Father Stephen De Young: Judas, now, they’ve given him some money. He’s now working on a plan. Notice once again, in the absence of the multitude, right? They’re very happy about this because, well, see, now we’ve got an inside man. They’ve got somebody in his inner circle. So Judas is with him. Remember, Jesus is going and preaching in the temple during the day, going out to Mount Olivet to sleep in the evening. So Judas is not only with him when he’s around the people in the day, Judas knows where he’s at, at night when the people aren’t around. So if we could go get him there, spirit him away, we won’t have a mob scene on our hands. We’ll have plausible deniability. We can blame it on the Romans. We can say, “Oh, hey, the Romans got a hold of them. That happens. You go around claiming you’re the Messiah, Romans are going to crucify you. We tried to warn him.”

Then came the Day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover must be killed.

Notice, he’s already said it twice. Now he says it two more times to make sure we’re thinking about this.

And He sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat.”

Now, remember, Passover refers to two things. Passover refers to the original event in Egypt, the 10th plague, and then Israel being set free, leaving Egypt to travel to the Promised Land. It also refers to the celebration of that event that happened every year thereafter, the Feast of Passover. Remember, the Feast of Passover wasn’t just a commemoration, “Hey, let’s have a Passover party and exchange gifts.” That wasn’t how it worked. It wasn’t just, make an extra visit to the synagogue this year. It definitely wasn’t, “Well, this is the one day of the year I’m going to decide to go to synagogue.”

What it was, was the people, remember, they were supposed to dress the way the people did at that time. They were supposed to dress as if they were about to go on a journey. They were only eating the foods. Why unleavened bread? Because they didn’t have time to wait for the yeast to rise, right? They were getting going. They needed bread now, so you make it without yeast so you can get it done, now they had all the food as if they were setting forth on the journey. Remember, there was the whole dialogue between the children and the parents, children and father. Now, the way it’s usually done in English is, “Why is this night different than all other nights?” “Because this is the night when we were brought out of Egypt.” Notice, “This is the night when we, at this table, were brought out of Egypt.”

And so, it was not just a sit around and remember, “Oh yeah, that was great.” The people came and they participated in that event. They became a part of it themselves. It wasn’t just their ancient ancestors who this happened to, right? But it happened to them. God did it for them, so they experienced it again. The reason I’m making this point is Jesus is about to eat the Passover meal and he’s about to transform that Passover meal into something else. And so, if we want to understand the something else, spoilers, the Eucharist, communion that Jesus is about to set out, we have to understand the context of how did the Passover meal relate to the original Passover. So we’ll understand how the Eucharist relates to Christ’s death and resurrection.

So he sends Peter and John to “go and prepare the Passover for us that we may eat”. So he’s specifically telling them, “You need to make the food, you need to go get a lamb, you need to kill it, you need to do everything, prepare everything. This is appropriate.”

So they said to Him, “Where do You want us to prepare?”

They said, “Okay, well, we could go take care of the food, but where exactly are we going to eat?”

And He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water; follow him into the house which he enters.  Then you shall say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with My disciples?”’ Then he will show you a large, furnished upper room; there make ready.” So they went and found it just as He had said to them, and they prepared the Passover.

So aside from, again repeating Passover, Passover, Passover, for us here, so we keep that in mind. Notice here once again, St. Luke is making it very clear to us. Everything that’s happening here, Jesus knows about and has planned out to the point that he knows what moment they’re going to end up arriving in the city where the servant with a pot on his head is going to be at that moment. So they run into him, they have exactly where that servant is, right? Jesus knows all of this. This is all part of the plan. Everything is unfolding… because we’ve just been told Judas is sneaking off to betray him at the behest of Satan. But even though Judas is sneaking off to betray him at the behest of Satan, Jesus, from his perspective, all of this is unfolding, exactly as he knew it would.

When the hour had come, He sat down, and the twelve apostles with Him. Then He said to them, “With fervent desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”

Now, sometimes this is interpreted oddly, like people will say, “Oh, this is just the last time he’s going to eat before he rises from the dead,” which isn’t what Jesus said. This last time I’ll eat of it, this is the last time I’ll eat the Passover, until what? Until it is fulfilled. Until the Passover meal is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.

