Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, when we fully get started here in just a minute, we’re going to be starting at the beginning of chapter 3 where we left off last time.

And so, I can get us caught up again relatively quickly since we’re only two chapters in. We saw that most of the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel was the sort of poetic introduction and prologue where St. John introduced a lot of his themes of what he’s going to be talking about as we go forward in the Gospel. The second half of that first chapter was talking about the transition between St. John the Forerunner and Jesus, how St. John the Forerunner began this movement, but that the intent of that movement all along was to prepare a group of people, a group of disciples to then follow Jesus once he publicly announced himself. And we saw that happen. We saw St. Andrew and St. Philip encounter Jesus and become his followers and invite their brothers and friends to also become disciples.

Then we saw in chapter 2, Jesus did the first sign in his ministry. And we talked about how for St. John, instead of talking about miracles and emphasizing just Jesus’ power, he talks about signs with the idea that these things that Jesus does are pointers, the way a sign indicates something bigger than just what it is. It’s an indicator of who Jesus is and what his mission is and what he’s here to do so that people should, if nothing else, see those signs and be able to understand based on them who Jesus is and that he’s a Messiah.

And the first one of those was at the wedding in Cana, where he turned water into wine. And we talked about how wine, especially at a wedding, how this was symbolic of the bridal feast that’s referred to in the Old Testament and other places in the New Testament as a symbol for the age to come when the Messiah comes, the time when God will return to his people. And so, this should have been a sign to the people who saw it that Jesus was the Messiah and that Jesus was God returning to his people and that they should have believed and embraced that now was the time when those things were coming to pass. We also saw that they didn’t. But they should have.

And then we saw Jesus. We talked about how in St. John’s Gospel, unlike St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke’s Gospels, which present Jesus’ ministry as sort of a straight line where he travels from Galilee to Jerusalem in one trip. And then when he arrives at Jerusalem, he has this confrontation with the chief priests and the Pharisees and the scribes that ends in his death and then his resurrection. Whereas in St. John’s Gospel he presents Jesus’ ministry as taking place over three years. And so, we see multiple times where Jesus goes to Jerusalem for different feasts. So, we saw the first time he went to Jerusalem, that being for the feast of the Passover and when he arrived there, he went to the temple and saw the people there conducting business, making money, exploiting the people, these being the people who are in authority at the temple. And we talked about how this is one of the themes that the prophets in the Old Testament had: the image that God would use of God appointed these people as shepherds over his sheep and then he returns and finds them having killed and eaten the sheep rather than having protected them and preserved them and shepherded them.

Interlocutor: Is this incident of the cleansing of the Temple in the other Gospels too?

Fr. Stephen: It is. And that’s exactly where I was going next. Because this is one of the differences between St. John’s Gospel and the other three, is that not only is there not that single structure of the one trip, but because of that structure of the single trip from Galilee to Jerusalem, in the other three Gospels, this happens at the very end of Jesus’ ministry. And especially in St. Mark’s Gospel it looks like this is sort of the episode that causes the Pharisees and the rulers of the temple to decide to put Jesus to death. It happens at the beginning of what we celebrate as Holy Week, whereas it’s St. John’s Gospel, it happens right here at the very beginning. And so there have been a number of ways that people have understood the relationship between those things.

And the reason this is important to discuss beyond just this one episode is: what we do with this issue, there’s plenty of issues like this when you compare the four Gospels where things are in different orders, where things are just a little different. If you put all of the accounts of the resurrection together how many angels were there at the tomb? Was there one or were there two? Where the angels inside or outside when they walked up? There are all these little details. So how we deal with any of these, we’re saying something about how we’re going to deal with all of them.

So, one of the ways this has been dealt with is some people and I don’t mean just sort of random people. St John Chrysostom is one of them who does this, says that “Well Jesus must have done it twice, he did it once at the beginning of his ministry and then he did it again at the end of his ministry.” Well, that takes care of the problem. But now we’re saying that Jesus did it twice and none of the Gospels says he did it twice. All four of them say he did it once. And so this is a process that’s usually called harmonization. One of the most common examples of it that you see all the time, especially during Holy Week, is people will preach or they’ll talk about the seven sayings of Jesus from the cross. Well, you can look at any of the Gospels and none of the Gospels does Jesus say seven things from the cross. He says different things in different Gospels, and if you take all of them and put them together, you’ve got seven, right? But when you tell the story of Jesus saying these seven things, you’re telling a different story than the one that each of the four Gospels tells. They each tell a story. You’ve now made up a fifth story by putting them together.

And I think that the overall problem with that is that we need to take seriously the fact that the Church canonized four Gospels. And when the Fathers did that, it wasn’t because they didn’t notice that there were differences. They didn’t canonize all four of them and they start reading them and go, “Oh, oops, wait, that’s a problem!” They were fully aware that they were different. They were fully aware that there were these differences, and yet they canonized four. They could have put them all together into one. At the end of the 2nd, beginning of the 3rd century, a person named Tatian in Syria did exactly that. It’s called the Diatessaron, which is Greek for “through four”. He took all four Gospels and smushed them together, sort of wove them all together, all the stories, into one big story of Jesus. But the Church didn’t canonize that. That’s not what the Church put in the Bible. What the Church put in the Bible were the four separate, independent Gospels.

Interlocutor: How did the Church react to that?

Fr. Stephen: It was used by a lot of people for a long time in terms of studying and in terms of a way of putting things together, but it was never read in Church as the Gospel reading because it was different. And the Church could have canonized just one of the four, could have just picked one of these four and said, “Well, St John has the most deep theology, so we’re just going to make this one our gospel.” Or, “St Luke says the most complete story from Jesus’ birth to his death and ascension, so we’re just going to use that one.” They could have done that, but they didn’t. That’s not what the Church did. And there were people like Marcion, who was denounced as a heretic, who did that. He said only St. Luke’s Gospel, and he got rid of the other three. So they could have done that, but they didn’t. And we have testimony going all the way back to St. Irenaeus in 170 AD to the fact that there are exactly four Gospels. So we have to take that seriously.

