Father Stephen De Young: We are going to pick up here in Luke, chapter 18, verse 15. And by way of my usual non-introduction introduction, if you want to hear from way back when, many moons ago when we had the introduction to the Gospel of Luke, that’s back in the very first Bible study. It’s available on the website.

To get us caught up to where we are right now, we have now spent a considerable amount of time in Judea. We talked about how in broad strokes what we have in St. Luke’s Gospel is after the beginning where you read about the birth of St. John the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist and the birth of Christ. After that sort of prologue, we’ve seen Christ’s ministry begin in Galilee and then his journey through Samaria down to Judea. And now we’ve seen his sort of teaching in Judea while he’s on his way to Jerusalem. We are getting much closer to Jerusalem now. In fact, probably before we finish this evening, we’ll be at least on the outskirts of the city.

And as I said, since Jesus has come to Judea, we’ve been reading sort of a series of sections from St. Luke describing aspects of his teaching, recountings of his teaching. We had the dinner party at the Pharisee’s house. We had some other interactions with the Pharisees, we’ve had some interactions with his disciples and with the people who are following Him along the way. And we’re sort of in the midst of one of those right now. Before we start, I do want to make a note because of some questions I was asked. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s been a while, I think. So I’m going to talk about it. I’m going to talk about it again.

One of the problems, I’ll go ahead and call it a problem, in Bible study and in talking about the Bible, if you get books about the Bible, if you make the mistake I frequently do of watching TV documentaries about the Bible or watching YouTube videos, even worse because there’s no quality control, about the Bible. One of the sort of presuppositions that people have is that sort of the earliest and the oldest form of the text is the best form or the real form of the text. Sometimes it goes beyond that. Sometimes it goes to “Well, we need to try and get past the text of the Bible and get to what really happened,” that’s sort of behind the text.

And there are a number of problems with this. Because for example. When I’ve talked about this before. I’ve talked about it in terms of other things. For example, in terms of the tendency people have to want to sort of try and harmonize the Gospels. Try and take the four Gospels and smush them together to make one story, that’s essentially a form of this. Of what I’m talking about. “Well, we need to get at what really happened behind these four Gospels.” So, St John says that Jesus cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry. Well, I shouldn’t say that. He doesn’t say he did his ministry. As you’re reading the Gospel of John, one of the first stories you read is Jesus cleansing the Temple. The other three Gospels, that comes right at the end. And so you will see people and this has a long pedigree. St. John Chrysostom did this, saying, “Well, Jesus must have cleansed the Temple twice. He did it once at the beginning and then once at the end.”

Well, none of the four Gospels said he did it twice. Not a one of them. They all say he did it once. And so what you’ve done now is you’ve made your own version of the story that doesn’t correspond to any of the four. Or one of the really common ones, and I know I mentioned this before, but this is going to destroy a lot of really nice sermons and Easter pageants. But the seven last words of Jesus from the cross, none of the four Gospels said that Jesus said seven things from the cross. The four Gospels have him saying different things. If you tally those up, you end up with seven. But none of the Gospels say he said all seven. So you put them all together, you’ve made your own version of the story that’s different than all four Gospels.

Those are sort of the nicer ways of doing it. History Channel and National Geographic channel, you get more like, “Well, none of this really happened here’s what the historical Jesus really said and did and what he was really like.” You get that kind of thing. But that’s basically the same thing that’s coming up with another version of the story other than the four that we have.

And you will see this done in other ways. You will see people go and try and chop up the text itself, right? They’ll say, “Well, this half of the verse isn’t in the oldest manuscripts.”

An example we saw already in Mark and Luke. Remember the episode where Jesus returns to his disciples and they’ve been trying to cast the demon out of the boy, right? And after Jesus sort of upbraids them for their lack of faith, what does he say? “This kind only comes out through prayer and fasting”, The earliest manuscripts don’t have the “and fasting” part. As much as I’d like to leave that out personally, as you could tell from looking at me, right? If that wasn’t in the original quote-unquote, “the original”, then we don’t have to worry about it. We can ignore it. That’s not quote-unquote, “really in the Bible”.

