Fr. Stephen De Young: So. Any other questions before we sort of dive in? Okay, so when I say “dive in,” we are going to dive in, because St. John’s gospel here, beginning in 1:1, dives right in. He’s got sort of this poetic… The first 18 verses are sort of this poetic introduction, which is very different [from] the other three. St. Matthew and St. Luke have genealogy material and sort of try and locate us historically: Here’s when these things happened and then start with Jesus’ birth and then go from there. St. Mark starts relatively abruptly, but he goes into Jesus being baptized, and the story goes from there. St. John, we can already see, is taking a different approach, because he begins with a poem. He’s going to tell us who Jesus is not by telling us when and where he lived or who his ancestors were, but by poetically describing who Jesus really is.

Q1: Is that kind of similar to the beginning of Genesis as well? Genesis kind of begins poetically.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Genesis 1 through about 2:2 is basically a poem about the creation of the world. So John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So you notice the first three words, “In the beginning,” is lifted directly from Genesis. In the Hebrew it’s Bereshit bara Elohim (“In the beginning, God created…”); in the Greek it’s En arche ho Theos (“In the beginning God…” So when St. John begins—and in the Greek it’s “in the beginning was the Word.” It’s very striking that he’s already put the word in the position that “God” occupies in Genesis. It’s also important that the verb he uses when he says “was” is a particular type of Greek word called an imperfect, that refers to not something that just happened in the past, but something that was going on continuously in the past. So he’s saying, “In the beginning—”

Q1: It was still going on?

Fr. Stephen: Right. “In the beginning, the Word already was existing,” so not “In the beginning, the Word came into being,” but “In the beginning, the Word already was.” He was already there.

And “the Word,” of course, is our common English translation of Logos. Logos is kind of more complex than that as a word. Logos can refer to… It’s the root where we get the word “logic.” It can refer to a pattern of meaning, so you can see how that applies to a word, a word as connected to a meaning, but it could also refer to a structure or a pattern, and so sometimes it’s translated in other contexts “reason,” not in the sense of “my reason” but in the sense of the reason for something.

Q1: The cause?

Fr. Stephen: Sort of the underlying motive. Yeah, the reason for existing. And so by referring to—as we’re going to see, this is going to be Jesus—referring to Jesus as the Logos, the Logos of creation, he’s not just talking, giving him a title, but he’s saying that Christ is sort of the reason behind creation.

Q1: The structure?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the structure. It’s similar—in Proverbs 9, there’s some very similar things said, such that St. John is probably picking up on them, about wisdom. In the beginning, wisdom sort of providing the pattern for everything that God created, and so it’s sort of a parallel idea here. But the change that St. John makes there from wisdom is that “wisdom” is sort of an abstract concept; the Logos, we’re going to see, is a Person, has personal qualities.

Q1: Now, when his readers hear that word, logos, right there at the beginning, what meaning does it convey to them? Because, of course, I was taught the old-fashioned: This is all Greek philosophy here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s Stoicism. [Laughter]

Q1: Right, so what does it mean to these non-Greek philosophical people who are hearing this word about five words into the Gospel?

Fr. Stephen: Right, Stoicism would not have been their first point of reference on hearing it! Well, assuming they understood it as “word,” in the Old Testament, the Word of the Lord is very commonly spoken of in terms of the prophets. It’s sort of the stair— It’s the debar Yahweh, and it’s spoken of in terms of, at the beginning of a prophet’s ministry or when he’s called to do a particular thing, it’ll say—it’s usually translated in English: “The Word of the Lord came to… Elijah” or “The Word of the Lord came to Amos,” or “The Word of the Lord came to Hosea, saying…” And so that would have been the more immediate.

Q1: So that’s… The Word of the Lord is not— It’s not the prophet’s message, but it’s what brings the prophet the message.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s the intermediary between God and the prophet, that brings the message and empowers them to do it. So that’s an element of it, too. And so St. John is also projecting that back into the creation, tying it together with that idea of wisdom in the creation so that it’s not just something back at the beginning, but, see, now you’ve got the Word playing a role all the way through the Old Testament history of Israel, right up to the present day.