And in another place, although St. John Chrysostom, as I said, does use the two cleansings of the temple explanation. In another place, St. John Chrysostom says that the differences between the Gospels, those little differences, are the proof that they’re true and that their eyewitness accounts. Because, as he said, and this is back in the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century he said, if you’ve ever investigated something and you can ask any police officer today and they’ll tell you this, believe me, if you ever investigated something and you talk to people who are actually eyewitnesses, their stories will not match up. If you talk to four people who actually saw it, who were actually there, St. John Chrysostom said, if you find four people and you interview them and they all give you the exact same story, that means they got together and they worked out their story, right? So he says, this is proof that what we have in the Gospels is not made up. It’s not something they got together, the apostles got together after Jesus’ death and said, “Oh no, what are we going to do? Our movement is over. Our messiah is dead.” And they cooked up this story together, right? Because then they would all have the same exact story. So he says this is proof that it’s true, because each one of them is recounting what they saw and heard and remember.

So, what we really have are, Jesus is a person, and if you ask four different people who know a person in four different contexts, you ask somebody who works with a person, somebody who goes to church with a person, somebody who’s in the person’s immediate family, you ask different people about that person, they’ll all describe that person to you. But the descriptions will be different. Not because some of them are true and some of them are false, but you’re getting different perspectives, different parts of who that person is. And so that’s what we have with the four Gospels, these four different accounts that ultimately go back to eyewitnesses of who Jesus is. We have all of those individual stories. St. Luke tells us he talked to a whole bunch of people and put together a whole bunch of eyewitnesses’ testimony. So we have all of these people who encountered Jesus, who were with Jesus, who traveled with Jesus, who knew Jesus, and through all of them, we get this sort of three dimensional picture.

When I was a kid, we had Viewmasters. You’re probably too young. And the way a Viewmaster worked was they had two pictures essentially from a slightly different angle, and you’d look into a thing. So one picture would be in front of one eye and the other picture would be in front of the other eye. And so it would do an optical illusion. So proceeding to two different angles, you’d get what looked like a three dimensional picture.

So what we have with the four Gospels are four angles, right? Four angles, four perspectives that show us who Jesus is. Now, that said, if you’re still wondering, “Okay, but did Jesus cleanse the temple at the beginning or at the end? Or both?” Well, the earliest testimony we have, and I know I mentioned this once before, but the earliest testimony we have about the Gospels comes from a person named Papias who lived in the first century. So he was born probably around 30 years after Jesus died and lived in the latter half of the first century and knew several of the apostles. He did not see Jesus, but he knew several of the apostles while they were still alive. And he wrote a number of books, unfortunately, we do not have copies of any of the books he wrote, but we have quotations of him in other Church Fathers who had his books, and so tell us what he said. And what he says about St. Mark’s Gospel is he says that St. Mark was a disciple of St. Peter. St. Peter recounted to him what Jesus said and did while St. Peter was traveling with him. And St. Mark wrote an account of the life of Jesus, but not in order.

That’s the earliest witness we have to this for someone who’s roughly contemporary with the apostles, with St. Mark, which means that if we take that seriously, that means that the order that we have in St. Matthew’s Gospel, St. Mark’s Gospel and St. Luke’s Gospel is a literary order of the story, and that it’s St. John’s Gospel that gives us the actual order things happened. And this is why when you read in any of the Church Fathers, they all say Jesus’ ministry lasted for three years. They’re getting that from St. John’s Gospel because it’s never specified in St. Matthew’s Gospel or St. Mark’s or St Luke’s. But St. John, that’s what it is, three years. That’s why when we come to Holy Week, holy Week starts actually before Holy Week with Lazarus Saturday going into Palm Sunday. Well, the raising of Lazarus is a story that’s only told in St. John’s Gospel, and it’s in St. John’s Gospel that the raising of Lazarus leads to Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which then leads into Holy Week. So in our Holy Week services, we follow St. John’s timing breakdown.

So in general, if St John’s Gospel differs from Matthew, Mark and Luke in order of events, the church has always taken St John’s Gospel to be the literal, historical order, whereas St Matthew, St Mark and St Luke have arranged theirs differently to make a different point, not to lie to us and pretend things happen in a different order, but just to make a particular point, mainly that point being in their case that Jesus is on a mission when he’s born, and that mission is to go to the cross. And so, they present it as just this one straight… to make that point.

Interlocutor: Okay, in the Gospels, we have Palm Sunday and then we have the crucifixion… I watched the show on Public Broadcasting [Laughter] and they analyzed everything, and they said that there was no way that it could have been Palm Sunday. They suspect that his crucifixion was much later than it happened… more than a week. Do you….?

Fr. Stephen: Right. The main reason that’s unlikely is that they’re not taking into account the historical context. I mean, it does seem kind of wild to us that on Sunday everybody is cheering for Jesus and yelling that he’s the Messiah, and then four days later they’re yelling, “crucify and kill him!” The same people. That seems drastic to us. And we’ll talk about this more when we get to Holy Week in the gospel. But there are a number of historical situations that are going on at that time, the biggest one being the Romans and the fact that there had been rebellions against Rome that had started during Passover in previous years and that had to be quelled.

We’ll go into more detail on this later, but without going into too much detail on it now, it’s more amazing that if Jesus rode into town with that much fuss, it’s more amazing that he survived four days before the Romans had him executed, then that it only took four days. Pilate had, and there was a reference to this specifically in St. Luke’s Gospel, but about 20 years before Jesus was put to death, there was a rebellion that had been attempted to get rolling as the Passover was approaching in Jerusalem. Because at Passover at this time, the temple’s still there. Jews come from literally all over the Roman world and even outside of it, from the Persian Empire and other places, come to Jerusalem for the feast. And so it was packed. There were more than a million people, which is massive for an ancient city at that time. It was stuffed. And so there’s a whole bunch of people there. They’re all there with a lot of religious fervor for Passover. It was sort of like a powder keg. So someone showed up claiming to be the Messiah, “Hey, let’s overthrow the Romans.” You could have a riot break out very, very quickly.