And so, you will get all kinds of arguments toward that kind of thing. The story we’re going to read in a little while about Christ’s sweating blood in the Gospel of Luke isn’t in the oldest manuscripts of St. Luke, so they’ll say, “Well, that’s not really there.”

I’m going to use some tautologies now as to why this is a problem. Why this is a problem is, first of all, we don’t have any access to, quote-unquote, “what really happened” other than the four Gospels. So anything else you’re going to say happened that doesn’t correspond to one of the four Gospels is conjecture. You’re making it up, essentially. You’re guessing because we have no access to it.

Second problem, this is one of those tautologies. The Bible is the Bible. And what I mean by that is the more you study the Bible, the more messy things kind of get. It’s not just the current church that’s disorganized. It’s pretty much been that way since the beginning. So, for example, when people are trying to say, well, “It’s the original, it’s the original that has authority,” okay, well, let’s look at I know we’re not there yet, but let’s look at Second Corinthians. We all agree St. Paul wrote Second Corinthians. What does that mean? Because he tells us in Second Corinthians, he’s not sitting there with a pen writing it. He’s speaking and a scribe is writing it down, even assuming he’s speaking Greek. It’s being written in Greek. Do you think his secretary wasn’t doing part of his job, which was to correct the grammar?

So what’s the original? Is it what came out of St Paul’s mouth or is what the scribe wrote down? Common practice after that, and we have examples of St Paul doing this in the text is that after that, the person who dictated the letter would read it over and make corrections if there was something they didn’t like, and then sort of sign it at the end. Remember one of his letters, St. Paul says, “See, I’m writing this with my own hand.” That he’s sort of signing it at the end. So then which is the original? Is it what the secretary wrote down St. Paul dictated, or is it the version after his corrections?

Second Corinthians gets even more complicated because Second Corinthians is made up of at least two letters. We’ll talk about that more when we get there. St Paul actually wrote four letters to the Corinthians. Second Corinthians is made up of parts of two of them put together. So when you say “the original Second Corinthians”, do you mean the two letters? Do you mean the two letters in their entirety or just the parts that ended up being in Second Corinthians?

Not only that, around 100 AD, Christians took all of Paul’s letters and Hebrews, this is why in the church we refer to it as St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews because it was part of that collection. Even though the church fathers read it and read St. Paul’s letters and said this doesn’t look like it’s written by the same guy, but it was part of that collection, collected it all together and edited it at that time.

So again, is the version of Second Corinthians that’s edited into that collection the original? Or is it the way it was separately? Because every manuscript we have, every copy of Second Corinthians that still exists is from that collection. That’s the only one we have access to. So this idea that it’s the original, that somehow we have to pursue, quote unquote, “the original”, it doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.

So now I’m going to say another tautology. The version of the Scriptures that has authority in the church is the version of the Scriptures that has authority in the church. Meaning there is a version of these texts, there are a lot of them out there. You go and look all there’s close to 6000 manuscripts of the New Testament, okay? 6000 handwritten copies ranging from the second century up to the 15th century. There are actually some more after that, but we’re not counting those because those are so late, about 6000. None of them are identical. Why? Well, because they’re hand copied. So people make spelling mistakes. I mean, it’s not confusing. It’s not like we don’t know what it says. Because you could tell whether there’s a spelling mistake because you have 5999 other copies, right? So you can go, “Okay, this guy just made a spelling mistake, or this guy just left a word out, or this guy was late at night and he skipped a line,” right? There even somewhere they skipped a page, but we could tell because we have all these other copies. So it’s not like we don’t know what it says, but there’s all these copies and they’re all different.

But there is one that has been used by the church. It’s like you’ve got all these branches of the stream, but there’s one stream that’s been used in the church that’s been read in the church, that’s been prayed by the church, that’s been quoted by the church for the last 2000 years. And so the version that has authority is not some hypothetical original. It’s not some hypothetical events that the original was written about. The version that has authority is the version that has had authority.

