Fr. Stephen: When we start in just a second, we’re going to be starting here in chapter 7 of the Gospel According to St. John. Just to quickly sort of get us caught up to where we were. Remember, Jesus had been in Jerusalem. He had healed a paralyzed man on the Sabbath. This led to a conflict between Him and the Jewish authorities and so he had left Jerusalem and gone back to Galilee. And in Galilee he began teaching. We read about the feeding of the 5000 and then Jesus talked about himself and his flesh being the bread of life. And we talked about how Christ was talking about his own coming death as a sacrifice and a sacrifice that they would participate in through what we now call the Eucharist, where we eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood. And we also read that from that time when he started teaching that many people left because they decided they weren’t in for that. And Jesus finally, at the end of chapter 6, asked the disciples if they were going to leave too. And they said, “Where would we go? You have the words of life.” And Jesus pointed out that one of them was a devil, namely Judas.

And so, as I’ve talked about several times now, but the structure of St. John’s Gospel takes place over several years and Jesus makes several trips back and forth between Galilee and Jerusalem. And so we’re about to see here as we start chapter 7, another one of those trips. So, we will pick up here at the beginning of chapter 7, verse 1, unless anybody has any questions or anything, allegations, half-truths, anything else they want to throw out before we begin? [Laughter].

After these things Jesus walked in Galilee; for He did not want to walk in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill Him.

So that’s kind of understated, [Laughter] Jesus started spending more time in Galilee because as we read here, we’ve got to remember any time you read the Jews in the New Testament, anywhere in the New Testament, what it really says is the Judeans. When we think of Jews, we either think of sort of ethnic Jews or we think of rabbinic Judaism as a religion. At this time in history, it’s talking about a group of people who live in a particular place.

Interlocutor: The people worshiping according to Judaism in Galilee are not…

Fr. Stephen: They’re referred to as Galileans, not Judaeans. Now they are all, depending on who you ask, they were at least at one point considered all one people that kind of fell apart. We talked about that a little bit in the period between the Old and New Testaments when John Hyrcanus was the king, when Judea was independent and he was the king and also the high priest at the same time. And he went and destroyed the Samaritan temple. That kind of broke things off with the Samaritans. And because those living in Galilee have so much contact culturally and everything with the Gentiles, a lot of the Judeans kind of look askance at them as they’re sort of watering it down, sort of compromising with the Greco-Roman culture. They’re not as bad as Samaritans. And you’ll see at several points in the Gospel, people will refer to Jesus as a Galilean and it’s not a compliment. People from Judea, Pharisees, and the chief priest, they will say, “Oh, that Galilean,” right? And again, that’s not a compliment. That’s, “What do you know? You’re one of those.”

Now the Jews’ Feast of Tabernacles was at hand.

Remember, the Feast of Tabernacles is not one of the bigger feasts of the Jews in terms of our consciousness. Now, a lot of Orthodox Jews still celebrate this. It’s changed a little bit in how they celebrate it. Originally in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, during this feast, sometimes referred to, depending on your translation, as the Feast of Booths rather than the Feast of Tabernacles. But the idea was that the people were to leave their homes and go and live in tents for a period of time. And this was sort of like the Passover when they would eat the Passover meal to commemorate them coming out of Egypt. This was for them to remember when they were wandering in the wilderness. The idea was, we see this is a theme running all through the Old Testament where God was always trying to remind them, “Look, this land isn’t yours. I’ve given it to you. I could take it back if you don’t live the way I’ve commanded you to live and you shouldn’t get too settled here and start to think, ‘Oh, this is mine.’ When you have a good crop, ‘Oh, I did this.’” So, the idea that you need to remember and that you’re still dependent upon God for everything. And so this feast was supposed to be a reminder of that.

Over the centuries, now, the Orthodox Jews who still participate in this feast, it’s primarily become, because of the time of year when it happens, it’s become sort of a harvest festival. So they will still sometimes construct these little tents and things. And so they’ll pray for the harvest and they’ll have some of the harvest symbols and that kind of thing. So it’s kind of changed over time. But so this feast is now coming up. It’s now approaching.

His brothers therefore said to Him, “Depart from here and go into Judea, that Your disciples also may see the works that You are doing. For no one does anything in secret while he himself seeks to be known openly. If You do these things, show Yourself to the world.” For even His brothers did not believe in Him.

So we’re talking about who would become St. James and St. Jude and his other brothers. So at this point, as we already saw, the people of Nazareth were not real keen on him. And now even his own family members, the Theotokos, of course, saw the Archangel Gabriel. She’s very aware of who Jesus is. But remember, his brothers are Joseph’s children from his original marriage. So they’ve seen this new woman come into the family with this kid and their father passed away not long after. And so they don’t see why he’s so special.

