But so, this rich man in the parable, he’s clothed in purple and fine linen. Remember, purple was pretty much the most expensive dye going at this time in history, they’re not producing artificial coloring, right? So to get dyes, usually most of the dyes came from either insects or water mollusks that had various colored shells that would get crushed and ground up and then used to dye cloth. So, most things were sort of linen colored. They were sort of off-white because that’s the color of things came in, right. But being able to afford dye already meant you had money. Purple was the rarest kind because if you just think about it at the top of your head, where would you get purple in nature in terms of bugs? It was actually the shells of some little water snails that they used at this time in history. But those are kind of hard to get your hands on, especially in large quantities. So the idea that this guy wore purple and fine linen all the time means he’s got lots and lots of money. More money than he knows what to do with if he’s spending it on sets of purple clothes. And he feeds sumptuously every day, so he’s eating more than his fill every day.

But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich manís table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

So we’ve got opposite poles here. We’ve got this rich man who’s about as rich as you could get. He’s got money to burn. You have Lazarus, who has absolutely nothing. Doesn’t even have his health. It’s not just the guy is homeless and doesn’t have any food and he’s laying there, but he’s got sores all over his body. He’s sick to boot, and the dogs are coming and licking the sores. Now, the idea here is this is actually something that was done in the ancient world because dog saliva is much thicker than human saliva and kills bacteria. This is why dogs can eat like rotting meat instead and not get sick. And so they would often let dogs lick wounds, for example, in order to disinfect them. But the idea here is he’s laying there at this rich man’s gate. He wants the crumbs that fall from his table. He’s not asking for much, right? “When you’re done, when you stuffed yourself full, can I have the leftovers you’re going to throw away? Can you give them to me instead?” Implied here, the rich man isn’t giving them to him. These dogs, they’re just wild dogs. Don’t think pet dogs. These wild dogs have more pity and more compassion on Lazarus than this rich man does his fellow human being.

Interlocutor: Is it significant that they call him Lazarus?

Fr. Stephen: Well, a lot of people want to connect it with his friend Lazarus. Unfortunately, Lazarus was a fairly common name in Judea at this time. As we’ll talk about here in a minute, I think it’s significant that he is named and the rich man is not named. But the particular name I don’t think… it’s sort of the equivalent of John Smith, right? It’s sort of a generic name that he’s given for the purpose of naming him, as we’ll talk about here in a minute.

So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abrahamís bosom. The rich man also died and was buried.

Now, notice we don’t see any direct interaction between the two while they’re alive, right? It doesn’t sort of dramatize… we’re given the impression, obviously, that this man is not taking any pity, right, on Lazarus. But I mean, we don’t have it dramatized him walking into his house and stepping over Lazarus. But it’s clear he doesn’t care, right? We have no indication that he even knows Lazarus is there really, as opposed to the dogs. But notice also the language. The beggar died, Lazarus dies, and is carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. Now, Abraham’s bosom, again, you’ll get a lot of people taking that and running with it. What it means is just that he is where Abraham is. Abraham is sort of your paradigm of a righteous person. He is the first father of the Hebrew people. So this means he’s with the righteous, right? He’s with the righteous. Notice it doesn’t say immediately the rich man died and went to hell.

He’s dies, he’s taken to where Abraham is. Rich man dies, he’s buried in the ground. Like what? Like an animal, right? Like a dog. An animal dies, it just decays into the ground,

“And being in torments in Hades,”

Hades is what’s used in the New Testament to translate sheol and of the Septuagint into the Greek Old Testament translates sheol  from Hebrew, which just means the grave. Just means the grave. Don’t read back hell into it. Hell is an Anglo-Saxon concept from about the 8th century. He’s in the grave, he’s in the ground, he’s in the underworld, which is not a good place to be. It would be nicer for people to cease to exist. And remember, at this point in history, most people don’t have a firm concept of the resurrection. We talked about this as we were going through the Old Testament, how their understanding of the resurrection of the dead kind of developed. The general view in the Ancient Near East at the time when the earliest parts of the Old Testament were written was that there was just sort of an underworld, there was just sort of the grave, and everyone who died went there, and it was dark and terrible and horrible and miserable. So you didn’t want to die.