Q1: So they might be thinking, “This Word that was at the beginning is what inspired Jeremiah, Isaiah…”

Fr. Stephen: Has come to the prophets, has come to the… Right. And so it’s not just sort of the reason for the creation, but it’s also the reason all the way through, guiding Israel. So when he personalizes that word, you now have the Person of God, the Person of the Father, and the Logos existing in this relationship with God’s people throughout the Old Testament.

Q1: That’s pretty big!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] That’s why I said you can take one sentence and chew and chew and chew and chew on it! And he’s done that with just one—not even; we haven’t even done the whole sentence! [Laughter] The first clause of the sentence! But yeah, and it’s also important that this Prologue here isn’t just a poem to set things up, but he’s sort of laying the groundwork for everything he’s going to do as he tells the rest of his story. He’s sort of: Here are my themes; here are the things to be looking for. It’s sort of a chorus: Here are the things to be looking for now as we go forward.

So he says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” and so this establishes that the Word and God are separate Persons. It’s not just another name for God, in other words, for a universal God. “And the Word was God.” [Laughter] So we already have what you could call binatarianism. Right here we have one God, but this God now we see two personal existences: one that’s called God proper—ho Theos with a definite article: the God—and one that is the Word. But they are both God, singular. So we already have that.

Now, a note for our Jehovah’s Witnesses friends, because they like to come to this verse, and what they will point out is that in that last clause, what it literally says in Greek is: “And God was the Word.” There is not a definite article in front of “God”; there’s not a “the.” So they say, “See, it doesn’t say, “The Word was the God,” so they want to say it means the Word is a god.

Q1: Ah!

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s their understanding, because they reject the idea of the Trinity, and they try to do that from here. There are several problems. There are several problems with that, but the biggest one is that it’s a misunderstanding of the Greek language. I don’t want to go— I’m a language nerd; I don’t want to go too deep into this, because I’ll bore everyone to tears.

But it’s important to remember that both Greek and Latin didn’t really have articles the way we have articles. Latin has no definite article whatsoever; there is no word “the.” And in Greek, at Homer’s time, there was no “the.” And in Greek there has never been an indefinite article; there has never been “a.” So there’s not a way to say in Greek: “a god,” strictly speaking. That’s an English thing. In English we say, “The tree or a tree.” One of them refers to a specific tree; one of them refers to just any tree. To do that in Greek, you would have to say the equivalent of “this tree”—you could point at a tree: “this tree”—or you could say, “some tree.” But the word “God” here has neither of those in front of it, so it just means “god.” It doesn’t mean a god, it doesn’t mean the god; it just means “god.” So what it says is: “The Word was God.” [Laughter] The end.

So they’re trying to take the way English works and pretend that Greek works that way, and that’s largely because their founder didn’t actually know Greek. He made a translation of the Bible without ever studying Greek, which makes it hard to translate from Greek.

Q1: Impressive in its way. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But that’s not what it says. It very clearly says that the Word is God, and so what we see in this clause is: In the beginning, the Word is already existing. He’s with God, so there are two personal existences here, but they are one God.

Q1: Now it says “the Word,” but you’re saying it’s personal. Is there something in the Greek that’s indicating that “the Word” is not a thing but a person?

Fr. Stephen: We’ll get there in the next verse.

Q1: Oh, okay!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because verse two starts: “He!”

Q1: Ah!

Fr. Stephen: And Greek does have a developed pronoun system. So you can say “he,” you can say “she,” you can say “it.” And it doesn’t say “it”! It doesn’t say, “It was in the beginning”; it says, “he.” So here we have a personal pronoun referring back to the Logos. So he was in the beginning with God. That’s basically re-establishing, but adding that element to clarify: I’m talking about a Person, not, again, an abstract idea or principle, which is how the Stoics would have used Logos. I’m talking about a Person.

Q1: So really, up until the point of the word “he,” a person could be thinking of this as an abstraction, couldn’t they?

