Okay, so we’ll go ahead and get started here in just a minute. When we get started, we’re going to be picking up in the Gospel According to John, chapter 4, verse 27.

Interlocutor: Oh, my wife has a question.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Interlocutor: She wants to know how we know Photini’s name?

Interlocutor 2: I was going to ask that too!

Interlocutor: Wow, really? She asked me that two weeks ago. I can’t believe I remembered it. The woman at the well is named Photini, but her name isn’t here. How do we know her name?

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re right in the middle of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well who Jesus encountered, who, as you just mentioned, is St. Photini. The way that we know that is that the village, Sychar, where she lived continued to exist after this. And when we get to the Book of Acts, which we’ll get to after John here, Christianity went into Samaria very early, and a good portion of what was at that time Samaria, now it’s Palestine, was converted to Christianity. And so there was a collective memory of the churches in that area of who she was.

So, we actually know a fair bit more about her. She was eventually martyred for her faith later on, but you can go, this well is still there. There’s a church on the spot, and the well is sort of in the basement underneath the church. But because it’s located here in the text as being Jacob’s Well at Sychar, we know where that well is in Sychar still.

So, there’s been Christianity in that region for 2000 years. And so I don’t like when people tend to say, “well, there’s a tradition that…” and it’s almost like they’re saying, “there’s a legend”. They’re kind of implying by it that, “Well, we know this is probably not accurate”, and that’s not really the case. Really what it is, is it’s history. It’s history that was oral for a period of time and then was eventually written down. But that’s like pretty much all history, especially in the ancient world.

And again and again, these things that are considered “tradition” or “legend” are turning out to be true, archaeologically. My favorite recent example is until a couple of years ago, it was widely considered by historians that all the stories about St. Thomas going to India were bunk, despite the fact that in India and what’s now Pakistan, there are churches that they’ve held were traditionally founded in cities by St. Thomas. In the Christian parts of India, everybody’s named Thomas, virtually. There is this very live cultural memory of the people there, of St. Thomas coming and having converted them, but it was just considered to be bunk. You know, “How would that have happened, how would he have gotten there?” etc., etc., etc.

And one of the things they used to point and laugh at is that part of the stories of St. Thomas in India are this series of encounters he had with this king named Gudnaphar, who he ended up being martyred under. But they would go on and on… “There’s no King Gudnaphar, there’s nothing. This name doesn’t even work with the names of the local kings at that time….” On and on and on and on and on. And then about two years ago, they were excavating in the Monkara area of India and they found about 2000 coins stamped King Gudnaphar with a picture of him. It kind of said, oh, because what are the odds? If that was made up, they would have kept that cultural memory for 2000 years of something that never happened. Even while there was no evidence of this king, the only evidence of this king existing until those coins were found were those stories. So it’s a pretty powerful connection there.

So, like I said, I try to say this is history. The fact that St. Peter was crucified in Rome is not tradition, it’s history. St. Paul’s beheading…

Interlocutor: Many things that I have taught as ancient history, secular ancient history, are based on no greater security than we have.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, if anything, usually less. There’s nobody writing about Alexander the Great anytime near when he was alive.

Interlocutor: I’ve told classes because people are often questioning the evidence for the resurrection of Christ, if we had the same evidence for a battle, that battle would just be an event, without question.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, yeah.

Interlocutor: It’s because it’s something that just doesn’t happen that it obviously can’t have happened.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We just assume.

Interlocutor: Yeah. In spite of the fact that otherwise it’s very hard to explain why all those Christians got so excited.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and we don’t do that with other ancient histories. You read Herodotus on the Persian wars and yes, he has Zeus coming down out of the sky and throw lightning bolts at Persian ships. But nobody reads that and says, “Oh well, I guess we can’t know anything about the Persian War because this is clearly nonsense, we just have to throw this out.” No-one does that. And yet they don’t believe that Zeus actually appeared through thunderbolts. They say, “Oh, well, there must have been a lightning storm during the battle.” But they don’t throw the whole thing out because there’s something supernatural in it. But when it comes to anything having to do with Christianity, the second there’s something supernatural, this is worthless. We can just chuck it, the whole thing. If we did that with ancient history, we wouldn’t know anything about the ancient world. Because everything has something in it that we now would not buy into, necessarily.