What we start to see as we work through the Old Testament is, we start to see references in the Psalms, for example, even if I go down into the grave, God will still be with me. That’s the idea that for the righteous person, that horrible end isn’t the end of the story. And then we start to see, later on more clear pictures of the resurrection of the dead. And as we’ve seen already in the Gospels, and we’ll see even more in the Book of Acts, this is one of the places where different sects of Judaism disagreed at this time. Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection. They believed you died, and that was it. The Pharisees did believe in the resurrection, but they believed in the resurrection far in the future. When God returns, there will be a resurrection of the righteous. The rest of them will stay in the grave.

And so, none of them are expecting Christ’s resurrection. But this is true in Judaism even today, even among Orthodox Jews. There are many who do not believe in any kind of afterlife or resurrection or new heavens and new earth. None of that. That becomes really the provenance of Christianity following the resurrection of Christ, as we’re going to see when we get into St Paul’s epistles, the resurrection of Christ, once we see Christ race from the dead in glory, that sort of serves as a key to unlocking all those passages of the Old Testament, so that they all sort of fall in line and make sense in terms of what God is doing in redeeming his creation, the resurrection of the dead at the end of time.

But if you don’t have that key, you don’t necessarily get that just from the Old Testament by itself. We’re going to see St. Paul referring to this, that when he says, he talks about the veil that covered Moses’s face when he came down from the mountain, he says even to this day, the Jews who don’t accept Christ are reading the Scriptures through a veil. So, they don’t see Christ there, they don’t see the resurrection there, they don’t see these things.

But so, the picture we have here of the rich man is that he dies and goes into the grave, goes into the bad place. He goes to a place where he’s in torment and suffering. Lazarus dies. He’s with Abraham. And the righteous. Yes?

Interlocutor: How do they have torments and suffering? Is that only their soul or spirit?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. They continue to exist. And this is…

when we talk about somebody’s soul, we tend to think about it in a very Greek philosophical way, basically the way Plato talks about the soul, like it’s your quote unquote “real self” or something. Which of course, is not the teaching of Scripture. The word that translated “soul” in both Hebrew and Aramaic of the Old Testament and Greek of the New Testament really means “life”, is what it means. So when you die, the life leaves your body. The body is still there.

And so, the question is, where does that life go when it leaves the body? Does it just evaporate and go nowhere? Or as St Paul’s going to say, is our life hidden in Christ? Because what’s going to happen is St Paul’s going to take this kind of language about Abraham and the righteous and move it to Christ himself, who is now ascended into heaven. Christ is speaking here to the Pharisees before that, before that happens.

So, the idea is that when the life leaves our body, remember when God created Adam, what the picture was? He makes his body first of the ground and then breathes life into him, and so that life leaves again, but it doesn’t dissipate. It doesn’t cease to exist.

As I said, it would be better for someone like the rich man if he did cease to exist. But, yeah, that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about soul. We’re talking about a person’s life, not sort of their true self as opposed to their body, which isn’t really them. No, it’s their life. And then this is the picture which, remember we read here on Pascha a few weeks ago, the valley of the dry bones, in Ezekiel, what happens? The bones all come together and then what? And then the breath comes back into them. So that’s the picture of the resurrection, is our bodies being reconstructed and then our life being breathed back into them.

Interlocutor: So is that where they get the theory of purgatory, that the life goes somewhere, and just waits?

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s…

Interlocutor: What happens to Christians, when their life leaves, where does it go?

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Well, that’s what St. Paul is going to say, building off of this, is that our life is hidden in Christ, that we go to be where Christ is.

Interlocutor: Even if we don’t repent?

Fr. Stephen: No, I thought you said Christians.

Interlocutor: But I might forget to repent and then get hit by a car.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well that’s where the idea of Purgatory comes from. The idea of Purgatory comes from in the West especially, as you get in the Middle Ages, they adopted the idea. And this is the original argument about Purgatory. There’s a whole later Protestant argument about Purgatory. We didn’t have anything to do with it 300 years before they didn’t have anything to do with it. And the original debate, the 13th century, when Rome first proclaimed Purgatory as a dogma, was that they taught that in order to enter heaven. And now see already the language has changed because they’re not talking about the resurrection of the dead, now. They’re not talking about standing before Christ’s judgment seat. They’re talking about going to heaven. In order to go to heaven, you have to be perfect.

Interlocutor: Isn’t that kind of what we say?

