Fr. Stephen De Young: I’m going to go ahead and get started. When we get started in just a minute here, we’ll be picking up in the Gospel according to St. John, chapter 17, verse 20. As usual, because it’s now actually there, if you’d like to go back to way back when when we started the gospel of John, the introduction is posted on the internet, so you can listen to that podcast, because it’s been a while. So if you’ve forgotten everything that we’ve said before, you can go back and refresh. [Laughter]

But to get us caught up to where we are right now, that we’re in the middle of sort of a long discourse, a long, final discourse by Christ before his arrest that really began at the Last Supper, the Mystical Supper, right after Judas left. Jesus began speaking. Then we had sort of a change of setting as the disciples went out to the Mount of Olives where they were staying in the evening. And then last time we saw there was yet another transition where Jesus went from speaking to the disciples directly to praying to his Father, sort of in front of his disciples. So this is still a public prayer, but he’s been speaking to his Father primarily so far about his disciples.

We saw that in the earlier part of this prayer he was talking about both the importance of unity among the Church that was going to be established by the coming of the Holy Spirit. We talked several times about how, unlike St. Luke, St. John doesn’t sort of write the book of Acts. He doesn’t write part two after his gospel, but that in his gospel and through Jesus’ teaching, St. John has sort of telegraphed to us what’s going to happen. He’s spoken theologically in great detail about the coming of the Holy Spirit, for example, and about the apostles being sent out into the world, about how the world was going to hate them because it hated Jesus, that they’re being sent sort of in the way that Christ was sent; now they’re continuing Christ’s mission in the world, of being sent out to bring the Gospel.

C1: And of course his readers know there’s a Church, because they’re in it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so even though as we’ve seen the disciples at the time were sort of clueless in terms of what Jesus was trying to get across, Jesus himself has told them, “Once I am gone into heaven, and the Holy Spirit—” once Jesus has returned to the Father, to use the language he uses in St. John’s gospel, once Jesus has returned to the Father, and the Holy Spirit has come, the Holy Spirit will cause them to understand these things. And so, yes, from the perspective of the readers at the end of the first century who are reading St. John’s gospel, these things have already happened. So they’re now clearer to them than they were to the disciples at the time.

The place where we left off and where we’re picking up, there’s another sort of transition in the prayer, where Jesus has been speaking specifically about his immediate disciples and apostles, and now he’s going to expand the vision of the Church that’s to come after his Ascension. Unless anybody has any questions left over that you’ve been holding onto for the last several weeks, we’ll go ahead and get started here in chapter 17, verse 20. [Laughter]

“I do not pray for these alone”—and that’s referring again to the disciples and the apostles—“but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they all may be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.” So this— We see that this is again sort of the way St. John has Jesus speaking all the way through here, with “mine are thine and thine are mine,” in these sort of recursive sentences. But here, as I said, Christ is extending his prayer, not only for these apostles here, but they’re being sent out to proclaim the Gospel, and so there are going to be all of those who come into the Church from hearing their word. These are these people who are going to come to believe through the apostles’ preaching is of course the reader, the original readers of St. John’s gospel.

C1: And, indirectly, us.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, then down through the centuries, us. So this is where—Oh! Jesus is now talking about us.

And the specific prayer here is that all of those who come to believe through the apostles would be one, and that oneness, what that means is here set out in parallel to the way in which Christ and his Father are one. His Father is in him, and he is in the Father; that they all would be one, not of themselves, but be one in us. What Jesus is setting out there is— We talk a lot about unity in the Church, and even unity among Christians who aren’t members of the Orthodox Church, the ecumenical movement wanting to bring everyone together, and there are all kinds of sort of proposed bases for how we would unite. One approach might be to say, “Well, we’ll sort of find the lowest common denominator, or we’ll call it mere Christianity. We’ll come up with a really short list of things we all agree on, and then we just won’t talk about all those other things we disagree about. We’ll just— There are these core things that we agree on, and be unified around those.”

C1: It’s already been done.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! And so there’s sort of that idea.

There’s the idea… And this, unfortunately, you sometimes hear when people talk about Orthodox unity, they talk about it on this basis, and they’re talking about sort of administration, that we’d all sort of have the same office we report to. [Laughter] We’d have these organizational structures that are all connected to each other. That would be a kind of unity.

