Father Stephen De Young: When we get started here in just a couple of minutes, we’re going to be picking up in John, chapter 1, verse 14.

And we don’t need to spend a lot of time catching up on where we are because we’re only 13 verses in, and we’re still in the… as I mentioned last time, the beginning of the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel is sort of this poetic introduction. And so we have this long poem about Christ that introduces the Gospel, introduces some of the themes that we’re going to read about and find here in the Gospel as we go forward.

And so, we saw last time that it began sort of the same way that the book of Genesis begins with a poetic introduction, so did St. John’s Gospel. It even started with the same few words: “In the beginning”, to call us back to that. And what we’ve read about so far is about the fact that Christ, before he was born, already existed, that in fact he already existed at the time that God created the world, that he already existed as God and he already existed with God, that both are true.

And St. John has then begun to transition to talking about Christ as the Word or the Light or Life coming into the world. He talked about the fact that already in what we now call the Old Testament before his birth, that the people, the righteous of the Old Testament, the Old Covenant, who knew God, knew the Word, knew Christ already because he was not only already existing but he was already interacting with human beings. He was already part of God’s work in the world.

And when we ended, St. John had just made the statement regarding the purpose for why Jesus was now going to be born into the world. That purpose being so that those who believed in him and who received Him, and we talked last time about how that’s talking primarily about worship, that those who worshiped and followed Christ would receive the right to become sons of God. And we talked about this as sons of God in the sense of being heirs of the promises of God. And to contrast that already with the idea that a lot of the people of Judea had at the time that Christ was born, that they were heirs of the promises of God just because of their ethnicity or because of their family line, or because they had done certain things like becoming circumcised or following food laws or that sort of thing. St John said that’s not what makes you an heir of the promises, but following Christ.

Interlocutor: I have a question about the Old Testament saints. We do call them saints?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor: Is there any differentiation between a St. David or St. Jeremiah and a New Testament or later, saint?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there are various categories of saints, and usually the category of saint that’s used to refer to the saints of the Old Testament is they’re referred to collectively as the prophets, even those who weren’t specifically prophets in the sense of having a prophetic calling like Samuel or Nathan or Hosea or Isaiah. So they’re collectively known as the prophets. But that’s the only real sort of distinction. So when you talk about the ranks of saints and it’s not ranks like ascending order, it’s ranks like categories, units.

There are, of course, the bodyless powers of heaven, the angels and archangels, et cetera. Then there are the prophets who are the saints of the Old Covenant. They’re the apostles of the New Testament period. And then going forward from that, you have various other categories of hierarchs and monastics and unmercenary healers and these other further categories, but so they are categorized slightly differently. But there’s not a distinction there. And part of the reason there’s not a distinction there is exactly what St. John was arguing here, that it wasn’t that… and we’re going to get into that a little more tonight, that it’s not as if in the Old Testament these people were saved by something else, that they were saved by keeping the law or… he isn’t saying that, “Well, at one point you were saved just by being circumcised, but not anymore, because there’s been this shift.” That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that was never the case. So it was never ethnicity, it was never these things. They were saved through their knowledge of the triune God, which means the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Interlocutor: That leads me to the question of, at the harrowing of Hell, we think of Christ taking these people out of Hades. Is that where they were or what’s the story?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, there’s an important distinction that we have to make between the concept of Hades and the concept of Hell. And those things have kind of gotten smushed together, particularly in the Germanic languages, because that’s where the word “hell” comes from. It comes from the Saxon word spelled with one L. Hades is the Greek word that’s used to translate the Hebrew word Sheol, which literally just means “grave”. Just the grave, the place of the dead. We now have this very developed idea, which isn’t entirely Christian, of, you know, people die and then good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. And that’s sort of how we think about it. That’s not really what the Scriptures teach.

What the Scriptures talk about before the death and resurrection of Christ is that people die and they go into the grave, they go into Sheol, they go into Hades. That’s what the Old Testament basically says. Now, there are indications in the Psalms, for example, “Even if I go into Sheol, thou art with me, that for the righteous who trust in God, even though they’ve gone into God,” is somehow with them. Their experience of the grave is different. And then later, as we move through the Old Testament sort of chronologically in terms of when it was written, the idea starts to become very clear that there is going to be a future resurrection of the dead, that those were dead, at least the righteous ones, are going to live again. And then in the New Testament, we get the clearer teaching that everyone is going to be raised from the dead and then be judged and receive either eternal glory or eternal condemnation.

So, the picture that we’re given of what happened at the time of Christ’s death and resurrection is that Christ sort of led an exodus. And eventually when we get into Second Peter and Jude, it talks about that pretty explicitly, that imagery, that Christ led this exodus out of the grave for the righteous because the grave no longer had any hold on them, whereas for the wicked, it still did.

So, the Book of Revelation talks about this as the first resurrection and the second resurrection. As St. Paul says the dead now or the dead in Christ who rise first, they now experience, their experience at death is not just that they go into the grave because the grave can’t hold them. They go to be with Christ where Christ is. And so when Christ returns, they will return with him in the resurrection of the dead, is the idea there.

And so, yes, we shouldn’t think of it as everybody who died before Jesus rose from the dead, went to hell, and then Jesus got some of them out or all of them out, as some people would. But it’s that the experience of the righteous that’s usually referred to as the intermediate state. Our hope isn’t that we’re going to, when we die, float up to heaven and sit on a cloud. Our hope is that one day Christ will return, we will be raised from the dead in a renewed heavens and a renewed earth and reunited with everyone. And we’ll all live forever, eternally with Christ together in the new heavens and the new earth that’s what the Creed calls “the life of the world to come”.

There’s a New Testament scholar who says he’s not really interested in “life after death”. He’s interested in “life after life after death” to sort of indicate that, to say, well, okay, yeah, there’s this period where we’re waiting. But what we’re really looking forward to is that ultimate consummation.

Interlocutor: That period gets referred to as the place of repose, right?

Fr. Stephen: Or it’s referred to as Abraham’s Bosom, from the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, that it’s not our ultimate destination. But there is already a distinction even there, before the Last Judgment has happened, in how we experience God based on how we’ve lived this life. Because really, the Last Judgment is when the fathers talk about it. They talk about it, they make a comparison, especially St. John of Damascus, to the angels. The angels, because they don’t have bodies, aren’t changeable, and so they can’t repent. And so, the angels who sinned were confirmed in their wickedness permanently, immediately, whereas the angels who did not sin were confirmed in their goodness permanently, immediately.

Because we have physical bodies, we are changeable. And that’s bad for when we sin, but that’s good because that means we can repent. But there comes a time at the Last Judgment where whoever we’ve become over this course, the course of this life is made permanent, is cemented. And we’ve set ourselves on one sort of trajectory or another. We’ve gone down one road or another, and after that, it’s too late. After that, repentance is done. And so we’re confirmed in that.

And so, this is why we continue to offer prayers for the dead, because until the Final Judgment has happened, we have hope. And there are stories that we have from the fathers of people who have interceded for people, and maybe things have changed. But at the Final Judgment, then that’s sort of set in stone, either glory or condemnation.