Fr. Stephen: No. You have to reach a certain bar. And if you don’t read that bar, you reach that bar, you can’t get into heaven. And so this caused a problem for them theologically, because they’re like, “Well, 99.9999% of people, even faithful Christian people don’t hit that bar, aren’t going to be perfect.” So what happens to them? Does just everybody go to hell? And so they had to come up with, “Well, if you’ve still got a little work to do, we’re going to have this third place where you go to get up to that bar to cover the last leg”. And then that gets into the whole distinction between mortal and venal sin, and that goes at a whole rabbit trail that we don’t go down right now.

But what we would teach, in contrast, is that there’s not a bar. There’s not a bar where you’ve earned salvation or earned your way into heaven, where you’ve achieved it by God’s grace or otherwise. Rather, there’s a continuum between us and God. And since we’re creatures and God as our creator, there’s an infinite distance between us, which means for all eternity, I can continue to draw closer to God, to learn more about God, to understand God more deeply. There’s no end to that because he’s infinite.

And so, it’s not a question of reaching some artificial bar and then you’re done. You’re perfect now. But it’s an idea of being on a trajectory. It’s like we talked about when we were going through Proverbs. And like Christ has referred to, remember earlier, a few weeks ago, he referred to the narrow gate, we saw in Proverbs, it refers to the two paths. There’s the path that leads to life and the path that leads to destruction. It’s about being on a trajectory. It’s about being on a path. We’re either on the right path or we’re off the path in the weeds. And there’s no sort of stagnant point. There’s no sort of neutral point. You’re either drawing closer to God or you’re destroying yourself in sin. That’s it.

And so, we don’t have the idea that sin is sort of this finite thing. Like, I have a certain number of infractions, and then I have a certain amount of repenting I have to do for each infraction in order to make up for it, right? We don’t have that whole construct. Repentance is a continual process. The example I usually give for repentance is it’s sort of like if you’re in a room with a dim light and you look down at your clothes, you’re like, “Oh, there’s some spots.” Like I have on my shirt right now. So you go and go, okay, “I’m clean.” And then somebody turns the dimmer switch up a little, “oh, oops”... Crank it up a little more, right? The closer we come to God, the more we become aware of our own sin and our own weakness and our own failings. And so, we continue to repent throughout our whole lives.

St. Sisoes the Great, when he was leaving this life, he was surrounded by his disciples. He was over 100 years old, one of the greatest monastics in the history of the church, Saint Sisoes. And his disciples were surrounding him. And before he passed from his life, his face was already shining with the reflected light of God the way Moses’s did. And so they asked him for sort of his last… what’s your final word to us? What do you have to say to sum up your life? And the last sentence he said was, “I regret only that I only just started repenting.”

So there’s not this perfect bar. Because let me tell you if St. Sisoes the Great didn’t hit perfect, didn’t hit the bar. Ain’t nobody hitting the bar in this life or the next. And so, we have to kind of shift our thinking on that.

And so our closeness to God, our understanding of God, our knowledge of God, our life with God, our sharing in God’s life begins in this life and then continues into eternity. But that’s on a trajectory. It isn’t that this life is this place where this is the series of exams God gives us to see if we’re going to pass and get into heaven or fail and go to hell, right?

Interlocutor: That’s kind of what I was taught.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s not Christianity. Strictly speaking, that’s not the kind of God we worship, that God is trying to weed out people who aren’t fit to come into his presence. It’s a very different picture of God. It’s a very picture of God. What everything we know about God, we learned from Jesus Christ, right? Is that how Jesus is acting towards the Pharisees, his worst enemies right now, in Luke’s Gospel? “You guys aren’t going to make the cut, you’re all going to hell.” No, he’s pleading with them like the Father with the prodigal Son and St. Paul we’re going to see in Acts at the end of the book of Acts, which is of course, the second part of St. Luke’s Gospel. It’s volume two. When he’s saying goodbye to the elders in Ephesus, the presbyters in Ephesus, he says to them, “Remember how I never cease, night and day in tears, pleading with you to be reconciled to God. Not judging you to see if you’re worthy, not giving you penance to make up for all the evil stuff you did, but pleading with you in tears to be reconciled to God.” So our God has a very different character, and that’s where it all starts.

So, yes, the lives of these two men, the rich man and the beggar, the rich man and Lazarus, both continue after their life in this world ends, and they continue on the trajectories that were set by their lives in this world. The rich man lived his life in one way, and that trajectory continues. Lazarus, the beggar, even though he was a beggar, even though he was covered in sores, lived his life in another way. And that trajectory continues.