And so, this is why I don’t think anyone here has been overly shocked by it. Maybe I said it too fast. But when I’ve said things like “For thine is the kingdom and the power of the glory” wasn’t originally at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels that was added by the church later. This is why that’s not a problem for us. Because we as Orthodox Christians don’t believe that God sort of inspired St. Paul one day in 45 AD to write Galatians and then Galatians just got thrown out there into the world, for who knows what to happen to it over the course of 2000 years. And now we got to just do the best we can to try to figure out what it was that the Holy Spirit inspired St. Paul to say. The same Holy Spirit who inspired St. Paul on that day in 45 AD to write Galatians is the same Spirit who lives and dwells in the church and leads us to Christ. It’s the same spirit who was there and the people who were copying the manuscripts, who are reading those manuscripts in church, who are preaching on those manuscripts, the fathers who are quoting those manuscripts, it’s the same Holy Spirit all the way through guiding the whole process.

So, the Scriptures we have now are the Scriptures that God has given us now and all of this archaeology, while kind of interesting, it’s kind of interesting to see how the text developed and how things changed and to look at different things. “Oh, this church father quotes this verse a little differently than this other church father.” Well, that’s all interesting to nerds like me, right? It’s not germane to what version of the Scriptures has authority over how we live our life, how we understand who Christ is and come to know Him. That’s the Scriptures that we have today in the church.

I went through all of this because like I said, I had some questions from people and there are a lot of discussions about this and we need to sort of understand that and at least be able to give somebody else some idea about that. Because this is… our Protestant friends spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about this, because of their views of inerrancy and their views of…. They say, well, it’s inerrant, the originals. Well, we don’t have the originals. And so there’s a lot of the whole fundamentalist/liberal debate, all this sort of stuff and you get bogged down in it to the point that you don’t hear what Scripture is saying anymore. You’re so busy arguing about whether the Exodus literally happened exactly the way it says in the book of Exodus and what year it was and what Pharaoh was Pharaoh and all this kind of stuff that you missed the point of what the text is trying to teach us. First of all, about how God deals with his people. And then secondly, and probably even more importantly than that, or more specific than that, what it teaches us about Christ.

Because as we’re going to read coming up here in Luke, when Christ dies and rises again, he does it at Passover, and that’s not a coincidence. So you can kind of miss the forest for the trees when you get down into the weeds into the weeds of that stuff.

And so that’s why I went through that. Again, that’s not something that we need to engage in. It’s not an argument we need to have, right? We have the Scriptures. God has given them to us through His Holy Spirit, and they’re here to help lead us to Christ. And so we can study them as we have them without having to pull all this apart.

And a brief footnote to that just real quick, a big part of why is that and again, this is an important part of the Orthodox Church in our understanding and understanding of the Holy Spirit being still with us, is that through the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is still with us. This is why in the liturgy we say that Christ is in our midst. Christ is still with us. In the West, while they don’t often put it this way, once Christ ascends into heaven, if you’re a Protestant, he ascends into heaven. And he left us a book. And that book, the Bible, is how we come to know Christ now, right? That’s how we come to know Christ. That’s how we come to know how we come to know everything. If you’re a Roman Catholic, Christ ascended into heaven and he sent us a vicar. He ascended into heaven, and he put St. Peter in charge. St. Peter passed it on to the next and on to the next. So if you want to know what’s true, you don’t look at the Bible. You go and the pope tells you what’s true. Teaching Magisterium of the church tells you what’s true, they tell you what the Bible is, they tell you what the Bible means, they tell you what tradition is, they tell you what tradition means.

Neither of those is what the Scriptures actually say. What the Scriptures actually say, we just celebrated the ascension, is that Christ ascended into heaven and left us the Holy Spirit, who continues to be in our midst, who continues to make Christ present with us, continues to reveal Christ to us, continues to reveal Christ to us through the Scriptures and through the church, right? And so when we talk about tradition, we’re talking about the life of the Holy Spirit in the church. We’re not talking about something that bishops whisper to each other in back rooms and handed down. We’re talking about the Spirit living in the church, who has lived in the church in every generation of the church since the beginning. And so this is why we can trust the scriptures we have now, because it’s not the result of a series of historical accidents. It’s the result of the working of the Holy Spirit in the church.

