Father Stephen De Young: Okay, so when we get started here in just a few minutes, we’re going to be picking up in John chapter 1, verse 35, where we’re going to be picking up where we left off last time. And as I usually say at the beginning of these, though it isn’t at the moment, soon the first Bible study John will be available on the Internet, where I talk about the Gospel according to St. John in general.

Catching us up to where we are now is pretty quick because we only gone through 34 verses. We went through the first section of chapter 1 of St. John’s Gospel was sort of the poetic prologue, introduction where he sets up the different themes that we’re going to see throughout the book.

And then we’ve just begun actually not with Jesus himself, but with St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, who’s been baptizing in the Jordan River. And we’ve seen a number of things trying to clarify both who he is in general and who he is in relationship to Jesus as the Messiah. And we’ve seen that not only has St. John himself denied that he is the Messiah, but he has indicated fairly clearly that Jesus is.

And so, we’re going to get back into we’re going to continue with that theme here when we pick up. But since today is the day when we commemorate St. Elias, the prophet Elijah, this is probably a good time to talk about part of what St. John is doing here in his Gospel in terms of the relationship between St. John the Forerunner and Christ. Because in large part that’s based upon the prophet Elijah, in the Old Testament.

We mentioned already that in Malachi there was this prophecy that the prophet Elijah would return. Remember, he didn’t die, strictly speaking, he was taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot. And so, there was this prophecy that he would return. And not only did many of the Jewish people at the time take that very literally, that the prophet Elijah himself was going to come down out of heaven, But to this day, for example, many Orthodox Jews at Passover seders will have an empty seat that is there saved for the prophet Elijah if he shows up.

Interlocutor: Right, I’ve been to some of those.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so, that was a very sort of literal expectation. But obviously the Gospel according to St. John as we’ve already seen, sees that a little differently and a little less literally.

Interlocutor: Because, John specifically denies that he’s Elijah.

Fr. Stephen: That he’s Elijah, right, that he is not the same person as Elijah. But we also talked about what we mean when we talk about fulfillment when we talk about things from the Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled, that a lot of times we have in our head this sort of very wooden idea of, “Well, this person predicts this is going to happen and then it happens. That’s a prophecy that it’s fulfilled because it came true.” But that’s not really the way that fulfillment is used by the writers of Scripture. And to get at that, we talked about it’s even in the root of the English word, that “fulfill” comes from the idea of filling something up until it’s full. You take something and you fill it up till it’s full and overflowing. And so the idea here is not just this idea that someone predicted something would happen and it happened, but that there is some sort of pattern or paradigm or something we see in the Old Testament, or we see just sort of a little piece of it, just a little part of it is revealed to us. And then in Christ, that pattern or that thing we see just a little bit of is filled up all the way until it’s overflowing and goes beyond even our ideas of what we originally thought it might be.

Interlocutor: I had an argument with my sister about that. She’s a Presbyterian minister and an Old Testament scholar, but she has a modern slant on things, or more literal slant on things. And she says, “No, when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, it does not have anything to do with the Trinity or anything.” She says that the Old Testament writers meant what they said, and they didn’t mean any more than that. And my argument was that they might well have not known the significance of everything that they were writing, that then they may have said more than they knew they said.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And they established, again, they established patterns of how God works with his people. I’ll give an example, and this is an example that has caused a lot of problems with modern scholars, because this is basically the issue surrounding Isaiah 7, verse 14, which is usually in our English versions, “A virgin will bear a son and you will call his name Emmanuel”. And that, of course, is quoted by St. Matthew at the beginning of his Gospel, talking about the birth of Jesus. And so you get that debate of, well, was Isaiah really talking about that? Was Isaiah really prophesying something that was going to happen? Well, if you read Isaiah, the whole passage in Isaiah closely, the other issue surrounding that, of course, is that in the Hebrew, it doesn’t actually say a virgin, bethula, which is virgin. It just says ama, which means a young woman. So then you get these people saying, well, why does the Greek have “virgin”? And this has “young woman”? Back and forth arguing about that.