Interlocutor: Father Philip said this, and I like this very much: the idea that when we die, we all go to God, all of us. And the idea that corresponds to hell, is not hell, is that some people don’t like that that makes them miserable. But it’s not that God has done that to them. It’s that that’s their reaction to being with God. How does that fit with that? Or does it?

Fr Stephen: Well, no, it does. The image that some of the Fathers use is you’ll have some clay. You’ll put it in the sun, and it’ll become soft and malleable from the heat. You have some other clay, and you’ll put it in the sun and it’ll become rock hard, you know, harder than a rock. You could break a rock on it. And so it’s the same sun. The sun’s not, you know, shining lovingly on one and hatefully on the other. It’s the same sun. But the clay is different. The clay is different. And so how we experience God when we come into his presence is decided or determined by what we’ve made of ourselves, who we are.

If you’re a person who hates God, then being in his presence is going to be miserable torture, not because he’s torturing you, but because you hate Him. And in the same way, if you’re someone who truly loves God, then being in his presence is going to be warmth and light and love and wonderful, not because he loves you more than that other person, but because you love Him.

Interlocutor: Is that referring to the intermediate stage or to the life after the life after death?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s really referring to the life after life after… the ultimate state, but it’s true to an extent in the intermediate state as well.

Interlocutor: Okay, but in the intermediate stage, I could say after a while this God isn’t so bad after all, change my mind.

Fr Stephen: We hold out hope. We don’t know exactly how that works. No, the stories we have from the Fathers, the Bible says very little about the intermediate stage. It says things like “they’ve fallen asleep in Christ”. They’re “with Christ where He is”. Well, what do you mean where he is? He’s here, isn’t he? We’re not told a lot.

St. Paul says that even more so when talking about the life of the world to come. He says, what we will be is not yet made known, but we know we’ll be like Christ because we know we’ll see Christ as he is. But even that you can’t really define exactly what that means.

I’ll give you an example. St. Gregory the Dialogist, St Gregory the Greater, who was the Bishop of Rome at the end of the 6th century, who wrote our presanctified liturgy that we do during Lent, one of his practices since he was the Bishop of Rome is every time he prayed, he would pray for the souls of all of the pagan emperors of Rome who had persecuted Christians; he’d pray for their souls. And it was revealed to him miraculously at one point that through his prayers, the soul of Vespasian, the Roman Emperor, had entered into salvation.

Okay, well that raises more questions than it answers, right? Because why Vespasian and not any of the others? Was there something different about… he prayed for all of them. We don’t know exactly how that works, but we have this hope extended to us. As St. James says in his epistle, “the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective”. We have this promise that until the last judgment, until the day of Judgment, there’s still hope for transformation. And so, we pray with that hope. And of course, we never as human beings ever know the state of anyone’s soul. Some of the people we think are the most righteous, may be the most wicked, and vice versa, in their hearts.

Yeah, so with all that said, we have reason to pray and hope that just because someone has passed away and they didn’t seem to us, whatever that means, that they were on the right track, that our prayers are still received and worth praying. But yeah, we don’t have a lot of details. We mainly, as with a lot of the church’s doctrine, we have lists of things that are incorrect [Laughter] and then not really a definition of what’s correct because we can’t really nail it down and define it because we know it’s not this and we know it’s not that.

Interlocutor: Because the truth would be too big to fit in our brains anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We can’t comprehend the fullness of it. I’m sure even when we’re there, we won’t fully comprehend the fullness of it. That’s part of the teaching of the Church, too, is that even in that final state, when we’re either confirmed in righteousness or confirmed in condemnation, we will continue to grow. That it’s not sort of this state that you hit and it’s “now I’ve arrived” because God is, of course, infinite. So we could continue to grow closer to God and learn more about God into eternity forever and never come close to getting a spoonful of the ocean that is the divine.

This is not totally a digression. This will become germane here in a few minutes, once we get started. So, does anybody have any other questions before we start? Okay, so Gospel According to St. John, chapter 1, verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

So a couple of notes here on the translation. “The Word became flesh,” Of course, that’s the Word we’ve been talking about, who already existed with God, who has always existed back into eternity, now becomes flesh, so becomes man. There is no story in St. John’s Gospel of Jesus’ birth the way we get in St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. Luke’s Gospel. So we have that here, this poetic portion describing what happened.

The word there that translated “dwelt” when it says and “dwelt among us”, is literally in the Greek “tabernacled”. It’s from the root, skini, that means tent or tabernacle. And the reason that’s important is, again, we talked last time about how St. John uses a lot of references to the Old Testament, sort of continuously. He doesn’t quote that much where he’ll say, “as Isaiah said”, or “as Moses said”, but he will elude and refer back to ideas and things in the Old Testament all the time. This is another one of them. Remember the Tabernacle at the time that the people of Israel were brought out of Egypt and brought out of slavery, and while they were traveling for 40 years through the desert, they were encamped, in tents, and they built one particular special tent in the center of their camp that was called the Tabernacle. And that Tabernacle is where they went to offer sacrifices and where they went to worship. But that’s not primarily how it was seen. It was seen as God’s tent in the middle of their tents.

Interlocutor: Is that where the Ark of the Covenant was?

Interlocutor: Right, that’s where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. That’s where the sacrifices were offered. That’s where the priests went to offer prayers and incense was in that tent, because that’s the tent where God dwelt in the midst of the people. And it was literally in the middle, the rest of the people camped around the tent.

And so, what St. John is saying here by referring back to that is that in the Old Testament, first we have the tabernacle where God comes to dwell among his people. Then once they’re settled in the land and Jerusalem becomes the capital city, they build the temple, right? And the temple is right in the middle of the city, and that’s where God comes to dwell among his people.

Now that has changed. Now the person of Jesus Christ is where God comes to dwell among his people.

And so, one of the themes we’re going to see again, as I said, this poetic part is setting up the themes we’re going to have later on in the Gospel. One of the themes we’re going to see is that even though there’s still a temple sitting there in Jerusalem at this time, that that’s not the place where God is active among his people, but it’s in Jesus. And so based on that understanding, when the temple eventually is destroyed in 70 AD, for the Christians, that’s not going to cause a huge problem because the Christians are going to say, “Well, that wasn’t needed anymore anyway,” but that is going to cause a huge problem for those who didn’t obviously accept Jesus as the Messiah. But so St. John is sort of giving that to us right here, right here already.

The other important thing to remember about the temple that existed at this time is that even though we have in the Old Testament, when the tabernacle in Leviticus was first dedicated, they come and they offer the sacrifices and there’s this fire and this wind and this cloud that comes into the tabernacle and fills it. So they say, okay, God has now come to dwell in the Tabernacle. And when they dedicate the temple in Jerusalem in First Kings, same thing. They offer the sacrifices, they offer the worship. There’s a wind and a fire and a cloud, God comes and dwells in the temple. Well, that temple was destroyed in 586 BC by the Babylonians. When the people of Israel were taken into exile.