So all that said, unless there are any question? Yes?

Interlocutor: Our Protestant friends think differently than the Orthodox do, about the Holy Spirit. So how could I explain to them what you said with their mindset?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, part of the issue there isn’t just with Protestantism, it’s with Western theology. I don’t want to go too far to the weeds here, but Western theology is sort of innately binitarian. And it’s because of the Filioque clause, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Binitarian as opposed to trinitarian. Two instead of three. And when you look at the Filioque clause and how it started, it started as a response to the Arians we talked about earlier today. The Arians argued that because the Logos is Christ God, the Son is begotten to the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. That only the Father is really God then, because the other two sort of come forth from Him, which is a bad argument, because it’s a circular argument.

What makes the Father the Father is that he’s unbegotten and doesn’t proceed. And so they’re saying, well, only the Father can be God, therefore only the Father is God. That’s why it’s a circular argument. But rather than responding by pointing out it’s a circular argument, the West created the Filioque clause that said, “Oh, well, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son too. So, see, both the Father and the Son are the sources of divinity.” What’s the problem with that? Who proceeds from the Holy Spirit? So then, by their own definition, is the Holy Spirit God? See the problem?

And so what happens in that kind of thinking regarding the Trinity is that the Holy Spirit gets kind of demoted. He has sort of the subordinate status. They’re not going to say he’s subordinated. They’ll deny that. But the construct sort of does that automatically because they’ve already posited, in order to be God, you have to sort of be a source of Godhood for another person. And then they’ve said that the Holy Spirit isn’t.

And so that’s why in not just Protestant theology, but in a lot of Roman Catholic theology, the Holy Spirit is kind of depersonalized. He’s sort of like the force in Star Wars. He’s sort of a feeling or an energy or… his personhood and his status in the Holy Trinity that he proceeds from the Father and comes to rest in the Son and the unity of the Trinity of the Father. All that kind of vanishes. And so, there’s a basic misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit in all Western theology, and it manifests itself in different ways. You either get Pentecostalism where all you talk about is the Holy Spirit, or you get most Protestant churches where you barely talk about the Holy Spirit.

He’s sort of an afterthought; it’s focused almost entirely on Christ. So the correct way to respond to that, you have to start back a step and start talking about the Holy Trinity, start talking about these are three persons who are all equally God, right? And that there’s only one God, and that unity is found in the Father.

And so that gets very deep. And I went into the weeds, like I said, I didn’t want to, but that’s really where you have to start and a good place to take them in the Scriptures. And this part of the discussion with this, a good place to take them in the Scriptures is take them to John chapter 16 on.  John 16-19, basically, where Christ is talking about sending the Spirit and what the Spirit will do and how the Spirit is going to work. The church sort of take them through that. The way that Christ talks about the Spirit, the way he talks about the Spirit relating to Him, the way he talks about the Spirit relating to the Father. I think that’s probably the best place to take them and get them to start thinking about that and start thinking about the Trinity in a different way.

So unless there’s anything else, we’ll go ahead and get started now that I’ve gone way into various matters theological. Okay, so Luke, chapter 18, verse 15:

Then they also brought infants to Him that He might touch them; but when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them.

Now, we’ve talked before about kids, but it bears repeating, the view of children in the ancient world was very different than the view of children today. We just love little kids. “Oh, this baby is cute,” right? Little kids are cute, little kids are great. Some of us want to sort of pad the whole world for kids. We have to scrutinize what we allow on TV because kids might see it. To say the least, the ancient world was not that way. Not that way. We’ve talked before Roman family structures. It’s worthwhile, and I don’t want to go into the weeds on this, we talk about the horrors of abortion in this country, but we have to remember, not only did they have abortion in the Roman world, they exposed infants.