Fr. Stephen: Could.

Q1: And, no, it’s not an abstraction.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Hebrew does not have a neuter. Hebrew is a gendered language, so everything is either “he” or “she,” but Greek has a neuter: there’s “he,” “she,” and there’s an “it.” And nowhere here does he use the word “it” to refer to the Logos, before or after the Incarnation.

Verse three: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made.” Now this tells us a couple of things. Number one, it refers back to that idea of wisdom being the reason behind creation. The Logos here is the reason behind creation, and things are created through the Logos. But also, if all things are made through him and there’s nothing made that was not made by him, what does that mean automatically? It means he was not created. He was not made. It doesn’t say everything else was made through him, as if God created him and then he helped create everything else. No, everything that’s created was created by him in tandem with God in the beginning.

Q1: So creation is the product of both the Father and the Son.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: Not one or the other.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if we go back to Genesis, we also see at the very beginning of Genesis, the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. So when you put all those together, you see creation as the work of the whole Trinity together. Together.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” So there’s two pieces there. One of the most common ways of referring to God in the Old Testament was as the living God, the true and living God, and that was as opposed to idols. An idol is not alive: it’s a piece of wood, it’s a piece of stone, it’s a piece of metal. It’s not alive. It can’t act; it can’t do anything. Whereas God, because he is living, he can act. He can do things; he can accomplish his purposes; he can accomplish his will. And so we see here this is again adding to this idea that the Logos is a Person and not an abstract concept. He’s a Person, he’s alive, he’s active, he’s doing things. He’s not sort of a tool that God uses to create the universe, but he’s an active, living participant in that creation.

And it’s his life also that becomes the light of men, meaning already in the past in the Old Testament the Word of God has had this relationship with human beings. It’s not that in the old covenant they just knew— Sometimes people will think this way: The old covenant, well, they knew the Father, and in the New Testament we meet Jesus. [Laughter] And then at Pentecost we meet the Holy Spirit. But that’s not the case. He’s been living. He’s been active. He’s been known by the people of God since the very beginning, as has the Spirit.

Q1: Would you read that line again about the life of man?

Fr. Stephen: Right. “In him was life, and—“it should be “this life,” really, not “the life”—”...this life was the light of man.” So when man, even in the old covenant, when they came to know God, when they were illumined by God, it was by Christ. It was by Christ. And we’re going to see, as we go on, that part of what St. John is going to do—and St. Paul is going to do this, too, in several of his epistles—is they’re going to go back to the Old Testament, and they’re going to use what they now know about Jesus Christ to help them to understand some of the confusing passages in the Old Testament. For example, in Exodus, we read that Moses sat and spoke with God face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. And then, less than a chapter later, Moses tells God he wants to see him, and God says, “Well, you can’t see me, because if you see me, you’ll die.” [Laughter] Well, wasn’t he just sitting there and speaking to him face to face? Well, they’ll go back and read those passages and say, “Okay, well, here you see… You see God the Father who can’t be seen and has never been seen by anyone; and you see God the Word who is illumined, who has illumined men, and who has [been] seen.”

Q1: And talked to face to face.

Fr. Stephen: Right, whom we have seen. And several of those things. And the psalm: “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand.” Well, there’s two “Lord"s there, and they’re having a conversation. They’ll go back and say, “Oh, this is the Father and the Son. The Father is saying to the Son: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool,” and they’ll connect that to Christ’s ascension into heaven and sitting at the right hand of God. So they’ll sort of go back and understand those in terms of… And that’s what St. John is already keying in on here, that it isn’t just: the Word popped up now in our day, it’s that all along he’s been with the people of God. Now it’s that he’s going to come to us in a unique way, as we’ll see later on in this Prologue, but he was already present and already active and already alive.

Q1: So what we have received from God in the past, we have received through Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Through Christ, because, remember, the Word of the Lord comes to the prophets. That’s that intermediary, that he was revealing himself through the Word.