So, what he is about to institute, what Jesus is about to tell them to do, he is setting up as a fulfillment of the Passover. This is important in our understanding of the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, the Old Testament and the New Testament. Because, again, sometimes, especially our Protestant Christian friends, one of the things they don’t understand about the Orthodox Church is our liturgy. It seems very foreign and very odd to them. And when they talk about Christian worship, essentially what they’ve done is, they’ll say, “Well, we believe you should worship the way the Bible tells us to.” By Bible, they seem to only mean the New Testament, because if you go into the Old Testament and you try and say, well, in the Old Testament, they had this whole cycle of feasts, so shouldn’t we have a cycle of feasts? They’ll say, “Well, that was the Old Testament.” And if you say, well, the first commandment about worship in the Old Testament is you should offer incense to God in the morning and in the evening they say, “Well, that’s the Old Testament. There’s nothing about that in the New Testament.”

What Jesus is showing us here is that what we do in the church is not get rid of the Old Testament. We’re not starting from scratch. Not, “That was okay, but now we’ve got better,” or worse, that it was defective somehow, and now we’ve got better. We’re starting over, but it’s the fulfillment. So this is why our celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection is the fulfillment of Passover. The Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Passover meal.

We worship on Sunday rather than Saturday, because, remember, what was the command of the Sabbath? God worked for six days. He rested on the 7th day, and so the 7th day is a Sabbath. Well, what does Jesus say in the gospel of Gospel According to St John? Jesus says when questioned about the Sabbath, God is still working even up to this very day. And then in Gospel According to St. John, as Jesus dies on the cross, what does he say just before he dies? He says, “it is finished”, tetelestai in Greek, which is the exact same word that is used in Genesis when it comes to the 7th day. And it says, in six days, God finished his work. So Jesus finished his work and he rested when he rested in the tomb. What day? The 7th day, the Sabbath day. And so he fulfilled the Sabbath day by resting on that day, rose from the dead on the first day of the week or the 8th day. And so we now celebrate his resurrection as the fulfillment, because Christ fulfilled what the Sabbath was about. So now we celebrate on the 8th day. It’s true of circumcision and baptism. This is why we baptize babies, for the same reason they circumcised babies all the way through.

Our understanding of worship as Christians and the Church is that we now have not scrapped the old worship, but it’s now fulfilled. And so the Eucharist here is part of the fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice and all of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament.

Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”

Now, when he says “Do this in remembrance of Me”, as we’ve already seen, was the Passover meal a just remembrance? We just sit around and remember nostalgically, “Oh, yeah, the good old days, right? Escape from Egypt, that was great.” No, it was a participation in it, right? And the word anamnesis that’s actually used here for remembrance, the Greek word is the same word that’s used in the Septuagint in the Greek version of the Old Testament, which is what the apostles were primarily using. Anamnesis, do this as a remembrance is the same word that’s used in Numbers 10:10, regarding the sacrifices that Israel was to offer to God. He said, you were to offer XYZ animals as a remembrance before the Lord your God.

So this, he’s not just talking about sitting and remembering, saying to do this as a remembrance. He’s setting this up as part of worship. As part of worship, taking the place of the Passover meal and the sacrifices. Now, in this participation, we come together and participate in Christ’s sacrifice, Christ’s offering of Himself. And so we offer ourselves by offering bread and wine and we receive from God in return, Christ gives us in return, Himself. When we celebrate the Eucharist. And that’s what’s being set up here.

It’s very important that we break it down on that level, because this isn’t just a nice thing to do in church or something. This is something that Christ commands us to do. He’s commanding us to do it as a religious observance in the way that they used to practice animal sacrifice. And he’s telling us that it is the fulfillment of those Old Testament, Old Covenant, liturgical rituals, the fulfillment of it. It is not a separate thing.