When a baby was born, the baby was taken to the paterfamilias, who was the head of household, right? Literally being the father of the family. But we have to remember, we’re talking about extended families. This wasn’t Mom, Dad and the kids. This was Mom, Dad, the kids, the grandkids, maybe an uncle, aunt, cousin, the whole extended family. The head of that whole family, the patriarch of the family, Grandpa, Great-Grandpa, whoever it was with the paterfamilias, anyone in that household had a baby, it was brought to the paterfamilias. Paterfamilias sort of expected it, thought about things economically and et cetera, et cetera, who the father was, what was going on, decided whether to accept it or not. If he decided not to accept it, they took the baby out and left it in the woods to die.

This was completely accepted in Roman culture. We have letters from the first century. Husband writing home to his wife who just had a baby. If it’s a boy, keep it. If it’s a girl, take care of it. Meaning go abandon it. This was just common and accepted. One of the things early Christians used to do was go and find these babies and adopt them because of course the early Christians were completely opposed to this practice, but it was a common Roman practice.

So, kids were not seen as this blessing from God. Kids were not seen as it was up to you whether you wanted to raise this kid or not if you didn’t, get rid of it. Kids were kind of a nuisance, right?

Interlocutor: Did Jews do this?

Fr. Stephen: The Jews did not. The Jews did not. By and large. I mean I’m sure there were Hellenized Jews in different parts of the empire who may have participated in it but in Judea that kind of thing would frowned upon.

So again, with that being a commonly accepted practice you can imagine what that does to your view of children. So kids who are running around in the streets were sort of one step up from stray dogs. They’re usually running around begging and stuff. So the disciples, when they’re bringing these kids to see Jesus, and the disciples say get out of here, they’re not just being grumpy old men. “Get out of here kid young punks. Get off my lawn.” It’s not like that. They’re reflecting the common societal attitude. They’re just like “Oh get these kids out.” You know what I mean? Like the way they’d shoo off a stray dog that came around begging or a stray cat. Get out of here.

But Jesus called them to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God. Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.”

Now sometimes, the reason I went through all that in terms of the ancient view of children, sometimes when you hear people read this passage and interpret it what does it mean to be like a child? And they do it based on our modern view of children, right? “It means being innocent and kind and trusting and loving.” You got to remember that’s not the view of children at the time. What Jesus is saying here is this is an illustration of what he’s been saying, what we’ve seen him say in the last few passages about the last being first and the first being last.

We’ve got a group of people… remember we just had the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican where the Pharisee thought he was pretty great and the publican realized he wasn’t much but asked for God’s mercy. This is a reflection on the same kind of idea when he says of such as the kingdom of heaven. These sort of cast-off kids, these people you think are unimportant and are basically leeches, dependents. You need to set yourself in the lowest place, the lowest place if you want to enter the kingdom. This is about humility, when says they need to be like children. It’s not about being sweet or innocent or cute or any of those other things we associate with it.

So we’re now about to have we have the Pharisee and the Publican. If the kids are like the publican now, we’re going to get another example of the same thing, but in the other direction.

Now a certain ruler asked Him, saying, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Now, when it says ruler, you may wonder, what is this guy, king from somewhere? The word in Greek is actually archon. Basically, leader would probably be a better translation than ruler. The idea is this is a leading citizen, right? A prominent citizen. A prominent citizen of Judea, not a Roman citizen.

So, this is someone who’s important in the community in Judea. These are not the peasants from Galilee who Jesus is speaking from before. This is one of the quote-unquote “important” people. And he comes to Jesus and says, good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.”

Now, is Jesus saying that he is not good? No. So what is he saying? That he’s God. Because he approaches him and says, “good teacher”, while it’s kissing up a little bit, right? And while it’s respectful, is that what Jesus is? He’s just a good rabbi? There’s a bunch of rabbis. I’ve gotten opinions from these other rabbis. Let me get opinions from this rabbi, right? Collecting spiritual advice of how I should be, how I should be a good person. What is this rabbi’s? What’s important, is that who Jesus is in relation to this man? No, no.