“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” “Comprehend” is probably a better translation than what you’ll see sometimes. Sometimes it’ll say “overcome,” but “comprehend” is probably a better translation of the Greek word. They’re both true. I mean, the darkness didn’t overcome Christ either, but the idea is that even though that light has been there, that those who are in sin did not perceive it.

So this is—again, one of the themes we’re going to see in St. John’s gospel he’s telegraphing right here, and that’s going to be his answer to the question: Why, if Jesus Christ is so present in the Old Testament, in the old covenant, why did the teachers of the Law, the people who’ve spent their lives studying the Old Testament Scriptures, why didn’t they recognize him when he came, when he showed up amongst them? Why didn’t they of all people say, “Oh! This is…” And St. John’s explanation for that is going to be: It’s because of their sinfulness. It’s their sinfulness [which] blinds them to seeing what is there, to realizing and recognizing it.

So for St. John it’s not a question of sort of a decision. We tend to think of accepting or rejecting Christianity as someone presents Christianity—here’s what Christianity teaches—and then we choose to accept it or reject it. Whereas for St. John there are going to be people who are righteous or holy, and they get that way by repentance, not just by being born saints. But there are people who are seeking after God: they’re going to see Jesus and they’re going to recognize him immediately. And then there are going to be other people who are sort of immersed in their sin, and it’s not going to matter what—I mean, Jesus can do every miracle in the world in front of them, and they’re blinded by their own sin and wickedness. So for him it’s not so much a decision as sort of whether someone’s heart has been prepared to receive Christ or not that’s going to decide whether people accept or reject him.

That’s what he’s laying out here at the beginning of the Prologue, that Christ’s light has been shining all the way through, all the way through the history of God’s people.

Q2: Having eyes but do not see…

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, but because people are sunken in wickedness, they can’t. They don’t see it.

Q1: There are Old Testament saints, so to speak, who did see.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: And whom we revere.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And there will be people, of course, in Jesus’ life—unfortunately, a minority of them, but there will be people in Jesus’ life who will encounter him and, yeah, and see. St. Simeon sees him as an infant, but because he’s a righteous man, because he’s been waiting on the Lord, because of his relationship with the Lord, he sees him and recognizes him even as an infant, immediately: This is him.

Q1: He’s sort of the last person to recognize Christ in the Old Testament way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he and St. John the Forerunner, who points: Look, there.

Q1: John the Forerunner had foreknowledge more than Simeon does.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he has a very unique role. Right, he has a unique… Yeah. And speaking of St. John the Forerunner… [Laughter] The very next verse:

“There was a man sent from God whose name was John.” So this is something that, in a lot of modern Christianity—it’s not as much the case in the Orthodox Church, but in a lot of modern Christianity, St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, is kind of minimized. I mean, he’s certainly mentioned and read about, but even in most Roman Catholic circles, there’s not a lot of veneration of St. John the Forerunner, especially compared to the Orthodox Church. But we see here just how central he is to the story that St. John is telling, that he needs to be—he and his witness need to be here in the Prologue. All four of the gospels include—even St. Mark’s gospel that doesn’t have anything about Jesus’ childhood, it starts with St. John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River and testifying to who he is.

Q1: Now I always thought that this passage about John the Forerunner in here was a sort of parenthetical insert to tell people: Don’t follow John the Baptist…

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to get that here in a minute, and when we finish these next couple verses, I’m going to come back around a little more on that.

“This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all through him might believe.” Now the “him” there is not referring to Jesus; the “him” there is referring to St. John. So this second verse here is pointing out what St. John the Forerunner’s role was. He came to bear witness to Jesus. Why? So that, through St. John’s testimony to who Jesus was, all might come—meaning all at that time might come—to follow Jesus.

He was not just sort of an Old Testament prophet who came and preached righteousness the way the Old Testament prophets did and was killed by the king the way a lot of the Old Testament prophets were, but he has this unique role in terms of Jesus, to give his testimony. And his testimony here again is—his testimony is especially important, considered especially important, that he vouched, that he pointed to Christ. So that his witness, his testimony, should cause anyone who hears it to accept that Jesus is who he says he is.