Interlocutor: So that’s how you explain the word “brothers”?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Going back to the year at least 125, we have a document called the Protoevangelium of James, that dates back to at least 125 AD. So less than 100 years after Jesus’ death, that talks about… it’s less about Jesus and more about the Theotokos because it tells sort of more of her history about Sts Joachim and Anna, her parents, and her birth and how she was betrothed to Joseph. And the reason she was betrothed to Joseph is that she came of age. She had been living in the temple until she came of age. And then because of the regulations about women in the temple, once they came to maturity, they had to leave. And so at that point, St. Joseph was an older man who had already had a wife who had passed away, he was widowed, had children, and so Mary was betrothed to him so that he could sort of protect her during that middle part of her life. And then once she became elderly, she could come back to the temple and live there, like St Anna the Prophetess.

Interlocutor: Would a similar arrangement has been done with other women who were brought to the temple as children like that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s a reference in Second Maccabees to the virgins living in the temple. Those are the young women. And then there are also widows who are sort of attached to the temple who live there and stay there. So on either end. And so she was betrothed to Joseph just so he could take care of her and protect her and see to her needs, as an older man.

But that’s why if you look at the icon of Christ fleeing to Egypt after his birth, you’ll see there’s what looks like a teenager leading the donkey. That’s St. James, who was St. Joseph’s oldest son. They were older already when Jesus was growing up. And so they see this person who’s sort of their stepbrother, and these people are claiming he’s the messiah and they’re not so sure at this point. At this point. Later on, they’re going to be sure but at this point they’re sort of… so they kind of say to him… Jesus has started spending his time up in Galilee rather than going down to Judea. They say “If you’re doing all these miracles and stuff if you’re the Messiah why don’t you go down to Jerusalem and do them in front of everybody? Go do them in front of everybody then they’ll accept that you’re the Messiah.” They’re saying that because they don’t actually believe it. They’re saying “Yeah sure right we know you got all these country bumpkins up here in Galilee fooled but…”

Interlocutor: Well it’s also, maybe you’ll get killed and we’ll get rid of you.

Fr. Stephen: Well I don’t know if they go that far yet.

Interlocutor: Whether they say it or not they’re asking him to go into danger.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah. Now presumably they might think “Well if you go and do these miracles in front of everybody then they’ll accept you and they won’t be trying to kill you. They’re trying to kill you because you’re a fraud,” essentially is what they’re implying. This is one of the important things to remember in terms of when we think about the resurrection. What would it take for you if you were convinced that your brother was a sham? If you thought your brother was a phony, he was a phony messiah, he was putting one over on people and then the Romans executed him as a phony messiah. What would get you to turn around and worship him as God? It would take an awful lot, right? St. James his older brother who here doesn’t believe in him becomes the first bishop of Jerusalem. He becomes the first leader of the church of Jerusalem and ultimately is martyred, is killed, for proclaiming that his brother is God. 

So, to make that change something had to happen. So if you don’t believe the resurrection happened you’re going to have to come up with a pretty good explanation for why he would go from not believing in Jesus, to being willing to die for Jesus seemingly overnight.

Interlocutor: For that matter, all the disciples are cowardly bunch. They seem highly resistant to Jesus’ teachings about himself and then they all go out and get martyred for this idea that they were pretty shaky about.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor 2: I think we have to remember that Jesus grew up in that area so people knew him since he was a kid so they won’t expect that this is the Messiah that is growing up. Like your family will believe in you less. And they say in a different part of the Bible, “We know him, he’s the Galilean.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. In St. Luke’s Gospel, when he preaches in Nazareth they say “Isn’t this Joseph’s son and that’s his brother. Who does he think he is?”

Interlocutor 2: So, it’s like, no prophet is praised in his own country.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. But what St. John is showing us here is, remember, he’s always making these contrasts between who believes and who doesn’t, and the people who you might expect to believe, right? Like the people who know Jesus best and are closest to him, like the disciples and his family members, they don’t really get it. And these people who he runs into, like the Samaritan woman, who you wouldn’t expect to have anything to do with him, they’re the ones who get it. They’re the ones who see who Jesus is and who believe first.

Then Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always ready.”

Meaning if I go down to Judea, they’re going to kill me. It’s not that I don’t want them to kill me. I know they’re going to kill me eventually, but now is not the time. Jesus has more to do before he’s crucified. So he says, “It’s not time for that yet, for me to go down there and face that.” He says, “But your time is always ready.” Their time to do what? Their time to believe. Their time to accept who Jesus is. They don’t need to wait. They’re going to wait, but they don’t need to wait for Jesus to rise from the dead. They could believe now as other people have.

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it that its works are evil”

This is another theme in not just St. John’s gospel, but in St. John’s writings in general, because in First John, when he talks about Cain and Abel, why did Cain kill Abel? He says, “Cain killed Abel because Cain’s works were evil and Abel’s works were good”. So there is this idea that someone, not even directly saying so, but someone who lives a righteous life around wicked people… The wicked people feel their way of life being condemned, by seeing and being around that person, and rather than what they should do, which is change their way of life, rather, they tend to attack and criticize that person. Jesus is going to say this later on to his disciples. He’s going to say, “When the world hates you, remember that it hated me first”, because he’s predicting, if you go out and you really be my disciple, they’re going to hate you.

Interlocutor: This is observable today.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re going to hate you because they love evil, and you’re calling that into question. And so rather than repent of their evil, they’re going to choose to attack you, get rid of the person who’s making them feel bad about it, so they could go back to enjoying it rather than trying to change. But notice the criticism here of his brothers. The world cannot hate you. Why would the world not hate them?