But neither of those or any of the other ones you could propose are the basis for the unity that Christ is proposing here. For the unity that Christ is talking about here is the fact that all those who come to believe in Christ come to be in Christ, meaning Christ is both human and divine; Christ has taken upon himself our humanity. Sometimes we get a little sloppy when we talk about the Incarnation, when we talk about Jesus becoming man. There’s a reason why it doesn’t say that Jesus became a man. Or we’ll talk about Christ having a human nature, like a human nature is a thing. And because we talk about it like it’s a thing, some people even think sort of: “Okay, well, there’s God, and there’s this human body in there, connected somehow.” That’s not what we’re saying.

When we say that in the Person of Jesus Christ, God takes upon himself human nature, that’s a human nature that we all share. We all share: it connects all of us, in the same way, or in a parallel way, to the way in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share one divine nature. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: one of the ways in which they are one is that they have one nature, one divine nature. In the same way, human beings have one human nature that we all share. This is why, when our first parents fell into sin, that affected all of us, because it deformed our human nature which was then passed down to all of us, because we derived our human nature from them.

So this is why the Fathers, when the Fathers talk about our salvation, unlike a lot of our fellow modern Christians who, when they talk about our salvation, immediately start with the cross, you find, for example, St. Athanasius, when he’s talking about our salvation, he starts with Christ’s birth. He starts with the Incarnation. He starts with God taking our human nature upon himself, because as soon as Christ does that, he’s transformed our human nature; he’s united it to God. This is why St. Paul is going to say later on that in Christ we have a new nature.

C1: So when St. Paul used that phrase, “in Christ,” a lot, that’s what he means?

Fr. Stephen: This is what he’s talking about, because as he says, and as we sang just this last Sunday, “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” When we baptized, our old human nature, that we received from Adam down through the years that had been distorted by sin, dies, and we receive a new human nature that is patterned after Christ’s human nature, and that therefore is connected now to God. And so by being in Christ, because, as Jesus says here, the Father is in him and he is in the Father, for us to be in Christ is for us to be united to God.

C1: I have a problem that not many people have, but I was a philosophy major. [Laughter] So I’ve got the universals and Platonism and things like that running around in my head.

Fr. Stephen: And participation and all of that.

C1: Yeah, all of that stuff. Should I get rid of that, or is there some of that is…?

Fr. Stephen: This is closer to Aristotle than Plato, but even there there’s a difference, because the way humanity—the way all human persons share the human nature— There’s one human nature. There’s right now a little over seven billion persons. In the Godhead, there’s one divine nature and three Persons. The way that’s parallel is related to the fact that humanity is created in the image of God. So that doesn’t hold true for rocks or trees or dogs or horses. All oak trees do not share an oak tree nature, and each one is an individual oak person. [Laughter] They’re objects, and so that kind of philosophical discussion, of universals and particulars, applies to objects but not to persons. That personhood is different.

A human person being killed or harmed or suffering affects other human beings in a way that a chicken being killed and cooked does not affect all other chickens. There’s a fundamental difference. You cut down one tree; that theoretically affects the forest in some way, but not in the same way that the death of a person affects the rest of humanity. So there is a fundamental distinction there.

Part of the problem—and this affects a lot of Western theology. You can see it in the order in which Western systematic theology is written. They start with God, and they don’t start with God as he’s revealed in the Bible. They start with sort of the Platonic version of God: God is one, he is simple, he is omniscient, he is omnipotent—all of these philosophical things. And then at the end of that section, there’s sort of an appendix about the Trinity. [Laughter] And then they talk about man and they talk about humanity, and at the end of that they talk about Christ. And the way they talk about Christ is to take what they’ve said about God and take what they’ve said about humanity and smush them together to talk about Jesus. And this is precisely backwards to what we’re seeing, for example, in St. John’s gospel and what we see in Scripture. But specifically in St. John’s gospel and what we’ve been reading, what we see is that in order to understand God, where do we look?

C1: Christ.

Fr. Stephen: We look to Christ. Christ is the One who shows us who God is. If we want to find out what humanity is, what a human person is, where do we look?

C1: Same place.

Fr. Stephen: We look to Christ. This is what we mean when we say he is true God and true man, is that that’s where we look. And if my humanity doesn’t look like Christ’s humanity, that’s because my humanity is deficient. So the Christian life is my humanity being conformed to Christ’s humanity, and that brings with it, as we see here in this verse—that brings with it being ever more closely united to God himself.

C1: So if we were to achieve being like Christ in his humanity, there’s no distinction between that and being like Christ in being like God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. When we talk about theosis or divinization and this, this is what we’re talking about. We don’t take on the divine nature.

C1: No. Yes, I see.