But if you read Isaiah carefully. Isaiah is describing something, a historical event where the Assyrians were laying siege. I’m sorry, not Assyrians… This is during the period of the Syro-Ephraimite War, which is basically period where the northern kingdom of Israel and the Syrians, the Arameans, teamed up to attack Judah in the south. And the king was concerned because they had an overwhelming military force. His military was much smaller than theirs. So it looked to him like he was doomed. And Isaiah comes to him and says, “This is what the Lord says. You’re not doomed. In fact, even though their army is bigger and they have this and that, you’re going to defeat them.” And then he says, “This will be a sign to you, that this prophecy is true.” This is common in Old Testament prophecy. They prophesy something for the future, and then they say, “Okay, well, that’s a long-term thing. Here’s a short-term thing. So when you see the short-term piece, you’ll know that the long term is true.” So he says, this would see “a young woman will have a child, and before that child is old enough to know good from evil” while it’s still an infant, “you will be delivered from the hands of the Syrians”.

When St. Matthew quotes that to talk about the birth of Jesus and saying that he fulfilled that, he’s not saying “Isaiah was not talking about the Syro-Ephraimite war. He was talking about Jesus’ birth.” What he’s saying is, read that in Isaiah, the birth of this child was the sign to God’s people that he was going to deliver them from their enemies. Now look at the birth of Jesus, and in a much bigger, fuller way, the birth of Jesus is the sign. He hasn’t lived, he hasn’t suffered, he hasn’t died, he hasn’t risen again, yet. That’s still all future. But the fact that Jesus has been born is the sign to his people now that God is about to deliver them from their enemies, from a much bigger enemy than the Syrians. Ben-Hadad was long dead by then. So that’s how St. Matthew is using it, when he talks about fulfillment, he’s comparing those two things.

Interlocutor: That’s really useful. Very helpful. Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: So, St. John is doing a similar thing here because remember the prophet Elijah, even though he is one of the greatest of the prophets, I mean, it’s probably goes Moses and then Elijah in terms of the top major prophets of the Old Testament, remember the prophet Elijah turned over his mantle when he left this world. He turned over his mantle to Elisha, or Eliseus in Greek, turned it over to him, and Elisha received a double portion of the blessing that was upon Elijah.

So what the Gospel writers in general, and St. John here in particular see in that transition is, you have this person who’s a great prophet, but they’re not sort of an end in themselves, right? They prepare the way and then pass on their ministry to this other figure who is then even greater. And so as they’re thinking about St. John, who is this great prophet, does these great things, but then about Jesus and the way in which the movement that started under St. John comes to then follow Jesus, they see this paradigm in the Old Testament, this pattern in the Old Testament they say, “See, this is a fulfillment of that. This is that same pattern, but even more so, even fuller, even richer.”

Interlocutor: Isn’t this a pattern that we would even use today in trying to explain things to people that we would say, “Well, it’s like this event you’re familiar with in that it follows a pattern. We don’t mean it’s like it’s happening all over again.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, or that the people are the same people.

Interlocutor: You can understand something about this thing I’m trying to explain because you already know the story.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then there’s a move from smaller to greater, smaller in the Old Covenant, in the Old Testament, and then greater in the New. So it’s the same kind of idea.

And so that’s then their response to this idea that well, the prophet Elijah himself is going to show up in person is “Well wait, it was never really about the prophet Elijah himself, right?” He was not an end in himself. He was there to pass on to the… and so St. John fulfills that role of the prophet Elijah not only by being a great prophet, but also by then passing on to Jesus. And so that’s the way that St. John fulfills that prophecy.

Interlocutor: That’s why the prayers tonight had so much to say about that double grace or double…

Fr. Stephen: And referring to Elijah as the Second Forerunner of Christ, that pattern, right? That’s what the liturgical hymns were trying to draw out was that pattern and that connection. And that’s the same thing that St. John is doing here in his Gospel in this first chapter.