So, what Jesus is doing here is he’s questioning the man’s approach, right? Because when Jesus speaks and when Jesus answers this question, he’s going to answer it in a way that’s authoritative. Jesus doesn’t say things to people and say, “Well, think about this, decide if it’s useful. Maybe not, it doesn’t work for you,” Jesus doesn’t give advice, right? He gives authoritative instruction. And so if Jesus is going to answer this question, he’s answering it in that context. That’s what he’s saying.

“You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’”

So he quotes some of the Ten Commandments, “you know”, right? Why does he point out that, “you know”, he’s still questioning his approach, right? “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Well, you’re a prominent person around here. You’ve been to a synagogue. You’ve heard the law. What does it say in Deuteronomy? He who does these things will live by them, right? You want to turn to life, keep the commandments. Why are you asking me this question? You should already know.”

And he said, “All these things I have kept from my youth.”

Who does that sound like earlier this chapter? Remember our friend, the Pharisee? The Pharisee and the publican? Yeah, right. “Thank you, that I’m not like these other men. I fast two days a week, I tithe, I do this, I do that, right? I do all these things. Therefore, I’m one of the righteous people.” This guy comes up, what, “Good teacher? What’s your opinion, as an equal? What’s your opinion? What do you need to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus says, “Well, you know the commandments.” And he says, “Oh, well, I’ve done all those things since I was a child.” We know he was a teenager at some point, so we know that’s a lie, right?

So when Jesus heard these things,

Notice the phrasing here. When Jesus hears his response. Now, he knows who this person is.

He said to him, “You still lack one thing.”

He says, “Okay, for the sake of argument, you’ve kept all the commandments from your youth, okay? Just do one more thing. You’ll inherit eternal life.”

“Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

You’re a prominent citizen. You’re wealthy, right? Take all that stuff you’ve got, sell it, give it to the poor. Come, become one of my disciples. You’ll inherit eternal life. Now, is he being sarcastic? No, no. If he does this, he will inherit eternal life, right? This is an honest answer, right? This is an honest answer. This is what this man needs to do if he wants to inherit eternal life.

But when he heard this, he became very sorrowful, for he was very rich.

Because he was very rich, he had a lot of stuff. You got to keep your stuff.

And when Jesus saw that he became very sorrowful, He said, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!  For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

So Jesus sees his response, which obviously was visible, right? He made the sad-face emoji after hearing this. He was visibly distraught because he wasn’t going to do what Jesus had said. And so Jesus says, “how hard is it?” Now, we typically think of this as an actual, like, needle-and-thread needle and trying to shove a camel through it. There’s some debate as to whether the eye of the needle is actually a reference to a particular gate, small gate to the city, and trying to shove a camel through it. Either way, you get the idea, it’s very difficult.

Now, it’s interesting. You could go and see this in Italy to this day. But the Medici family, who was insanely wealthy in the 16th and 17th century, their family chapel at their estates, there is a huge fresco of a camel going through the eye of a needle because they wanted to communicate the fact that they were going to make it, even though they were insanely wealthy.

Now, this we’ve seen already. This has been a recurring theme in St Luke’s Gospel, where, you know, for example, in Matthew 5, in the Beatitudes, we saw blessed are the poor in spirit. Remember, in St Luke’s version, it was just blessed are the poor. Period. Where St Luke tends to speak more literally in terms of wealth and poverty. As we’ve said before, this is not saying wealthy people are bad, poor people are all good. That’s not what St Luke is getting at. But what he’s getting at is the fact that the things that we think, again, remember, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The things we tend to think of and value in this life that we tend to think of as helpful, could spiritually become a great obstacle to us in terms of the kingdom of Heaven. And some of the things which we think of as negative in this life, like poverty, can actually be blessings and helping to draw us closer to God.

