla is, you might say, more traditional, because the word “mandorla” means an almond. It’s an almond-shape. And when you are put in there and you have that glory of God around you, it means nobody can see this except those to whom it is revealed and who are prepared to see it. And only those are prepared to see it who are already shown their willingness to follow, to die with him, to be with him through the whole passion and death in order to be exalted with him and enthroned with him. That’s how it works.

So whenever you have that kind of an event—if you take the Last Supper, for example. If somebody was hanging around, look through the window, they would see a supper. They would see a supper, but they wouldn’t see the Transfiguration. They wouldn’t see the destruction of death. They wouldn’t see the Ascension. Those are the things that are revealed to the eyes of faith. And that’s very, very important.

Now, this icon and the proclamation is very important because in this icon the Church with the most perfect Christian in the middle of it—Mary, Christ’s Mother, Panagia—is bigger than the ascended Christ—takes two-thirds of the icon—because the really important thing is: what are we doing now that he’s enthroned? And on the icon, as a matter of fact, you have the angels—you can’t tell whether he’s coming or going. Is he going into heaven or is he returning to us? And the whole point is the Christians live under— The greatest of their expectations was that he will come again in glory, because the first time he came, he came in the form of a slave to be murdered outside the city of Jerusalem among malefactors, the most humiliating death that a human being, and a Jew especially, could possibly die, in order to enter into his glory. And if we don’t imitate him in that, we will not reign with him. That’s for this afternoon.

Fr. Alexander: Is St. Paul in that Ascension?

Fr. Tom: Yeah, well, I’ve got to continue. Here you have in the picture, your perceptive pastor knows, that Paul is in the picture. It’s probably Paul there. Here it’s very clear who Paul is. Paul is always bald-headed with a big head and a brown beard. That’s Paul; that’s Peter. Paul was not at all historically even a Christian when Jesus was taken up into the heavens, having been crucified, raised, and glorified.

Paul is also on the icon of Pentecost. He was not there. I always felt a little bit sorry for Matthias. You know, he gets elected to replace Judas, and then he never gets on an icon. [Laughter] They put Paul there all the time. But Paul is important because it shows that you have the Twelve—you have Peter at the head, you have, so to speak, the Church institutionally, the Qahal Israel, the new coventant Church, the fullness of him who is all in all, the very Body and Bride of Christ—and then you have Paul, this interloper and so on.

I can’t resist saying how once I was talking to a bishop—sometimes we do talk—and I was saying— I was trying to encourage him to get more involved in things, take more responsibility for church life and so on. And this bishop said to me, “Well, you know, I’m kind of an outsider in the Church. I’m not Russian, and I’m not really involved with everything. I’m kind of like an outsider. And so I don’t think that I should take that kind of an activity initiative.” And, God forgive me, but I spontaneously answered, “So was St. Paul.” [Laughter] But he had no qualms about going to Jerusalem, facing the pillars, so-called pillars, face to face, and having a fight with Peter and with James, the Lord’s brother, the first bishop of Jerusalem. Oh, yeah, he did that.

And so you have God’s activity that is not bound by the institution of the Church in that same way. But still, when Paul sees the risen Christ and converts, he gets baptized, and he participates in the Eucharist. You know, it’s a very interesting thing also: in the New Testament, we would have no record of the Eucharist at all in the early Church anywhere unless some Corinthians were showing up drunk and making a scene of it and St. Paul had to chastise them. So that chapter in 1 Corinthians is the only reference to the Eucharist that was obviously celebrated all the time by Christians, but it wasn’t part of Scripture. Thank God he did that because at least you got it in Scripture once, so it’ll satisfy some particular people who feel if it’s not in Scripture, it’s not important. That’s crazy. What’s in Scripture is like a drop in the ocean compared to what the faith was that people were living in the Holy Spirit and passing on to one another.

But everything is in silence; it’s within the mystery of the faith, the mystery hidden even from the angels and only revealed to them in the Church. And one of the interesting things that you find in the service of the Ascension is one that you find in all the services of the great feasts of Christ in the Church. We had a student at St. Vladimir’s when I was a student, long time ago, who was a kind of funny guy, witty guy. Fr. Alexander Schmemann taught liturgy class. Sometimes there were exams like: What was said in the Liturgy? What did the verses say? What did the canon say? What did the song say? What biblical readings were read? What were the three Old Testament readings?—which are very interesting for Ascension. You have the Mount of Olives one, very short; you have Isaiah about the ascension into heaven; you have everything that was done in the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets relative to God is now said about Jesus.

The whole Psalter is about Christ; that’s how it was interpreted in the early Church: you read it through the lens of the crucified and glorified Christ. Without that, the psalms don’t make much sense about anything, because they’re prefigurations of what was to be fulfilled, and that’s why we still sing the psalms in church. “The Lord has gone up with a shout, the Lord—” I mean, that’s what we sing on Ascension. We use 47, 48, 49, 110: these are the psalms that we use, and they’re called the psalms of ascent. They were read in the Old Testament when they went up to Jerusalem for the enthronement of Yahweh in the Jerusalem Temple. And that was a prefiguration of the enthronement of the Messiah on the clouds over all the ages when the whole story was finally complete. So it was a prefiguration, and that’s why some people claim that the festival of the Ascension liturgically is the most Jewish, biblical, Old Testamental feast in our entire Church, because everything had to do with the fulfillment, and the ultimate fulfillment is seated at the right hand of the Father with the marks of the cross on his body.