So we’ll go ahead then unless anybody has any other questions, we’ll go ahead and get started in verse 35 here:

Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”

Now this is the second time he said that. So we’re going to see, the two disciples are going to go and follow Jesus. And so the reason John is repeating this, this isn’t just like, oh darn it, I need to stop saying stuff like that, I keep losing disciples. St. John, by saying that he’s directing these two disciples to Jesus, he said it once to one group of people. Now he’s saying it specifically to these two disciples of his, “look, go, stop following me, start following him.”

The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus.  Then Jesus turned, and seeing them following, said to them, “What do you seek?”

We’re going to see this is a question that Jesus is going to ask a lot in the Gospel. Basically, “Who do you think that I am? Who do you say that I am? Who am I? Why are you following me? What are you expecting? What are you expecting to get out of this? What is it you’re looking for?” Because he knows that most of the answers he’s going to get are going to be bad ones. He’s going to need to teach and try and change their expectations, because as we said before, their idea at this time of who the Messiah was going to be, for many of them, it was going to be sort of this warrior king who was going to show up and overthrow the Romans. Well, if that’s what they’re looking for, that’s not who Jesus is, right? That’s not what he’s going to do. But so, he asked them, “What do you seek?”

They said to Him, “Rabbi” (which is to say, when translated, Teacher), “where are You staying?”

So, notice something that St. John does here, because remember, St. John, as he’s writing this, is living in Ephesus, in Asia Minor, in what’s now Turkey. So, he is not living in Judea. The first readers of this are not all Jewish, right? There are Jewish people who have accepted Christ as the Messiah or Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, and there are also Gentile people who have accepted Christ as the Messiah. And so, one of the things we see is St. John stops all the time to kind of explain, right? “Oh, they said, ‘Rabbi’, oh, well, that means teacher for you Greek folks who don’t know what that word means.’

But notice they don’t answer his question. They don’t say, here’s what we think you are, here’s what we’re looking for. They just say, “Where are you staying?” Because they’re saying, “Well, we’re going to follow you,” basically. So they’re kind of leaving it open. “Well, we’re going to see what we’re going to see.”

He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where He was staying, and remained with Him that day (now it was about the tenth hour).

So with the hours, this was obviously before we had Greenwich Mean Time and time zones and 24 hour clocks. People don’t realize how recent that is. Even in the end of the 19th and early 20th century, different towns would be running on different times or even time zones. So with the trains, you had to figure out, like, okay, this is the time. It is in Chicago, and this is the time where I am, and here’s how long the trip is. Try to figure out what time you would get there. So the way that time was done at this point by the Jewish people, the Romans did a little differently. The Romans were very military oriented, so they divided time into watches. They had first watch, second watch, third watch, fourth watch, which was based on military camps.

Interlocutor: How long was a watch?

Fr. Stephen: Usually 4 hours. And so you will sometimes hear references to that in our hymns, like “From the morning watch until night, let Israel trust in the Lord.” That’s what that’s referring to. The morning watch means, the first watch. The first watch all the way until… But so the way that the Jewish people tell time was by the number of hours after sunrise. So from our perspective, this is horribly imprecise because the exact time of sunrise and sunset changes every day.

Interlocutor: Isn’t it 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness that are divided up?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s the assumption. But in reality, in the summer and in the winter yeah, it’s going to be… So whether it’s dark at the 10th hour or the 12th hour or not is going to depend on the time of year that we’re talking about. But so the first hour is 1 hour after sunrise on a given day.

Interlocutor: I thought the hours were what varied so that in summer you had long daylight hours and short night hours.