70 years later, they came back and they rebuilt the temple. But when they rebuilt the temple, started offering sacrifices again, there’s no record anywhere, that there was any cloud, there was any fire, there was any wind, nothing happened. That temple got desecrated by the Greeks and then it was rededicated. That’s what the feast of Hanukkah is about, the Maccabean Revolt, but when it was rededicated, no wind, no cloud, no fire, nothing happened. They didn’t have the Ark of the Covenant there anymore.

In 63 BC, when the Romans conquered Judea, the Roman general Pompey, who was the one who conquered it, decided he wanted to see what was in the Jewish temple because the Romans found the Jews fascinating because they didn’t use idols in worship. There were no statues, there were no… and they thought that was strange, but also intriguing because some of the Roman philosophers say they prayed sola mentis. They prayed only with their minds. And so that to the philosophers was like, “Wow, maybe this is some kind of advanced religion.” Well, so Pompey figured, “Well, they don’t let anyone back there into the Holy of Holies behind the veil. They’re like, there must be something, there’s got to be something back there. There’s got to be some statue, some relic. They’ve got to have their God back there who they worship.” So he barged in, he went back there, and when he went behind the curtain, he found absolutely nothing there, just an empty room, which then really confused him. “I don’t get this at all, they don’t let anyone go back there and see nothing.”

But even from a religious perspective, there was nothing there. He went back there, he didn’t drop dead. He found nothing. He found an empty room. And the Jewish people at this time were keenly aware of this, keenly aware of the fact that these things that had happened in the past with the temple weren’t happening with this temple, that God was not there in the same sense. And so there was this expectation and a lot of the different sort of sects of Judaism that we read about in the Bible, like the Pharisees, the Sadducees, were based around sort of theories as to why this hadn’t happened yet and what it would be that would cause God to return to his people.

The Pharisees basically believe, “Well, it’s because, look, we were exiled because we didn’t keep the law. We sinned. We didn’t keep the law. That’s why we went into exile. While we look around, there’s still a whole lot of us not keeping the law. And that must be why God hasn’t returned yet. We’re still in exile basically until we all start to be obedient.” And so that’s why the Pharisees are going to become so strict about everyone has to follow every rule, exactly. And they’re going to add rules. They’re going to go in and define… Well, you can’t work on the Sabbath. Well, what constitutes work? Okay, well, you could walk this far, but that’s it. If you walk farther than that, it’s work? All these rules, what’s work and what isn’t. And so we can all follow everything, because if we all just do this right, then God will be pleased with us and God will return to us.

That’s why they’re so hostile towards people they perceive as sinners, because sinners aren’t just a question of, “Oh, that person is a sinner. Well, they’re going to go to hell, they’re one of the bad people,” but rather “They’re the problem for what’s afflicting… the reason the Romans are oppressing the Jewish people are because of those people who are sinning.” And that’s why they treat them like the enemy. That’s why they’re so hostile toward them. It’s not just a question of, again, going to heaven or hell when you die. It’s a question of God’s not blessing us because there’s these sinners, there’s these tax collectors.

Interlocutor 1: They were really picky because they were hoping that would bring back God’s presence.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Interlocutor 2: There was a saying, I think it’s still a Jewish saying, that if all the Jews obey the law just once, one day the Messiah will come.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the exact mode of thinking.

Interlocutor 3: What are they doing on Sabbath, there’s all these rules?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you’re supposed to just rest.

Interlocutor 2: Well, if you’re an Orthodox Jew, you’re supposed to live close to the temple, to the synagogue.

Fr. Stephen: You could only walk a certain distance and you’re not allowed to kindle a fire, which means you can’t start a car, you can’t use electricity, you can’t flip a light switch.

Interlocutor 1: It’s actually kind of nice.

Fr. Stephen: It is peaceful. It is peaceful, for one day.

And so, rabbinic Judaism develops out of Pharisaism, so there’s a continuity there. It’s that same mode of thinking. And so some of them, you have some sects like the Essenes that were sort of like Jewish monastics, and they went and lived separately in communities, and they said, “You know, the reason God hasn’t come to that temple is he’s rejected it. He’s rejected Herod who built the temple. He’s rejected the temple; he’s rejected you people. We’re going to go off here and be holy, and then God will return to us. Not you, but us.” So there are a number of different views on this.

And so, when St. John says this to his original hearers, he’s weighing in on this, right? He’s saying, God has returned to us. God has returned to his people, and he’s returned to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is how he’s returned to us, to bless us. And so that’s going to shape now sort of… that idea that we already have here is going to shape how St. John talks about what Jesus is going to do and why he’s here and how he goes about it.

“And we beheld his glory.” So it’s ascribing glory to Jesus, meaning part of what’s being made clear here is we already heard about Jesus’ preexistence, that he was with the Father. Now, he just said “the Word became flesh”. What’s a possible way you could misunderstand that? You could think, well, he turned into a person. He turned into a human being. He stopped being God and he just became a person, right? Well, if he still possesses this glory, then that means that’s not true. He’s still who he has always been but he’s now also human.

Interlocutor: I would have thought that for pagans of this period, it would have been very easy for them to think that God simply took the form of a man the way Zeus takes the form of a bull or a swan or anything like that. And I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t more in the Bible telling people, “No, that’s not what they mean”.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that is actually one of St John’s concerns we’ll see later. And he’s getting at that with the “became flesh”. He doesn’t say “became a man” or even “became man”, the way we say in the creed. He became human, he says became flesh. Because flesh is material. It’s stuff. So by saying that he became flesh but maintained his glory, he’s trying to come at that from both sides. In First John, which we’ll get to eventually, but in his first Epistle, he says that the mark by which you can tell when someone comes to you claiming to preach Christ, whether they’re preaching the real Christ or they’re preaching antichrist, is whether they say that Christ came in the flesh. Meaning just that. That they believe that Christ truly is man, not just appears to be. Looks like. When we get to Philippians 2, we’ll talk more about that, where St Paul uses the phrase being found in the form of a servant regarding Christ. And now that’s sometimes misinterpreted, including by the Living Bible, which in its first edition they corrected this later, but in the first edition of the Living Bible, they translated that as “Jesus having been found disguised as a man”, which is pretty horrible.

But no, St John is trying to be clear that that’s not the case. He became flesh, actual. You could touch him, you could feel him, but also he still had his glory. And that theme of Jesus’ glory is going to be another theme that’s going to go through the Gospel right before Christ’s death. He’s going to pray to his Father, “Glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world began.” So this theme is going to come back. But he’s trying to get at both sides of it there.

“The glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” So the word that’s translated only begotten there is very controversial. It’s a Greek word, monogenees, which can mean the question is whether the genes part is referring to it could be either in Greek, really, either referring to what we would now call like in biology, a genera, like a group of animals, a classification. Mono, meaning one, it would be “he’s one of a kind”, essentially, or whether it’s genees, from the Greek word genao, which means “to be born”, in which case it’s only begotten the only one who was born.