Interlocutor: Because they’re living the way the world does.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they’re not living as a testimony against the way of the world. Remember, this is what Israel was called to originally, when you read the Torah, this is what God says to the people of Israel. He says that he’s called them for them to be a light to the nations, right? That they were to go out and live a certain way and live differently than all the other nations in the world and follow God’s law. And then when they did that, the other nations would see it and be attracted to it, and they’d come to worship the true God also. That’s what they were chosen for. That’s what they were to do. That’s why he says there to be a kingdom of priests. Priests for who? Priests for the rest of the nations. That was the intent, they would lead them in the worship of God. But as we know again and again and again in the prophets, when the prophets come and are condemning Israel and later Judah for their sins, they’re saying, “Look, you’re living. You’ve become just like every other nation in the world.” In fact, he compares them to really horrible places like Sodom and Gomorrah, not just in general, “Oh, you’re like Greece, but you’re like really bad places, like Nineveh before it was destroyed”.

So there’s this theme that Jesus is picking up here, too, that what was true about the whole nation is also true about individual people. And he’s saying, “Look, you get along fine in the world because you’re just doing things the way the world does things. If you were trying to live a righteous life, if you were living the way I’m living, if you were following me, they’d hate you, too, the way they hate me and want to kill me. But they don’t, because you don’t.”

“You go up to this feast. I am not yet going up to this feast, for My time has not yet fully come.” When He had said these things to them, He remained in Galilee.

So he tells them, “You go ahead, you go to the feast. You’ll find a lot of people there who you’ll get along with just great.”

But when His brothers had gone up, then He also went up to the feast, not openly, but as it were in secret.

So he goes, because it’s a feast. He’s going to worship his father, to worship the Lord, so he goes. But he goes kind of undercover, because again, he knows there are people there who are trying to kill him and it’s not time yet for Him to give his life.

Then the Jews sought Him at the feast, and said, “Where is He?”

Interlocutor: Wouldn’t they expect him to be there anyway?

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe. They’re probably kind of hoping he’d been scared off, right? But remember, during these pilgrimages, during these feasts, now, this one is not as big as Passover, but even in a feast like the Feast of Tabernacles, the population of Jerusalem would about triple. So there’s a lot of people in the city. So just because you hear a rumor, “Oh, hey, Jesus of Nazareth is here”, doesn’t mean you’d be able to figure out where he was and find him. It’s sort of like if somebody told you, “Oh, your cousin’s in Lafayette,” but he didn’t make contact with you and you just went out looking for him. It would be kind of difficult unless you’re going door to door. That would take a long time.

And there was much complaining among the people concerning Him. Some said, “He is good”; others said, “No, on the contrary, He deceives the people.” However, no one spoke openly of Him for fear of the Jews.

So when the rumor gets out that he’s in town, this sort of starts arguments, right? Because some people are saying, “Hey, I heard he did this, I saw him do this, or I heard him say this. I think he’s the Messiah.” And somebody else will be like, “No, he’s a phony, he’s a sham, dah dah dah dah.” So this starts some bickering. But when the Judeans, meaning the Pharisees, the priests, when they’re around, nobody even brings his name up because they know they hate him. So you just don’t even bring it up. But notice again here, even the people who do believe in him, at least to some extent, are sort of scared and intimidated to say so. They’re not ready to be hated the way Jesus is hated. They’re not ready to stand up there and say, “Oh, hey, I know you want to kill him, but I think he’s a great guy.” They’re not going to do that yet. Remember, it’s sort of like Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night when nobody would see where he was going and who he was talking to. So even the people who kind of believe in Jesus aren’t willing to say so openly yet.

Now about the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught.

So, we’re in the middle of… it’s about a week long, the festivities. So probably somewhere around Wednesday, Jesus goes to the temple and starts teaching. So he publicly appears, there have been these rumors, but now he comes out into the open. And being in the temple courts is about as in the open as you can get during a feast celebration because this is where everyone’s going on the pilgrimage.

And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?”

Now, “know letters” in the Orthodox study Bible is a very old phrase, a “man of letters”, educated. Really the idea is they literally say, how is this man literate? What they mean is just he’s there preaching and talking about the Scriptures, and they’re looking at him going, this guy’s a peasant from Galilee. He didn’t come out of a rabbinical school. He didn’t come out of any kind of training, how is he able to do this? How does he know what he knows?

Jesus answered them and said, “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority.”

So they say, “Wow, where’s he coming up with this?” Jesus says, “I’m not coming up with this. What I’m teaching you is the truth, it’s not something I came up with. This is the truth of God that I’m laying out and explaining to you. I didn’t need to be educated to come up with something; I know God.”

Notice, He says, “If anyone wills to do his will”. He doesn’t say, “If you’ve studied,” but he says, “If you’re seeking to do God’s will, if you’re seeking to live in a righteous way, if you’re seeking to draw close to God and to follow God, then you’ll know that, you’ll hear what I’m saying and you’ll recognize it.” You’ll say, “Oh, that’s true. And I know it’s true because I’ve come to, to some extent, not to the extent Jesus did, obviously, but I’ve come to some extent to know God. And so this is true. This isn’t something he just made up. This is the truth.”