And then in the next verse: “He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness to that light, that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world.” So at the end there you have this idea that Christ, who has been this light throughout the old covenant, throughout the history of Israel, he’s been this light to people, now he’s coming into the world in a unique way. So there is both the fact that he’s always been present with God’s people, but now there is something unique happening. He’s coming in a special way that’s about to happen, and because he’s coming in that special way, St. John has this special mission to point to what’s happening, that this is now happening, this is now taking place.

Q1: So John knows and understands what is about to happen.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: And is proclaiming that so that other people are ready to hear it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He is—and we’ll get to, when it talks about him baptizing—preparing— And the reason he’s baptizing in the Jordan in particular… Remember, when Joshua led the people of Israel into the promised land, after they finally got there and Moses had died, he led them through the Jordan River, and the Jordan River parted.

Q1: Yes, like the Red Sea.

Fr. Stephen: And so St. John is now calling the people back out of the land to again pass through the Jordan. So he’s sort of creating this new people of God for Jesus now to come and rule and lead. So he is—that’s why he’s called the Forerunner, that he’s preparing the way in the sense that he’s preparing this people.

Q1: Do we know of any of the disciples or other followers of Christ who were first followers of John the Baptist?

Fr. Stephen: We know several of them were. St. Andrew was, which means very likely St. Peter was, his brother. Philip and Nathaniel were. So at least there were several that were.

Q1: See, that’s never been pointed out to me.

Fr. Stephen: ...that were originally followers of St. John.

Q1: It really helps make the whole John situation clearer if you realize that, yes, it worked! [Laughter] And here are some specific examples.

Fr. Stephen: And when St. John said, “He must increase and I must decrease,” he’s not just talking about his own humility. He is talking about his own humility, but he’s making a very literal statement of: “Now I’m handing off… I’ve done my part that I was called to by God, and now I’m giving this over to Christ, to do what he’s going to do.” Yeah?

Q3: Were John and Jesus related?

Fr. Stephen: They were cousins.

Q3: Okay, that’s what I thought.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they were cousins.

Q3: Okay, well, they never met again until adults?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because St. John had to flee. He was born— And it’s the beginning of St. Luke’s gospel, the first chapter, that tells about St. John’s birth. He was born not long before Jesus was born, and if you remember what happened after Jesus was born, Herod ordered all of the infants killed. And in hiding his son, Zacharias, his father, was killed by Herod’s troops in the Temple. And so St. John and his mother, St. Elizabeth, had to flee into the desert, and she ended up passing away in the desert, and so St. John grew up out in the desert, sort of by himself. And that’s part of the Elijah imagery around St. John. When St. John shows up, he’s sort of dressed like Elijah and he eats like Elijah and he’s out in the wilderness like Elijah. Remember, when Elijah was in the wilderness, he had the ravens bring him meat, and he had the stream and that kind of thing. So it’s the same kind of imagery, that St. John grew up out in the wilderness.

So then when he comes of age and begins his ministry, he comes out of the wilderness to preach to the people who are in the cities that they need to come out.

Q3: Thank you for explaining that to me, because I never knew. Now I know why he’s trained like he was. I didn’t know that he…

Q1: He explained a couple of Leonardo da Vincis to me, too. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and there’s a very common… There’s several Renaissance art themes that are stories that we don’t hear a lot today. One of them is that. You’ll see a lot of pictures of the infant St. John in the wilderness, being fed by angels sometimes. Another one, just as an aside that I know about because of my name, there are a number of paintings of the burial of St. Stephen from the Renaissance, which isn’t really described in the book of Acts, but that was a very common theme in Renaissance art.

Q4: Is he the inspiration for monks?