I think both ideas… And we’re going to see this in St. John’s Gospel a lot, too. St. John likes to do a lot of plays on words we’ll see later when he describes the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus is going to say to Nicodemus, that to enter the kingdom “you must be born…” And the Greek word is anothen, which can mean “again” or it can mean “from above”. So, people argue which it is. But I think there are so many of these in St. John’s Gospel, I think he’s doing it on purpose.

He means for you to think about both, for you to think about both that Christ is both the Son of God in a unique way. And that unique way is described by the term being “begotten”. Why does that make it unique? Well, he just talked about the fact that all those who believe in Him and who receive him, what? Have the power to become sons of God. So he’s not saying that Jesus is the Son of God, in that same sense, we become sons of God: heirs of the promise by adoption, God adopts us into his family and makes us his children. Jesus is not adopted. Jesus is natural born. He’s the only begotten. But at the same time, remember what St. John is arguing. He doesn’t want us to get the idea that Jesus was born from the Father at some point in time. So you have that ambiguity. Where he’s using this word to describe the special relationship between Jesus and the Father, which relationship has always existed.

Interlocutor: So Jesus’ “begottenness” from His Father is a very different thing from our “begottenness” from our parents. It’s not a biological process.

Fr Stephen: And there was no mother involved. One of the hymns that we sang during the little entrance at Vespers, sometimes sort of in the rotation, talks about the fact that Jesus had no mother on the side of his father and no father on the side of his mother because he had no divine mother and no human father.

But so, that’s a special relationship. The “begotten” word is, again, not to indicate that Jesus was born at some point in time, but to separate his sonship from our sonship.

Fr Stephen: And then the last phrase is literally “filled with grace and truth”. Grace, what we’re talking about, the word that’s used for grace can mean a lot of different things. But what we’re talking about when we talk about grace and I think this will be borne out again as we go forward in the Gospel of St. John, is that grace is the activity of God. Grace is the activity of God. It is God working, working in us, working in the creation. And so, when it said here that Jesus is filled with grace. It’s again referring back to that idea that Jesus is the place now where God is working in his creation. In a parallel way to, remember, he said God created everything through Christ back in verse 2. And now he’s continuing through to Jesus, in that Jesus is the place where He is and the means by which he’s working in the world. And “truth”, we’re going to see. St John is eventually going to start using “truth” as another name, the way he’s used “the Word”, “Light”, “Life”. He’s going to use “Truth” as another name for Jesus, like when Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”.

Now, going back to glory, the word doxa in Greek, that we translate as glory, is used for two different words in the Old Testament, in Hebrew and Aramaic, and one of which is kavod, and one of which is shekina. And shekina refers to glory in the sense of a kind of radiance like light. So when you see in an icon the nimbus, which is the correct term for the halo, that is like with Moses, when he talked to God, when he saw God, his face shone, that’s what that’s to reflect, because the saints are in the presence of God, so they now reflect his glory, right? And that’s glory in that sense, that sort of radiance of God.

Kavod, which is also translated the same way as glory, literally originally meant weight or heaviness or mass, sort of substance. It’s more like essence. And so in this context, because we’re talking about seeing his glory, it’s referring to (and of course, the Mount of Transfiguration being the sort of literal place) that radiance. And the fact that they’ve seen that glory coming from Christ is what identifies again who he is in relation to God, because in his case, that’s not reflected glory, it’s his as well.

And so, we’ll see when St John talks about glory, that he sort of very subtly makes that distinction that this is Christ’s glory and it’s glory that he shares with the Father and that’s part of what identifies Him as God.

At the same time, that also involves the other kind of glory. Because when we’re talking about the Holy Trinity, we say that there are three persons. The three persons share this glory in the sense of radiance, but they also have one essence, they are one in their substance. So both senses are involved, they’re related to each other.

Interlocutor: This weighty sense of glory, I’m trying to think of how we would think of that and I’m coming up with maybe “awesome”, that it’s something extremely serious, extremely weighty in the metaphysical sense.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the… and we’ll come back to this in a minute here, because this is where St John’s going to go. But that kavod that weighty word is the word that Moses uses when he says to God after he’s spoken to him face to face, he says tells God he wants to see his kavod. And that’s when God says you can’t or you’ll die. And he says what you can see is sort of it’s usually the backside or something but basically, it’s the glory of his passing. I’ll cover you… once I’ve passed by. So you’ll sort of see the effects but not the cause. You’ll see his glory in what he’s done in creation and those kinds of things. But you can’t see… a human being cannot see God and live in that sense we can’t possibly fathom.

Interlocutor: This explanation of glory applies to all saints?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the glory of God reflected because they’re now in the presence of God. And that’s why if you look at icons of the Last Supper, you’ll notice Judas doesn’t have one of those because he’s not there. Yeah, he’s not there.

Verse 15:

John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’”

So we’ve already read, we already had St. John the Forerunner introduced a few verses ago that he came from God and that his purpose was to sort of prepare and to witness to Jesus as Jesus was coming into the world. And so now we’re sort of catching up to him in the narration, now that Jesus has actually been born. Now he’s indicating Jesus who has been born, saying “This is the one who I was talking about. Even though he comes after me, even though I was here first. Yeah, in terms of you hearing my preaching, I was here first. He is preferred before me. That means he’s the one who you should be following.” So St. John is sort of passing the baton. “Here’s the people I’ve gathered together, now you need to follow Jesus because he was before me, meaning he existed before me.”

Here, St John the Forerunner is not only testifying to the fact that for example Jesus is the Messiah or Jesus has come from God, but he’s testifying to what St. John the Theologian has already told us. Even St. John the Forerunner here is testifying to the fact that Jesus is God, that Jesus already existed. That he already existed. And so, it’s not just, “Oh well, here’s another king who’s going to come and overthrow the Romans and we’ll have an independent Judea again.” But this is God returning to his people. This is a different solution to the problem.

And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace.

It’s translated here in the Orthodox Study Bible “and grace for grace” which would probably be “of his fullness we have all received also grace”, really, “grace after grace” or “grace upon grace”.

And now he’s going to expand. We have to keep reading because that’s not the end of the sentence.

For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Now you’ll notice in the Orthodox Study Bible. If you’re looking at it, there’s a “but” there, and it’s in italics. When you see a word in italics in the text here, that means it’s not actually there. That means they’ve added it. And I don’t think there should be a “but” there. So what it says is, “for the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”. And the reason I don’t think “but”: if you put a “but” there, that sounds like you’re contrasting the two. Like over here you have the Law that came from Moses, but now you have grace and truth through Jesus Christ, like Moses bad, Jesus good.

But again, that’s part of the same sentence as the previous verse. And from his fullness, from Jesus’ fullness, we have all received also grace upon grace. The law came through Moses. That was grace. That was God acting in the world. That’s what we said grace was. God was acting in the old covenant. He was acting through Moses. He was acting through the Law that he gave his people. As we say in the prayers that I say behind the altar during communion, there’s a prayer where we sort of rehearse sort of all the way through the Scriptures, everything God has done for us. And one of those is that he gave us the Law to aid us. He gave us the Law to show us the right path, to show us what righteousness is. So the Law came through Moses, that was grace. That was God acting, right? And now grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. And so we received grace upon grace. It’s fulfillment, because this all comes through Christ’s fullness, completing it. Christ is now filling it up. We had some, we had part. Now it’s filled to overflowing.