This is an important passage for those of us who have lived most of our life in Western culture, which isn’t everybody here, because Western culture and Western theology is very sort of head-focused, brain-heavy, intellectualized, right? If we want to hear a lecture on theology, we’re going to go to somebody who has a PhD in theology, not a monk who never went to school. Where in reality it should be the exact opposite. The monk who has lived a righteous life and has drawn close to God. He’s the one who could tell you the truth of God, not the guy who’s spent his whole life reading books and studying. And I say this as somebody who’s soon to be a PhD candidate, so I’m self-condemned to a certain extent, but this is an important truth. And St. John, remember, he never makes believing in Christ a question of whether you’re smart or stupid. Whether you believe in Christ is a question of whether you are righteous or wicked, whether you’re trying to follow God or whether your life is evil.

Interlocutor: That’s really an interesting point because as long as I was a Western Christian, I read theologians. Since then, I’ve been reading monks. It really is, it’s good that in the Orthodox Church, if you want to read something important religious, it’s usually by a monk or an ascetic or somebody who… not a scholar. So that difference is really dramatic.

Fr Stephen: Because even though it’s only one word, there’s a big difference between knowing God and knowing about God. An academic theologian can tell you lots of things about God, but there’s a big difference between somebody who knows a lot of facts about my wife, and could tell you, “Oh, well, she was born here on this date, and these are her parents’ names and here’s where they’re from and here’s where she went to school.” They could have all these facts about my wife. But there’s a big difference between that and the way I know my wife, knowing her as a person.

And so, we know God in the person of Jesus Christ. And so there’s a big difference between being able to know things and say things about Jesus Christ and actually knowing Jesus Christ. That distinction sort of underlies what’s going on here. It sort of underlies what Jesus is saying. There’s a difference between knowing things about God that you can go and learn at a school and actually knowing God. And if you know God, then you’ll know what I’m saying is true. Because what I’m saying doesn’t come from things I learned in school, but from knowing God intimately Himself.

He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.

He says, I didn’t come here. This isn’t something I came up with. I’m not speaking on my own authority because he says, someone who comes and speaks to you. If I go and I work out my theological system and I come and I present it, I put a banner that says “Father Stephen de Young Ministries” over my head and I say, “Oh, look at all these brilliant insights I have”. I’m not trying to bring glory to God, I’m trying to bring glory to me. By doing that, I’m standing up and saying, “Look at me, follow me. Aren’t I smart?” Whereas what Jesus is saying is, “Look, this isn’t something I came up with. So who am I trying to bring glory to? I’m trying to bring glory to God by telling you his truth.” Now, the flip side of that is, if they reject what Jesus is saying, they’re not just rejecting Jesus, they’re not just saying, “Oh, I don’t think this guy knows what he’s talking about.” If they reject what Jesus is saying, they’re rejecting God. They’re rejecting God because he’s just speaking God’s truth, right?

“Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill Me?”

So he calls out the elephant in the room. At first He says, “Did not Moses give you the law? Moses gave you the law. You all respect Moses, you don’t respect me, right? You don’t care what I had to say, but you believe Moses, what Moses said because why? Because Moses, on top of Mount Sinai, sat and spoke to God face to face. So you accept that Moses knew God, right? You don’t accept that I know God, but you accepted that Moses did. So you’re rejecting what I’m saying because you say, I don’t know God. Well, if Moses knew God, you should accept what he’s saying. So why don’t you keep what Moses said? Why don’t you do what Moses said, then, forget about what I was saying. Do what Moses said.” And they’re not. And so he says, “So why are you trying to kill me?” He calls them out publicly.

The people answered and said, “You have a demon. Who is seeking to kill You?”

We have to talk a little bit about what having a demon means, because this language was very common in the Greco-Roman world, and they didn’t think it was a bad thing. They thought it was a good thing to have a demon. The word demon, when we think of demon, we think of evil spirit. But the Greek word daemon originally just was a synonym for like, a god or a spirit, good or evil or whatever. So in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Theaetetus, Socrates says he has a demon that dwells within him, that whispers wisdom to his soul. And that’s part of him defending himself, that’s part of him saying, “This isn’t just Socrates talking. I’m divinely inspired because I have this spirit within me.”

The oracle at Delphi was possessed by Apollo. People would come to talk to her in order to talk to Apollo, because Apollo possessed her and would speak through her, they believed. And we’re going to see this in the Book of Acts. In the book of Acts, in one of the stories, there’s a slave girl who’s possessed by a demon and who’s a fortune teller. People come to her to talk to the spirit that possesses her, and her owners as a slave are making all this money off of her fortune telling. So when the apostles cast the demon out of her. The owners get mad. “We had a good business going. What are you doing?”

So, the Jewish people did not say, “Oh, that’s malarkey. They didn’t say, oh, Apollo doesn’t exist. Oh, all this is silly, right?” What the Jewish people said was, no, these are evil spirits, these aren’t gods. Paul’s going to say at one point, “All the gods of the nations are demons.” He doesn’t say all the gods of the nations don’t exist. He says they’re all demons. So you’re following after real spiritual powers that are out there in the world, but they’re not good, they’re not positive, they’re not holy.

