Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, we are actually at a chapter break. It’s been a while, but when we start here in just a minute, we’re starting at the beginning of Gospel According to St. Luke, chapter 22. Our introduction will be kind of short today because it doesn’t need to be much longer. As usual, you can go back and refresh on the Internet the first Bible study on the Gospel According to St. Luke, when we talked about the Gospel in general.

Right now, I know I’ve said this several times last few weeks that we’re sort of approaching the endgame. We’re coming into the conclusion; we’ve only got three chapters left now. And so where we left off last time, Jesus had just given his last, his final sort of oration, his final teaching. From here on out, we’re going to see events unfolding. For the first half of this week, which we celebrate in Holy Week. Jesus has been teaching in the Temple. He’s been teaching the crowds. He’s been confronted, as we saw, by the chief priests, by the Pharisees, by the Sadducees, by the scribes, just about everyone else trying to trap him. We’ve been told that they’re lying in wait, plotting to get rid of him, to kill him, specifically by turning Him over to the Romans.

We also, however, it’s important to remember, have been told repeatedly all through the Gospel According to St. Luke. We’ve seen telegraphed the fact that Jesus is planning on dying, even specifically by crucifixion at the end of this week. He repeatedly prophesied it, he repeatedly predicted it, he repeatedly reminded the people. And this was also that we would know so that it would be very clear that this isn’t sort of an accident. This isn’t like, “Well, Jesus was trying to start this movement and then he read afoul of the Romans and oh, no, they killed Him. So I guess he wasn’t the Messiah after all.” This is not the plan going awry. This is the plan. And so now he’s prophesied all this, as we saw in his final teaching, He was talking about what was to come after his death and resurrection and ascension. He was talking about what was going to happen in 70 AD, what was going to happen after that with the destruction of Jerusalem in 128, and then what was going to be going on during that span of time between his departure and his return.

And so, now that he has explained that, left that teaching with his disciples and with the people who come to hear Him, now we’re going to see these final events begin to unfold. So unless anybody has any questions before we start, we’ll dive right in here in chapter 22, verse 1:

Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called Passover. And the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might kill Him, for they feared the people.

Now, that “for” there might give you the wrong idea. The “for” there might make you think, “Oh, well, they want to kill Jesus because they’re afraid of the people.” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying the reason they had to figure out and think and plan and plot how to do it was because they were afraid of the people. Jesus is still very popular with this mass of people. If they go and try and grab him, try and lay hands on them, especially if they’re seen turning one of their fellow Jews over to the Romans, things are going to go very badly for whatever priest or scribes are involved in that activity. So they need to find a way to do it and get away with it. That’s what they’re searching for.

Now, we hear it so often that Christ’s death and resurrection happened at the time of the Passover that I think we kind of blink right past it as if “Oh, that just happened to be the time of year it happened.” But all four Gospels… there are very few things that all four Gospels mention, that all four Gospels think are of key importance. This is one of them, that Jesus dies and rises again at the time of the Passover. This is why we still refer to the feast of Christ’s resurrection as Pascha, which is the Greek word for Passover. We don’t celebrate it instead of Passover, it’s our Passover. What Christ does, and dying and rising and it’s fulfilling Passover.

The reason this is so important, especially today, is that many of our Western Christian friends, when they talk about Christ’s death and resurrection, they focus on his death and they talk about atonement. They talk about Christ’s death, atoning for sin. They talk about, they compare Christ… it gets a little muddy because on the actual Day of Atonement, it’s now called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as we saw in Leviticus, the way the Day of Atonement actually worked was there was a lamb and there was a goat. And remember, the sins of the people were laid on the goat and they drove the goat out into the wilderness to die and take their sins with it. And then they took the lamb that was sort of pure and holy. They took that lamb and sacrificed it to God and sprinkled the blood inside the tabernacle and then inside the temple.