Fr. Stephen: St. John? Yeah, he… A lot of what’s called the eremitic or the desert lifestyle, a lot of the Desert Fathers—St. Anthony the Great, St. Pachomius—were sort of emulating St. John’s way of life at first, by going out into the desert and subjecting themselves to austerity. That really begins… I mean, what really starts monasticism is the legalization of Christianity. And so, once Christianity becomes legal, and then, once under Theodosius at the end of the fourth century, it becomes the official state religion, you have a lot of people coming into Christian churches who maybe aren’t the most sincere, pious people; they’re just sort of doing it because, for political advantage or whatever.

And because of that, sort of compromises started being made. For most of the history of Christianity until then, Christians had given everything they possessed to the poor and lived in common. Well, once the whole Roman Empire becomes Christian, the economy would collapse if everybody did that! And if everyone dropped out of the army, they’d get invaded, so they had to start changing things. But there were a lot of very pious Christians who said, “No, we need to preserve sort of the original, traditional, strict form of Christianity.”

Q4: So it was really sort of monastic before then.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Really before, while Christianity was being persecuted, just by default because of the persecution, they lived a very monastic kind of lifestyle. I mean, you couldn’t get a lot of jobs if you were a Christian in the Roman Empire. You couldn’t… You sort of had to support one another. You had to live in communities and that kind of thing. So the original monastics are sort of preserving that earlier Christian way of life after the legalization of Chrisitanity, sort of in its strictness. But, yeah, they were also emulating sort of St. John’s way of life.

And St. John’s way of life and his parallel to Elijah was not lost on the Jewish people of the first century, because we have, for example, Josephus, who was a Jewish historian, who was not a faithful Jew. At the end of his Histories, he comes to the conclusion that Rome is the Messiah. [Laughter] And that Jews should just become good Romans, because isn’t Rome great? So he’s not exactly a pious man, but even he, when he talks about St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, says he was a prophet, hands down. And he attributes the destruction of both Herod’s line and the Temple in Jerusalem to the fact that Herod had killed St. John. He said he killed this righteous prophet, and this was God’s judgment on him because of that.

So that’s the reputation that St. John had. So that shows you, for somebody who’s completely impious…

Q1: And he was quite a bit later, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s writing in about the 80s. He’s writing probably around the same time St. John was writing. But, yeah, so even at that time, somebody living in another part of the empire, who’s not very pious, still has this impression of St. John the Forerunner. So his testimony, the testimony he bears to Jesus, bears a lot of currency with a Jewish audience, that someone as righteous and holy as John was here to bear witness to who Jesus was, that’s an important point, that St. John’s movement was not sort of a rival movement to Jesus’ movement, but it was Jesus’ movement.

“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him.”

Q1: This is Jesus again.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is Jesus. This is the light or the Word as we’ve… So he’s now come into the world. He’s in the world; he’s the one who created the world, but the world doesn’t recognize him. So this is describing the situation of Jesus’ life.

“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.” So this is again that imagery where we saw the light, and the darkness not being able to comprehend it. This is how that played out sort of in his life.

Q1: Is “his own” there referring to the people of Israel or to all mankind?

Fr. Stephen: “His own” there is referring to the people of Israel, because that particular language comes out of the book of Exodus, where God calls Israel his own people, where he says, “I have called you, out of all the nations, to be my people.” And so this is sort of furthering the original thought. He comes into the world, the whole world was created by him, but the people of the world don’t recognize him. He not only came into the world, but he came to his own people, and his own people didn’t even recognize him. The people who had known him in this other way previously did not recognize him now.

“But as many as received him, to them he gave”—here it has “the right”: that’s a good American translation: “rights” [Laughter]—“he gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in his name.” The word there they’ve translated “right” is more “power” or “authority.” But so it’s not everyone who rejects him; there are those who receive him, and everyone who receives what? They receive this power or authority to become children of God, to those who believe in his name. So “accepting him” and “believing in his name” here are the same thing. That’s what it means “to accept him” is to “believe in his name.”