And before we continue, just remember, Jesus is telling this parable to the Pharisees, remember, after talking to them about their love of money. So it’s not coincidental, right, that we’re talking about a rich man here, because remember, Jesus was just criticizing them for being all about money and being all about their reputation, how they appeared before men, right? Well, the rich man certainly appeared a whole lot better than Lazarus.

“And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.”

So, he’s way in the distance, far off, right? He sees Abraham and recognizes Abraham, sees Abraham, sees where the righteous are long ways off, and he sees that Lazarus is there. “Oh, yeah, that’s that guy who used to hang out there by my gate.”

“Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’”

Notice how things have changed, right? It was Lazarus who was begging at his gate in this life, asking for the rich man to have some mercy on him when he had abundance. He was just asking for his garbage. Now, this has been flipped. Last, shall be first and the first shall be last. Now the rich man is begging for Abraham… Notice still, this is one of those things where you think, well, you know, after things turned out that way and you died and you’re in torment, you might have thought, “Well, why wouldn’t somebody repent at that point?” Did the rich man ask Lazarus? Did the rich man say, “Hey, Lazarus, sorry about how I treated you. Will you come and…?”

No, he addresses Abraham. Abraham’s apparently his peer. And Lazarus is not even now. Even in torment, he’s not going to lower himself to ask Abraham, will you send that beggar over here? Because the reason he’s there is not that he was a nice guy who made some bad choices. The reason he’s there is because who he’s become as a result of those choices. And so this is why you’ll frequently hear things like the doors to hell are locked from the inside. This is still who he is, even now.

“But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented.’”

You had the things you wanted. Those were the things you really wanted. You really wanted a good reputation. You really wanted wealth, you really wanted a life of luxury and ease, and hey, you got it. What was it that Lazarus wanted? But in terms of his life, right? He was one of those people who Luke talked about earlier in the Sermon on the Plain, who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, right? Blessed are the poor in spirit. That’s who Lazarus was. That’s what he wanted. And you know what? Now he’s got it too, right?

So, what Abraham is saying is, God has given both of you what you wanted. He gave you blessings in the world. That’s what you wanted. Lazarus wanted treasures in heaven, and guess what? He’s got them. And so there’s a truth here, that Jesus is getting across. This is the truth about our lives. People can… almost all I mean, there are exceptions, but especially in our modern Western world where we’re relatively affluent and have lots of opportunities, people can pretty much get what it is that they really want. What we really want isn’t always what we claim we really want, but what we really deep down want, we can usually get. If you want to have a really successful career and that’s what you really want, you’re willing to sacrifice everything else. You can pretty much have that. If what you want is a family and kids by hook and cook, you could probably get that. If you’re willing to sacrifice everything else, whatever it is, if you’re willing to sacrifice, you can get it.

And what has Jesus been calling on people to do the last two chapters? He’s been saying, if what you want is the kingdom of God, you’re going to have to be ready to sacrifice everything else. And if you’re willing to sacrifice everything else, if you’re willing to sacrifice wealth, if you’re willing to sacrifice reputation, if you’re willing to sacrifice your family, if you’re willing to sacrifice your own life, you’ll get it.

But the mark of the fact that that’s what you really want is going to be that you’re willing to make those other sacrifices. And the whole point he’s been making to the Pharisees is they’re not. Money is more important to them. Reputation is more important to them. Their own self-righteousness is more important to them. And because those things are more important to them, they’ll get those things, but they’re going to miss out on the kingdom of God. And so that’s what’s happened here. Lazarus has gotten the one thing he really wanted, even though he had to give up everything else and suffer a lot, and have a pretty miserable life on this earth, such that Abraham could say he received evil things, he had a pretty miserable life, but he’s gotten the one thing he wanted, and the rich man got all those things in this world that he wanted but missed out on the kingdom.