Also, I don’t have the book here with me, but I’ve brought it in before. I have a copy of… it’s the critical edition in Greek of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens. It’s commentary on the constitution of Athens. And at the end of it, it has photos of all the manuscripts, all four manuscripts. And none of them is complete. The critical edition is pieced together. They take all four of them, kind of try and fit them together to get one. And there’s holes, there’s spaces where there’s just dot, dot, dot. We don’t know. And there’s only these four copies and the oldest one is from like the 6th century AD. So 900 years after Aristotle.

You compare that to any book of the New Testament where we have a copy within probably 60 or 70 years of when it was written. We’ve got close to 6000 manuscripts of the New Testament books that go back to the early part of the second century, papyrus manuscripts. And we’re still finding and cataloging more every day, literally. And yet people will say very confidently, well, “Aristotle said this and Plato said this, and Socrates said this.” But then, “Well, Christians supposed Jesus to have said thus and so.” Or they’ll talk about, “Oh, scribes changed things in the Bible and it became corrupted.” There really isn’t any evidence to support that. It’s this horrible double standard of, “You know, I don’t want to believe this. So no matter how many copies and how early they are, I’m still not going to believe it.” Whereas you show up with a copy of half of one of Plato’s dialogues. And all of a sudden. “Oh, yeah, Plato wrote that.”

Interlocutor: All of our knowledge of ancient secular literature is from the Carolingians. It was copied down in the 800s. Yeah, we don’t have anything earlier than that.

Fr. Stephen: And the earliest Eastern ones are mostly Arabic editions from the 8th and 9th and 10th centuries of secular stuff of Aristotle. So, there’s a real double standard there in terms of the reliability of the Bible itself and the reliability of the history preserved in the church. It gets proved sort of time and time again and the evidence is overwhelming compared to anything else. And yet people will doubt one and not the other.

Yeah, that’s true, even compared to other… You take like Islam, which is a later religion. No one even mentions the name Muhammad until 150 years after he was supposed to have died. His name doesn’t occur; 150 years later. Someone wrote a biography of Muhammad. And yet when you hear people talk about Muhammad, you never hear anyone say, “Well, supposedly he went from Mecca to Medina.” You never hear that, right? They just take it for granted. But none of that was written down for 150 years. When you get to talking about the Gospels, people say, “Oh, well, none of this was written down until 30 or 40 years after.” All of a sudden, 30, 40 years is this huge span of time and now we can’t believe anything. So there really is no comparison in terms of historical reliability to the New Testament scriptures in particular and the memories preserved in the church.

So that’s how we know her name was Saint Photini to bring it back around to the beginning. So as we just mentioned when we left off last time we were in… and we mentioned this before, the Gospel of John, instead of having sort of this straight throughline narrative where Jesus is on this journey to Jerusalem, St. John describes Jesus’ ministry in terms of a three year period and three cycles of the feasts and tends to sort of slow down and take his time and focus in on, as we’ve seen, we have whole chapters of a conversation between Jesus and one other person, whereas in the other three Gospels, we tend to see Jesus will give a sermon or he’ll say something or he’ll heal someone, and then he’s moving on. So, St. John is sort of going more in depth.

And this is, as we mentioned in the very first Bible study on the Gospel according to St. John, this is in part because it’s very likely that St. John already had access to the other three Gospels by the time he was writing, so he didn’t need to sort of tell the same story again that already had been told. He’s going to tell us at the end that obviously, if someone tried to write down every single thing Jesus said and did his entire life, there wouldn’t be enough books in the world to hold it all, but that he had selected these things to describe in order to strengthen people’s faith.

So he’s very conscious that, “Okay, people, this has been recorded. Here’s some more.” In some cases, as we’ll see right now, we’re in parts which are stories that we don’t see in the other three Gospels. Later on, when we start getting to some of the stories where they’re also told in the other three Gospels, we’ll see that St. John seems to kind of deliberately fill in some of the blanks. Why was this person there? How is this person related to that person? Connect some of the dots and answer some of the questions that you might have from the other three. Again, because he’s got access to them, and so he can kind of flesh that out and take advantage of the fact that people already know sort of the basic story so that he can go more in depth.