Back in the day, way back in a long-ago time, when I was a Protestant pastor, we had communion three times a year, whether we needed it or not. So, it was not central. It was not central. I used to jokingly at the time, this isn’t just me now, I, at the time, used to make jokes that basically our worship services were singing a bunch of songs to get people excited and then me preaching for 40 minutes to put them back to sleep. There was none of this ritual element. It was definitely not centered around the Eucharist. It was definitely not centered around any kind of sacrament. We acknowledged that baptism and the Eucharist were sacraments, but like I said, Eucharist was maybe three times a year. Baptism was when somebody had a baby, and a lot of times it may or may not have been done actually in church, so nobody but the family may have seen it. So there was no concept of sacramental life.

But the way Jesus is talking about life in the Kingdom here is very different than that. It’s very different than that. He’s talking about the Eucharist as being the central act of worship, because the central act of worship in the Old Covenant, in the Old Testament was sacrificed. They were sacrificing animals every day, thank offerings, grain offerings, sin offerings, in the temple. And the temple was the hub of that, was the center of their religious life. So when Jesus says, this is replacing that sacrificial system, he’s saying that now as he establishes the kingdom now in the church, this is going to be the central act of worship. The Eucharist is now going to be the central act of worship, fulfilling that whole sacrificial system. This is what you are now going to do.

And so, if we have our worship structured around anything other than the centrality of the Eucharist, then we’re structuring our worship in a fundamentally unbiblical way. We’re not structuring it the way Christ is here telling us to structure for whatever reason, for whatever misguided reason.

And so, this is why so much of our life in the Orthodox Church centers around the Eucharist, to the point that even the sacraments sort of take place around the Eucharist. When someone’s baptized or chrismated, they received the Eucharist. It’s sort of the gateway to now being welcomed to the community of the church by receiving the Eucharist. We celebrate the Eucharist, I was going to say every day, twice on Sunday, but not twice on Sunday, but continuously. The same way that the sacrifices of the old covenant were continuous. When we talk about confessing our sins in the sacrament of repentance, we tend to talk about that in regard to preparing ourselves to receive Christ in the Eucharist. This is the center, and this is why it’s always been at the center of the church’s worship in life is because that’s how Christ gave it to us. This is how Christ laid it out to us.

Likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you. But behold, the hand of My betrayer is with Me on the table. And truly the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom He is betrayed!” Then they began to question among themselves, which of them it was who would do this thing.

Now, notice Jesus doesn’t deny Judas communion, but also notice that he doesn’t say it’s going to do him any good, right? “There’s a new covenant in my blood which is shed for you. But behold, the hand of my betrayer is with me on the table.” Meaning, while he does it… as we said before, St. Luke doesn’t just come out and tell us things, he shows us things, right? Whereas St. Paul, for example, his letters, is going to tell us things. St. Paul in First Corinthians is going to tell us that if someone comes unworthily and receives the Eucharist, they’re bringing judgment and condemnation on themselves. St. Luke doesn’t just tell us that, but he shows us that with the person of Judas that the Eucharist here that he receives from Jesus is for his condemnation.

And notice, once again this theme we’ve been seeing in St. Luke’s Gospel. “Truly the Son of Man goes as it has been determined.” Everything is happening exactly according to plan. “But woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.” That doesn’t mean Judas is off the hook, right? Because his intent is purely evil. Purely evil.

Notice finally, and I mentioned this before when we talked about St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. Mark’s Gospel, “Then they began to question among themselves which of them it was who would do this thing.” This gives us a glimpse into where the apostles’ minds and mindsets are. If I was sitting at a table with five other people and one of them said, someone at this table is going to betray me, I would not say, “Is it me?” I would say, “Which one are you four is the rat? Which one of you four is no good?” Because I’d say, “I know I’m not planning on the betrayal.”

So, what does it say that when he says that, they all start going, “Oh, is it me?” What are they thinking? This is why I mentioned, like with St. Peter, it’s not that the eleven are faithful and true and Judas is a bad egg. At this point, they’re all, to varying degrees, getting ready to betray Jesus. We’re going to see when he gets arrested, they’re all going to head for the hills. Not one of them is going to stand by him. They’re all going to split. They’re all going to run and hide. So, they’re all going to betray them to one degree or not to the degree that Judas is, but they’re all going to betray them. They’re all going to set off down that road. We see a glimpse of it right here. “Are you talking about me? Because I’ve been trying to this looks like it’s going in a bad way and I’ve tried to look for an out.” And so, part of the picture here of Jesus too, is Jesus is ultimately pretty alone here. These twelve are his closest confidants, and they’re all on the way out.