The reason I say it gets a little muddy is most of our Western Christian friends sort of have Jesus as both the goat and the lamb because they want to talk about his sacrifice. But at the same time, they want to talk about people’s sins being laid on him and him being punished for our sins. And that is their primary framework for understanding Jesus’s death. Now, it is true in St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews later on, in Hebrews, there are comparisons made between Christ’s death and elements of the Day of Atonement. I think they’re a little clearer and less muddy than that. Those are there, but in all four Gospels and nearly everywhere else in the New Testament, when Christ’s death and resurrection are connected to a feast, it’s not the Day of Atonement, it’s Passover. It’s Passover. There’s a lamb on Passover too. Quickly people go from, “Oh, Jesus is the Lamb of God,” and they jump to that lamb on the Day of Atonement, but there’s a Passover lamb too.

What happened at the original Passover? The original Passover was about the people of Israel who were slaves in Egypt being set free. And the way that they were set free was that judgment came upon Egypt, and they used the blood of the lamb that was sacrificed and then eaten as a meal together to mark themselves out from the Egyptians. And so, what the Gospel writers and the fathers of the church following the Gospel writers see in that connection, what they’re trying to say is that Jesus’s death and resurrection in the same way is about setting us free. It’s about setting us free from death. And it’s Christ’s blood shed for us that marks us out from the world that’s being judged for its sin.

So Pascha, Christ’s death and resurrection is about freedom. It’s about being set free. Sin is the element that death uses to hold on to us. And so Christ does take away our sins. He takes away our sins, in order to free us, to free us from the power of death.

And while that may sound only subtly different, it has major implications for how you view God. For example, according to that Western Christian paradigm, God is merciless, right? God shows no mercy towards sin. He punishes every sin completely. He either punishes the person for it or he punishes Christ for it. So you have a God with no mercy in that paradigm. You have a God who is not truly sovereign in that paradigm, because God can’t do what he wants. God isn’t free to just forgive sins. He has to follow justice. Justice is sort of over the top of God’s head and God has to obey justice, which isn’t the God of the Bible. We’ve seen very clearly from the very beginning.

We’ll just talk about St. Luke’s Gospel, what’s one of the first things we read about? Pretty much the first thing we read about after the genealogy is St John the Baptist, his birth. And then he’s what? He’s baptizing people for the forgiveness of sins. He’s baptizing people and telling them that through that baptism their sins were forgiven. He’s not telling them someone is coming who’s going to be punished for what you did. He’s telling them that God had called him to baptize and that through that baptism, God was forgiving their sins.

We saw in the latter chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel, remember there’s that lengthy section talking about the forgiveness of sins through the Church, that we gather together and pray for one another, rebuke one another and through us. Remember, he says, “whoever you”, plural, if you, plural, forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. Retain the sins of any, they are retained. God has chosen to forgive sins to the Church because God can forgive sins however he’d like to. He doesn’t have to do anything.

And so, God has chosen to set us free by offering Himself in the person of Jesus Christ for our salvation. That is how he has chosen to do it. And St. Paul’s going to tell us that he has chosen to do that so that Jesus’s name would be the name that is above every name. In order that Christ would be glorified. And later in John’s Gospel, we’ll see more of that Christ specifically talking about that, about being glorified through his death and resurrection.

But so, this is important. It’s not just a coincidence that it’s at Passover. It’s not just a coincidence that we still call the celebration of it Passover. This is sort of the real deliverance because as we saw in the Old Testament, yes, they were brought out of slavery in Egypt, but what ended up happening? They fell back into their sins, and what ended up happening, they ended up in exile and slaves again in Babylon. And so this is a superior Passover.