And the way the Romans did things, the Roman Government was more like the mob than our contemporary governments. Pontius Pilate was sent there as the governor. His job was to keep the peace. That’s it. Keep the peace. And whatever he had to do to keep the peace, he was authorized to do. He could kill anybody he had to kill. He could torture anybody he wanted to torture. Whatever he had to do to keep the peace, he was expected to do. And if he didn’t succeed in keeping the peace and this actually happened to him because he was recalled to Rome after the Jewish revolts later. And when he failed to keep the peace, he was beheaded.

And the way they did capital executions in Rome, this is a little grizzly, but in case there’s any 13-year-old boys listening, they’ll find this exciting. We think of beheading, you cut someone’s head off. The swords and that kind of thing at that time were not able to be sharp enough for that to not be horrible, so they didn’t behead people that way. The way they beheaded people is they got two very strong men who would wrap a leather cord around the person’s neck and pull in opposite directions. And they did this in public. They did this at the top of these steps that led down into the Tiber River in Rome, so the person’s head would bounce down the stairs into the…

So, this was to make a point. The Romans did everything they did to make a point. It wasn’t just to punish the person, it was to make a point to everyone else. So this governor, he failed to keep the peace. Look what happened to him. You don’t want that to happen to you. Do your job.

Interlocutor: How long was Pilate there? Because I know that I’ve heard that he caused a riot when he arrived by bringing Roman standards into the temple.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he was there between 18 and 22 years. We’re not exactly sure, so that’s not so short, he did pretty well in terms of length of time. He still had a bad ending, but he did okay for the length of time. But this is why they did crucifixions. People were crucified naked, and they would be left to hang there. And sometimes it would take days for the person to die. And they didn’t take the bodies down when they died, they left them there for animals. The point being so that everyone would see, and they put the crime over their heads. So when you walk by, you’d say, this is what happens when you do this, so don’t do it. It was to make a point to everyone as be a deterrent.

And so, what Pilate did when this revolt started, about 20 years before Christ’s death, he heard that people were going around fomenting rebellion, and so he seized 150 random Jewish people off the streets. Men, women, didn’t care, grabbed them off the street, 150 at random, and crucified them along the roads leading into the city. So as the pilgrims came to the city, they had to walk past all of these people being crucified to make the point, once you get into town, you’d best behave.

Interlocutor: They crucified children also?

Fr. Stephen: Yes

Interlocutor: And they crucified them naked?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor: Even Jesus?

Fr. Stephen: That’s what they say. They don’t show that in… And I won’t go into detail on that. You can read some of the lives of the saints who are crucified. The soldiers who did it would get bored and find creative ways to crucify people. It was just sort of obscenely violent on purpose.

Interlocutor: In the research I’m doing on World War I. I researched the Armenian genocide and the Turks crucified Armenian girls. There are photographs.

Interlocutor 2: I saw the photographs because it was online.

Interlocutor: And that’s in the 20th century, crucifixion. They were crucified because they were Christian.

Fr. Stephen: It was so horrible that we invented a word to describe it, that’s “excruciating”, comes from the root of crucifixion. We have a new word to describe pain based on crucifixion. So this is how the Romans operated. And the reference to this earlier in the Gospels is Jesus talks about those whose blood Pilate mingled with the sacrifices. That’s who he’s talking about, are those people who he crucified at the Passover.

So, the Romans had zero qualms about violence of any kind. In fact, a lot of nonbelieving Bible scholars are dubious of Jesus’ trial before Pilate because they say Pilate wouldn’t have given him a trial, he would have just killed him. That’s sort of explained in the Gospels by the fact that his wife had the dream and this… but Pilate executed first and asked questions later. He didn’t consider Jews to be human, so they were non-persons under Roman law, so he didn’t care what happened. It was like killing a cow or a dog to him.

So, yeah, people don’t realize, and we’ll get started after this, but people don’t realize. There’s a really good editorial about a year ago that a historian named Tom Holland wrote. Tom Holland is a great history writer. Most of his history writing is about ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and he talks about how even though he’s not personally a believer, he’s not a Christian, he’s come to realize the debt that civilization owes to Christianity. He talks about in the piece, he talks about how he was a little kid, he loved dinosaurs. He thought dinosaurs were really neat. But if you think about it, meeting a Tyrannosaurus rex would not be really neat. It’s kind of neat at a long distance in history.

And he said he’d studied these people like Nero and Caesar Augustus and Hannibal and Alexander the Great, and they were sort of like Tyrannosaurus rexes. They’re neat and they’re fascinating and they’re these intriguing people. But you look at the brutality and the violence and the sexual immorality and all this that surrounded these people, they would just be monsters by today’s standards. But who are sort of lionized by history. And he came to realize as he thought about just how much Christianity transformed civilization, even for people who aren’t Christians. The way women are looked at in society, the way getting rid of slavery, the way ethnic hatreds have been broken down as much as they have. All of these things happen because of… the idea of hospitals, the idea of charity, the idea of orphanages. All of these things sort of came from Christianity. Whether you want to be a Christian or not, that’s where they came from and how much it transformed society.

Interlocutor: I read a book on the conversion of the Roman Empire, and I’d forgotten the author, but one of his main theses was that because the Christians took care of their sick and nursed them and took care of their poor, they survived at a higher rate. And aside from persuading people, because people were persuaded that it would be nice if we did, we would survive too, that Christian numbers grew as fast as they did, partly because Christians were simply taking care of each other.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the infant mortality rate was unbelievably lower because it was common… what happened when a baby was born into a Roman household, the head of a Roman household and a Roman household would be the extended family. It wasn’t just father, mother, children, the way we have a nuclear family. It was the grandfather, the aunts and uncles, their spouses, the grandchildren, the servants, this whole extended family. But the head of that whole extended household is called the paterfamilias, the father of the family. And what happened in Roman society is when a baby was born to anyone in that household, from the wife of the paterfamilias all the way down to one of the slaves, that baby was brought to the paterfamilias, who inspected the baby, thought about it, and decided whether they were going to keep it or not. And if they decided against keeping the baby, for whatever reason, baby would be taken out and left in the woods to die. It was called exposure.