“‘And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’”

What’s he telling him? It’s too late now. Remember the strait gate, the narrow gate? And we pointed out that Jesus wasn’t saying there’s going to be people who try to work hard and don’t make it. Because when he continued, he said, once the door is closed, the door is closed. He told the parable of the wedding banquet, master of the banquet invites the first group of people, they all RSVP in the negative for various excuses, various things in this world. They got married, they bought this, they bought that. So, they don’t go. He sends out… says, “Okay, we’ll go and get me whoever you can.” The place fills up, door is shut. It’s too late for those people who got the first set of invites. So the point of that is not so much talking about, “Well, could somebody who’s in Hades, can someone who’s in the grave repent after they’re dead?” It’s not really what it’s talking about, it’s talking about the fact that you need to repent while you’re alive, right? Lazarus was laying out there for quite some time. You didn’t do anything about it then. This was your opportunity.

St. Isaac of Syria said, “This life has been given to us for repentance, don’t waste it on frivolous things.” That’s what the rich man did. He had this opportunity to repent. He had this opportunity. Remember what Jesus said at the end of parable the young just steward, that we could take our wicked mammon, we could take this money and this wealth and we could put it to good use in this world for the purpose of the kingdom of heaven, right? Rich man had plenty of opportunity to do that and he didn’t. What did he do? Spend his money on nice clothes and big meals. Had lots of opportunities. Now they’re gone.

“Then he said, ‘I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my fatherís house,’”

Notice once again, it’s “I want you to send Lazarus,”

“‘for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.’”

There’s a couple of things going on. You say, “Oh, that’s altruistic, at least he still loves his brothers, right? “I don’t want them to end up like I did.” Cautionary tale, go tell them… But notice also, it’s also kind of an excuse. It’s also basically saying, “Oh, I didn’t know this was going to happen. If I had known this was going to happen, I would have done things differently, so if you just tell my brothers, they’ll do things differently.”

So, he’s saying, “Oh, I didn’t know.” He gets told it’s too late, and he says, “Well, I didn’t know.” What’s Abraham’s response?

“Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’”

That’s why, that’s his response, right? They have Moses and the prophets, you have the Scriptures. You should have known how you were supposed to live your life because God told you, right? If you didn’t want to end up here in the state you’re in, God told you how to do that. At the end of Deuteronomy, today I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. You chose curses, man. You can’t say you didn’t know. And so he’s saying, your brothers aren’t going to have that excuse either. Your brothers have the law and the prophets, your brothers have the Scriptures. Your brothers can go to the synagogue just like anybody else. They know how they should be living their life if they want to be with Abraham and Lazarus. And they know how living their life will make them end up with you. They don’t need another person.

“And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’”

No, that stuff is old hat, that Bible stuff, right? Nobody paying attention to that. We need to scare them straight. We need to confront them with this, right? We need to show them a sign, some kind of miracle. Then they’ll fall in line.

“But he said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.’”

Now, what’s the irony there? Who’s he talking to? He’s talking to the Pharisees, right? Who he’s just said, don’t believe Moses of the prophets. They’re not listening to him. And what’s going to happen when Jesus returns from the dead? Are they going to suddenly fall in line? No, because if they didn’t listen to the law and the prophets, they’re not going to accept Christ either. If their heart’s already far from God, miracles, light shows, signs and wonders aren’t going to do it, they aren’t going to do it.

Okay, so a couple of final notes here on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Remember the focus here that he’s talking to the Pharisees, is he’s talking to them about Mammon, he’s talking to them about the reputation in this world, right? And what that’s really worth and the fact that they’re trading that for the kingdom. And the day is going to come when they’re going to realize that they made a bad deal, they made a bad trade, and by the time they realize that, it’s going to be too late. So what’s he doing? Giving him another chance. He’s calling on the Pharisees to repent and change their ways. Which shows what? He’s not treating the Pharisees like his enemies. They consider Jesus to be their enemy. Jesus loves them, is concerned that they don’t end up like this rich man, and is trying to bring them to repentance. As we’re told in the Old Testament, “God does not delight in the death of the wicked, but rather that they should turn and live.” Jesus is God. He doesn’t delight in the death of the wicked, but rather that they should turn and live.

And this just as a footnote to that. Getting back to what we were talking about before, one of the most infamous passages in Thomas Aquinas is in the third part of the Summa. And Roman Catholic apologists like to point out that Thomas hadn’t finished the Summa when he died. And so they try and clear them on this one. But one of the things he says there when he’s talking about the third part of the Summa, he’s talking about heaven and hell, basically. And unfortunately, at that point in history in the west, that’s what they were talking about. They weren’t talking about the resurrection of the dead much anymore, it was heaven and hell. And one of the things he says there is that part of the joy and happiness of the people who are in heaven will be seeing the sufferings of the people in hell and delighting in God’s justice.