Interlocutor: Whereas the Greeks thought many of them were.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re leading you to destruction. They’re leading you to destruction, not to glory. And so they cast a different light on it. But they believed that phenomena happened. And the reason the Greeks and Romans believe that is it’s part of their religious understanding. They believe that what made these spirit, spirits is that they didn’t have bodies. So if a person who has a body wants to talk to a spirit that doesn’t have a body, in their minds. What you had to do is you had to make a body for the spirit to inhabit. So that happened one of two ways. Either through what we call idolatry, they would fashion a statue of a body and then they believed that the spirit of that being would come into the statue. That’s why they had them in the temple and they’d go and worship there, because they believed that the God would come there and be in the statue, so they could interact with it. Or it would possess a person and use their body to communicate. So that’s what they believed religiously. So what the Jews are saying to Jesus, is, Jesus says, “I’m not speaking on my own authority, I’m speaking for God.” And they say, “Yeah, not our God. You may be speaking for somebody, but it’s not the God who we worship.”

Now, notice that’s a double-edged sword, right? Because in a way, they’re telling the truth, that the problem was they were not worshipping the true God Jesus spoke for, they were worshipping another god. And Jesus is going to straight out tell them that later, “If you knew my Father, you’d know me, but since you don’t know who I am, that means you don’t know the Father either.” So whoever it is, you’re worshiping somebody else. So Jesus essentially is ultimately going to say, “You’re right. You’re not worshipping the God who sent me. Unfortunately, the God who sent me is the only true God and you’re worshiping something else.” So they say you got some kind of other spirit, some kind of… maybe some heathen God, but it’s not our God you’re speaking for. And the “Who is seeking to kill you?” is kind of rhetorical, because if he actually were demon possessed and was going around trying to start a following in the temple, then according to the law, they should stone him to death. If a demon possessed man came into the temple and was preaching heresy, you’d stone them to death, right? So that’s sort of their argument back. So Jesus says, “Why don’t you do what Moses says?” They say, “We’re trying to do what Moses said. We’re trying to stone a sorcerer to death.” It’s basically their retort.

Jesus answered and said to them, “I did one work, and you all marvel.”

Which is healing the paralyzed man. He’s referring back to him, “You saw me do this one thing. There’s all this hubbub, there’s, all this clamor, all this trouble.”

Moses therefore gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

Remember, they got all worked up because he healed a paralyzed man on the Sabbath. “How dare you?” He says Moses gave you circumcision, meaning circumcision is part of the law. And then St. John sort of qualifies it. Well, because remember, it was given to Abraham, that’s what he knows by the fathers, the patriarchs, before, even though it goes back even before Moses, but it’s part of the law. He told you to do this work, you need to circumcise your male children on the 8th day. That’s in the law. He gave that to you. And if the 8th day falls on the Sabbath, even though it’s the Sabbath, you still go and do what Moses told you to do. You go and you do this work on the Sabbath. You circumcise this child.

“If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?”

He says, “So you’re willing to do this on the Sabbath because you don’t want to break, you don’t want to violate any of those commandments. So even on the Sabbath you’re going to do it. But now you’re angry with me because I healed the whole person. You did a medical procedure on one part of a person. I healed the whole person. And you’re mad at me.”

“Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

He says, “You’re being superficial, you’re just looking at the surface of things.” “Oh, you’re not allowed to do stuff on the Sabbath, he did something on the Sabbath that’s bad!” So he’s saying, “Stop and think about this for a minute. Think about what you’re saying, think about what you’re going to do. Does it make any sense? You need to judge with a righteous judgment.”

If there was a judge who, when the people came before him to settle a case, didn’t listen to anything they said, just looked at them and said, “Oh, that guy looks kind of shifty, that guy looks like a decent guy, okay, he’s right.” You would say that’s a horribly unjust judge, right? You want a judge who’s going to make a righteous judgment, who’s going to investigate it and think about it. That’s what he’s saying to them, saying, “You’re being like that unrighteous judge, you’re just maybe this knee-jerk response, you’re not thinking about this.”

Now some of them from Jerusalem said, “Is this not He whom they seek to kill?”

So he’s standing there out in the open preaching, and they’re like, “Aren’t there people looking to kill this guy? And he’s out here.”

“But look! He speaks boldly, and they say nothing to Him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is truly the Christ?”

So the onlookers are looking at this and say, “He doesn’t seem scared of them at all. And in fact, when they have these little verbal jousts, he seems to be winning and they don’t have anything to say.” So they start to think, “Well, maybe they know he’s the Messiah and they just don’t want to admit it because he’s threatening their power and authority.” So he’s getting the better of them publicly. And they’re starting to get people to think about Jesus differently. They’re starting to say, “Hey, maybe I heard these bad things about him, but now that I see how he’s operating.”

“However, we know where this Man is from; but when the Christ comes, no one knows where He is from.”