Fr. Stephen: Not with the Jewish people at this time. Okay, that may have been a later development, but they had basically…

Interlocutor: That’s the medieval…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, if you’re using sundials, that’s how it ends up working because of the position of the sun. But no, at this time it’s basically by a period of counting and then you’re using something more not really an hourglass, but something more like an hourglass. And so first hour is 1 hour after dawn, third hour is 3 hours. So, 10th hour is 10 hours after dawn. So the idea here is that they spent the rest of the day with him until we get to the point of evening when it says the 10th hour. And of course, we still have services in the church that are first hour, third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour.

When we do them now, because we have more precise time, we’ll do like matins at 06:00 AM, first hour after matins at 07:00 AM., regardless of when the sun actually rises, third hour at 9, six hour at noon, 9th hour at 3 in the afternoon because we’ve now got…

Interlocutor: So then monastic hours are Jewish time.

Fr. Stephen: They’re based on that, well, they’re continued from that. Almost all of our liturgics in the Orthodox Church are taken from either the synagogues in the first century or the temple in the first century, because the way it’s often talked about, they talk about well, there’s Judaism and then Christianity sort of splits off. That’s not really what happened historically. Historically, what happened was there was this religion in the Old Testament period and the center of that Jewish religion was around the temple in Jerusalem and the sacrificial system, sacrificing animals and all that.

In 70 AD, when the temple got destroyed and hasn’t been rebuilt since. There have been no sacrifices. So the religion as it was practiced up to that time basically ceased to exist. Out of that, two different groups claimed to be the inheritor of that tradition. One is Rabbinic Judaism. One is Christianity. So from the very beginning, Christianity saw itself as the continuation of the religion of the Old Testament. And of course, so did, Rabbinic Judaism, it says, “No, we’re the continuation of the Old Testament”.

But so, if you ever watch or go to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service, you’ll notice, for example, that in the synagogue service they make a procession with the Torah scroll, the way we do with the Gospel book. And so when it came to worship, the apostles didn’t sort of start from scratch, didn’t say like, “Oh, well, we’ve just got to make up a new way to worship God.” They took the way they were worshipping God, but they saw it as being fulfilled in Christ. So instead of the Torah, now we have the Gospels, and instead of sacrificing animals, we now have the Eucharist. Instead of circumcision, we now have baptism. Instead of worshiping on the Sabbath, on the 7th day, we worship on the 1st day, on Sunday, the day Jesus rose from the dead. So all those things just get transformed. They don’t get done away with, they get transformed. And this is what Jesus is talking about in Matthew, in St Matthew’s Gospel, when he says, “I’ve not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, not one bit of the law will pass away.” A lot of the way people read that a lot of the time “destroy” and “fulfill” our sort of a distinction without a difference, because either way, well, we could just ignore it now, right? But that’s not how the early Christians saw it. The way the early Christians saw it was, no, we don’t destroy it, we don’t do away with it. It’s now fulfilled in Christ. So we continue to do these things, but we don’t do them in the old way.

That’s why we don’t celebrate the old Passover, right? The old Pascha. We celebrate the new Pascha. That’s why in our hymns, Pascha says “A new and holy Pascha, blessed Pascha”, right? Because it’s taken the place of the old one, because it’s now fulfilled the old one and it’s bigger. So it’s that same paradigm. That’s why, just as they had prayers at the hours of the day, using some of the same Psalms we now read at those hours, right? We’ve taken that and it’s now transformed in Christ. And the prayers are transformed to talk about Christ and the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity. But we’ve kept basically the basic structure in the psalms and those pieces that have been brought over.

One of the two who heard John speak, and followed Him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.

This is why St Andrew sometimes called St Andrew the First-Called because he was one of the first ones to follow Jesus and had been a disciple of St John the forerunner.

He first found his own brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated, the Christ). And he brought him to Jesus.

Notice again St. John explaining; they don’t know Hebrew Aramaic, so the word meschiach doesn’t mean anything to them. So he says, “Well, that means Christos, right? And he brought him to Jesus. So it’s Andrew, the older brother, who goes and finds Simon and brings him to meet Jesus.