Now there was also a dispute among them, as to which of them should be considered the greatest.

This is one of those things that, again, when we separate out the pieces of the story, we kind of miss how they connect. Notice where this comes. First, they’re sitting around wondering who it is who’s going to betray them. Now they’re arguing about which one of them is the greatest. So again, Judas is not alone. He may be further down the road than the rest of them, but the rest of them are not… Pride, doubt, have all these things going on as well.

And He said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors.’ But not so among you; on the contrary, he who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he who governs as he who serves. For who is greater, he who sits at the table, or he who serves? Is it not he who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as the One who serves.

So Jesus, knowing again what’s going to happen. Remember, Gospel according to St. Luke is Part 1 and Acts is Part 2, same author, right? Volume one, volume two. So as St. Luke is writing this, he knows that these men other than Judas are going to become the leaders of the church. And Jesus knows that too, despite where they’re at right now, which is not a good place. Jesus knows where this is going and that’s why he now corrects them. He says, “No, look, if you’re going to be great, if you’re going to be leaders, you need to do that by being the ones who serve. Being the ones who serve,” he says, “Because I’m here serving you.” That’s the least of it. He’s there dying for them. He says, that’s how leadership is going to work in the kingdom.

“But you are those who have continued with Me in My trials. And I bestow upon you a kingdom, just as My Father bestowed one upon Me, that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”

What is Jesus saying here? Well, what was he just saying before when he began teaching about the Eucharist, he said it was going to be eaten and drunk in the kingdom. Here he’s telling the disciples that they’re going to become the apostles, that they’re going to have this leadership position. That leadership position is going to center again on what? Eating and drinking at his table. Again, the eucharist is central. So even the authority of the apostles, when Jesus describes it, that’s how clear St. Luke wants to make this. Even the authority of the apostles in the Church for St. Luke is described in terms of the Eucharist, is described in terms of Eucharistic authority. They’re the ones who are going to preside at the Eucharist. That’s how central it is.

And while we tend to read that “judging the twelve tribes of Israel” as referring to something about the Last Judgment, right? Remember the Book of Judges? They judged the tribes of Israel. This was a position of leadership. Before there was a king… He doesn’t tell them they’re going to be kings in the kingdom. Jesus is the king of the kingdom. Remember before Israel had a king, they had judges. Samuel is described in 1st Samuel, the prophet Samuel, as having judged Israel. He was the last of the judges. Remember what happened was they were dissatisfied with God’s rule and God sending judges to judge over them, they said, “we want a king”. They said to Samuel, “We want a king like the other nations have a king.” And Samuel said, “You don’t really want a king like other nations have a king because he’s going to tax you. He’s going to draft your sons and send them off to die in wars. He’s going to do all these things.” They said, “No, we want a king like the other nations.” And that was a rejection of God.

So notice when Christ talks about his kingdom, he doesn’t have kings, he’s the king of the kingdom. But he sends people to act as judges the way the prophet Samuel acts as a judge, right? He sends leaders into the Church, but those leaders are operating within the realm of his authority and his kingship. That’s the significance of that “judging” verb being used there.

And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat.  But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.”

But he said to Him, “Lord, I am ready to go with You, both to prison and to death.”

Then He said, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster shall not crow this day before you will deny three times that you know Me.”

So notice he now turns to sign in particular, this is all continuous. He’s made the reference to Judas betraying Him. He’s talked to them about the leadership positions they’re going to have. And now he speaks specifically to St. Peter. Notice “Satan has asked for you, that he may shift you as wheat.” Does that remind anybody of anything from the Old Testament? Remember the Book of Job, or the Book of Job begins, Job is this righteous man with his flocks of sheep. What happens? Satan comes to God, right? And he starts accusing Job. He says, “Oh, yeah, Job loves you. Job loves you because you’ve given him all these children and a happy life and wealth and flocks and earth. Yeah, I’d love you too if you gave me all that. You start taking away some of that stuff, you see how much he loves you.” And so then there’s that whole back and forth. That’s what St. Luke is referring to here, that Satan is now accusing Peter. Remember “sift you as wheat”, right? You separate the wheat from the chaff. Same kind of thing that was going on with Job being tested. Does he really love God? Is he really loyal to God? Is he really devoted to God? Or is it just God’s given him a lot of nice things?