And St Luke isn’t just making this up. This isn’t a new insight. Remember, this goes all the way back, all the way back into the Old Testament, all the way back into the Torah. Remember what God said in Deuteronomy was going to happen after he brought them into the land? He said, “I’m about to bring you in the land. And once I’ve given you the land and you’ve built your vineyards and you built your farms and you’re settled there, you’re going to get rich and you’re going to get fat and you’re going to forget about me. You’re going to forget you were slaves in Egypt. You’re going to forget what I’ve done for you. You’re going to forget that I gave you this land. You’re going to forget me. And then it’s all going to fall apart.” It’s all going to fall apart, not because God was going to get angry at them for forgetting Him, but because when you forget me, you’re going to forget my law. You’re going to start lying, you’re going to start cheating, you’re going to start stealing, you’re going to start worshipping other gods, participating in these pagan rituals. You’re going to start marrying multiple wives, you’re going to start doing all these things. Your families are going to fall apart, your social structure is going to fall apart. The kings who roll over you are going to become tyrants because they’re going to forget my law. This whole thing is going to go south.

None of us wants to get sick. But when I’m sick, I’ll be honest. I tend to pray more than when I’m healthy. When I’m having money problems, I tend to pray more than when I’m flush. I’m not more dependent on God for my health when I’m sick than when I’m healthy. I’m not more dependent on God for my well-being when I’ve got money in the bank than when I don’t. I just suddenly remember when there’s a problem. And the rest of the time when there’s not a problem, I forget. Just like Israel forgot.

And so, in this way, these things will be called later in the epistles trials of various kinds, temptations, hardships, these things can be blessings to us because they remind us of God. They remind us of who God is. They remind us to be thankful for things that we take for granted. A few years ago, when all of a sudden we couldn’t drink the water around here or take showers, all of a sudden I realized what a blessing it is to have hot and cold running water. Which I had taken for granted pretty much my whole life.

And so these things can actually be blessings. And the flip side of that is those things we think are blessings. We come into a bunch of money, things are going well, when we get the promotion. All these things that we think of as good things, if they cause us to forget God, they cause us to forget his law, they cause us to sort of wander off and depend on our own understanding and our own wherewithal, can actually be curses in terms of the big picture, in terms of the kingdom of God, in terms of eternal life. That’s what St. Luke is getting at here.

Now, a lot of people who preach on this and teach on this, this is one of those things that people like to relativize, right? “This ‘Let’s go sell everything, you have to give it to the poor’ thing. That was just for this one guy. Jesus was just making a point. I don’t have to do that, right? It’s okay for me to be rich, right? He was just making a point.”

This has to do fundamentally with our approach to the Scriptures. When we read the Scriptures and we see a commandment like this that we can’t keep, the correct way to respond to that is to say, “There’s a commandment here that I can’t keep because I’m weak. I need to do better about this.” I need to do better about spending less money stuffing my gut and more money giving to the poor and helping people. I need to work on not collecting so much stuff and putting the money to better use for the Kingdom of God.

But what is important that we don’t do is try and relativize it or excuse ourselves. Because where do we end up if we do that? We end up with the Pharisee, we end up with this young ruler. “Oh, I’ve done everything I needed to do. I’ve kept the whole law, because everything I can’t keep, I’ve explained away somehow.” We sort of lower the bar so that we can step over it, rather than just admitting the bar is too high for me and I need to work on it.

And we’re about to see that the people who heard it originally understood that. Because the people who hear it, their response is not, “Man, that guy is stupid. Trading eternal life for stuff.” Or “Yeah, those no good rich people stick it to ‘em Jesus. Occupy Judea!” That’s not where they go. Their response is:

And those who heard it said, “Who then can be saved?”

They saw this interaction, where this guy says, “I can’t do it. I can’t sell everything I have and give it to the poor.” And Jesus says, well, “It’s real hard for somebody rich like you to get saved.” “We’re all in trouble because I’m not ready to do that either.”

But He said, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

Which says two things. Number one, you’re right, you can’t do it. The bar is too high for you to jump it. But don’t fall into despair, because though it’s impossible for you, it is possible for God to do it. This is the beginning, what Jesus is saying here is the beginning of the fulfillment of what we saw in Jeremiah, chapter 31, when Jeremiah prophesied about the New Covenant. At that point, we talked about the difference that Jeremiah says between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant is in the Old Covenant, God commanded people to be holy. He promises in the New Covenant he will make people holy. Sort of external versus internal. Jesus is saying, “Yeah, there’s the bar. You try and jump that bar, you’re going to fall on your face or hit the bar. It’s not going to go well.”