Interlocutor: That’s an argument that they’re saying He’s not the Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So they’re saying, “Well, maybe,” but then they’re going back to like, “This guy’s from Nazareth in Galilee. Where is there a prophecy that the Messiah is going to come from Nazareth, for Pete’s sake?” Their picture of the Messiah is this great king who’s going to come and deliver them from the Roman Empire. This guy’s some peasant from Galilee who’s basically homeless. This kind of isn’t our image, right? “I mean, I see what he’s doing. He’s getting the better of them and he’s sort of saying the right things. But this doesn’t seem like the right person.”

Interlocutor: I can kind of be sympathetic because it must have been pretty bewildering that he’s not following the script.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And see, again, that’s a challenge to, again, the idea of knowing about God and knowing God, right? They think they know a lot of things about the Messiah. They’ve been taught Messiah is XYZ. Here’s the sort of qualifications, here’s what he’s going to do. All this is about the Messiah. Whereas, for example, the Samaritan woman comes to know Jesus and because she has in some way trying to have a relationship with God, recognizes him as the Messiah.

Interlocutor: And that’s also a very personal thing. The encounter with her, what he says to her and everything is very personal, very intimate, very real. And these people are all still thinking in abstract terms of the Messiah and big issues. But God really comes to people individually, intimately.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I have this mold in my head and he doesn’t fit that mold. So rather than me changing the mold, I reject Him. And this is true of something we do not just with the Messiah, but with God in general. Because remember, Jesus is God. So when they get to know Him, when they hear what he has to say, when they see who he is, they’re seeing who God is, what God has to say. And some of them don’t like what they see. I have this idea in my head of who God is and who he’s supposed to be and how he’s supposed to act in relation to me. And so, if he doesn’t fit that, forget it.

Interlocutor: Isn’t it a theme all through the Old Testament that God is always surprising? That when God does want a king, he picks a shepherd boy.

Fr. Stephen: Right. After the whole tussle about whether they should have one or not. Yeah, because again, they tell God how he should work. “You should give us a king because all the nations have kings and that king represents God’s authority on earth and that’s what we want too. That’s how you should interact with us, God, we don’t like how you’ve been doing it. In fact, we have some suggestions as to who would make a good king and what kind of person he should be. And we don’t really care what you think about it. We want you to do what we want you to do.”

That’s even… and they’re still up online somewhere. When I was going through 1st and 2nd Kings, when you read the story of the dedication of Solomon’s temple there’s this interesting back and forth where for example Solomon’s prayer at the dedication is all about “God, come and dwell in this building and bless us from here. And when we want to see you, we’ll come here. And when we pray in this building, please answer our prayers” and da, da, da, da, da, right all down the line. And God’s response starts out with “I am God. I don’t live in buildings made by human hands. I show mercy on whom I will show mercy. I show favor on who I will show favor. I’m not going to agree to your terms but, knowing your limitations, knowing who you are as people and your weakness, I will come and I will dwell among you in this temple. I will condescend down to your level and come here and dwell.”

So, there’s this interesting sort of push and pull where they want to put God into this easily manageable box and that’s basically the way paganism works. Paganism, especially magic, and ritual was, this is how you get the god to do what you want him to do. We do this ritual and then he will send rain. We do this ritual and then we will have fertile crops. We do this ritual and then this will happen.

That’s sort of the whole pagan worldview and so that causes them… this is what brings the persecution down on the Jews, originally, under Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the Greek Seleucid monarchs, he lost a battle and so he says, “Well wait a minute, we did all the right sacrifices.” Now given he was fighting someone who worshiped the exact same gods which always presents an interesting… like how do they pick since both sides were praying and making sacrifices to the same god? He says, we did all the sacrifices and all this, the gods should have given us victory. They’re sort of required to because we did the right things. And so he concluded, well they must be ticked about something, what could it be? And then someone pointed out to him, “Well there’s these Jews who won’t worship the gods who are part of your territory so they must be mad about that. So you need to go force them to worship the Greek gods. So then the next war you’ll win because if you do all the rest.”

And that happened to the early Christians under the Romans. That was one of the main causes of persecutions of Christians that would break out in places, was something bad would happen, there would be a natural disaster or something. And they’d say, “Well, why are the gods mad at us? We did all the sacrifices. It must be those Christians who won’t worship them. That’s what they’re ticked about, get them.” So that whole thinking. And unfortunately, the people of God sometimes fall into that thinking, “What do I have to do to get God to do what I want Him to do?” Rather than relating to Him as a person and us trying to do what he wants us to do, we focus on that, and it never works.

It doesn’t, for the record, work in marriage either. Me trying to figure out what I need to do to get my wife to do what I want her to do doesn’t work. It’s much easier if I just get to know her more closely and I try to do what she wants me to do. Things go much smoother, so there’s a practical application for it.

Then Jesus cried out, as He taught in the temple, saying, “You both know Me, and you know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know. But I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me.”