The word “fulfill”, even though it has the word “fill” in English, we don’t really think about it that way. When we say Jesus fulfilled a prophecy, we think, “Oh, well, they predicted this would happen and then it happened, so the prophecy was fulfilled”. But really fulfilled in English, the word comes from “to fill full”, right? To take something and fill it until it’s full. And so the idea here is really that Jesus doesn’t just, “Oh we find some prophecies that talk about Jesus before he was born”, but in the sense that Jesus takes what God has been doing since the beginning of creation, and he fills that up. He fills that up to overflowing now, because as St. Paul’s going to say in Christ is the fullness of deity in bodily form. So, Christ now represents the fullness of what God does in the world. And it’s not as opposed to what he’s done in the past. There’s not opposition there. It’s just more and more, greater and greater until Christ is the pinnacle. Jesus is the pinnacle.

And then to further emphasize that:

No one has seen God at any time.

Interlocutor: That’s what God told Moses.

Fr. Stephen: After he spoke to Him face to face! Yeah, no one has seen God at any time.

“The only begotten son”.

And that’s the same word again, monogenes, has both ideas.

“Who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him”.

Now he just referred to Moses, who spoke to God face to face. So what St. John is saying here is when Moses was sitting there speaking to God face to face, it wasn’t the Father that he was seeing, it was Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, who Moses was sitting and speaking to. That he was speaking to. So, he’s not just saying in the Old Testament, nobody saw God. Well, I can show you all kinds of passages in the Old Testament where people saw God. What he’s saying is all those times, they were seeing Jesus Christ, that that’s who he is identifying, that’s who Christ is.

So, this is important because, again, from St. John’s perspective, from the way he’s setting this out, he’s not saying, okay, I’m going to teach you something new. You all thought there was just one God and he was one person, but actually there’s two. That’s not how he’s approaching it. He’s approaching it as: now that we’ve seen Jesus in the flesh, now that we’ve known Him and interacted with Him, now we understand what was going on. Now we understand why Moses could talk to God face to face. And then one chapter later, God tells me, “If you see me, you’ll die.” It’s like, “What?” Now we understand that, Because now we’ve seen Jesus who Moses saw.

Interlocutor: So I’ve heard Jesus described as God made visible. So we would say then that anytime in the Old Testament when God is made visible, it’s Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Interlocutor: What about the icon of the Trinity?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Which one?

Interlocutor: The Hospitality of Abraham.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the Hospitality of Abraham is not… the three angels are not supposed to be the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They’re supposed to represent the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. And if you look closely at it, there’s one of them that is dressed the way Christ is always dressed in icons and in his nimbus, it has the cross that Christ always has in the icons. And then the other two angels just have sort of regular…

Because if we go back and read that story in Genesis where God comes to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, the text is very clear. It just says, Yahweh came to Abraham’s tent. It causes problems from a Jewish perspective, but it just says, Yahweh came to his tent. There were these two others with him, and the three spoke with one voice.

But then the two angels then go down to Sodom and Gomorrah to get Lot. Those are the two angels who go to Sodom and Gomorrah. And Yahweh stays and continues to talk to Abraham for a little bit. And so, we would understand that again if that was Christ talking to Abraham, being with Abraham, with those two angels that he and the two represent the idea of the Trinity.

Interlocutor: So, the two angels are actually only two angels.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Interlocutor: We take this as…

Fr. Stephen: Symbolic.

Interlocutor: Symbolic of the Trinity.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so the purpose of that icon is to aid us. That’s a biblical image of the Trinity. And so when we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, that we can’t understand, but when we want to meditate and contemplate it in prayer, we have that icon sort of aid us in that meditation and contemplation.

Interlocutor: It is properly, I would guess, called the hospitality of Abraham, not the icon of the Trinity.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, it existed as the icon of the Hospitality of Abraham for a long time. It only started being referred to as Icon of the Holy Trinity with Andrei Rublev’s version, which, if I remember incorrectly, was in the 13th century. And what he did was he essentially added the identifiers to Christ and to sort of make that element this is an image of the Trinity, make that imagery more clear in the visual icon, but it is still the hospitality of Abraham.

Interlocutor: There is a Western icon of the Trinity that we wouldn’t accept, but it shows up in Renaissance art a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor: Where Christ is on the cross, the Father is holding the cross behind him, and there’s a dove flying between them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the technical rules, which aren’t always followed, of Orthodox iconography, you’re only to depict the Holy Spirit as a dove in the icon of Christ’s baptism by St. John, and you could depict Him as the tongues of fire in the Pentecost icon. When you’re depicting events where the Holy Spirit appeared, you could depict Him as He appeared. But He’s not actually a dove. That is a form in which He appeared at one particular time.

Interlocutor: And we would not make an icon of the Father.

Fr. Stephen: Now, how that developed, just as a brief aside, is there was an icon called the Paternity, which is a very, very common icon theme, of the Theotokos with Christ on her lap, sort of enthroned on her lap, they made a parallel icon that was Abraham and Isaac. It was Abraham holding Isaac on his lap. And it was supposed to be symbolic, because Isaac was the child of the promise and all this. They called it the Paternity because it was supposed to be symbolic of God the Father and God the Son. And somewhere along the line, that symbolic part kind of fell out. People just started saying it was the Father and the Son, and then other people would add a dove to it. And so you get that because people sort of lose track of the rules.

But another place where this verse comes up in our matins service on Sunday after the Gospel reading, where we have where the Gospel readings about Christ resurrection period, there’s a prayer, “we have beheld the resurrection of Christ”, then that we say about Christ, “thou art our God and we know none other beside thee.” Well, if you don’t know what that’s getting at, that English translation makes it sound like, “Well, what, we don’t believe in the Father or the Holy Spirit anymore? It’s just Jesus now?” But that’s not what… the phrasing kind of throws people off because they tried to put it into King James language, “we know none other beside me”. Meaning we have no knowledge of God apart from Jesus Christ. It’s not that Jesus Christ tells us some things about God and then we have these other sources of information about God also. Everything we know about God, about the triune God, we know through Jesus Christ, which is what St. John is communicating here. So that’s a way of saying that back, right? That it’s through Jesus Christ in particular, and only through Jesus Christ that we come to see and know who God is. Because of course, Christ being man, we can know another man or woman, whereas God is beyond our comprehension.

But this theologically is also a very important point because you will very often hear people when they start talking about God, even theologians. If you pick up a book called “The Doctrine of God”, “Who is God?” And you open to the first page, it’s not going to say anything about Jesus, even from a Christian. It’s going to start talking about the oneness of God, God’s omnipotence, his omniscience. He knows everything. He’s all powerful. It’s got all these philosophical attributes of God. He’s going to go all through this stuff and then there’ll be an appendix about the Holy Trinity. And then they’ll tell you, go read volume two about Christ, right?