At the feast day, we’ll even sing: “We magnify you, we magnify you, O life-giver Christ, who for our sake has ascended into heaven in glory”—and then the punchline—“in your most-pure flesh.” In the flesh, with your body, because that’s what’s saved and glorified.

So you have this understanding of things, this fulfillment of things in this way, but for the Christians you might almost dare to say that the festival of Ascension was much more about us on earth than it was about Christ, because in a sense he was raised through the glory of the Father on Easter Sunday. As a matter of fact, in St. John’s gospel, he gives the Holy Spirit to the apostles on Pascha night. There’s no 50 days there; there’s no Pentecost there, although the feast of Pentecost is mentioned. And then of course you have the Church replacing these feasts. Our Easter, Pascha, was the Old Testament Passover. Our Transfiguration was the Old Testament feast of booths. Our Christmas and the feast of lights was the old festival of lights, the Hanukkah. And our celebration of the Ascension was the old celebration of the enthronement of the one true God over the people of Israel in the Jerusalem Temple. Then it gets widened out to the whole of creation, bringing it out to all the Gentiles as the ultimate act of God.

But he still has to return again in glory, and we wait for his return. We pray for his return. The Lord’s Prayer is nothing but a prayer for Christ to come. “May your kingdom come. May your will be done. May your name be kept holy. As in the heavens, in the glorified Christ and all the saints, so also in us, his members on earth, while we’re still living here.” And then we say, “Give us today our super-essential bread.” It doesn’t mean “daily”; it’s a mis-translation. It means Christ himself, the bread of the future age, because in church we eat and drink with him in the kingdom at the right hand of the Father. And then it says: “And forgive us, as we have already forgiven everybody else, and when the tribulation and the trial comes, don’t let us fail; don’t let us chicken out; don’t let us fall apart—let us stand.” See, that’s what “lead us not into temptation” means in the Aramaic idiom, “but rather, deliver us from the evil one”: every son of [un]righteousness, every man of lawlessness, every anti-Christ, every servant of the beast, every evil spirit, every darkness, and Satan himself, because that war is still going on, and that’s what’s going on in the Church until Christ comes again in glory.

And so in that sense, according to the Scripture, the Messiah has not yet come. The Messiah has not yet come. He has not come in glory to establish God’s kingdom throughout the whole universe. He came in the form of a slave to be crucified.

I often tell the story of this Karl Stern, whose books I love, who was a Jew and a secular, then he became an Orthodox Jew, then he became a Christian, Roman Catholic. He says he remembers once in synagogue, under Hitler— He escaped because he had an American fellowship, actually. Made it to America, but all his family was killed in the Holocaust. He said someone asked the rabbi, “Maybe the Messiah came. Maybe we missed him.” He’d probably heard some Christians… And the rabbi gave a perfect answer, absolutely perfect, A+. He looked out the window and said, “No, he hasn’t come yet.” [Laughter] “The dead are still dead. The poor are still poor. The blind are still blind. Injustice is still being done. It’s all over a mess all over the earth. He has not yet come.” And we would have to say: Yeah, that’s true. He hasn’t come—in glory. But the One who is coming, we know who he is: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. That’s the difference, and we preach that. And most important, we live by that. And that’s why you have the Church here glorifying him, praising him, and calling for him to come, the oldest, most ancient Aramaic Christian prayer is: “Maranatha; come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly.” And that’s what we still pray: Come. We’re waiting for him to come, and we bear witness to him until he comes. And this is what we have, with the Theotokos in the middle, the apostles, worshiping God, kept by the angels.

And I can finish my story here about that student who said, “If you’re asked to comment on the Liturgy of any of the great feasts of the Lord and you don’t know what to say, there’s one sentence you can always say and it’ll always be right: The angels were amazed.” The angels were amazed. And, by the way, the angels, according to the Scriptures and the Fathers, they weren’t even aware of the Incarnation. They didn’t see the full— They themselves only came to the full realization when they see this crucified Man being enthroned above them! High above the heavens, over everybody, and even this Mary who’s here, she’s more honorable than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim—all the angels. We have been exalted with him into the very presence of God, and that’s what this festival is all about. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s what we celebrate.

It’s very interesting that in this festival practically every other stichera at vespers, at matins, it says, “The angels were dazzled. The angels were amazed.” They couldn’t imagine seeing this crucified guy with this bozrah, the flesh and blood—that’s one of the reasons at vespers, coming into the very presence of God and being seated on the throne with the Father, realizing that he is the eternal Son of God, which they could never even begin to imagine. As someone once said, their divine minds—and all they are is minds, angels: there’s no body—they were blown, blown to imagine that this was the plan of God from all eternity. And it was.

So this is what we celebrate; this is what we have there. And it isn’t as if Jesus were going around for 40 days hiding behind a tree and then appearing and then hiding, and then on 40 days he says, “Okay, this is it. I’m leaving now.” [Laughter] In fact, he left, but he still appeared to Paul. In other words, he wasn’t playing hide-and-seek. He wasn’t resuscitated for more life on earth. He was appearing to the apostles in his glory—in his glory. But showing that he was the same One who was crucified, and he had to be crucified to enter into that glory, and so do we. And that’s what this afternoon will be more about. [Applause]