So again, that gives you a picture of some of the dark places Western theology went. And the problem is, again, that’s a picture of God that is the opposite of the revelation of God that we have in Jesus Christ, who takes no delight in the death of the wicked, but wants them to turn and live. And when you have a different conception of God, that’s going to skew everything else.

Now, in terms of the name issue, remember going all the way back to the book of Exodus in the Torah? One of the primary metaphors that’s used in scripture to talk about, what in the New Testament ends up getting referred to most frequently as salvation, is having your name written in the book of life. And that’s a way of talking about… it’s easy for me to say, right? “Your life leaves your body and your life is somewhere else.” We don’t have a frame of reference for understanding that, right, because everything alive that we know of except angels and demons, and of course, God himself, who’s not a creature, but in terms of creatures other than angels and demons, has a body, right? We don’t have a lot of bodyless lives that we’re intimately familiar with. So that’s really easy to say. So, that metaphor of having your name written in the book of life, that you’re sort of on God’s record, you’re remembered by God. And this is why we sing “Memory eternal” in the Church, is that same kind of idea, is that if you’re in God’s memory, then when the last day comes, God remembers you and he knows who you are, then you’ll be raised up on the last day.

And that’s a phrase that gets used, we’ll see when we get into St. John’s Gospel here, in several months, probably, we get into St. John’s Gospel, that’s a phrase that Jesus uses in St. John’s Gospel a lot, talking about being raised up on the last day as sort of a synonym for salvation. So that’s the idea there.

So, the fact that Lazarus here has a name, even though it’s sort of John Smith, right? The fact that God remembers his name, with the righteous, there’s Abraham, there’s Lazarus, God remembers them, God knows them. Remember, a couple of chapters ago what the Master says to those who want in? He says “Begone, I never knew you. I don’t know who you are.” God knows who they are. So the names are written in the book of life. These are all ways of talking about salvation. Whereas the rich man who had this great reputation in life, he was this wealthy and important man, talking about the Pharisees, caring about their reputations before man. Great reputation in this world. Probably be remembered for a lot longer than Lazarus in this world, but in the grand scheme of things, he’s just some guy, some guy who lived for a while and died and got buried in the ground and that’s it.

So, it’s significant that he’s named. The particular name, you shouldn’t read much too much into but yeah, significant that he has a name, and Abraham has his name. Remember, God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Those are three human beings. God chose to associate himself with, to explain who he was.

So, this is part of our understanding of salvation, is God sharing his life with us. Salvation is this communion between us and God. It’s not just this legal thing where, “Okay, I was granted admittance to heaven,” right? But it’s God sharing his life. He knows our name, we know his name. There’s communion and fellowship between us on an intimate level.

Interlocutor: Doesn’t it say somewhere in Scripture that each one of us has a new name?

Fr. Stephen: That’s Revelation. It’s going to be a while before we get there, but yes, in one of the letters to the seven churches, Jesus says that he’s going to give… “The righteous will receive a stone, and on it will be written a new name in the kingdom of heaven.” And that idea of a new name is referring us back to a number of episodes of the Old Testament and a few in the New Testament, like St. Peter, where God will give someone a new name, right. Abram, Avram, becomes Avraham when he enters into a relationship with God. God gives him a new name. Jacob becomes Israel, God gives him a new name, it’s this idea. And Jesus does that with Simon the Rock, Bar Jonah, who preceded Dwayne the Rock Johnson by a couple of thousand years, but gives him a new name. Yeah, that’s the idea behind that. But it’s a mark again of intimate relationship.

And you could see that even in our relationships today, couples have pet names for each other that they call each other. Funny story about that. Not long after we came here, somebody was asking my wife, “Well, you know, do we have to call him Father Stephen all the time?” I think they’re trying to get to Father Steve. I think they’re trying to leave off a syllable. I think that’s where they were going with it, “Do we have to call him Father Stephen all the time? What do you call him?” And Tricia shrugged and said, “I call him Papa Bear. You probably shouldn’t.” [Laughter]

This idea, when you’re closer, you may have a nickname or a pet name for somebody that isn’t shared by the rest of the world. It’s that idea, but having that kind of intimacy and that kind of closeness with God where he has a name that just he calls you.