Fr. Stephen: But our humanity in Christ—in Christ, in us, here. Our humanity in Christ is united to the divine nature. So we don’t become persons of the Trinity like Christ is. [Laughter] And this is the phrase that you see in the Fathers, that we become by grace what Christ is by nature. We don’t take on— But by grace, we’re united to God in him, and so become like him. And that’s what’s being talked about here, and the basis of that is in, again, who Christ is.

And so that is the basis, if we’re going to talk about the unity of human beings which was lost by sin—sin is not what separates one person from another in terms of being persons, because there’s three Persons in the Trinity and there’s no sin involved there. So each person is a person and is unique as a human person, but what separates, what divides them from other human persons is sin, what causes strife between them. But the unity here between people is found in those persons being united to Christ. If I am united to Christ and you’re united to Christ, we’re going to be united to each other, just by definition. And as we’re more closely growing into the likeness of Christ, we’re also going to grow closer to each other. This is why, again, as St. John is going to return to this in his first epistle when he says you cannot— If someone says they love God but hate their brother, they’re a liar, because it’s not possible. It’s not possible to be separated from your fellow man and united to God at the same time.

And so this is sort of, as we’re going to see when we eventually get there, in St. John’s epistles what he’s really doing is applying: This is the theology—St. John the Theologian—and then he’s going to apply it in his epistles. This is what this means for you and your community: Your community needs to be one. Why? Well, because it has to be. If you’re experiencing salvation, if you’re growing closer to Christ, then unity has to be a natural result of that, and if it’s not, then that shows that there’s something wrong in terms of your faith and your worship and your piety. It’s sort of a symptom that there’s something broken there.

And notice that the result—the result of Christians being united, of the Church being united—is that the world will believe that Jesus is the Christ who is sent by God. This is important because, just as in the Old Testament Israel wasn’t chosen as sort of an end in itself—the election of Israel, the choosing of Israel in the Old Testament, wasn’t “you guys are the best people in the world” or “I love you more than everyone else”; it was: they were chosen, they were called for a particular purpose, and that purpose was to be a light to the nations. We see— And part of what’s going on in St. Simeon’s prayer when he says that is he’s referring that to Christ. And this is one of the themes in St. Luke’s gospel, is that where Israel sort of failed in that mission, Jesus now succeeds in that mission.

But that was what they were called for, and when God said to them that he was going to make them a kingdom of priests, what he meant was that Israel should have the same relationship to the other nations that the priests had to the rest of Israel. Israel’s job was to help the whole world, that the rest of the nations would look at Israel, look at how they lived under God’s teaching, look at how they worshiped, and be drawn to that and come in.

And so here Jesus is saying the same thing about the Church, that our salvation is not just an end in itself. This separates the Christian view of salvation from sort of the parallel view of salvation in many other religions. For example, Buddhism. In Buddhism, it’s just me. It’s me finding my enlightenment, me escaping reincarnation, me escaping the suffering of this world, but it’s about me; it’s not about—

C1: The rest of the world goes along by itself.

Fr. Stephen: Now in Buddhist meditation, you might experience compassion for things and suffering, but, again, it’s about me experiencing this wonderful feeling of compassion for everything. It’s not me actually doing anything to help.

C1: Well, you can’t.

Fr. Stephen: It may all be an illusion anyway. But that’s very focused on the individual. You look at Islam, and the view of salvation is: me personally—I, because of what I’ve done and how I’ve lived my life—I make it into paradise, and in paradise I’m rewarded with all these things, for the good that I’ve done, but it’s all about me. It’s not about me going out and helping someone else. There’s no end-game. They’ll go and conquer a country and make them convert, but that’s not out of compassion for them and wanting them to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth; it’s because this is what God told me to do, and by me doing this I get into paradise. [Laughter]

The Christian view of salvation here is quite different [from] that, that Christ is saving people and God is giving saints to each generation—people are experiencing salvation—in order that, through them, others come to the truth. So God is not just picking this group of people out of the world, or there isn’t just this little group of people out of the world who picks God, either way, to save them out of the world. God is in the business of saving his entire creation, and he’s doing that through human persons.

C1: And that personal view is extremely widespread in Christianity.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] That it’s about: I need to do this so I go to heaven. But this is a cosmic view, and we see this all through this passage. Christ is sent into the world to save the world, all the way back in John 3:16 and 17. And now Jesus says, “As the Father sent me, now I am sending the apostles out into the world, and they’re going to tell people, and these people are going to come to believe through the disciples. But even those people who come to believe, they’re coming to believe and they’re being united in the Church so that even more will come in.”