We saw in Jeremiah, especially around Chapter 31, we saw that transition talked about from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant, where he says in the Old Covenant, God commanded us to be good and commanded us to be holy. In the New Covenant, he makes us good and makes us holy. So there’s this superior, and this is the hymns of… I know we’re more than 50 days out now, but this is the hymns of Pascha. One of the things I’m not totally happy with, I’ll put it that way, in our translations of some of the Pascha hymns. Is that they keep using the word Pascha. They keep using the Greek word. Whereas I think if they translated it Passover. People would understand it. “A new and saving Pascha is revealed to us”, what, this year’s? It’s a new and saving Passover, right? Not like the old one, it’s a new Passover, a glorious Passover, because we have passed over from death to life. And that gets lost a little because we sort of leave it in Greek rather than translating it all the way into English.

But so right now, as St. Luke starts this final piece of his Gospel, he says it twice, it’s so important. He says it’s the feast of unleavened Bread, which is called the Passover. Just to make sure you’re clear what he’s talking about, this is all about to happen at Passover. So be thinking about Passover, be thinking about the Exodus, be thinking about what God did there, in order to understand what God is doing here, though it’s a quick reference and we hear it so much we don’t even really think about it anymore. It’s very important to how St. Luke wants us to understand what he’s about to write. So we need to keep that sort of in the background.

Then Satan entered Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who was numbered among the twelve. So he went his way and conferred with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray Him to them. And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. So he promised and sought opportunity to betray Him to them in the absence of the multitude.

Now we’ve seen the way Judas is handled is a little different in the different gospels. In St. Mark’s Gospel we saw there’s sort of a little bit of ambiguity as to why exactly Judas is doing this. Some people have proposed different things. Well, maybe he was trying to get Jesus to show his hand or maybe this or maybe that. St. Luke from his perspective is very clear on what happened, Satan went into him and caused him to do it. And St. John’s Gospel is going to be even less charitable, shall we say, toward Judas. If you really need to be charitable to Judas, but St. John’s Gospel, every time he mentions Judas, even when he just names who the twelve disciples are, it’s sort of Judas “who is going to betray him”, sort of spit on the ground. So, St. John right from the get-go. But St. Luke here is also very clear. This is Satan who comes upon him to do this.

Interlocutor: Is it because he was stealing that he would sin, that the Devil was able to get into him?

Fr. Stephen: Well, St Luke doesn’t mention the stealing part. Well, we don’t know exactly, again, we don’t know exactly what was going on with Judas, but what’s key here is that, notice what St. Luke is doing because we already know, we’ve been told over and over and over again in St. Luke’s Gospel that Jesus is planning on this happening. He’s predicted already that he’s going to be betrayed, repeatedly. He says, “I’m going to be betrayed, I’m going to be handed over to the Romans, I’m going to be crucified, I’m going to be killed.” He’s predicted it. So this is part of the plan, this is something Jesus knows is going to happen. It’s part of God’s plan of what’s going to happen. But now at the same time, St. Luke is saying that it’s Satan who’s causing the betrayal. Right? So what this means is from St. Luke’s perspective, even Satan, even Satan when he’s going out and trying to destroy Jesus when he’s going out and trying to do these things. Even Satan lies under God’s authority, whether he likes it or not, and he, of course, doesn’t.

So, there is not in St. Luke’s Gospel this sort of, what they call dualism. It’s not like there’s good God and evil God and they’re fighting who’s going to win, right? That’s not St. Luke’s picture at all. In St. Luke’s picture, there’s God. He’s in charge of everything. And so even when Satan thinks he’s up to a good one, “I’m going to kill off the Messiah,” He’s actually really doing what Jesus wants him to do, and even though Judas thinks he’s doing this evil thing…

And this plays back into, as we’ve talked about before, going all the way back to the story of Joseph in Genesis. Remember, his brothers throw him down a well and then sell him into slavery. Then he gets falsely accused of rape and thrown in prison and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And at the end he says to his brothers, “You meant it to me for evil, but God meant it for good.” Not saying that they didn’t have any free will. That’s not what he was saying. He said “You guys set out to do evil. You sat and you conceived in your heart to do evil to me, to harm me. You were trying to hurt me, you were trying to kill me at one point. But God took your evil intent and the evil you planned in your heart and he used that to bring about good things,” both for Joseph and for them ultimately.