Same kind of thing he’s saying to Peter particularly, you’re going to be tested, you’re going to be sorely tested now in the coming days, he says. But Jesus says that he’s prayed for Him, that his faith would not fail. And notice he doesn’t say, “If you return to me”. He says, “When you return” which means he’s prophesying two things. He’s not just prophesying that Peter will deny Him. He does prophesy that. He prophesies, “Yes, you’re going to fail, you’re going to fall, but when you return,” because he’s also telling them that that’s going to happen too, “When you return, strengthen your brethren.” Why does he need to strengthen the brethren? Because they’re all wishy washy, too. Remember? You’re going to take a fall, but when you repent, when you come back, and when you’re restored, you need to help shore up the rest of these disciples.

Interlocutor: Do we know why he calls him Simon and not Peter in this case?

Fr. Stephen: Well, Peter, remember, is his nickname. It essentially is the equivalent of Rocky in our common parlance. It’s a nickname, right? And so, I mean, I don’t know how much significance you want to attach to it. When my mother called me by my full name when I was a kid, when I heard Stephen James de Young, I knew she was serious about whatever was coming next, it was very important that I listened to it. So it may be that it may be that this is his more formal name. So it’s sort of this isn’t just casual conversation, you’re my friend, but this is serious.

Interlocutor: Do you think it might be part of it that Peter is not a rock in that time?

Fr. Stephen: Well, maybe. I don’t know if that’s necessarily completely in view, but I think it may be just to emphasize a seriousness. And he says his name twice, so it sort of gives you the idea that he’s trying to make them focus. They’re sitting there arguing about which one of them is greater than the other one. And Jesus is now saying something that’s very important. Not like their sort of silly conversation. This is very important. Listen to what I’m saying right now.

And He said to them, “When I sent you without money bag, knapsack, and sandals, did you lack anything?”

Remember, St. Luke’s recorded twice where Jesus sent them out to do miracles? And he told them, “Don’t take anything with you, just go. Whoever receives you into their home, eat what they put in front of you.” And they came back, they were rejoicing and all happy because of all the miracles they’ve seen and all the wonderful things that had happened. So now he reminds them, he says, “Remember when I sent you out? I sent you out with nothing. Did you lack anything? Did you go hungry? Did you have any problems?”

So they said, “Nothing.”

Yeah, no problems. Right.

Then He said to them, “But now, he who has a money bag, let him take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. For I say to you that this which is written must still be accomplished in Me: ‘And He was numbered with the transgressors.’ For the things concerning Me have an end.”

So he says, “This is different. This is different. Things are about to get really dire. Things are about to get much darker, because there are still things that were prophesied about me that are still part of the plan now that has to be fulfilled. And it’s kind of a dark chapter, so you need to be prepared.” Remember, “the things concerning me have an end” doesn’t mean, “This is it, this is the end of the road. Sorry, guys.” The word that is translated “end” there is “end” in terms of purpose. “The things concerning me have a purpose.” There’s a mission that Jesus is on. This isn’t just a bunch of things that are going to happen, and, oh, by the way, I happen to know about them in advance, but they’re determined by faith, so I could do nothing, that’s not what Jesus is saying. There’s a purpose here. There’s a mission, there’s a goal that he’s now coming to.

So they said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.”

So again, are they following anything He’s saying? No.

And He said to them, “It is enough.”

So he’s like, “Yeah, okay. That’s not what I was getting at.”

Coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him.

Remember, we’ve already been told Jesus is going out there every evening. So they’ve eaten the Passover meal in the evening. Now they go out as usual to the Mount of Olives to sleep.

When He came to the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. When He rose up from prayer, and had come to His disciples, He found them sleeping from sorrow. Then He said to them, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation.”