And when we left off, Jesus had just finished having one of these conversations with a rather unlikely person. In the previous chapter, we saw Jesus have that conversation with Nicodemus, who was one of the leaders of the people, who was one of the rabbis, one of the heads of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, one of the elders of the people. That’s the kind of person you’d expect Jesus to talk to, right? The religious authorities, he would come and talk to them about the Scriptures. That conversation took some unlikely turns, but he’s the kind of person you’d expect him to talk to.

A Samaritan woman, we talked last time a little bit about the Samaritans and how they had been alienated from the Jews who were considered to be heretics, and there were ethnic issues such that they wouldn’t speak to them, they wouldn’t come near them, they wouldn’t touch them. So not only is he speaking to a Samaritan, he’s speaking to a Samaritan woman. And as we saw last time, it’s a Samaritan woman who has not been living a very holy or righteous lifestyle over the course of her life. So this is someone as we’re going to see unfold here, remember the disciples went to get food while Jesus was having this conversation, as we’ll see when they come back. This is not the person you would expect Jesus to be speaking to and having a conversation with and having a back and forth with.

And so, just when we finished up, he had this conversation with her and he kind of brought her along to her understanding that he is the Messiah. And we talked about how the Samaritan little twist on the Messiah was that the Messiah was less of a king after David. That was the idea that most of the Jews had, there’s going to be a new king like David who’s going to come and reign on this throne. The Samaritan idea, because remember, the Samaritans just had the Pentateuch. They just had the first five books of the Bible. Their idea is more that the Messiah is going to be the prophet like Moses, that Deuteronomy prophesied is going to come and teach them, he’s going to be a teacher who’s going to give them further because Torah kind of means teaching, he’s going to come and bring more further teaching. And so she kind of comes to the point, Jesus leads her along to the point where she sees that he is that figure.

So just at that point where she has said that she is sick and he’s the Messiah, he says, “Yes, I am”, that’s where we pick up right now:

And at this point His disciples came, and they marveled that He talked with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?” or, “Why are You talking with her?”

So the disciples show up and see him talking to her, “What is this about?”

Interlocutor: It says here Jews were not allowed to converse publicly with a woman.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s not because with Samaritans, they thought Samaritans were unclean and wicked, it’s not that they thought women were unclean and wicked. It’s that if you have a man, especially an unmarried man, speaking with an unmarried woman, especially a woman who is of some ill repute like this, that’s unseemly, that seemed to be… courtship is happening, right? Some kind of… they’re flirting, they’re working up to some kind of liaison. And so that was seen to be kind of unseemly. You wouldn’t go and do that in a public place like that, just approach a woman or a woman just approach a man.

But the disciples, for all their shock that this is happening don’t say anything. They just kind of stand there and gawk like, what is going on?

The woman then left her waterpot, went her way into the city, and said to the men, “Come, see a Man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” Then they went out of the city and came to Him.

So she once she decides this is the Christ, this is the Messiah, she goes back to her village and tells everybody. She’s like, “I met this I met this man who told me all the things I ever did,” Remember, He told her about how many times she’d been married, and said this could be the Messiah.

Interlocutor: I’m surprised they followed.

Interlocutor 2: Yeah, well since she says, “He told me everything that I’ve done in my life,” and they know that story. They know that disgraceful story; that makes it more credible or at least…

Fr. Stephen: They may well have interpreted that as him sort of convicting her sinfulness and said, “Oh, well, this must be the prophet’s and he’s come and….”

In the meantime His disciples urged Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

So they’ve shown up with this food. They’re like, okay, we went and got this food. So notice what they call Christ. She just called him the Messiah. Disciples aren’t there yet. So she’s already, even though she’s a Samaritan woman who’s lived this… she’s way ahead where the disciples are already. He’s just their teacher to them at this point.

But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”

Therefore the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?”

We’ve seen this several times where Jesus will say these things and the person will sort of misunderstand, grossly. Remember when they had them as he said, you must be born again? “He said what? Am I supposed to go back into my mother’s womb and remember with the Samaritan woman,” he said to her, “I have water. If you knew who I was, you would ask me for water.” And she said, “How are you going to get water? You don’t have a bucket to get water out of the well.” It was the same kind of thing. He says, “I have food that you don’t know about”. And they take it literally. They’re like, “Oh, did somebody else bring him food? Is he holding out on us? What’s going on?”