And so this is why, in the Orthodox Christian understanding, the greatest examples we have of love are Moses and St. Paul, when both of them in different places—St. Paul in Romans, Moses in Exodus—say that they’re willing to be cut off—they’re willing to be blotted out of the Book of Life; they’re willing to give up their salvation—if others could be saved—if others could be saved, in favor of other people. That makes no sense in any other kind of religious system, that level of compassion. [Laughter] That I would—

C1: Doesn’t that shock us to do something like that?

Fr. Stephen: There are some groups…

C1: That delay their…

Fr. Stephen: But it’s at the least very rare that we have this idea. For the most part, most people will say, and most of us, and even most Christians will say, “Well, the one thing you can be kind of selfish about is your own salvation.” But that’s not really what we see in Scripture, that even that— Your salvation is for the sake of others’ salvation. And this is what’s behind St. Seraphim of Sarov’s famous quote: “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands will be saved around you.” This is not an end in itself.

We talked a little bit about this last time when I mentioned monasticism, that a lot of people have this view of monasticism: Well, they go off and they just try to work on getting themselves saved and they leave the world behind and all. But what we see in monasticism, St. Seraphim being a prime example, is that through these people working out their own salvation and becoming saints, becoming holy men and women, others see that, and so their witness, the witness of their lives, like St. Seraphim, ends up being the means through which God saves thousands, millions more.

None of salvation is selfish. All of it is oriented towards— If God gives you the grace of making you a saints, it’s so that through your life and through your teachings and your example many, many more can be saved, not just because you’re special and the best and God’s favorite. [Laughter] That’s not how it works.

And so this is what Jesus is outlining here, that he was sent; the apostles are being sent. People are going to hear from them, but they, too, are in a way being sent to reach the next, until the whole world has become one in Christ.

C2: Father, as Jesus asked us to be one, the Church was one? You know in the world we have big churches. And all other churches, they came…

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on what sense you mean “one.” [Laughter] There’s a sense in which the Church—

C2: They have one patriarch, one pope—I don’t know what they called it at that time.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the Church has never been one in that sense. The Church has never been one in the sense of administration, where there was just one bishop. That’s never been the case. Even when it was just the apostles, as we’re going to see as we go one, Ss. Peter and Paul went at it a little bit for a while in Antioch. [Laughter] And they had disagreements that they had to work out.

C2: They had at that time, we had one Church.

C3: St. Peter was the…

C1: Oh, yes, there was one Church, but it didn’t have just one bishop.

Fr. Stephen: It depends on what you mean by “one Church,” because there was a church in Jerusalem and church in Antioch and churches in cities in Samaria, and they were all in fellowship with each other—

C2: The first was in 450.

Fr. Stephen: Well, sort of, yeah. [Laughter]

C2: Here, 700, the Orthodox stay in line and the Catholic, the Roman Catholic…

C1: 1054 is when, formally…

Fr. Stephen: Right, but again, it depends on what you mean by “one,” because there were periods… There are very few years—there are a handful of years in the history of the Church—where every patriarch has been in communion with every other patriarch. Right now, even in the Orthodox Church, not every patriarch is in communion with every other patriarch. So if you mean in the administration has all been in communion with each other, it never has been. Now, if we’re talking about what Jesus is talking about here, being one in Christ, this is what we mean when we recite the Creed and we say we believe in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” This is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about that every believer, every Christian, who is in Christ, we’re all united to each other in the Church.

C1: And would you say we might actually belong to different official churches?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, at the very least, if you’re an Orthodox Christian, you have to say that people in the patriarchate of Jerusalem and people in the patriarchate of Antioch and people in the patriarchate of Constantinople and the patriarchate of Moscow are all in Christ and are all united in that way—at the very least, even though, for example, as I speak—and hopefully this will be healed soon—but right now the patriarch of Antioch and the patriarch of Jerusalem are not in communion with each other. But no one says that that means that one or the other—the faithful of one or the other church are cut off from Christ. Nobody thinks that! [Laughter] Even though the bishops aren’t in communion.

Unity, again, doesn’t involve— Our unity as Christians involves each of us as human persons being united to Christ.

C1: Well, would we say that there are Catholics who are united to Christ and are therefore one with us?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this— [Laughter] This is where it gets tricky. As St. Irenaeus says, “We know where the Holy Spirit is; we don’t know where he isn’t.” So we can say for certain that the Orthodox Church has preserved the path of salvation correctly. That doesn’t mean that everyone who was baptized Orthodox at some point is in Christ and is working out their salvation. Some are; some aren’t. And we also know that there are people who are not in the Orthodox Church who are still experiencing salvation. We don’t know who those people are.