So they go out there before they’re going to bed down. Jesus goes to pray, as we know it’s his custom. Jesus knows what’s coming. And so Jesus prays that. What does he pray? This is another passage that often people go off on sort of flights of fancy. That Jesus’s will and God the Father’s will are two different things. Or Jesus doesn’t really want to do this, but he knows he has to. Or Jesus has doubts, some people have even gone so far as to say, well, that’s not what’s going on here. That’s not what’s going on here.

As we’ve seen throughout the Gospel According to St. Luke, as we’ve said already tonight, St. Luke shows us things, he doesn’t tell us things. And one of those things that he shows us, rather than telling us, is who Christ is. As we’ve seen, St. Luke doesn’t come out and say, “Jesus Christ is one person in two natures, and those two natures are without mixture or confusion.” He doesn’t lay out everything that the ecumenical councils would later lay out in those terms, but he shows us the one person, Jesus Christ, doing things only God can do: forgiving sins, calming a storm at sea, the healings, these are things only God can do, and Jesus does them the same time we see Jesus. Jesus Christ is one person doing things that only human beings do: Like praying, like eating, like sleeping.

And so, St. Luke shows us, rather than telling us about the two natures of Christ. This passage here, we’ve just come from a long passage where Jesus has been in detail, predicting the future and talking about how everything is coming to pass exactly according to plan. He knows where the guy with the jar is, at what exact moment, and where everyone’s going to be, right? This has been a lot of things only God knows and only God can do.

So, what would we expect, having read this far in the Gospel of St. Luke? What would we expect St. Luke to do next? We would expect him to reemphasize the fact that Jesus is also human, right? Jesus is also a man. Right? That’s what we would expect to balance that out. That is exactly what this passage that we just read in the garden of Gethsemane, this prayer is. It is reemphasizing that Jesus is human. He is a man.

Meaning what? if he has human nature, if he shares our human nature with us, what is the most basic drive a human being has? To live, right? To survive, to go on living, to continue living. Because we know from the book of Genesis that when God created humanity, death was not in the picture. Human beings were not created to die. Death is foreign to God’s creation, let alone to human beings who he created in his image. And so there is within our created human nature, not our sinful, human nature, our original human nature deep within it, that death is foreign to it. The death is an enemy, that’s repelled by death. Jesus doesn’t fear death. We’ve already seen. He doesn’t react to death with fear. But death is still foreign to Him. In fact, death is more foreign to Him than it is to us, because all of us have sinned and the wages of sin is death. All of us have brought death upon ourselves. When we die, we die for our own sins. Jesus has committed no sins. Death has no claim of it.

So, death is even more foreign to Him than it is to us. And this is what we see expressed. Christ’s true humanity expresses itself through his abhorrence and repulsion at death. He knows and he shares the will of God the Father and the will of the Holy Spirit. They have one will: there’s one divine will he shares that with. He knows what must be done. He knows what’s going to happen. He knows why it must happen. He knows the purpose for what is going to happen. But at the same time, in his true humanity, he has a human will, which like all human wills, finds death foreign.

And so, what he is saying here is that he knows and agrees that the divine will, the divine plan, takes precedence, and so he’s going to willingly lay down his life. So this is again showing us Christ’s humanity on the side of his divinity. We see that he knows everything that’s going to happen, and he knows the purpose of it. In terms of Christ’s humanity, we see that he is dedicated to that purpose and choosing that purpose, in spite of how horrible what’s about to happen is. So those two things work together. They don’t contradict each other.

Now, the verse about the sweat falling like great drops of blood is going to blow some people’s minds again. Not written by St. Luke. It’s not there in the early manuscripts. It shows up later. I’ve talked before about things that show up later and why they’re not a problem. To reiterate briefly, there is a view that, again, some of our Western Christian friends, especially our Protestant Christian friends take that sort of the inspired version of the New Testament, The authoritative version of the New Testament is quote-unquote, “the original”. I’ve talked before about how even figuring out what the original means with some of the books can be tricky. Like Second Corinthians: there’s two different letters of Paul put together into one. So what’s the original? Is the original the two letters separate? Is the original the first time the two letters got put together?