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work. Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest! And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have entered into their labors.”

So Jesus tries to sort of explain to them.

Interlocutor: I’ve never really understood that passage.

Fr. Stephen: Well, so Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father.” What he’s saying is, what was the disciples concern? Disciples have been traveling all day. They come to this village. What are they thinking about? Eating, right? That’s their primary concern. “Man, I’m hungry. We need to get something to eat!” That’s what they’re concerned about. And so when they go and get some food, they come back and they’re telling Jesus, “Come on, eat something, eat something!” Because that’s where their brain is. They’re operating at that level. And that’s why when Jesus says, “I have food that you don’t know about,” they instantly assume, “Well, somebody else brought him food,” because they’re operating at this level. So what Jesus is saying when he says that his food is to do the will of his Father, he’s saying that that’s his primary concern. He’s not focused on what I’m going to eat, what I’m going to drink, where I’m going to sleep tonight, making sure my clothes are clean. Those aren’t my primary focus. Those are down the list. Number one is doing the work that my Father has set me up to do.

And notice, he says, “and to finish his work”, we’re going to see this, this is going to pop up again and again when we talk about God working, this goes all the way back to the beginning of Genesis. Genesis, chapter 1. At the very beginning of chapter 2, God creates the world over the course of six days. And he says, and then on the 7th day, what? He rested from all his work. Therefore, the 7th day is a Sabbath.

So, with St. John’s Gospel, he’ll introduce a theme in one chapter and then kind of pick it up a few chapters later and develop it a little more, and then a few chapters later a little more. This is the beginning of this idea, this idea that it wasn’t that God got to the 7th day and then just, “Okay, now I’m done.” Sat back and let the world sort of roll, but that God is still working. That process that began with the creation of the world is still going on and has an end, and it has an end that Christ is going to bring to fruition. This is another part of what we talked about before with St. John’s idea that Jesus is already present and working in the Old Testament. That it’s not that he suddenly pops up in the New Testament. But this has been going on since the very beginning. Since the very beginning God has been working. Jesus has been a part of it and that together they’re going to bring this work to completion.

And so then he makes this analogy to them about the harvest. He says to them, “do you not say there are still four months and then comes the harvest.” This must have been four months before harvest time when he said this. He said, “You know, that at a certain time of year, that process of planting, you begin the process, you go out and you plant and you have to care for over the course of the period. And then that comes to fruition, that process, that work comes to an end and that’s the harvest.” So he’s saying, “You understand this when it comes to farming that something gets started, it has the beginning and then you have to bring it to the end. If you never harvest your crops, you are wasting your time planting them and caring for them.”

So he says, “Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest.” So now he’s not talking about the literal fields. He’s talking again, he’s making an analogy to the work that God has been doing. He’s saying, already this is reaching fruition. Already this is coming to fruition. We’re not waiting anymore. “And he who reaps receives wages and gathers fruit for eternal life. That both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.”

Interlocutor: This is the part I don’t get.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, well, now he’s talking to the disciples. He’s told them the fields out there are ripe for the harvest. This is coming to fruition. Because the disciples… this isn’t something that God is doing sort of by Himself. Jesus isn’t saying, “Well, yeah, God started this when he created the world and I’m going to bring it to fruition. And you guys just check it out, watch what happens, sit back and watch the show, eat some popcorn.” But they’re called as his disciples to take part in this. To take part in this. So when he says, “Look, the fields are ripe for the harvest,” he means it’s time for you guys to get out there and get to work, right? Because this is the part that you’ve been called to participate in. And so the one who does, the one who reaps, the one who comes and participates in what God is doing, receives wages, receives a reward for his work and gathers fruit for eternal life. That’s what the reward is, his eternal life. So that “he who sows”, who sowed originally God, right? And the one who reaps, the disciples may rejoice together.

He says, “For this the saying is true, ‘one sows and another reaps’. I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored, others have labored and you have entered into their labors.” You weren’t there when this was planted, and you haven’t been there along the way as this has been nurtured and this has grown, but you’re here now, and now you’re being sent to be a part of the harvest. So now we go back to the Samaritans:

And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans had come to Him, they urged Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days.