C1: No, I didn’t mean that we could tell!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we can’t identify them, but we know that there are people. And we know that even from the example of Scripture. We know in the Old Testament. We have these people sort of come out of nowhere. We see very clearly God has this plan of salvation. He calls Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and then Israel through Moses. But then you have Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, who is a Midianite, but seems to be worshiping God. And you have Melchizedek with Abraham, who just sort of comes out of nowhere and seems to be worshiping the true God. So God is working beyond what we know.

Now if someone comes to me and says to me, “I want to draw closer to Christ. I want to work out my salvation,” I’m going to direct them to the Orthodox Church. That’s where I’m going to say you should be. But that doesn’t mean that I’m saying that anyone who’s not in the Orthodox Church is cut off from Christ. I don’t have any authority to say that. But God knows who those people are and how he is working with them; I don’t. [Laughter] He hasn’t told me.

The example I use—because this is the example we have—is Israel in the Old Testament. Israel, and then later Judah, it was an actual country, with actual borders. It wasn’t just a spiritual concept. It actually existed, and there was a Temple there in Jerusalem, and that was the place where God was to be worshiped. So we have to say that in the same way the Church is not just a spiritual concept. The Church actually exists on earth. It has borders, and it has temples where God is worshiped in truth, in the correct way.

But there were also, for a good chunk of the history of Judea, at least, for centuries, synagogues in other cities, other places where people were who worshiped the God of Israel. If you— It was totally clear that the Temple was the place where real worship was going on, and that Judea was Judea, and that Rome was not Judea and Babylon was not Judea and Egypt was not Judea, and the synagogues in those places were not temples. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who wasn’t physically located in Judea and worshiping in the Temple was cut off from God and was condemned.

And so that’s the analogy I carry forward to the Church. The Church has borders, has places where the true worship of God is going on. There are other people outside the Church who worship Christ. Where they worship is not to be confused with the Church, but at the same time the fact that they’re not in the Church does not necessarily mean that they’re cut off from Christ. God is still working with them however he’s working with them. Does that answer?

C1: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: And it’s really important, again, that our unity is found in Christ. So if we— To be very practical about it, if we’re going to talk about having unity with Roman Catholic Christians or the Melkites in particular or any Protestants, any Protestant group in particular, what will bring us together is all of us as persons drawing closer to Christ. That is what will draw us together and unite us together, not trying to come up with some doctrinal statement where we ignore our differences and whittle it down, not us merging our offices somewhere together. That’s not what’s going to bring us together. It is that all of us need to come to know Christ more deeply. And as that happens, then we will be drawn together. I happen to, of course, believe that since the Orthodox Church is the Church, that will involve them being drawn into the Orthodox Church, or, in the case of Roman Catholics, being drawn back into the Orthodox Church. But they would probably say the opposite. They might agree with me that that’s how unity will happen, but they think we’ll be drawn into the Roman Catholic Church. [Laughter]

But, yeah, that’s the unity that we’re talking about. So that’s why— For that kind of unity, you can’t compromise on doctrine and the truth of Christ. You can’t sort of say, “Well, we just won’t talk about that because we disagree.” You can’t do that, because that’s not the way you draw closer to who Christ actually is. It’s through coming to know that more deeply. So that’s a much harder road toward unity in actuality, but that’s the road that Christ is laying out here, that we work towards our salvation, and, through that, other people, other persons are brought to salvation. And then, as we’re all brought to salvation, we become one.

C2: Father, as Orthodox Church here, we follow the Antiochian Church.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

C2: Now, in Lebanon, we have three Antiochian Churches, and all are Antiochian. When they say, for metropolitan, for Patriarch John, “and of all the Middle East,” Damascus, Beirut and Lebanon and Egypt, it includes Jerusalem if we have some Antiochians. They have maybe the Greek… They have all, even they have the Roman Melkite. Same things, they call the patriarch of the Roman Melkite: “of the whole Middle East.” Same thing they call for the Maronite patriarch: Antiochian, “for the whole Middle East.” So we are one! [Laughter] If you follow the Antiochian Church which is the… All the churches are the Antiochian. Before Jesus Christ, before the Antiochian Church, we have Rome, Rome and the Greece, Constantinople. But there was one before we had the division.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they were— See, that’s tricky.