And the result of believing in his name, then, is having this power and this ability to become the children of God. Now they use “children of God” because they’re trying to be gender-neutral. It literally says “sons of God,” and I’m going to say that’s important for this reason. A lot of people interpret that as just, “Well, that’s sort of, you know, it’s the first century and they’re sexist.” [Laughter] But here’s why it’s important: because in the first century they were sexist. [Laughter] In the first century, they viewed sons as more valuable than daughters. Sons were heirs and daughters weren’t. So you notice it doesn’t say, “to the men who believed in him, he gave the authority to become sons”; it says, “as many as”: everyone who received him became sons.

Q1: So became heirs.

Fr. Stephen: Became heirs. So this means that everyone… Because if we say they became sons and daughters of God, in the original context, they would have said, “Well, you know, the sons are better off than the daughters,” but the point is everyone who believes in Christ’s name becomes an heir of the promises of God, whether they’re male or female. Both become sons; both become heirs; both become the valued—that first-born child who inherits.

And that’s important because this is the way the promises of God were handed down in the Old Testament. The promise is made to Abraham and his seed. So we see in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob the first-born son, and sometimes the sons fighting over who gets the birthright. So this is saying anyone who believes in the name of Christ becomes the heir of those promises that go all the way back.

Q1: There’s this really important phrase: “believes in the name of Christ.” What does…? I mean, we’ve heard that from countless pulpits. What does that mean in the eyes of these first readers?

Fr. Stephen: The word “name” there is not as neutral as “name” in English. We tend to think of “name” as: yeah, that’s just what you’re called. You can go to the courthouse and change your name, or go by your middle name, or shorten your name, or have a nickname. But name, especially in this kind of context, again refers back into the Old Testament: the name of the Lord. And remember, the name of the Lord was not spoken aloud, was not written even, and when you came to it in a text, you would substitute one of two names for it. You would get to it and substitute Adonai, which means “Lord,” which is where we get… When you’re reading the Old Testament in English and it says “the Lord God,” the word “Lord” there is covering “Yahweh”; it’s covering the name. Or—and this is still the practice in a lot of Jewish circles—they’ll come to it and say haShem, which means “the name.” So they come to it and say, “The name said to…”

And so when they talk about Christ’s name, when St. Paul says that Christ was given the name that is above every name, this is a reference back to the name of the Lord.

Q1: The unspeakable name of God.

Fr. Stephen: So in the Old Testament, “to believe in the name of the Lord” meant to worship Yahweh as your God and as your only God. So when they talk about believing in his name, in the name of Jesus here—or the name of the Word, the light—it means that sense, that “believe” means “worship.” It means to worship and embrace Christ as God. So that has that context of worship.

Q1: I think it’s been weakened in modern religion so much that it comes out in many people’s minds as assent to some propositions about Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: I agree. The true/false test: Jesus is God—true. [Laughter] Jesus is man—true. The Holy Trinity—true. So there, I believe! [Laughter] No, that’s not it. The concept of belief in the Scriptures is tied up with the concept of worship. Whom you believe in is whom you worship as God. And that is the core question for Israel through the whole Old Testament: Whom are they going to worship as God? Are they going to worship Yahweh? Are they going to only worship Yahweh, or are they going to try and worship other gods alongside or instead of the Lord, these other gods? Or are they going to worship only him? And so this is a word of worship. That’s why, we’re going to see later on—not in John’s gospel, but later on in the New Testament—that before the name of Jesus every knee would bow and every tongue confess—your knee bowing and your tongue confessing: this is worship. This is worship.

So that’s what’s tied up there. This is saying that to those who receive—the way you receive Christ is by worshiping him, by offering him glory and worship.

Q1: That is the only—that’s the only meaning of receiving him. It doesn’t mean saying he’s a great prophet or something like that.

Fr. Stephen: No, no.

Q1: You don’t receive him unless you…

Fr. Stephen: Unless you worship him, yeah; unless you’re worshiping him. And that is… Worship has been so distorted in our modern world, too, where it’s… People will talk about the kind of worship they like. [Laughter] As if it’s something they’re receiving; they’re going somewhere where they’re receiving. Whereas worship in the Scriptures is something we offer to God, something that comes from us to God.