Now, notice the comparison here between him having to kind of get out of the city of Jerusalem, because they were unhappy with him, Now the Samaritans are begging him to stay.

Interlocutor: The Jews must have been thoroughly frustrated with the Samaritans converting to Christianity.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that was one of the things that helped end up separating Christianity and Judaism, was that for many of them, the Samaritans were worse than the Gentiles. It’s one thing that you let these Gentile proselytes join without circumcising them, but you let Samaritans in? That was sort of a bridge too far.

And many more believed because of His own word.

So there were some who believe just based on our testimony. There were many more who once he had spent those two days there and interacted with them, who believed because of their interaction with Him.

Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”

Interlocutor: They’ve gotten all the way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So they’re not just believing now based on someone else’s testimony. They have their own testimony to who Christ is because they’ve gotten to know Him. Why is this distinction here important? Well, remember St John is writing this probably somewhere in the 80s AD. So the people he’s writing this to and who are reading this, the vast majority of them never met Jesus on this earth. They weren’t around during the events that John is… That’s why St. John is writing them down, right? To proclaim them to them. But notice you believe at first because of the testimony you receive. You read the Gospel of St. John, you believe what he says. You believe the apostles’ testimony. But that’s not the full fruition of what faith is. The full fruition of what faith is that you could speak for yourself, your own experience with Christ, your own coming to know Christ. Those are stages you have to go through. You can’t leapfrog, but faith coming to maturity means moving beyond just believing what other people tell you.

Interlocutor: I noticed they calling him “Savior of the world”. That doesn’t sound like teacher. Have they come to a greater understanding of what Messiah is?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the “of the world” part is important because they’re Samaritans. They’re not Jews. And so the fact that he’s the Savior of the world means essentially he’s here for everybody. He’s here for everyone and available to everyone. The specific title, Savior of the World, has another interesting element in that, it’s one of Caesar’s titles. It’s one of Caesar’s official titles. Augustus took it first after he ended the Civil War with Mark Antony.

Interlocutor: It’s a title that the Hellenistic kings used.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, I think it was Antiochus the Third, who was Soter; when Augustus took it, he specifically meant that he had saved the world from civil war and brought peace. But if you think about that for a second, save the world from these enmities and brought peace, that’s exactly what you have between Samaritans and Jews going on at this time. It’s a sort of ongoing ethnic feud. In West Virginia, We weren’t far from where the Hatfields and the McCoys did their thing, but there’s been this blood feud between the Samaritans and the Jews there, right? But Christ is the Savior of the world because he brings peace where there was enmity and strife and hatred, he brings them together because he’s a savior of all of them.

Now after the two days He departed from there and went to Galilee. For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country. So when He came to Galilee, the Galileans received Him, having seen all the things He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they also had gone to the feast.

So he goes up to Galilee and he’s received there not because they really believe Him or believe in Him as the Messiah, but just because they saw the signs he did in Jerusalem at the feast. They’ve been talking about this. So he shows up, “Oh, hey, this is that guy from Jerusalem who’s doing and saying all those things!” So they have an even lower level than the testimony. They have a vague curiosity based on having heard of miraculous signs.

Now also it’s important here and we might miss, he’s just gone from Judea through Samaria after spending a couple of days there to Galilee. These are the three regions which have people who are, whether they would admit it at the time or not, people who were of Jewish descent. Now, the Judeans considered themselves to be the real Jews. In fact, the word Jew comes from Judean. Then the Galileans were sort of a step down, because Galilee, sometimes referred to as Galilee of the Gentiles, it’s this fishing community, but this sort of mercantile hub. So, there are a lot of Greeks living there, Romans living there, non-Jews. The Jews there are living with non-Jews. And so they saw sort of a lack of purity. They sort of compromised with the Greco-Roman culture. Most of them were primarily Greek speaking. They know some Aramaic. So they were seen as sort of…

Interlocutor: That’s an important point because we have all of these New Testament writings in Greek and I’ve often wondered where did these people learn Greek? They’re from Galilee but Greek was widely known.