And so, this is the picture from the Old Testament that St. Luke is picking up on. It’s not that Satan doesn’t have any free will. It’s not that Judas doesn’t have any free will. Judas is planning to do evil. The only thing St. Luke really says about his motivation is that they promised to give him money here. So there’s a greed element, clearly. And Satan, of course, we know why Satan would want to do it, because Satan is planning evil, right? So it’s not that they don’t have free will, it’s not to justify what they’re doing or say what they’re doing isn’t evil, but it’s to say that God can take even the most evil things, even the most sinful things, the most wicked things, the most wretched things that we plan and turn them around and bring good out of them despite us. Despite us.

Interlocutor: So then are you saying that this is St. Luke’s way of saying that Judas himself chose to betray Christ? Not when you say the money, but maybe Judas wasn’t aware of the total consequences. Remember when we go into the last supper, they’re falling away. Secondly, are you saying but are you saying that a Christian can be possessed?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the answer to both is the same. People don’t get demon-possessed by accident. You’re not just walking down the street, minding your own business and suddenly you’re possessed by Satan. That’s not how it works. Now, remember how, I haven’t talked about this in a while, so, demon possession was a common phenomenon in the Greco-Roman world from their perspective. And they didn’t think it was a bad thing. They thought it was a good thing. The word daemon in Greek before Christians started using it to refer to unclean spirits and evil spirits, before Christians got a hold of it, in the Greco-Roman world, the word daemon just meant a spirit, an ancestral spirit. Some of the gods were referred to as daemon, so just sort of “being a spirit”. So the oracle at Delphi was, according to their own writings, the way they described what happened with the oracle at Delphi is that she was possessed by a demon. Specifically, Apollo would come and possess her and speak through her.

Socrates… In Plato’s dialogue, the Theatetus says he has a demon that whispers wisdom to his soul, that lives within him. That’s pretty horrifying from a modern Christian perspective. But at the time, that meant that he was special and gifted, right? So where we get the word “genius”, actually is genius actually has the same original root as genie or djinn. It referred to a spirit.

So when the Christians… they tried to force them to sacrifice to the emperor, they were actually sacrificing to the genius of the emperor, to the god who dwelled within the emperor.

So we get genius from that. We say a genius is somebody who’s just really smart or really gifted at one particular thing. But genius in the ancient world, meant they had some kind of spirit dwelling within them that made them excel at something. So this is a very commonly discussed thing.

Now, from a Christian’s perspective, it’s important to remember that nobody who wrote the scriptures was a monotheist in the sense that we use the term “monotheist” today. When we use the term “monotheist” today, we mean there’s one god and all the other gods don’t exist. We would say Zeus doesn’t exist, Apollo doesn’t exist, pick your god… All these other gods don’t exist. That’s not what anyone who wrote the scriptures believed. It’s more correct to describe them as monolatrous. They only worshiped one god. They believed there was only one god who was a true god, who was truly worthy of worship as god. But they believed that these other spirits all existed. They just believed they were evil and unclean and that they weren’t on par with the one true God. There’s the one true god and then there are all these spirits, some of whom are angels, some of whom are unclean and evil spirits. And that the Gentile pagans worshiped those unclean and evil spirits as gods.

In Colossians, St. Paul refers to this. He talks about the worship of angels. Because from the Jewish perspective and the Christian perspective, that’s what they were doing. They were worshipping these demonic evil spirits. And that’s why idolatry was such a severe and horrible sin. They were taking the glory that was due to God and giving it to these evil spirits. And by worshipping those evil spirits, they themselves were corrupted spiritually and morally.