Q5: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Q1: And it’s something sort of overwhelming. It’s something that you can’t not do, once it has hit you, what God is, you burst out in worship. You don’t just say, “Okay. I’ll do church now.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Acknowledge it, right. And that going to church when we worship, it’s an activity. It’s not something we sit and passively take in and experience; it’s something we do. Something we do. So that’s included here. And that’s really what’s at stake, and we’ve intellectualized belief and sort of separated it from worship and turned it into… Well, I mean, Cardinal Newman, his work on faith is called A Grammar of Assent. “I assent to these things, that they’re true, even though I don’t have evidence or proof, and that’s faith.” [Laughter] That’s not really how the Scriptures talk about faith.

Q1: Almost all conversations that you have with anti-Christian people are on the basis of: Is this intellectually plausible? That’s the question they’re asking. And that’s not the question that we’re answering.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The question is: Whom are you going to worship? Whom are you going to put your trust in? Whom are you going to put your hope in? Whom are you going to serve? Those are the questions that we’re answering, not: Is this “believable” in the sense that…? [Laughter]

Q1: It’s not a, as people often say, substitute for science because they didn’t have science back then.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] It’s not a way of knowing things about the world.

Q1: Yeah, not an explanation of the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And human beings are created in such a way that we are going to worship, and we are going to serve something and someone, to paraphrase Bob Dylan. [Laughter] But we’re going to serve somebody. There’s going to be someone or something. That’s the way Jesus poses the question. He says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” You’re going to serve something. You’re going to chase after something. There’s going to be something that you’re putting your hope and your trust and your confidence in, whether it’s money or fame or science or philosophy or some god or other, in a literal sense.

Q1: Social standing.

Fr. Stephen: And what happens is, when you worship in a biblical sense, this is what you get out of, particularly in Isaiah when he’s attacking idols and idolatry, you become like what you worship, and so if what you worship is empty and powerless and dead, you become empty and powerless and dead. If what you worship is blind, you become blind. Whereas if what you worship is the living God, then you come alive. If what you worship is the light of the world, then you’re illuminated. If what you worship is the Son of God, you become a son of God. So worship is transformative when we do it.

And that’s part of what St. John is getting at here with that idea of authority, that by worshiping Christ we gain this sonship, because we become like the one whom we’re worshiping.

And then he continues talking about these sons of God: “who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” He’s already laying the groundwork for something we’re going to see in a couple of chapters when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, and he talks about being born again or being born from above. He’s already talking about when you become the son of God, you become the son of God how? Through the worship and the acceptance of Christ and belief in his name, not by what? Not by blood (relationship), will of the flesh (someone goes and decides to have a child), nor the will of man (this is my desire; this is what I choose), but of God.

So St. John is here juxtaposing the way in which we become heirs of the promises of God with the way many of the Jewish people of the time thought that you became heirs of the promises of God. They thought you became heirs of the promises of God how? Well, by being one of Abraham’s blood relatives, or by the will of the flesh—again, being born into a Jewish family. Or by the will of man—by being adopted into, through circumcision, and becoming part of the Jewish people. And St. John is already here saying, “That’s not how it works.” That’s not how it works: that it’s through the one who accepts Jesus, the one who receives Jesus, the one who believes in his name: that’s the person who becomes the heir of God’s promises.

And we’re going to see later in St. John’s gospel, Jesus is going to have this dispute with the Pharisees, where they’re going to say, “We’re the children of Abraham,” and he’s going to say, “No, you’re not! You’re the children of the devil, because you do what he does. You’re like him. You’ve become like him. You haven’t become like Abraham, so you’re not really Abraham’s children.” So who are the children of Abraham? The children of Abraham are the ones who—the real children of Abraham receive Abraham’s promises, are the ones who receive Jesus and who believe in his name.

We’ll end here, because I’ve gone on a long time. [Laughter] So we’re not quite at the end of the poetic Prologue, but we’ll pick up here next week, Lord willing.

Q1: Great.

Fr. Stephen: And keep going. So thank you!