Fr. Stephen: Was widely known and used in the synagogues there because it was so widely spoken there, even by the Jewish community in Galilee they would read from the Greek Septuagint in the synagogues. We know archaeologically, we found manuscripts. But also, you look at a number of Jesus’ disciples like St Andrew has a Greek name, St Philip has a Greek name, they’re from Galilee, but their name is not a Hebrew or Jewish name. They’re not named after anyone in the Old Testament. St Philip is named after Alexander the Great’s Father, for Pete’s sake [Laughter].

Interlocutor: Where did Andrew come from?

Fr. Stephen: Andrew comes from Andreas meaning “man”. So you can see that sort of cultural duality, we’ll see later, there are some Greeks in St John’s Gospel who are going to come to talk to Jesus and they specifically come to Philip and Andrew, who spoke Greek, sort of as their entry point. So Galileans are sort of in this cultural bridge which from the Judean perspective, especially if you’re a Pharisee in Judea, is a negative. They’re kind of sellouts, they’re kind of too involved in the culture. But they’re not as bad as Samaritans. I mean, Samaritans are…

Interlocutor: What about Jews in the Diaspora? I mean they spoke Greek, were they looked at in the same way as the Galileans?

Fr. Stephen: In a lot of cases, the Galileans are probably a step above a lot of the Diaspora Jews. When you’re talking about Jews in the Diaspora, you’ve got such a wide range of not just culturally where they’re at in terms of how Jewish they are, how Roman they are, how Greek they are, but religiously, even. Once you get outside… and we talked about the Pharisees and Sadducees and the Essenes, those are mainly the ones who are in Palestine. You start going, like to Egypt, there are all kinds of philosophical Jewish sects, there’s a lot of religious diversity in the Diaspora and in Babylon at this time in Mesopotamia. And when you get to the Jews in Rome or the Jews in the Greek cities, we’ll talk about them a little more when we get into Acts because St Paul is going around to convert all those people. But yeah, they’re sort of a mixed bag, they’re sort of all over the map in terms of where they are religiously and politically and culturally.

Interlocutor: So the Jews in Judea really are looking down the noses on all of the others.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they’re the real Jews and that’s why the word Jew comes from Judean. They’re the ones who are… because remember, at this point the temple is still there and all the commandments about worship in the Old Testament are that there’s going to be one place to worship God. You can only worship in one place. This is one of the things that made the Jews different than pretty much every other culture on earth at this time, is they’d have temples all over the place. Temple of Apollo in every city, temple of Zeus in every city. The Jews only had, and this is very strictly laid out in the Old Testament, there’s only one place, it was the tabernacle, and then it was the temple. And that’s it.

Interlocutor: That’s the first thing Photini asked about.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the temple is in Jerusalem. So they’re the ones who in their mind are worshiping God the way they’re supposed to be. This is how God told us to worship. We’re not actually sure historically and archaeologically where synagogues came from. They just seem to have developed in the diaspora, sort of organically. There’s nothing in the Old Testament about them, and we don’t even find anything in rabbinic literature about them until much later. And that’s just talking about the fact that they already exist. So it seems like the Jews of the Diaspora, who just functionally, unless you are very wealthy, you weren’t going to be able to afford to go to Jerusalem with any regularity. Maybe you might save up your whole life and go there once and see the temple. That means the rest of the time, how are you going to practice your faith? How are you going to practice your religion in this Gentile country? And so the synagogues, the name of which in Greek just means “gathering place”, a place where you gather together, seems to have just come from that. Just the Jews in a city would get together on the Sabbath and pray and read the scriptures, but there were no official commandments about that. So especially on that level, the Judaeans are saying, “Look, we’re the ones who are living where we’re supposed to be living. This is the land God gave us, not all those other lands. We’re worshiping at the temple where God told us to worship, not all these other places. This is the real deal.”