Now, this is kind of confusing because he seems to contradict Himself, right? He says, “You know me. You know where I’m from, but you don’t know the one who sent me.” But what he’s saying here is they’ve heard what he has to say. Jesus is saying all this publicly out in the open. They all know what he’s saying. He’s not hiding somewhere. He’s not whispering stuff to his disciples, and then it filters out, “Oh, I heard Jesus said this.” There’s no ambiguity. He’s saying it right in front of them. He’s yelling. He’s crying out. He’s yelling in the middle of the temple during a feast. “You know who I am and what I’m saying”. And he repeats what he just said. He hasn’t come… “This isn’t something I came up with and decided to go peddle.” “And he who sent me”, again, is referring to His Father, “is true, whom you do not know”. So he puts a pin in it. You don’t know him. If you knew Him, you’d accept it. You’d get all of this, but you don’t know Him. Again, he’s agreeing with them. “You’re right. The person I’m speaking for is not the God you worship.” And then he points. I know him, “for I am from him, and he sent me”. Jesus knows God the Father, obviously, intimately. They don’t know Him at all.

Therefore they sought to take Him; but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.

Now, notice remember back at the beginning of the chapter, he said, “I’m not going down there because the hour for me to die has not yet come.” But you notice when he does go down there and he preaches publicly, as much as they want to kill him, because it’s not time yet, they can’t. They can’t. So whether they want to believe in Jesus or not, whether they want to accept Jesus or not, who’s the one who is in control of the situation? Jesus, who is God, but Jesus is the one in control of the situation. This is another theme in St John’s Gospel. He’s going to come out and say later, “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down. And since I lay it down, I’m able to pick it back up again. I’ll be able to pick it back up again.” So this is the point. They can’t kill Jesus. They can’t kill him. When Jesus is going to die, it’s going to be because he chooses to lay down his life.

And many of the people believed in Him, and said, “When the Christ comes, will He do more signs than these which this Man has done?”

So he’s saying, “Look, with everything he’s doing, if he’s not the Messiah, I don’t know what’s he going to do. What’s bigger than this?” This has to be the Messiah. Again, a bunch of the people in the crowd now, not the people who are trying to kill them, don’t get won over, but a bunch of the people.

There’s an important… I’m going to go into this a little bit. I know we’re getting late. But there’s a point here with Christ laying down his life and picking it up again. The fathers are going to make a huge point in terms of our understanding of Christ’s death and resurrection and why Jesus can’t be killed. Why can’t Jesus be killed? Is it because he’s not really human? No. You say, well, humans are mortal, they can be killed. Well, we have to talk about how death works in the scriptures. Why did Adam and Eve die? Because they sinned. If they hadn’t sinned, they wouldn’t have died, right? They sinned and so they died. That’s what St Paul’s going to say. Wages of sin is death. You spend your day sinning. When you get your paycheck, it’s death. That’s it. That’s what you’ve earned, right? So, our sinfulness gives death a hold on us. We sort of owe a death for the sin. Any human person who dies, dies for their sins, for their own sins, because the wages of sin is death. St Paul’s going to talk about this in Romans 5, that death came into the world through one man, through Adam, or sin came into the world through Adam and through sin, death came into the world. And so everyone descended from Adam has died because everyone who has descended from Adam has sinned, right?

Interlocutor: But it’s not because they inherit sin.

Fr. Stephen: No, they’ve sinned. The way Adam sinned. They’re their father’s children. So just like him, they’ve all sinned and so they’ve all died. And what St. Paul is doing there, is he’s really interpreting the genealogies in the Book of Genesis. Because that’s what you see when you see the genealogy coming down from Adam, his son Seth, and all ends with, he was so many years old, he begat his son so and so, and then he died, and he died, and he died, over and over and over and over and over again. That’s the legacy we received.

Jesus has never sinned. So if Jesus is without sin, if sin is completely foreign to Jesus, he can’t be killed, right? He, strictly speaking, can’t die. And so this is what’s behind when we read in our Pascha liturgy in the homily of St. John Chrysostom. By Christ dying a death that he didn’t owe, Jesus is uniquely able to die for the sins of others because he doesn’t have any of his own. And so, when he offers his life, this is why when he descends into Hades, Hades can’t hold him, has no claim on him because he hasn’t sinned. He hasn’t sinned. And so he can destroy Hades, he can destroy the power of death by the fact that he dies a death that he didn’t owe. That he didn’t owe.

And so this is part of what St. John is doing. This is the negative side of it, right? The positive side, as he’s been saying, is Christ has life in himself and so he can give that life to us. But the flip side of that is Christ has no death in him, and so when he dies, he can take away our death and give us life in return. So that’s part of the undercurrent of what St. John is saying here, right? They can’t kill him, but he can choose later to lay down his life. So even though it’s kind of an offhand comment, there’s a lot there in terms of what St. John is doing.

The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things concerning Him,

So the Pharisees hear people saying, “Oh, this has got to be the Messiah.”

and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take Him.

So the Pharisees don’t have any troops, but the chief priests do. The chief priests were allowed to have guards. They were supposed to be from the tribe of Levi, though that had gotten kind of shifty by this point in history, it’s hard to tell exactly who is from what tribe sometimes, but they were allowed to have temple guards because of course, the Roman troops were Gentiles and they were not allowed into the inner part of the Temple. But the Romans were big, remember, on keeping the peace. So they said, “Look, we need to keep peace in there. You have these big pilgrimages, you get these big crowds in there. We’re not having a riot break out in Jerusalem out of your temple.” And so the compromise was the Romans allowed them to have their own guards, their own troops, but they were confined to the inside of the temple. If they tried to do something outside of the Temple, the Romans would quickly teach them that… they’re sort of like the campus police. You don’t go down to the freeway and try to hand out tickets when you’re campus police, it’s not going to work.