Now when Jesus looked at him, He said, “You are Simon the son of Jonah. You shall be called Cephas” (which is translated, A Stone).

Cephas, It’s actually Kaephas in Aramaic, means a stone or a rock. And so, again translates it… where it has a stone here in English, they translate it to Greek. The Greek is Petros, which also means the rocker’s stone. And in this instance, Cephas or Petros in Greek was not really a name at this time, not something that they named people at this time. As Jesus gives this sort of nickname to Simon, it really did mean sort of like “Rocky”, as a nickname.

There are a couple of things at play. First, there’s again this pattern from the Old Testament when Abram is called by God to go and become the beginning of a new people, he changes his name to Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah. Jacob becomes Israel.

And so, we see here again, number one, this tips us off, well, who’s Jesus then? Right? Jesus is continuing to do now what God did in working with his people in the Old Testament in giving Peter a new name when he calls him. But it also shows you the level of closeness here that exists between him and Simon. And we’re going to see later…

Interlocutor: What would this name have signified to the first readers of this? We’re very familiar with St. Peter, and he’s called Peter, and now it’s a name. Then it must sound a little strange, like if someone were to save them now on you’re going to be called “Tree”. What would they have gotten from the fact that this man is now to be called “Stone”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it kind of has the same connotation as the nickname, like Rocky.

Interlocutor 2: It’s a sign of intimacy between them?

Fr. Stephen: It’s a sign of intimacy, but just in terms of the name, that particular one, right. The idea that he’s kind of a tough guy.

Interlocutor 3: He just met him.

Fr. Stephen: Jesus knows him already, we’ll hear in a second.



Interlocutor 1: It’s as if he’s saying, “You’ll be called Mr. Tough Guy”. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Sort of, yeah. That’s continuing from the Old Testament, too, because, remember, the names in the Old Testament all had meaning and sort of told you something about the character of the person who had them. He’s named Abraham because he’s going to be the father of many nations. Remember, Jacob got the name Jacob because he was grabbing onto his brother’s foot as he was coming out…

So these things all sort of tell you something about the person. And so in addition to showing the intimacy between Jesus and Simon Peter and Jesus giving him a new name, the particular name also tells us a little something about the character of who Simon Peter is. And we’ll see that kind of play out also through the Gospel in some of his actions. He’s not a soft person. [Laughter]

The following day Jesus wanted to go to Galilee, and He found Philip and said to him, “Follow Me.”

So notice how St. John describes it. It doesn’t say he met Philip. It doesn’t say he ran into Philip or Philip came and talked to him. And after you talked to him a little while, he said, “Follow me”. Jesus found Philip. So with the calling of the disciples here in St. John’s Gospel, St. John’s portraying that Jesus is going out and finding these specific people who he wants to be his disciples and calling them to come and follow him.

Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote: Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

So just like Andrew did with Peter, Philip goes and finds Nathaniel and says “Hey, we found the Messiah, we found the person whom all the Scriptures were writing about.”

Interlocutor: And really this implies that meeting Jesus was something special because they haven’t seen him do miracles or anything, but they recognize that this is not just another guy from Nazareth.

Fr. Stephen: And this, remember we talked a little bit about this in the prologue for St. John. Whether or not you recognize Jesus has to do with the state of your heart and your soul at the time. And so the pious and righteous people see him. And they immediately know who he is, the people who are wicked. So the Pharisees and the corrupt who will encounter him, Jesus could do 100 miracles in front of them and they still don’t recognize who he is. So yeah, that’s part of what St. John is doing here.

So he said so we found him. His name’s Jesus. He’s from Nazareth. He’s the son of Joseph up there.

And Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Interlocutor: That sounds so like small town life.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there is a certain amount of bigotry there because Bethsaida is a rather large city in Galilee and it’s a cosmopolitan city at this time, meaning there are a lot of Greeks there. Galilee in the north, much more so than Judea in the south is very mixed ethnically. So there are people of Jewish background there. There are also a lot of Greeks there, Romans there, other people from farther east there. It’s sort of more of a melting pot. And of course, people intermarried and things; it’s sometimes referred to as “Galilee of the Gentiles” because of that. So people, especially people who lived in the cities there were multilingual. These four disciples we met probably knew Aramaic and Greek, very fluently. Philip has a Greek name, so that tells you something again about the culture. It’s not a Hebrew name or an Aramaic name or a biblical name. It’s a Greek name. So they considered themselves in the cities to be very cosmopolitan people, very educated people.

Nazareth, the Nazareth that Jesus came from, now there’s a Nazareth now in Palestine that is very near the place where the Nazareth Jesus came from. But the Nazareth Jesus came from was not really a city. There were in addition to the cities and most of the cities were around the Sea of Galilee. In addition to the cities in Galilee, in the sort of countryside, the people living there were primarily Jewish peasants because they didn’t have Roman citizenship. And as peasants, they basically were sort of migrant workers. So they would follow whatever was being harvested at that time of the year. They would go and sort of live near where it was and so there were these little sort of pop-up villages that would have people all staying together. And then they kind of disassemble everything and move on to the next the wheat harvest and then the grape harvest and just keep following it and working.

And to give you an idea of the kind of poverty that Jesus was born into, well, it’s usually translated “carpenter” St. Joseph’s occupation. The word in Greek technon that’s used of him is not that specialized. It’s a word that’s used for sort of day laborers. So in addition to carpentry, he probably would have done work with stonemasonry. He would have done… basically he was sort of a handyman doing repairs and things. But he was doing repairs and things in those little pop-up villages, meaning he was working for the peasants who were day laborers. So the level of poverty Jesus came from was even lower than that. It’s sort of like being a poor person’s maid, right?

Interlocutor: He’s an itinerant craftsman.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, sort of doing just whatever needs to be done, whatever someone will pay him to do. So that’s the kind of place we’re talking about. So this is part of why when he hears from Nazareth, he’s like, what? Like, “Those hillbillies!”

But also, there’s the fact that the prophecies that everyone was aware of, as we see in St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. Luke’s Gospel, also, the Messiah was going to come from Bethlehem, right? So they say, “Oh, we found the Messiah. He’s from Nazareth.” They’re like so he says,” Wait, what?” It doesn’t make sense to him. But notice again how Philip responds.

Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

We’ve already seen it twice. We’re going to see that phrase a lot in St. John’s Gospel. Different people saying, “Come, see”.

Interlocutor: I’ve noticed that in the Orthodox Church, the only thing you can say to someone that you’re trying to interest in orthodoxy is “Come and see”. You can explain various things, but they have to come and see to get what it is that you’ve said. They won’t even understand the words you’ve said. They come and see, right?

Fr. Stephen: One of my favorite quotes from St. Gregory Palamas is he said this was after a long series of public debates, he finally said, for every argument, there’s a counter argument. Any argument I could make to you, you could come back with something. For every argument, there’s a counter argument. But you cannot argue with life. And he was using that to point out, we can sit here and debate about theology all day, but when you meet a holy and pious person and you see the way they live their life, and you see the way their life is transformed by Christ, you can’t argue with that. There is no argument, with that. And so that’s part of what’s going on here. We can sit here and debate where the Messiah is supposed to be from and what a hole in the ground Nazareth is. Or you could just come meet him. And if you come meet him and you see who he is and you get to know who he is, you’ll know he’s the Messiah too, just like we do.

And so, yeah, it is important that, especially in this day and age of Internet arguments and all of this, that there’s a certain point where we have to be intellectually humble enough to say, “You know what? This isn’t what it’s all about. And me winning this argument isn’t going to change and transform your life. Christ is going to change and transform your life. So it’s better that I bring you to Christ and let you encounter Him than that I win this argument or make my rhetorical point.”

Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward Him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!”