So, from the perspective of scripture, someone doesn’t become demon possessed by accident. If you become demon possessed, it’s because you’ve already entered into that realm, usually through idolatry, usually through some form of idolatry. Now this may be playing into, again the greed issue with Judas. That may be what he’s worshipping, is mammon. It may be something else that we don’t know about. But it is through interacting with these evil spirits that one comes to be possessed by them. We use the word possessed to mean, “Well it’s in you.” But think about the word possess, right? Possessions. That means you own something. So if someone is demon possessed, it means that one of these evil spirits owns them, has control of them. What Judas has done in his life has gotten him to the point now where Satan owns him and has control of them. And he didn’t get that way by minding his own business. He got that way by living a life of unrepentant sin and going down this road of wickedness until he got to the point…

I think the best comparison for this is in our modern terms is addiction. If you get to a certain point in addiction, you may choose to take the first and the second, maybe even the third drink. But you could get to a point where after that, drinks four through twelve, you didn’t really make a choice anymore, because it had control of you at that point. Or hard drugs. Is someone who’s a real heroin addict choosing to use heroin anymore? He chose to use heroin at some point in the past, but now he’s not really making choices. It’s gotten control of him.

So, it’s that same kind of idea. Judas, at one point in his life was choosing wickedness and choosing pride and anger and greed and choosing these things. But now it has gotten to a point where he’s not really choosing anymore because those things have control of him. And through those things Satan has control of him.

And this plays very much into the understanding at this time in history of what was going on with Pharaoh right before Passover. What was going on with Pharaoh? Well, we have these recurring notations that he hardened his heart, God hardened his heart sometimes both going back and forth. It’s a similar kind of dynamic. At a certain point, Pharaoh had so given himself over to anger and resentment and all these things that they now controlled him and he really wasn’t making his own choices anymore. Other things had taken control of him and were moving him around.

And that’s part, of course, of why Christ casting out demons is a sign of the kingdom of God coming, which is how we’ve seen it used in the gospels. It’s a sign of the kingdom of God coming because what the person who has the demon cast out, sent away, is now free, he’s now set free. And so, Christ is removing those people from this bondage, this slavery, these demonic forces in the world, setting them free in his kingdom, because that’s what happens after the Exodus. They come to the promised land and they establish the kingdom. So that’s part of the dynamic that’s going on here. And so Judas is a figure sort of similar to Pharaoh, that’s part of that having the Passover of the background where he’s someone who’s now so given himself over that there’s going to be there’s just judgment coming down the pipe for him.

Interlocutor: Does psychology, it means two things does it not, mind and spirit?

Fr. Stephen: Actually, psyche means soul.

Interlocutor: So if we look at that, then if we are placing one in therapy, if you are a Christian psychologist, are you then setting that person free from a demon in a situation, and is this what Judas did, to set himself free?

Fr. Stephen: No on two counts, as we’ve seen, and I made this point, but it was earlier on in St. Luke’s Gospel. St. Luke, having been a physician himself, clearly distinguishes between demonic possession and illness. Sometimes you’ll see people say, “Oh, well, they were just primitive, so somebody was mentally ill and they thought it was a demon.” St. Luke clearly distinguishes between the two. Jesus heals people who have physical ailments and he casts out demons, but he keeps those two as two separate concepts.

What Judas does, and we’ll get there, what Judas does when he kills himself, and he kills himself a little differently, actually, according to St. Luke. But when Judas kills himself, he is not setting himself free. He is following through on his, not to put too fine a point on it, but following through on his allegiance to Satan. Because what is it that the evil spirits, the demons, want to do. To destroy human beings. To destroy and to kill. And so anyone who… this is why Judas is sort of paradigmatic for us, anyone who follows that road, that road of sin, right? That road of sin leads to death and destruction and condemnation in hell. And so what we see in the Scriptures, unfortunately, is that we see Judas walk that road all the way to the end.

And he is generally contrasted with St. Peter, who starts off down the same road but turns back and repents with the point being for any of us, for all of us who have sat down on that road and have gone some distance down it until we reach the end, it’s never too late for us to turn back. So we see with Judas the cautionary tale. This is where that leads. We see on the side of St. Peter the possibility of not having to follow that road all the way to the end so that’s part of the dynamic that’s going on here.