So, the Pharisees here, they’re saying this, they go to the chief priests and say, “Hey, this guy is out there preaching in the temple, he’s causing trouble. We were after this guy in the first place and now they’re saying he’s the Messiah. We need to nip this in the bud.” So the chief priest sends some of these temple guards to go grab Jesus.

Then Jesus said to them, “I shall be with you a little while longer, and then I go to Him who sent Me. You will seek Me and not find Me, and where I am you cannot come.”

This language is going to get picked up later on in the Gospel of St. John, and he’s going to go and explain more. But he’s already saying, “I’m only going to be with you now for a short time”, not as short as the Pharisees would like. “I’m only going to be with you a short time and then I’m going to be gone, and then you’ll be looking for me.” Why are they going to be looking for him? Who’s he talking to? He’s not talking to the people who believe in him. He’s talking to the guards who are trying to kill him. “You’re going to be looking for me. Why? To kill me and you won’t find me. Because where I’m going, you’re not going.”

And this is a theme that St. John is actually going to pick up on in the Book of Revelation. In the Book of Revelation, when he, poetically, in the apocalyptic language and everything of the Book of Revelation, he talks about Jesus’ birth, right? And how the dragon, the devil, was waiting there trying to kill Jesus and that Jesus ultimately is taken up into heaven. And then what does the dragon do? The dragon attacks his followers because he can’t get to Jesus. Because he can’t go where Jesus went. He can’t get to Jesus. So, he goes after Jesus’ followers to try and destroy them, this rage and anger.

So, first note, who is St. John saying these temple guards actually work for? Jesus is arguing… in the Jewish mind. They didn’t have their own king really anymore, none of them liked Herod or his sons, so they didn’t really have a king anymore. But they had these chief priests who were supposed to be the holy people, who were supposed to be their leaders. And they’re the people, these priests, they’re the ones who work for God. And then you have the Romans, who are clearly evil, and they’re working for Satan, they’re working for the devil, the devil’s behind them, demonic. They’re worshiping demons, right? That’s the Romans.

Jesus is drawing both of those together. He’s saying, “No, these chief priests and these Pharisees who are rejecting me are just as much a part of this world as the Romans.” He’s already shown… see, again, this is the negative side of something we’ve already seen. We’ve already seen on the positive side, that when the Samaritans come and believe in Jesus, Jesus welcomes them, right? That it doesn’t matter who they are ethnically if they follow Christ. But the flip side of that is, if you reject Christ, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or a Gentile, if you reject Christ, you’re part of this world. So, for St. John, in all of his writings, his Gospel and the Epistles, in the Book of Revelation, there’s only two sides. There’s Christ and there’s the world. If you’re part of Christ’s kingdom, you’re over here. If you’re part of the world, you’re part of Satan’s kingdom. There’s no sort of middle ground, there’s no DMZ, halfway point where you could stand in between. For St. John, it’s one or the other. That’s why every time he mentions Judas, he spits, right? Because Judas is clearly over here in the kingdom of Satan, in this world. He has nothing to do with us.

Then the Jews said among themselves, “Where does He intend to go that we shall not find Him?”

Once again, we’ve seen this over and over again at St. John’s Gospel, Jesus says things, and because these people are so spiritually blind, they take them literally and they don’t get it. What is he going to hide somewhere where we can’t find him? Where’s he going to go?”

“Does He intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?”

Now, he’s not talking about Greek people, the word “Dispersion” there is Diaspora, and that was the word that was already coming. That’s how they referred to people who are ethnically Jewish, who are sort of scattered around the world. “Diaspora” means scattered, like where you scatter seed. So they would talk about the Jews who didn’t live in Judea and Galilee, who lived in Rome or in Greece or in Macedonia or in Egypt. They were the diaspora. They were sort of scattered Jews. So they’re saying, “Well, where is he going to go that we can’t find him? Is he going to go to Greece and preach to the Jews there? Their synagogues up there? That must be what he means, right? He’s going to take off and we’re not going to know where to look for him.”

“What is this thing that He said, ‘You will seek Me and not find Me, and where I am you cannot come’?”

“We could go to Greece, right?” So again, they completely misunderstand. And so one last note on this, though. Notice Jesus continues to talk to them, right? Jesus continues to talk to them. And the reason they don’t understand is not that Jesus is speaking in riddles. The reason they don’t understand is because they’re very far from God. And so when he speaks God’s truth to them, they have no idea. It’s like he’s speaking Chinese. They don’t know what it is he’s saying. He’s speaking a foreign language because he’s talking about the things of God, and they’re completely disconnected from that. But Jesus continues to speak those things to them. He continues to speak to him. He doesn’t reject them, they reject him. We’re going to see that again and again in St. John’s Gospel. Jesus doesn’t reject people, people reject Jesus.