Interlocutor: This would be why some of the people of Israel today want to rebuild the temple.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is the real deal. It’s right here. This land, this sanctuary. This is where we’re supposed to be. From their perspective, yeah, everybody else is sort of slumming it. They’re going to be charitable while they’re doing the best they can over there. “They’re poor, they can’t get here, but they all dream of coming here, because we’re the real deal.” And so that holds true with Galilee and then Samaria. But this is continuing this theme, notice he says, a prophet is without honor in his own country. We’re going to see this throughout St. John’s Gospel. It’s the Judeans, the ones who are supposed to be the pure and truly religious people and all this, they’re the ones who reject Jesus. The Samaritans accept him and begged him to stay. The Galileans receive him. We’re going to see even some Gentiles are going to come to Jesus. But as he said when we had the poetic prologue at the beginning of St. John’s Gospel, he said he came to his zone and his own received him not. That theme is going to sort of weave its way through the people who you might think would be the first ones, the experts in the Old Testament, the experts in the law, would be the first ones to say, “Oh, yeah, this is the Messiah”, and recognize him, are the last ones to do it, if at all.

Interlocutor: When Jesus says this about his own country. Is he referring to Judea or to Galilee?

Fr. Stephen: Here, it’s referring to Judea. He’s referring to Judea.

Interlocutor: I always took it as Galilee and then and then immediately they receive them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Because remember, he’s born in Bethlehem. St John hasn’t made a point of that but yeah, he’s not really from Nazareth in the Gospels. And they make that point. They make that point for that reason. Remember when he was calling the disciple, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

One last note here regarding the harvest metaphor and the fact that God has already been working. This also plays into that theme we talked about since we were just talking about who recognizes Jesus and who doesn’t. It’s the people who are already living a righteous life, who are pursuing God. They recognize Jesus instantly. The other people who are wicked don’t. And this is part of the idea that the harvest is ripe because there are some of these Samaritans who like, St. Photini, despite being wrong about where the place was, where you’re supposed to worship, despite being wrong about the details, were still seeking after God, were still trying to live a righteous life. And so they’re the ones who come to recognize Jesus.

Interlocutor: And in her case, she’s trying to lead a righteous life but not succeeding.

Fr. Stephen: Not succeeding. Right. But she’s struggling with it. She wants something different. And this is important because St. John here is presenting us with a sort of different idea of missionary work than the one we normally think of. We normally think of, “Well, if I’m going to go and try and make someone who’s not a Christian a Christian, or I’m going to try and make someone who’s not an Orthodox Christian an Orthodox Christian,” we use the language I just use, “I’m going to make them… They’re something else now and I’m going to go and I’m going to win an argument or present the Gospel just right, or present all these proofs or this or that or the other, and I’m going to convince them and they’re going to convert to where we are.”

That’s not the picture St. John presents here at all. The picture St. John presents here is that the apostles what? The apostles go and give testimony to who Christ is, bring people to Christ, right? They experience Christ and the reason their experience of Christ is positive, the reason they accept Christ when they encounter Him is why? Because God’s already been working in their life. God’s already planted the seeds. God’s already worked the ground. You’re going out and doing your bit by harvesting. You’re going out and presenting them with the culmination, right? And if they’re wicked, you’re going to talk to them until you’re blue in the face, right? It goes back, a practical example of it is what we were talking about at the beginning. We could have every archaeological find in the world. We could find the original copies of St. Paul’s Epistles that he wrote himself, like the very first copy. And if someone wants to live a lifestyle that’s not compatible with Christianity, they’re not going to accept Christianity. It doesn’t matter what you bring to the table. It doesn’t matter… any piece of evidence.

Another good example of this was there are a number of Old Testament scholars who spent their careers writing doctoral dissertations and journal articles about how David never existed. There was no King David historically. Never existed. He’s like King Arthur, right? He’s this legendary figure. On and on and on. There’s no mention of him anywhere archaeologically. On and on and on and on. Well, finally, several years ago, they found an inscription referring to Israel as Bet-David, the “House of David”. Okay, so you think, “Oh, well, they’re now going to have to admit there must have been a David.” No, those same people proceeded to write journal articles about how that didn’t say Bet-David, it said Bet-Dod, which means the house of the water bucket and why Israel would be called the house of the water bucket, these elaborate theories. Why? They weren’t willing to accept…

Interlocutor: It couldn’t be David. I built my career on it not being David…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. The truth of the scriptures. They weren’t willing to change. They weren’t willing to accept what accepting that truth… And so, there are people who we will come to with Christianity in general or Orthodox Christianity in particular, who aren’t ready to do the things that they’ll have to do if they accept that it’s true. As Christ says in another place, he refers to it as counting the cost, right? This is what it’s going to cost me. This is what I’m going to have to give up. This is what’s going to have to change in my life for me to accept this as true. I’m not willing to do it.