Interlocutor: That was Greek as well.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Greeks did that too. That was for centuries, it was common until probably the third century. And Christians not only obviously wouldn’t do that, but Christians would go out and look for and find those children and adopt them and bring them into their families. And so that right there, demographically, over a couple of centuries, you have Christians having a lot more children, both adopted, and because they’re keeping their children, than the Romans. And so you start seeing that demographic shift towards Christianity away from paganism. That’s another example of how brutal life was in the Roman Empire.

So, yeah, when we see the Jews talking about the Romans and talking about the Roman tax collectors, and they have this disdain that they’re unclean and they won’t touch them and they won’t go into their home, and they’re always staging these revolts against the Romans. It’s not just sort of racism. The Romans really are sort of this monstrously, oppressive culture over the top of them. And periodically they would do things that were just grossly offensive, like Caligula trying to put a statue of himself in the Jewish temple. And they would just do these things because they had the power to do it. And that’s what the Romans worshiped. The Romans worshipped beauty, power, strength. Those were the things that they believed in. Not love, peace. Now they had what they called the Pax Romana. The Roman Peace. But that peace was Roman rule, right? So they’d conquer new territory. They’d say, “Well, we brought you peace by having conquered you. Now we’re ruling over you and so you were at peace.”

Interlocutor: We call it liberation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] Okay. So let’s go ahead now. We’ll get started here. At the beginning of chapter 3:

There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

So, Nicodemus, he was from the party of the Pharisees. I don’t know that we’ve talked too much yet about the different parties, the main two parties that we’re going to hear about… interestingly, I use the word parties. The word that was actually used in Greek to describe them was “heresies”. Because the word heresy originally just meant like, a sect or a group or a philosophical school. But these parties, when I say parties, what I mean are these are certain groups within the Jewish world who have a particular view of the world and of religion and of how it should function. They were religious factions. Saying denominations would be going too far. But some of them did have disdain for each other.

But there are at this point in history because the Jews have been sort of scattered all over the world, because different communities have developed differently, there’s sort of different ways to be Jewish at this point. Different focuses and different kinds of things. The Pharisees, as near as we can tell, their name comes from a verb that means to be “set apart” or to be “separate”. And they took a somewhat dim view of Herod’s temple because they took a dim view of Herod, who built it. They would go to the temple. They didn’t completely repudiate it the way some other groups did, but they were more ambivalent towards it.

Their focus was on being very strict about keeping the commandments of the Torah, specifically the commandments. And so what they did was they believed that the common problem of Jews at this time in history is that they’re under Roman oppression, God doesn’t seem to be working through their temple. They haven’t seen the kind of miracles in the current temple that were recorded about the tabernacle in the temple in the Old Testament. And so they believe that God is going to return to his people. They believe that part of that is going to be God sending his Messiah, his anointed king, who’s going to come and set them free and restore the kingdom to them. And then they differ, these different groups differ on how they understand that happening.

The Pharisees believe that that will happen when Israel keeps the commandments, when all of the people keep the commandments, then God will return to them. And they’re basing that on, in the prophets, when God departs in the beginning of Ezekiel, he has a vision of God leaving the temple right before it’s destroyed in Jerusalem. They say, “Well, God left the temple and God sent us into exile because we didn’t keep the commandments, because we were sinful, we were wicked.” So the logic is, “Well, if we come back and keep the commandments, then God will return to us.” And so to make sure that everyone can keep the commandments, they removed all ambiguity from the commandments by adding more rules. They called this “building a hedge around the law”.

So, one of the most obvious examples of this is one of the Ten Commandments, “do not take the name of the Lord in vain.” Well, they said, well, what does that mean? When are you taking it in vain and when are you not taking it in vain? They said, “Well, if you never say it, if you never say the name of the Lord, you can’t possibly take it in vain.” That’s the logic. So we will never say it, we will never write it. And so we just get rid of the name.

Interlocutor: My Jewish students would write the word God, G-D

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Interlocutor: Because even though that’s not the name, the idea was that a piece of paper could be damaged or dirty or anything, and so then it would be used in vain.

Interlocutor: If they didn’t actually say the name then how did they know who? What would they do if they’re trying to converse about it?

Fr. Stephen: What they typically did in writing was they put vowel marks around… Hebrew, as I understand, Arabic is the same way. There aren’t necessarily vowels written, right? There’s little marks that tell you how to pronounce it. And what they did is they put in little marks to pronounce the word Adonai, which means Lord. So when you came to the name Yahweh, you just say Lord instead.

Interlocutor: That’s why the Old Testament is always saying “the Lord”.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that’s kept in our English translations. When you see Lord in all capitals in the English, that means that was originally the name of God. The other way, and this is more common with modern Jews is when they come to it and they’re reading, they’ll say Hashem, which means “The Name”. So they’ll be reading a lot, and they’ll just say “name” to indicate that that’s where the name is, but they don’t actually say, that’s an example of building a hedge.

Or, you’re not supposed to do work on the Sabbath. Okay, well, what’s work? They’ll say, well, okay, you can walk only so far. If you walk more than this distance, that’s work. But if you walk less than that distance, it’s okay. Or all the specifics.

Interlocutor: An Orthodox Jew was telling me that you have to tear toilet paper the day before.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Interlocutor: I was raised Roman Catholic. My dad was a farmer. So, I mean, sometimes you have to get the crops out. They were ready. If he had to cut a crop of rice or whatever on a Sunday, he always went ask the priest with permission to perform work that day.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is… we have to have all the detailed rules. And so then the Pharisees believed that since they followed all the rules they’d come up with, “Okay, we’re righteous, we’re keeping all the Commandments. We’re righteous, we’re holy, we’re doing the right thing.” So while they were all doing the right thing and God still hadn’t returned, the Messiah, still hadn’t come, they said, “Okay, well, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is all these other people who still aren’t keeping the Commandments.” So if you have someone who’s sinning, if you have someone who’s living the wrong way, if you have someone who’s not keeping the Commandments, it’s not just, “Oh, well, they’re going to go to hell,” or whatever. It’s they’re preventing God from returning to us.

So, that’s why we’ll see this sort of hatred toward people who they identify as sinners, tax collectors, and they will have nothing to do with those people. They keep themselves separate from those people.