And theologically, what the Scriptures tell us is we should be doing the exact opposite. If you want to know who God is, what God is like, what his personality is like, you look at Jesus. Jesus shows us, we know that God loves us because we’ve seen that Jesus loved us so much he suffered and died this horrible death for us. That’s how we know God loves us. We know that he’s compassionate because we see Jesus’ compassion to our people. We know that he loves and accepts sinners in repentance because we see Jesus do that. We know he cares about our illnesses and our sufferings and our struggles because we see Jesus caring about it. That’s how we know who Jesus is.

And so, if anyone comes to you from the Old Testament or from philosophy or from anything else and wants to talk about God is like this or that or the other, unless they’re going to say whatever that is about Jesus, they’re off base. They’re off base because, as Christians, Jesus is the one source we have the one way and the only way we know who God is.

Interlocutor: Well, in our society today, where people struggle a lot or talk a lot about, “Do I believe in God,” or “Do you believe in God?”, “Can one believe in God?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard it phrased in terms of Jesus. It’s always in terms of basically a philosophical abstraction.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah. If there’s evil in the world, and if there’s this all-powerful theoretical God, why doesn’t he stop it?

Interlocutor: Yeah. And the word God in our culture means this philosophical abstraction, which we as Christians should say, “Sorry, we don’t know much about that, what we know is these behaviors that we witnessed in Jesus.”.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Jesus who suffered alongside us, who suffered the evil that we suffered in this world in order to redeem us.

Interlocutor: And who didn’t tell us why there is evil in the world. And so we don’t know. And really, I think that puts the whole discussion on an entirely different basis, because most theological discussions that I’ve heard or participated in outside the Church have really been that; they’ve been philosophical. They have not been truly theological. They’ve been, “Can we, using reason, come up with the answers to these questions?”

Fr Stephen: Right. Like a math equation. Yeah.

Interlocutor: And the answer is no, you can’t.

Fr Stephen: Right. And part of that is because, of course, we believe God is three persons. But that’s persons. That’s persons. There’s a difference between knowing a person and knowing even facts about a person. When I say I know my wife, and I know my wife deeply, intimately, as a person, I don’t just mean I know a lot of facts about my wife, her height, her eye color, her hair color. And if you pile all those up well, I know her really well. No, because she’s a person.

Interlocutor: This person thing, it was C. S. Lewis that just gave me a big “ah-hah”, when I read Mere Christianity ages ago, because he says the highest thing that we know in our world is persons. Personhood. It’s not abstractions and forces. There really isn’t anything as rich, as powerful, as complex, as valuable as a person. There’s just nothing else in that league. So if you want to think about what would be the greatest imaginable thing in the universe, you have to think in terms of persons. Because that’s as close as we can get.

Fr Stephen: Yes, because a person is, in some sense, absolute. They’re not just the sum total of all mathematical data.

Interlocutor: They are mysterious. What is a person?  That is a very deep question. And I used to, at ESA, when kids would go up to communion, I would think about each one and think, “that is a person”. And this is a great variety of people. And they were all persons in a unique way. And it’s just mind boggling when you start to think about what personhood is. And in most of these discussions about God as philosophy, well, the idea of God being a person is just sort of left out, right?

Fr Stephen: Yeah. It’s completely ignored.

Interlocutor: But to take the pop culture thing, “The Force”, which was a brilliantly contrived image of what most people would think of as God, is a force. The Force is nothing compared to a person, any person.

Fr Stephen: Yeah, just some kind of energy field.

Interlocutor 2: I think it’s only faith that [Inaudible], because we believe that Jesus when you think of God, we think of Jesus.

Interlocutor: We should. Yeah.

Interlocutor 2: That’s because we are faithful.

Interlocutor: I think you’re right. And I think that’s what goes wrong with the sort of philosophical discussions is that the people that are having those are trying to ask the question of, “Should I have faith? Could I have faith?” They want that solved here. They want it solved here before they even address it here, before they even think about admitting it to their heart. And you really only come to it through the heart. You can’t come to it.

Interlocutor 2: Exactly.

Fr Stephen: It’s like when you’re dating, if you sit down on a first date and say, “Can I believe that this person and I will someday be married? Before you’ve gotten to know them, before you know who they are, before…” you know what I mean, you have to come to know them.

Interlocutor 2: I’d have them fill out this questionnaire. [Laughter]

Fr Stephen: But even the questionnaire would just tell you things about them, right. It wouldn’t really tell you…

Interlocutor 1: That’s what those dating services do, everyone fills out a questionnaire…

Fr Stephen: And a lot of times they don’t work.

Yeah, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the first theological conversation was between Eve and the serpent, because before that, in Scripture, every conversation, God is part of the conversation. They’re speaking to God, or God is speaking to them for the first time, with the serpent and Eve, it’s two created things, talking about God in the abstract, because the serpent comes to you and says, “Did God really say that you should do that? And doesn’t it look good?” And they started talking about Him instead of to Him and with Him as an object.

And so that’s always a bad way to go. So the fact that we could come to know God in Jesus Christ is not just because Jesus Christ came and said,

“Okay, here, I’m going to write you a book”, or “Here I’m going to tell you a whole bunch of things about God by preaching” it’s because we could come to know Jesus as a person, and he is God, and so through Him we come to know who God is.

Interlocutor 2: It might take time, which is ok.

Fr Stephen: It does take time, it’s going to take eternity, [Laughter] but we can start now and grow forever.

Now we’re going to go back to St. John.

Now this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”

Now, we’ve ended the poetic part. And now we’re getting into the story proper. So, we’re starting with, as he sort of indicated to us in the poem, we’re starting actually with St. John before we get to Jesus in terms of the story. So, “some Jews”, “some Judeans”, is literally what the word means. Some of the people of Judea, they send priests from the city to make an official inquiry and ask him, who are you? Now, by that they don’t mean, can we see some ID? Or where are you from? Or who are your parents? By that, what they mean is effectively they’re trying to get at the idea, “Are you the Messiah?” Because you’re out here, you’re baptizing these people, you’re gathering a following, right? Is that where this is going? Are you the Messiah? That’s why they come to ask.

So, they say, who are you? He confessed and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ, Christ is”. Christos is the Greek word for that means Messiah, meschiach, the anointed one. So this is probably… there’s going to be a king from the line of King David who’s going to come back as part of God’s plan in his return to Israel. And at this time in history, most of the Jewish people are interpreting that very just politically in terms of just this world. He’s going to come back and get rid of these Romans who we don’t like.

Interlocutor 2: But there are some who interpret this very eschatologically that he’s going to come in the present world and bring in the kingdom of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But even their conception of the kingdom of God in a lot of cases is the Jewish people ruling the world from Jerusalem and the Gentiles becoming their slaves. It’s a very this-worldly kind of new heavens and new earth. It’s not overly spiritualized.

He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”

So, St. John here makes the point that St. John the Forerunner did not deny, he confessed, said straight out that he was not the Messiah. St John didn’t claim to be the Messiah, and then he got killed and it turned out he wasn’t, so now we say Jesus is, but he never was. He never claimed to be.

And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?”

Well, why would they ask that?