Interlocutor: I’m thinking of a person whose mother is Orthodox who said, “Mother, your faith is too difficult.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so we have to accept that’s the reality, and we have to accept that we’re not going out and making converts. We’re not going out and doing this work. God is working in the world. Christ is the savior of the world. Christ is saving the world. We’re called to do our little part, and our little part is to testify to who Christ is. Not just who we’ve heard he is, but who he is to us as we come to know Him. The rest of it is God’s work. And so the arguments and the back and forth and the… May be fun and entertaining like a tennis match back and forth, but it’s not accomplishing the work of God.

Interlocutor: What about people who know Christianity is true but they’re out to destroy it?

Fr. Stephen: Well, a lot of times in that same category, they want to destroy it because they don’t want to accept what it would call upon them, what it would call upon them to do. They say, if this is true… Well, look at St. Photini. For her to become a follower of Christ, she’s first of all going to have to either marry this person she’s living with or stop living with him. And if he’s not willing to marry her, which he probably isn’t, or they would have gotten married already, that means she’s going to have to try and get through life alone as a woman in a Samaritan village in the first century, which… it’s not like she could go get a job, right? So how is she going to live? Right? And ultimately, we know since she was martyred, it cost her life. She had to be willing to accept all those things to become a follower of Christ. And there are plenty of people who at any point down that chain just say, “I can’t do it. I need to reject this. I need to get rid of this. I need to argue against this as passionately as I possibly can because it can’t be true. I don’t want it to be true.”

Because again, the Gospel being true requires something of us. It’s not just we sit back and we’ve talked before about this, where faith is this checklist where I hit all the true/false right. “Jesus is God and Man… OK, I believe all the right things in my head. And so I’m a Christian and I go to heaven when I die.” That’s not Christianity of the scriptures.

Interlocutor: I read a lot of medieval history, and one of the things that’s really striking is that people want to do things for the church. They want to do things for God. They are enthusiastic about it. They invent more things they can do. They have more holidays, they have more customs. They do all of these things. And today nobody would put up with that. Absolutely nobody would put up with that because there wouldn’t be a separation between your secular life and your church life: that wouldn’t be. And so really, I think what that point is that if we fully understand and digest what the faith is and what God is, then we are going to be enthusiastically doing things that are for God all the time. And we, I can say for myself, we want our time off. We want our other things and our other interests. And I think all of us, except for saints, all of us hold back to some extent.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And we need to… because again, the wages at the end of the work, after we do our little piece, in this life, the wages at the end of that is rejoicing with the Lord in eternal life as Jesus just laid it out here. And when that’s your reward, when that’s what you’re working toward, then that’s why people were so joyful to work towards that. They knew what they were working for. They knew what the wages, the paycheck, was at the end of the day. And it was worth the hard work. It was worth what they had to go through. It was worth all that struggle to achieve that at the end.

Interlocutor: What strikes me is that for so many of them, it wasn’t hard work, it was joy. And they were motivated by joy.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it becomes joyful. It’s not meaningless toil

Interlocutor: And for us in our world. There are so many, many things that cut away bit by bit at our really understanding what the reward is. It’s “oh go to heaven”, well what’s heaven?

Fr. Stephen: Or don’t go to hell. It’s more just fear, or fire insurance, I don’t want to end up there, so what do I have to do?

Interlocutor: And that’s not going to move us in the proper way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Because in all of those ideas, God remains sort of external, sort of like, “I’m living my life, I’m doing my thing here. God is somewhere up there. There’s going to come a time when I die, and then I’m going to meet Him, and he’s either going to let me into heaven or send me to hell. So I need to figure out, if you could give me a checklist, that’d be great, of exactly what I need to do so that when I meet Him, I don’t end up going to the bad place. And then let me know what that is so I could go ahead and get that covered. And then I can go on with living my life the way I want to. Because, okay, I’ve got the God thing taken care of, I’ve got the religion thing taken care of. Now I can focus on other things that are more relevant to me right now.”

And that’s the exact opposite of what we’re talking about, because remember what Jesus said, “My bread is to do the work of my Father. More important to me than getting food to eat is doing my Father’s work.”