So he sees Nathaniel coming from… Now, Jesus didn’t tell Philip to go get Nathaniel. Philip just ran and got him. But Jesus sees him coming and recognizes him, and not only recognizes, “Oh, that’s Nathaniel,” but knows him already. Already knows him. This is what he said.

Nathanael said to Him, “How do You know me?”

He’s like, “I’m just meeting you.”

Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”

So this is again, St. John is not ambiguous in his Gospel about the fact that Jesus is God. There’s no ambiguity whatsoever right from the beginning, we saw the very first verse, right? He says that Jesus is God. This is continuing. Why does he know Nathaniel? Well, ultimately, because as we saw in that prologue because he created Nathaniel. He created Nathaniel. So he knows Nathaniel better than Nathaniel knows Nathaniel.

Nathanael answered and said to Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”

So he’s sold, he’s sold. “He must be the Messiah. Yeah, you’re right. He must be the Messiah if he could do that, right?”

Jesus answered and said to him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.”

So he says, “Really, that’s all it took, and you’re on board.” He says, “You’re going to see a lot more amazing things than just I saw you under the fig tree.”

And He said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

Now, what is that referring us back to? Well, that’s referring us back to one of the stories in the life of Jacob, Jacob’s ladder. Jacob, remember what he called Nathaniel? He said, “This is a true,” (it’s translated here), “Israelite”. But what would that have been? “This is a true son of Israel”. Son of Israel, right? The person Israel. And so Jacob, remember, has the vision of the ladder in Bethel. And on that ladder there are angels ascending and descending. That this ladder is the means by which heaven and earth are connected, and God is active in the world. So what is Jesus saying here when he says, “You will see angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”? He’s saying that he is again fulfilling that image because he is the place where heaven and Earth now are coming together, are connected in his own flesh.

Interlocutor: So I immediately looked at this and thought, now what event is he referring to? Because I was thinking in terms of, OK, prophecies are always telling you something that’s going to happen. So when did this happen? It shows that I hadn’t learned a thing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s that other view of prophecy.

Interlocutor: The fulfillment here is very clear. That literal, “Okay, where’s the passage for that” is not the point.

Fr. Stephen: And now we also have this Son of Man title. We talked about Son of God a little bit before.

Interlocutor: That title has always puzzled me.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, that title has three major areas of importance because it’s used three different ways in the Old Testament. And part of what we have to remember with that title is that it’s the Greek Son of Man. And the man there is Anthropos, which is the Greek word for Man, like humanity. Mankind. Not anir, which is the Greek word for “a man”. So it’s not Son of a man because that would apply to just about everybody except Jesus.

But it’s the son of Anthropos. The other thing we have to remember is that Anthropos there in the Greek is translating in the Hebrew and Aramaic, Adamah, which not only means mankind, but was also the name of Adam in Genesis. So this is sometimes used to mean “Son of Adam” in particular. So the three ways that this is used in the Old Testament are one to refer to someone as sort of being merely human, right? That someone is a human. So, “what is man that you are mindful of him or the son of man?” The idea there is just being humanity down here, God up here, yet God cares and loves humanity. And so part one, this title emphasizes the fact that Jesus is not only God but also truly human, which is important in this context because if heaven and earth are connected in Christ’s flesh, he has to have flesh. He has to have flesh of this earth, otherwise there’s no connection.

The second way it’s used is as the Son of Adam to refer to a connection back to Adam, to the first human being. That is not as much in view with this particular passage.

Interlocutor: How is that really different from saying he’s a human? Because we’re all sons of Adam.

Fr. Stephen: Well, what we’re going to see and like I said, it’s not as much in view in this passage, but for example, in Romans 5, St. Paul is going to talk about Christ is sort of a “second Adam”, that Christ is the beginning of a new humanity. So there’s that element too, though that’s not so much of you in this particular passage. That’s another element of the title, Son of Man.