C3: So complicated!

Fr. Stephen: Rome and Constantinople were still separate churches; they were just in communion with each other, and then they left communion with each other.

C2: So Jesus came to the others…

Fr. Stephen: And that’s what happened with the other groups you mention. I mean, the Melkites left communion with the Orthodox and went into communion with Rome. So we’re still dealing with— They were separate churches, but they’re separate churches that were in communion with each other, and now aren’t.

C2: The only two churches, the big churches, they have the same services: liturgy, Easter, just the Easter they follow there the Rome for Easter. They don’t follow the Greek Orthodox.

Fr. Stephen: The Gregorian calendar, yeah.

C2: So we have two different days for Easter, but all services are the same! All prayers are the same. Why do they not have the communion…?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you’d have to talk to the bishops, and there are a lot of political reasons and all kinds of reasons in the 18th century why the Melkite churches left communion with the Orthodox churches and went into communion with the Roman Catholic churches, but that’s what they did. They made a choice.

C2: They were, and are not now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so they’re dis-united from the Orthodox churches, but they’re united to the Roman Catholic churches, because the Orthodox churches— The churches of the East and Rome left communion in 1054, so you can only be in communion with one or the other. You can only be in communion with one or the other.

C2: So what happens in 1700s?

Fr. Stephen: So the Maronite churches is a little more complicated, because they actually left communion with both, back in the seventh century, and then entered into communion—

C1: Monophysites.

Fr. Stephen: No, they were Monothelites, actually, but they entered into communion with Rome much later. For a long time, they were independent; they weren’t in communion with either Rome or the Orthodox churches. And then they entered into communion with Rome.

C1: That’s in the Crusades?

Fr. Stephen: That they entered into communion with Rome? Partially, yeah, and then more firmly later on.

But this is a different kind of unity. This has to do with the fact that what we see—and this is the Orthodox understanding of the way that the Church is built, because we don’t have a pope— We don’t have one bishop who is sort of the supra-bishop, who is over all.

C2: Over all the Orthodox.

Fr. Stephen: Over the whole hierarchy. We have bishops of churches that are local churches, and the unity of this type, the administrative unity of the Church, comes through those bishops being in communion with each other. And so when those bishops break communion with each other, we have an administrative separation of the churches. Sometimes those are temporary things. There are a whole bunch of those in history. I am of the firm belief that the one between Antioch and Jerusalem is a temporary thing. But sometimes, like in 1054, with Rome and the other patriarchates, those things become semi-permanent. We don’t know if it’s going to be permanent! It’s lasted a thousand years. It could end a hundred years from now.

C1: They didn’t expect it to be permanent at the time.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they didn’t at the time. The same thing can happen with the Melkite churches, with the Maronite churches, with the Syriac churches, the Coptic Church—any of these other churches that we’re not in communion with now in theory those administrative things— Communion could someday be restored. But that administrative unity isn’t the unity that Jesus is talking about here. He’s talking about something much deeper than that, much deeper than that, because, even if we have… Right now, the Antiochian Archdiocese and the Greek Archdiocese in the United States: we have different bishops covering the same territory.

C2: We’re in communion, but…

Fr. Stephen: We’re in communion, but, administratively, we’re separate.

C2: And both are Orthodox!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so there’s always a lot of move to: Well, we need to get the hierarchies together; we need to get the administration together; we need to get our offices, our home offices together. But if I and the OCA priest, 60 miles from here, and the Greek priest from Houston, if we can all get together and celebrate the Liturgy together—

C2: You can!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and receive the Eucharist together, that reflects a deeper unity than us having our Liturgy books printed by the same printing press.

C2: There’s no difference in the Liturgy!

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s a deeper unity. The unity we have in Christ, in our faith, and in the Eucharist—that’s the kind of unity that Christ is talking about here. That’s the kind of unity that’s important, the unity of love, the unity of our faith. That’s the kind of unity he’s talking about here. If we want to have separate offices and separate printing presses, and they want to do it in Greek and English and we want to do it in Arabic and English and somebody else wants to do it in Russian or Slavonic and English—technically, that’s disunity, but it’s disunity of a much more frivolous kind than the unity that Christ is talking about here.

C2: The church that you are going to in Baton Rouge… that’s Antiochian?

C3: Comments: No, no.

C2: But they are Orthodox?

Fr. Stephen: OCA, yeah.

C3: Russian?

Fr. Stephen: So they’re from the Russian tradition.

C2: And we have communion with them?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Oh, yeah.