Interlocutor: Can I sort of slide under it?

Fr. Stephen: No, not and have it count. No limbo under this bar. But God can accomplish this. You can’t earn eternal life. So it’s a good thing for you that God wants to give it to you, that God wants to share it with you. But that doesn’t make the bar disappear or lower the bar one centimeter. It just means we give thanks to God for our salvation, not take credit for it ourselves, like the Pharisee.

Then Peter said,

Here comes St. Peter again. He’s always ready to pipe up and throw his two cent in. So these people all worried. They’re all like, “Oh, man, we got to do that. We’re in trouble.” But St. Peter says:

“See, we have left all and followed You.”

“See, Jesus, we did it. Yay go us. Right? All right!”

So He said to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or parents or brothers or wife or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who shall not receive many times more in this present time, and in the age to come eternal life.”

Now, what he’s saying there is not you left one wife, so I’m going to give you three. That’s not what he’s saying. But the point he’s making is, again, the offer he made to that rich ruler was serious. It was serious. He’s telling St. Peter, “Yes, you are on the path that leads to salvation.” He’s not saying, “You earned it yourself, congratulations.” But he’s saying, “Yeah”, he’s reiterating what he said before. This is the path leads to salvation, leaving everything in this world behind. Be willing to leave everything in this world behind and follow Christ. That’s it. That’s the path that leads to eternal life.

Then He took the twelve aside and said to them,

This is an important qualifier on what he just said. Notice he doesn’t say this to everybody. There are these people standing by who heard the interchange. Now he just takes his disciples. Notice again, it says the twelve. It’s going to be important later. Judas is there, too. Now, you got to remember, when he sends the twelve out to do miracles, Judas is out there doing miracles too. When his disciples are baptizing, Judas is out there baptizing people, too. I know that would be lame if you were one of those people who got baptized by Judas, but then we have to get into the theology of the sacraments. But that’s a whole other rabbit trail, right? When Jesus is teaching his disciples, Judas is there hearing it all, too. Jesus doesn’t exclude Judas. Judas is going to end up excluding himself.

So all twelve of them, he calls them off to the side. He says:

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”

The reason I say this is an important qualifier to what he just said to Peter is he just said to Peter, “Yes, you are on the road that leads to eternal life. By the way, this is where that road leads through. You’re following me. This is where I’m going. So before you think, ‘All right, I’m in!’ This is what you’re in for.”

It’s also important to remember, this is one of several the Orthodox Study Bible there. If you’re looking at it, you notice, says this is the third time Jesus explicitly said this. Remember, part of what’s going on here is this isn’t something bad that happens to Jesus, right? “Jesus walks into Jerusalem with the best intentions preaching and hoping everyone will come and follow him and oh man, it all goes wrong.” Jesus has known full well this whole time what’s going to happen when he gets to Jerusalem. He’s not just being a pessimist “Man, when we get to Jerusalem, they’re probably going to kill me.” He’s not just being Eeyore, right? He knows what’s happening and he’s going there deliberately to do this.

That’s part of what St. Luke is communicating to us. He’s going there in order for this to happen. That’s why he points out these are all the things that the prophets said were going to happen. “Those prophets who told you there was going to be a Messiah, if you read them carefully, you know this is what’s going to happen to them. This is what makes me the Messiah. This is the mission of the Messiah. I’m going there to fulfill it, not to ride in and overthrow the Romans, but this.”

And as we should expect from the disciples now:

But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things which were spoken.

So the disciples, even though this is the third time Jesus has run through it, are still clueless. “Quit being down in the dumps, Jesus. It’s going to go great, don’t worry about it.” They don’t understand what he’s saying.

Now we have a little bit of a break in the text. We’ve got a “then it happened”, which we’ve talked about before. So, what did Jesus just say? “We’re going up to Jerusalem now.” We’re entering into sort of the end game here of St. Luke’s Gospel. They’re in Judea, now they’re headed for Jerusalem.