So that’s the Pharisees, Nicodemus is part of this group. St. Paul was originally part of this group. And so we’ll see Jesus has a number of mostly negative, this one won’t be so negative, but mostly negative interactions with people from this group because of their view, because they’re going to look at Jesus and the standard they’re going to judge Jesus by is: “Is he following all of our rules? And if he’s not following all of our rules, then he’s one of those sinners, because our standard is the standard”.

Just real quickly about the Sadducees that’s the other main party that we’re going to hear about Sadducees’ name literally comes from Zadokites. And that’s because in Ezekiel’s prophecy, he prophesied that the priests of the new temple in the age to come would be descended from Zadok the priest. Now, none of the Sadducees were actually descended from Zadok. They were not even Levites. They were illegitimate. But they called themselves Zadokites in order to present themselves as legitimate. They were the ones who controlled the temple. The high priests at this time are Sadducees.

Interlocutor: How did they get into that position?

Fr. Stephen: They got into that position because after the Maccabean revolt, when Judas Maccabeus and his brothers led the revolt against the Greeks in the 2nd century BC, to establish Jewish independence, after they were victorious, he became king and he made one of his brothers high priest. And then at one point after that, there was someone who was both king and high priest at the same time, and went to war as the high priest. So that’s how… but these people, according to the Old Testament, are not supposed to be functioning as priests. So they called themselves Zadokites to try to claim…

Interlocutor: So, there are still Levites around who feel dispossessed?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Interlocutor: And are they Pharisees?

Interlocutor: They’re a mix. And one of the things that St. Luke is doing in the first chapter of his Gospel, where he talks about St. John the Forerunner’s father Zechariah makes the point that he actually was a Levi and was functioning as a priest. And so part of what he’s doing is St. Luke sets it up that really, since St. John is his son, St. John should rightfully be the High Priest, not any of the Sadducees. That’s one of the points that St. Luke makes. Now, St. John doesn’t make that point. That’s a point Saint Luke makes.

So, these folks are illegitimate. They have held on to the high priesthood, basically by being willing to collaborate with Rome here and there and work out compromises with Rome, which also does not endear them to the rest of the people. As we talked about last time, they, as those who control the temple, owned 70% of the privately owned land in Judea. So they’ve basically used the temple tax to take the people’s land. And now they’re working as tenant farmers on what used to be their own land and sending the money back to the temple. Yeah, if you take Goldman Sachs and TD Jakes and put together. So all their money is going back to the temple one way or another. They’re still paying the temple tax and all the money from working their land is also going back to them. So they’re exploiting the people.

They also had a couple of odd doctrinal issues that come up in the Scriptures, that is that they only accepted the Pentateuch, the Torah, as being Scripture. They did not accept any other writing.

Interlocutor: The Samaritans did that too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they had their own version of the Pentateuch that was actually a little different. So the Sadducees are using our version of the Pentateuch, but that’s the only thing they consider authoritative and so related to that, because there’s nothing explicit in those five books about an afterlife or the resurrection of the dead, they didn’t believe in the afterlife or the resurrection of the dead. And so that kind of explains some of their other behavior, because if there’s no afterlife with rewards and punishments, well, you might as well take the money you can get right now. So it sort of all fits together. But that’s who the Sadducees were.

Now, there was a group called the Sanhedrin, which was… it didn’t have any political power because of course, the Romans had all the political power, but they saw themselves as the successors of what we see in the Old Testament, refer to as the Elders of Israel. There was Moses, there was the Prophet, there was the King. They were also the Elders of Israel, who were sort of the eldest members and the heads of the different tribes and families and clans who would gather together to resolve issues affecting their own community. And so they had no actual political power, but they would get together to discuss and resolve issues affecting the Jewish community in a particular place. So they were sort of more like a modern day parish council. If you’re talking about the Sanhedrin in Alexandria, Egypt, they’re the leaders of the Jewish community there in Egypt, who are going to get together into issues that are affecting their Jewish community. Same thing here, obviously, the one in Jerusalem, because you’ve got Sadducees from the Temple involved, has a lot more power than most of the other ones, but still they’re under the Romans. So this is why we’re going to see when Jesus is arrested, he’s brought on trial before the Sanhedrin. They decide he should die, but they can’t put him to death because they don’t have the power to do that. So they’ve got to turn them over to the Romans in order to get that done. So they’re sort of a deliberative religious body, but with limited power and authority.

So, Nicodemus is not only a Pharisee, but he’s a member of that group, the Sanhedrin. And so he comes and he approaches Jesus, as we’re going to see here, most likely not just he, but the Sanhedrin has heard about Jesus from, for example, him cleansing the temple. The matter of who this Jesus is has sort of come to their attention and so he’s going to go and see him to find out who he is and what’s going on.

This man came to Jesus by night

Notice he does not come to him during the day, meaning he’s coming to him in secret, right? So Nicodemus is not ready to be publicly seen with Jesus by the Sanhedrin or anyone else who might talk to them.

This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”

So this is how he first approaches him. He tells him, “Rabbi, he says, you’re a teacher, we know you’re a teacher who’s sent from God. Why? Because you do these signs.”

Interlocutor: At this point, the signs have been cleansing the temple and the feast at Cana, only one of which Nicodemus would presumably approve of.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, as a Pharisee, he might go either way on the Temple.

Interlocutor: Oh Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Depending on more information. Because as I said, the Pharisees were kind of ambivalent on the Temple. If he was making a point about the way the Temple was operating, if he’s making a point about the Sadducees, then Nicodemus might be open to that. It’s sort of like if you have the Republicans and the Democrats, it’s like, well, if you’re going after the Republicans and I’m a Democrat well… And vice versa. But it depends on what he was doing. So this is a very neutral statement that he makes first, he’s not calling him the Messiah. He’s not even calling him a prophet. He’s just saying, “We know you’re a teacher and we know that you’re from God, because no one could do these things you’re doing unless God was with them.” But that’s still kind of we’re a little wishy-washy here, We’re a little tentative.

Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

So we’re going to see this is one of these things that happens a lot in St. John’s Gospel, is that Jesus doesn’t answer direct questions with direct answers, but Jesus engages in conversation. And this is something we see in St. John’s Gospel, too, I mentioned this in the first study on St. John’s Gospel is that in all three of the other Gospels focus on sort of again, it’s a straight arrow narrative. Jesus does this, he does this, he does this, he says this, he says this, he says this. Whereas St. John is going to slow down and take time and record these whole conversations. Even in St. Matthew and St. Luke’s. St. Mark’s gospel Jesus doesn’t say much at all. St. Matthew and St. Luke’s Gospels, we see Jesus saying things, but it’s usually him giving a sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain, or he’ll have sort of a quick… he’ll say something, they’ll say something, he’ll say something, they’ll say something. And that’s it. Whereas St John will record these longer conversations. And what Jesus tends to do in these conversations is he will throw something out there to sort of bring this person into a discussion. So he’ll say something, especially the first thing he says is usually somewhat cryptic. What does that mean? But that’s to get the person thinking, “Well, what is…”? To get them asking questions and draw them into discussion, because Nicodemus is showing up just like when they came to remember the people came from the Pharisees to talk to St. John in chapter one. And what they do, “are you the Messiah? Are you the prophet?” These are the questions they had. They went St. John and he said no. Next quick answer this is probably what Nicodemus is expecting from Jesus, right? “Are you the messiah? Are you the…? Tell us who you are, what you’re doing.” That’s not what Jesus is about. Jesus is going to now bring him into this discussion. And so he says:

“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

The kingdom of God, remember, is what they’re all hoping for. They’re thinking of it in very literal terms. They’re thinking of the kingdom of Israel reestablished on earth with a king. They want to see that come in their lifetime. They want to see that happen. The Romans be overthrown. Well, Jesus says, unless you’re born again, you will not see it. You will not see it.

Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

So he’s like, “What do you mean, be born again?” Now, I should mention here, because I actually alluded to this before, there was another time where St. John did this, and he does this a lot. St. John will use a Greek word that has two possible meanings, and he never explains which one he means. And he does it so often that I suspect he means both. What he literally says here, Jesus says, you must be born anothan in Greek, which anothan can mean again. Anothan can also mean from above. So does Jesus mean you must be born again a second time? Or does he mean you must be born from above? Nicodemus here clearly takes it as again. He says, “What? I got to go back into my mother’s womb and be born again? I’m an old man.” But as we’ll see, I think Jesus actually means both.

Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

So this is part of our evidence that maybe it’s “again” and “above”, because he’s talking about another birth, right? So that’s “again”. But he’s also talked about being born not only of water, but spirit of the spirit, right? Being born of the spirit.

Interlocutor: Spirit, I understand, water presumably refers to baptism. How would Nicodemus have heard that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll see. He’s going to continue. But remember what we saw a couple of chapters ago, what St. John the Forerunner said about Jesus, “I baptize you with water, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”. So one thing this makes clear right off the bat, since Jesus says both, is that this is not “OK, that water baptism thing is done. Now, there’s going to be this new spiritual…”, but that these two things are linked together. These two things are linked together. So if you want to enter into the kingdom. Now, notice that language. He doesn’t talk about the kingdom coming here, the kingdom being established here, if you want to be part of it. When I establish my kingdom, that’s not what he says. The language he uses entering the kingdom of God, which means it already exists. And the question is whether Nicodemus will enter into it. And in order to do that, he’s going to need to be born again from above with water and the spirit.

So he continues:

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

He says, “First time you were born, you were born from your mother’s womb, and there’s flesh. She’s flesh, you’re flesh.” And so implied, if now you’re born of the Spirit, then you will be spirit, you will be spiritual.

Interlocutor: This gets at something that is a modern idea that we are just animals. A lot of people say that we’re animals just like other animals, and that’s all we are. We’re really only body. And so he’s saying, yes, we are. But at least those who are entering into the kingdom have another kind of birth and another kind of existence.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And other thing that’s important to remember, we in our modern American culture use the word “spiritual” in kind of an odd way, historically odd way. We talk about spirit, like people say they’re spiritual and not religious, where spiritual just means some sort of vague religious sense. I’m a “spiritual person”, right. Or this is a spiritual truth, meaning it’s kind of esoteric or something. When we see spirit and spiritual in the Scriptures, it is always referring to the Holy Spirit, and there’s an intimate connection between the Holy Spirit and any human being’s spirit. Why? Well, because when you read in Genesis 2 about how humanity was created, God forms humanity out of this. And then what?

Interlocutor: Breathes.

Fr. Stephen: Breathes into him, the breath of life. Well, that’s God’s breath, right? The word breath is a form of the same word pneuma. In Greek, that means spirit. So there is this intimate connection. So when Jesus says “that which is born of the Spirit”, “is Spirit”, or “is spiritual”, he’s not saying, “Well, if you’re born of the Spirit, then you’ll get rid of this body and float off as a spirit,” right? That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying just as once you were born in this world, you became not just flesh. You’re not like you’re a lump of flesh, but you’re fleshy, right? You’re fleshly, and you have everything that goes with that, because we’re fleshly, we hunger, we thirst, we need to sleep, we get tired, we get sick, right? That all comes with being fleshly. In the same way, if you’re born of the Spirit, you will be spiritually, or spiritual in the sense that the Holy Spirit will be in you, and you will have those properties that St. Paul is later going to call the “fruits of the Spirit”, but you’re going to have those properties about you of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul’s going to say, love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. These things will characterize you in the same way that before your fleshiness characterized you. He says:

“Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

So he says, “Okay, Nicodemus, I know you don’t know what I’m talking about. You said you don’t know what I’m talking about.” But listen… And the reason he talks about the wind, why? Well, because it’s that word play between spirit and breath and wind. He says, look at the wind, right? You can’t see it, it blows. Where is it coming from? Where did it originate? Where does it end up? Where does the wind stop? These are questions that we don’t know and can’t understand, right? I mean, you know, there’s wind. You can feel the wind, but you don’t know where the wind started or where it is. It has direction. It’s not just totally ambiguous and esoteric, right? There’s a wind and it’s blowing, right? But you can’t nail down, “Okay, here’s where this wind started, here’s where it’s going.” And he says, “In the same way, so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Meaning what? Meaning someone who has not been born of the Spirit, which Nicodemus has not yet, right? When he looks at someone who is born of the Spirit is not going to understand who that person is, why they’re doing what they’re doing, what it is about them, where they’re from, where they come from, where they’re going. Remember, what was the first thing Nicodemus said to Jesus? “We know that you are a teacher who came from God.” So what is Jesus saying back to him? He says, “You haven’t yet been born in the water, the Spirit you need to be. Then you’ll understand who I am, where I’ve come from, and where I’m going.”