Interlocutor: Elijah is supposed to come back before the Messiah.

Fr Stephen: Right, there is a prophecy in the book of Malachi, the prophecy of Malachi, that before the end, before God returns his people, that Elijah would return.

Interlocutor: And I had heard the idea biblically, I thought that John was Elijah.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get there.  We’ll get there. But Elijah, remember, didn’t die. Elijah was taken up into heaven in the fiery chariot, right? So they believed since he didn’t die, he was going to come back. This would be one of the signs that God is about to… because remember what Elijah did as a prophet. He came and he denounced King Ahab, the wicked king, and brought judgment on them all. So they thought, oh, well, see, well, I just got to come back and he’s going to pronounce judgment on the Romans and the wicked in Judea, and the Lord is coming to straighten everybody out.

And what St. John the Forerunner has been preaching is not all that dissimilar from that. He’s been pronouncing judgment on Herod and judgment on sinners and saying, this is all about to happen. So it’s not an irregular from their perspective. Yeah, okay. So, Elijah returned and this is all about to happen.

He said, “I am not.”

[So they asked,] “Are you the Prophet?”

And he answered, “No.”

Interlocutor: What prophets do they mean there? I’ve heard this “the prophet” is supposed to come, but I don’t know…

Fr Stephen: Well, there is in Maccabees… there’s a reference to the fact that after the time of the exile, even though they came back from exile, one of the things that didn’t happen, in addition to the new temple not being filled with God’s presence, is there had been this line of prophets and there was no prophet coming them directly with the word of God during this time either. So they’re sort of running down their list. They’re like, “Are you the Messiah?” “No.” “Okay. You’re not Elijah, but are you the current prophet?” “Are you the beginning of this process? Are you the very beginning of this process?” And he answered “no” to that too. So he basically tells them, “I’m nobody, you don’t know who I am.”

Then they said to him, “Who are you, that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?”

So they say, “Well, look, people sent us out here to find out who you are. We have to tell them something. So if you’re not willing to accept any of these types, if you’re not willing to fit into our scheme here, what do we tell them? Who do we tell them you are?”

He said: “I am

  ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness:

  “Make straight the way of the LORD,”’

as the prophet Isaiah said.”

So a note here on the translation, we’re so used to seeing this way. We have to remember that both the original Hebrew of Isaiah, but also the Greek, were originally written in all capitals with no punctuation and no spaces between words. So where we put commas and where we end sentences is sort of a matter of convention when we read and understand the Bible.

And I would suggest that if we look this up, which we won’t take the time to do right now, but if you look this up in Isaiah, the prophecy that this introduces, and an important note on that, we have to remember they didn’t have chapters and verses at this time in history. So, if I wanted you to go and look at a particular passage in Isaiah, I couldn’t say, “Go look at Isaiah 42, verse 1,” right? Because that didn’t mean anything to you. There are no verses. I couldn’t say. “Well, go look at line number 123” because depending on which copy you were looking at, the lines might vary with the width of the paper.

So the only way you could refer someone to a passage was to quote the first line. So you will see, for example, they’ll quote the first verse of a song and they’re not just saying, okay, look at this one sentence, look at this one verse. They’re saying, “go read that psalm”. They’re sort of giving you this subheading. “Start reading where it says this and then read the rest of that passage.” So St. John is really referring to this whole piece in Isaiah, and what this piece in Isaiah is talking about, this particular prophecy, is talking about the return from exile.

And so, I think this would be better punctuated: “The voice of one crying, “In the wilderness makes straight the way of the Lord.”

Because what it’s talking about is God sort of opening up a road. Opening up a highway from Babylon back to the promised land, through the wilderness, through the desert. Through the wilderness to bring them back. Just as he brought them through the wilderness after he brought them out of Egypt. So when he has to identify himself, he says, “I’m the one who’s announcing this. I’m announcing that the exile that never really ended because we’re still not at peace in the land. God still hasn’t returned to us. God isn’t present with us anymore. I’m the one coming to announce that that exile is finally coming to an end.”

And if we tie that together with what St. John was saying in the prologue, who was St. John the Forerunner bearing witness to? Christ. And so it’s through now, Jesus, that God is going to bring an end to that exile.

And we’re going to see, as St. John’s Gospel continues, it’s not just the exile in Babylon, but it’s going all the way back to the original exile, which was the exile from the Garden of Eden, that’s the place we were really exiled from was from paradise originally. And it’s ultimately that exile that Christ is really going to be about reversing, not just about giving them a Jewish state over there.

Now those who were sent were from the Pharisees.

So now we get a little more detail that the people who were sent were specifically from this group, the Pharisees.

And they asked him, saying, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

“So you’re out here doing this, you’re out here baptizing people in the Jordan River…” And we talked last time real briefly about the fact that the book of Joshua, when the people are coming to enter into the land, they come through the Jordan River, right? The Jordan River parts the way the Red Sea did, and they come into the land. So even this baptism in the Jordan River is kind of symbolic of the end of the exile, this idea of coming back into the land. But they say, “Okay, well, we recognize there are these three figures who are going to have authority to do something. You just said you’re not any of them. So then why are you out here doing this? If you’re just this voice out here telling us that this is about to happen, why aren’t you just talking? Why are you gathering these people together? Why are you doing this?”

John answered them, saying, “I baptize with water, but there stands One among you whom you do not know.”

So, already, as John the Forerunner is saying this, Jesus has been born. Jesus is living. He’s saying he’s already here, right? “I’m not announcing somebody who’s about to come. He’s here. He’s come. He’s around.”

“It is He who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose.”

And that’s a pretty literal translation of what he says. “I’m not worthy to get down on my knees and remove the shoe from his foot.” And I’m given to understand that in the Middle East today, feet and shoes are still considered pretty dirty, filthy things that you don’t want to handle.

Interlocutor: We have a saying, “he’s not worth your shoe.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, so that’s what St. John is saying about himself, right? He’s saying I’m not worthy to touch his shoe. To touch Jesus’ shoe, right?

These things were done in Bethabara beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

So we have this place, that he’s out there by the Jordan baptizing.

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him,

So he sees Jesus coming, as he said, Jesus is already around. He’s already there in their midst.

and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

We’ll stop there first. We’ve put a lot of symbolism into “lamb” here that I’m going to say wasn’t originally there, because, especially in Western Christianity, but it bleeds over everywhere, We tend to think about when we talk about Christ’s death, his death in particular, but his death and resurrection both. We tend to talk about it in terms of atonement. People have this theory of atonement and that theory of atonement and this and that and the other, which is connected to the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, that holiday.

But St. John, all the Gospel writers, really, but St. John in particular is going to be very clear. Jesus doesn’t die on the Day of Atonement. Jesus dies on the Passover. That’s why we call it Pascha, Passover.

And there’s even a little bit of confusion about the Day of Atonement ritual, because in the Day of Atonement ritual, there was a goat and there was a lamb. The goat, they put the people’s sins on it and sent the goat with their sins out into the wilderness. And then the lamb, which had to be pure, was sacrificed and eaten and offered to God. They didn’t put the sins of the people on the lamb and kill it, what they put the people’s sins on, they set out in the wilderness to die.