And then the third one comes from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, where Daniel, the sort of middle portion, middle and late portion of the Book of Daniel are a series of apocalyptic visions that Daniel has. And in one of them he sees what he describes as the Ancient of Days. He has a vision of God, which, interestingly, we talked last time about how when God appears in the Old Testament, it’s actually Christ. But in this case, what’s really interesting about it is that in the Book of Revelation, when St. John describes seeing Christ in his glory, he uses all the same descriptions that Daniel did of the Ancient of Days, just to make that abundantly clear. That’s who we’re talking about. But in Daniel’s vision, he sees the Ancient of Days and then he sees one come up before the ancient days who he said looked like the Son of Man.

Interlocutor: “Before” in the sense of standing in front of.

Fr Stephen: Right. Comes up in front of. And so, this vision, was connected in First Enoch and in other Jewish writings to the Messiah, that the Messiah, and this was the beginning of the idea that the Messiah was not just another human king like David or Solomon or Jeroboam or Ahaz, down that line, but was actually more than that, had divine authority and divine power. So by Christ applying that to himself. He’s not only endorsing what he had just said about him being the Messiah, saying “Yes, I am”. But he’s also, by using that title for the Messiah, giving an idea of the type of Messiah he’s going to be. Because remember what Nathaniel said, “You are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel.” So you have this one view of the Messiah. Jesus responds by bringing into view this other aspect of who the Messiah is in revealing God and being the one who connects earth and heaven. So he’s already, as I said, when Jesus asks somebody who He is, it’s generally to say “no, it’s beyond that. It’s bigger than that.”

Interlocutor: Is the Theotokos also called the Mother of God?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because it is through her that God entered into our world. So there’s a comparison made there too.

Interlocutor: Why don’t we use the term Son of Man liturgically more than we do?

Fr. Stephen: It’s interesting because I think it’s in part because once you get out of the Gospels, in the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself by that title more than any other title. He calls himself the Son of Man more than he calls himself the Son of God. But once you get out of the Gospels, once you get into the sermons and Acts, once you get into the Epistles, no one else refers to him as that.

St. Paul doesn’t refer to him as that. He uses Son of God much more often than Son of Man.

Interlocutor: Would that be partly because as the Church got more and more into a Greek rather than the Hebrew environment, this reference to Daniel is not going to carry meaning?

Fr. Stephen: Well, partially and partially because Daniel was speaking about who the Christ was going to be. So it’s a picture, sort of like an outline and now we have the whole picture because now we have Jesus Himself. And so we’ve sort of abandoned… the language St. Paul’s going to use is that was sort of like a shadow we saw sort of the shadow of who Jesus was going to be there. Now we have the reality, so we don’t need the shadow anymore.

Interlocutor: I’m not trying to be picky, except that this has bothered me a little bit for years. Why does Jesus use it so much then?

Fr. Stephen: Well, because Jesus, as he’s standing before the people, is connecting Himself to that prophecy, to that prophetic figure who the people he was talking to were expecting to come in the last times. So, he’s connecting Himself to something, to an idea that’s already in their heads. Whereas after him that idea is no longer so much, not a big factor in people’s heads. People aren’t sort of waiting now for the Messiah. Now maybe if there was a messianic Jewish group that was still expecting the Messiah to come, you might go and sit with them and say, well, look, see, Jesus is the Son of Man from Daniel and Jesus is the prophet. But that’s the position that Jesus was in, he was talking to those people, right?

But yeah, there are several things in our worship that are based on that idea that now that we have the reality, we don’t go back to the pictures. For example, the Quinisext Council, one of the very few cannons having to do with iconography, there aren’t many, but one of them is that you’re not allowed to depict Jesus as a lamb or as a lion or any of these other symbols from the Old Testament. And the reason why is because now we have the fullness, now we have the reality, we have the face of Jesus Christ himself. And so, you depict him as he is. You don’t go back to the images and the shadows. And so, at the time of Christ’s resurrection, there is a transition from the old covenant to the new covenant. So now the way we do things is transformed.