Interlocutor: So he does ultimately answer the question, though Nicodemus doesn’t quite realize it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He tells him why it is he has to ask in the first place.

Nicodemus answered and said to Him, “How can these things be?”

So he basically says an Arabic, “shu”? He says what? He has no idea what Jesus is talking about.

Jesus answered and said to him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?”

He says, “I thought you were one of the elders of the people. I thought you were one of the leaders. I thought you were one of the teachers. You’re supposed to be leading all these other people, and you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

“Most assuredly, I say to you, We speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness.”

So Jesus is saying to him, “I’m not coming to you as some speculative philosophy or some mysticism that I’m not talking to you in riddles that you deliberately can’t understand.” He’s saying, “What I’m saying to you is what I know and what I have seen. But you’re not receiving it. Rather than receiving what I’m saying, you’re just going, ‘huh?’”

“If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

He says, “You want me to explain more? And you don’t even understand what I’ve already told you. I can’t do that.”

No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.

So he says, “If you want to know about heavenly things, if you want to know about the things of God, well, there’s no one who has seen those things, who can give you eyewitness testimony. You can conjecture and theorize and come up with theology here. The only person who has been with God and who has seen God is the Son of Man who is in heaven and who has come down from heaven. And of course, he’s referring to himself. So he’s saying, “I’m the only one who has seen these things and can give you firsthand knowledge. But I’ve tried to talk to you about basic things and you’re not ready for that.”

Interlocutor: Is it also because of the state of his heart?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We talked about the St. John’s gospel, the reason, and that’s what he was getting at with that. “You don’t know who I am and where I’m from because you haven’t been born of water and the Spirit. If you had been, you’d know, you’d recognize it. You wouldn’t have to ask.”

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

So Jesus refers back to this story in the Book of Numbers, which is, I don’t think anyone’s favorite book of the Bible. I’ve never met anyone, at least, I who asked, “What’s your favorite book of the Bible?” And they said, “Numbers!”, because a lot of it is census data. But I’m sure there’s somebody, a mathematician or somebody who just thinks that’s great. But it’s the story of Numbers, where the camp of the Israelites in the wilderness was invaded by these poisonous snakes and they bit the people and the venom was killing them and they’re dying a fairly painful torturous death. And God says to Moses, “I want you to go and make a bronze serpent. I want you to put it on a pole and I want you to set it up on the pole. And then whoever looks up to that bronze serpent will be healed from the snake venom and will be saved.”

And this is a very strong, strange story in the Old Testament for a number of reasons, and it confused the rabbis greatly, because number one, the second commandment says you’re not supposed to go and make graven images and bow down to them. And yet God tells Moses to go make a bronze snake, right? And then lift it up on a pole for people to look to.

And later on in Old Testament history, some people still had that snake and started worshiping it as an idol and it had to be destroyed. So that came to pass. So why is God telling Moses to do this? Why doesn’t God just heal the people? Why this whole thing? Well, Jesus is referring back to this story and talking about himself. He’s talked about, remember what the original question was about, where does he come from? Where is he going? He just talked about where he came from. He came down from heaven. He was with God. He came down from heaven. So now where is he going? He uses this story to talk about where he is going the same way that Moses, so the Son of Man is going to be lifted up and that’s the crucifixion that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. So he’s predicting that he himself is going to be lifted up on a pole and then whoever looks to him will be saved. But there’s some more packed in here, as usual with St John, because what was the serpent on the pole? The serpent was the image of what? The image of the thing that was afflicting them. They’re dying of poisonous venom. The last thing they want to look at is a snake. So this same symbolism is going to be picked up by St Paul when he talks about Christ, who is without sin, becoming sin for us, that Christ in his death, We see when we look to the Christ on the cross, we see death or destruction, the consequences of our sin, and yet it’s through looking…

Interlocutor: That makes me realize something that I had never really thought of before. And that is, if we were present as a crucifixion and looked at Christ, we would be repelled.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, horrified. Yes. And that’s why St Paul says that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. The idea that Jesus was crucified.

And this is why this connection here is why we typically in Orthodox churches have a cross at the top of the iconostasis in a prominent place that people can look up to as they worship. The symbolism, looking up to it to be saved. And so then we get John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

So a couple of things here we need to reiterate over and over and over again. The very first part of that verse that Jesus is given by God, is offered by God. Jesus offers himself as a sacrifice because God loves the world. It’s not God was so angry at all the sinfulness in the world that Jesus had to die to placate his wrath. It’s not, you know, God hated sin so much that he had to… Jesus’ death is an act of love by Jesus and by His Father. There’s not some division here where God the Father is sort of angry God and Jesus is merciful God, right? This is an act of love by God. And we talked before about the nature of beliefs, of believing in Him and in St. John’s Gospel that’s connected specifically with worship. More than anything, more than anything, there’s a concrete thing. Now, it’s going to be a little different than some of the other Epistles. Some of the other epistles, Faith is going to be connected more with the way of living our lives. But for St. John, it’s primarily connected to worship, that we worship Christ as opposed to anything else, that we worship Christ as God. And that includes in it these other ideas of how we live our lives. Because if we’re living a life of worship, that’s going to transform everything, but that’s including that belief.

But notice also the issue here, again, is not… he’s not using kingdom language now, right? He’s not saying he gave has only begotten son so that the Romans could be overthrown in the kingdom, could be re-established. He’s not using that kingdom language here. He’s talking about in both the previous verse and in this verse, eternal life, everlasting life. So the problem that’s being solved by God in Christ here is not Roman oppression, right? It’s not Roman oppression, it’s death.