And there is, to be fair, when we get to the book of Hebrews, there is in Hebrews a comparison made between Christ’s death and the Day of Atonement. But what St. John is always pointing at is Passover and the Passover lamb. And the Passover lamb was not sacrificed for people’s sins. What the Passover lamb did was, they killed the lamb, you cooked it whole and were to eat it whole. So it was this meal that you ate together and then the blood you used to mark your door so that in the judgment of God that was coming upon the world, you would be preserved, you and your family would be preserved through that judgment.

And so, the idea was that the blood of that lamb marked out who God’s people were, because if you read the original Passover story very closely, you’ll see they weren’t all, quote-unquote “Jewish”. It says there were Egyptians who went out with them. There were what would later be called Canaanites who went out with them, but they all became God’s people because they believed, and they ate the Passover lamb and marked themselves out with his blood.

So since we’re going to see all the way through St. John’s Gospel, when he talks about lambs, he’s talking about Passover, when he talks about Christ’s death and Christ’s blood, he’s talking about the Passover, right? It’s reasonable to believe that’s what he’s referring to here, too.

Interlocutor: So this is a lamb that identifies who the people of God are and who saves them from judgment, who marks them off as saved from judgment?

Interlocutor: Right. So, when God’s judgment comes, the people at this point are all looking forward to God’s judgment because they’re very convinced that since they’re the descendants of Abraham, when God comes to judge the world, they’re going to be on the right side and all these no-good Gentiles and no-good sinners are going to get theirs. And as we saw St. John’s saying, “no, that’s not the criteria”, that Christ is the one who forms the criteria for who’s going to be on the right side and who’s going to be on the wrong side when that judgment comes.

And we’re going to see when St. John later in the Gospel describes Christ’s death, he uses all the imagery of darkness and the earthquake and all that, that the Old Testament prophets talk about, about the day of judgment. So what he’s saying here, when he identifies as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, is that he’s the one who’s now going to provide, even though the people of God are sinners also, they’re not going to now suffer the consequences of that sin because of Christ and because of what he’s going to do. He’s going to preserve them through that judgment. So that’s what he’s aiming at when he calls him the Lamb, the Lamb of God.

Interlocutor: Father, how does he know that he’s Jesus, because they didn’t meet.

Fr. Stephen: Who, St. John? Well, they’re first cousins, but also, one of the things we see and this was mentioned we talked about last time in the prologue even, that this is one of St. John’s themes is that whether or not you recognize Jesus is based on your own spiritual state. If you are a righteous person who loves God, when you see Jesus, you know who he is immediately. If you’re not, if you’re wicked, if your heart is far from God, you can see Jesus, talk to Him, argue with Him, do all that, and you’re totally blind. You’re totally blind to who he is, because of the condition of your heart and your soul.

So, St. John here, is very close to God, and so he knows Jesus. He knows exactly who he is. I mean, in St. Luke’s Gospel, there’s even a better example, that’s St. Simeon, when Jesus is brought us a baby to the temple, he sees this baby and immediately knows who it is. But yeah, that’s the idea. So this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

“This is He of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who is preferred before me, for He was before me.’  I did not know Him; but that He should be revealed to Israel, therefore I came baptizing with water.”

That’s a confusing phrase. “I did not know Him, but that he should.” The idea being that the purpose of his ministry and the purpose of his baptizing was to reveal Jesus to the world. To reveal who he was. “I’ve been out here baptizing.” The Pharisees just asked him, why are you out here doing this if you’re not… And he’s saying, “This is why. He is why I’ve been out here.’

Interlocutor: So, Jesus arrived at this point. The people who’ve been baptized before this point presumably haven’t known Him. But do we then assume that because they’ve been baptized, they are going to know Him now?

Fr Stephen: They are people who have been prepared for Him by St. John. Yeah.

And John bore witness, saying, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him. I did not know Him, but He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘Upon whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, this is He who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.”

So we don’t have sort of the direct story of his baptism. It’s told after the fact. St John the Forerunner, as he’s testifying to who Jesus is. He says, “This is what I saw when I baptized him. And, oh, by the way, that’s important because back when God spoke to me and sent me to baptize, he told me, when you baptize someone and you see the Holy Spirit descend upon them, this is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”

Interlocutor: Others didn’t see the dove. Right?

Fr Stephen: Right. This is something that was revealed to St. John as a sign to him.

But this also points to… already here, and we’re going to see St. John’s going to do more with this, but that there are sort of two baptisms. There’s this baptism with water that St. John’s already doing, and then there’s this baptism that Christ is going to bring with the Holy Spirit, right, with the Holy Spirit. Because remember, Luke and Acts are two parts of one story, right? Acts is, essentially, volume two of Luke. In Acts, we get the story of Pentecost. So St. John isn’t going to relate to us that story because his gospel ends before we get to the day of Pentecost. But he is going to describe what happens at Pentecost in the sense that the Holy Spirit through Christ is going to come to dwell upon believers.

And it’s also important, we skim over the language, we’re so used to it, “I baptize with water, he baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” The “baptizing with the Holy Spirit” here is not, I’m going to give you the Holy Spirit. It’s used in the same sense as baptizing with water. What happens when you get baptized in water? Well, you get immersed in water. So what St. John is really predicting here for believers who are in Christ is that they’re going to become immersed in the Holy Spirit. That the Holy Spirit, when he talks about and this is the language that St. Luke uses of being again filled. We talked about that filling, fulfilling, filling up language. It’s not sort of like, oh, well, here’s the Holy Spirit, like it’s a token. But the idea is that St. Luke says you’re filled up with the Holy Spirit. He’s going to say St. John’s language is more you’re immersed in the Holy Spirit.

It’s not just they’re going to know God, in an external way. “Well, there’s Jesus. I know him.” But that we’re going to become intimately connected to God. As St. Paul quotes in him, we live and move and have our being that the Holy Spirit is sort of in us and through us and all around us.

And then finally he says, “I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God,” which at least was one of the titles that was given to the Messiah because the King was considered to be the Son of God, again, sort of by adoption. Sort of by adoption.

Interlocutor: Messiah was the word for king.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The anointed one, the anointed king.

Interlocutor: When we read about kings in the book of Kings, they’re messiahs.

Fr. Stephen: So Jesus Christ, you could translate it King Jesus, very literally.

Interlocutor: Because the ceremony that made a king was an anointing and not a crown, not a hat.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] And so it at least means that, but as we’ve already seen from what we’ve already read here in St. John’s Gospel, for St. John, Jesus being the Son of God means more than that because he’s the son of God, not just by adoption, but in a special and unique way as the begotten Son of God.

Interlocutor: At the very least, anyone hearing that at this point is going to say, “oh, that’s the Messiah.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, your average hearer at the time that would say, “Oh, okay, that’s what St. John meant when he said he wasn’t the Messiah. He’s saying this person is the Messiah. He’s saying Jesus is the actual Messiah and he’s here to bear witness to him.” They would not at that point have appreciated the fuller sense of that.