Interlocutor: What would the Pharisees have thought at this time? Would they have, since we know the Sadducees didn’t believe in life after death. What did the Pharisees believe, meaning, Nicodemus? But he had been thinking about it.

Fr. Stephen: The Pharisees believed that the righteous, those who were righteous in this life, those who followed all the laws, right? Those who lived righteous lives, followed all the commandments until their death in this life. That when the day came that the Messiah came and God returned to visit his people, that they would be raised from the dead to live in the Messiah’s kingdom, but only them. And that was way in the future. That was some future day. We’re going to see that later in St. John’s Gospel when Jesus is going to say to Martha, “Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead”? And she’s going to say, “I believe that the dead will be…”, yeah sometime in the future when Lazarus has just died. And Jesus then says, I am the resurrection, that that’s already come.

So that’s how he thinks about resurrection, not revolving around this idea of death being the problem. That’s a reward, that’s, “Oh, you lived a righteous life, so now you’re going to be rewarded. You’re not going to be left out of these good things.” Jesus is identifying the enemy as death, and then, of course, those who hold the power of death, which would be the powers, Satan, the minions. This is an important reorientation that Jesus is doing here of their thinking, because the Jewish thinking at that time is that the enemy is the Gentiles. That’s who God, when he returns, is going to defeat. He’s going to defeat the Gentiles, he’s going to overcome the Gentiles. These Gentiles who enslaved us are going to become our slaves. That’s their thinking. Jesus is reorienting that human beings aren’t your enemies. Your enemies are not your fellow human beings. Your enemy is death. Your enemy is Satan. Your enemy is Hades, it’s hell. Your enemy is sin. These are the things that you’re doing battle against, right? Not your fellow human beings.

Which is an important reorientation for a Pharisee in particular, because for a Pharisee, all of his enemies are human beings. It’s the Romans, the Gentiles, the Jews who are collaborating with the Romans and the Gentiles, the sinners, they’re all the enemy. They’re the enemies of God. And so they’re my enemies too, right? And so Jesus is reorienting that; that’s not what you should be worried about.

For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

Notice it’s “the world”, not “his people”. He did not send His Son to his people to condemn his people, which is how the Pharisees would have thought of it, right? They would say, “Yes the messiah comes to condemn and destroy all those unrighteous. And to save us from them.”

Interlocutor: It says for God so loved the world, not the Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Everyone. Because death comes into the world through Adam’s sin. Adam wasn’t a Jew. Everyone of all races is descended from Adam, and so everyone dies. So we’re talking about the common enemy of humanity. And so, again, this is reiterating that that he loves the world. He’s not coming to condemn the world, but that the whole world through him might be saved. The whole world might be saved.

And this has profound effects on our understanding of morality. If we really understand the fact that no other human being is ever our enemy. That the most horrible, wretched, wicked person who has ever lived. And don’t say me. I could say me, but you can’t say me [Laughter]. the most wretched person who’s ever lived is not our enemy. No matter what he’s done, no matter what he’s done to us, he is on our side as a human being. He has just fallen victim to our common enemy. He’s someone who’s been wounded. He’s someone who’s been defeated by the same enemy I’m fighting. That will cause us to take a very different approach to our fellow human beings when they fall into sin, when they fall into evil, when they fall into wickedness, then the Pharisees took. That’s a profoundly different view. And this is why Jesus could say to love our enemies and pray for those who are persecuting you, that wasn’t just an abstract “Oh, this person is mean to me at the office or at school,” there were people murdering Christians, right? And Jesus is saying, you need to love them and pray for them. This is why. Because those people who are doing that to you are doing it to you because they’re lost. Because they’re lost. Because they’ve fallen prey to the devil. They fallen prey to sin. They’re on their way to death and destruction. You should pity them and pray for them, not be angry and want revenge.

Interlocutor: How could these people understand all this at that time?

Fr. Stephen: Well, they didn’t. [Laughter] That’s what we’re told over and over again, is that the people didn’t understand until after Jesus was raised from the dead. And so what we get in the Gospels are all written after that. The Epistles are all written after that. And they’re looking back at it and saying, “Okay, now this is… now we’re starting to understand and piece this together”. And then that’s what the theology of the Church is. The theology of the Church is the Church, Jesus didn’t depart and go somewhere, right? Christ is still in our midst. We say in every liturgy. He’s still here with us. And so every generation of Christians comes to know and experience Christ and comes to understand Christ. And so that’s what our theology proper is.

Interlocutor: Thanks for telling me that. I’ve been struggling with this, and I’ve been wondering, but now that you call me, now I understand. How did they understand what he was trying to tell them? They didn’t!

Interlocutor: Right, after the fact, they come back and look at it and say, “Okay, now I understand. Now I see what he meant.”

Interlocutor 2: What is our theology proper?

Fr. Stephen: Our theology proper is the experience of Christ, coming to know Christ. That’s theology. And then from that, from our experience of Christ and our knowledge of Christ, we’re only able to do theology insofar as we know Christ. If you’re far from Christ, you can’t do theology, you can philosophize, but that’s about it, right? Because theology proper is our experience of Christ, and from that then from our knowing Christ, not knowing things about Him, but knowing Him. We understand moral theology, how to live our life. We understand natural theology. We understand what God is saying to us in creation because we know the Creator who made it. We understand how we are to live our lives, how we are to be saved, soteriology. We understand the scriptures because the scriptures are about Christ. So if you know Christ, it’s like if I was reading my wife’s diary, because I know my wife, I would understand things she said and things she meant that other people wouldn’t understand if they didn’t know her. They’d look at it and go, “What’s that about?”

So all these things become possible insofar as we know Christ. And that’s why you’ll hear often the Fathers will say that in the Orthodox Church, theology is prayer, because prayer is the way we come to know Christ. As we draw closer to Christ, these other things all sort of come together, right, and start to fall into place and make sense.

Interlocutor: So John himself, as he tells the story, he now understands what was being said, but at the time, he probably wouldn’t have understood, right? He was as confused as anybody else.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Okay, so this is probably I know we’re in the middle of a chapter, but this is probably a good place to leave off for tonight because the part we’re going to get into is again, going to be real chewy. So thank you, everybody.