But the reality is, if you stop and think for a minute, not only do we not have the original now, people try to reconstruct the original from the later copies we have now, but we don’t have the original now. They didn’t even have a reconstruction of the original for 2000 years of the history of the church, right? Christians worshiping in the Byzantine Empire or in Gaul in the 8th century had no concept, let alone access to the original. They had Bibles, they had the scriptures that were read in their churches, and those words were authoritative. Those words were the word of God that was proclaimed to them. Because God didn’t just dictate the 27 books of the New Testament to the apostles and then sort of step back and say, “Boy, I hope they do a good job copying these things, cause otherwise all this other uninspired stuff is going to work its way in there. It’s going to be a mess 2000 years from now.”

The same Holy Spirit who was speaking originally through the apostles has been speaking in and through the church and living in the church because we have the proclamation and the preservation, the interpretation of the Scriptures ever since. So if this verse showed up later, it’s because God wanted it to show up later. Every generation of the church has the Scriptures that God wants them to have, and the scriptures they have is authoritative to them.

This is the only way to really make sense of what we even have in the New Testament, because as I mentioned earlier tonight, most of the quotes from the Old Testament that we find in the New Testament are not from the original, they’re not from the Hebrew. They’re quoting the Greek translation, right? Not the original. It’s a Greek translation that was made hundreds and hundreds of years later. But the apostles don’t say, “Well, bear in mind this is a translation,” or they don’t quote it and then say, “Well, the original Hebrew of this word means blah blah blah blah.” No, it’s their Bible, they quote it. It’s the word of God to them. So, yes, this verse shows up a few hundred years after St. Luke had gone on into the kingdom, but it shows up there precisely because God wanted it to show up there. And notice, what does that verse do? It reinforces what this text was already doing. It reinforces Christ’s humanity, which is what this text was already about in the first place just adds reinforcement to it.

We can’t… I don’t know if I’ve said this recently, but I know I said it a lot back six years ago, when we first started Genesis. One of the points I made a lot about the Book of Genesis especially, was that we can’t show up to the Bible, we can’t show up to the Scriptures saying, “Well, okay, here’s what the Scriptures are and here’s what they have to do, and here’s how they have to work, and here’s how they have to quote each other, and everything here needs to be literally true or it’s all a pack of lies. And you can’t have poetry and you can’t have…” We can’t show up with all these presuppositions and then try and force the Scriptures to fit into that, because the whole purpose of studying the Scriptures is for God to speak to us through them. And if we’re telling him what he has to say, he can’t get a word in edgewise. We have to come to the Scriptures and see what the Scriptures are and see what God is saying to us. And then based on that, we come to our conclusions about what the Scriptures are and what they say.

And if that means that there are things that only entered into the text in the 6th century, the 7th century, then fine, that’s how God has chosen to bring the Scriptures to us.

Interlocutor: Do you know whether the original writings are existing at Mount Athos?

Fr. Stephen: Not original copies. No, the oldest the oldest piece of any New Testament book that we have is about the size of a credit card. It’s a papyrus fragment. It’s a piece of the Gospel of John from 125 AD. Which people debate when the Gospel of St. John was written, most people now think it was written around 90 AD. That piece of parchment is from Egypt in 125 AD. So within 35 years it had been copied and made it to Egypt. But that’s a copy, and probably a copy of a copy of a copy at least. But that’s the oldest piece we have. So we don’t have, quote-unquote, “the originals”. We don’t have any pieces from the New Testament from the first century.

Interlocutor: One of the reasons I ask that is… [Question about NT manuscript in a display case]

Fr. Stephen: It was probably Greek. If it was a very early copy, that was for the fourth or fifth century, which if it was a book in book format, codex format, it’s probably from the fourth or fifth century. They wrote in all caps with no punctuation, no spaces between the words. And sometimes they didn’t even go like this, like right to left. They went right to left and then left to right and then right to left, and they’re winding down the page just to make it even harder for Americans to read. But yeah, that’s what that would have been. But yeah, the earliest sort of books, Bibles, what we would identify as a Bible that we have come from the fourth century and those like Codex Siniaticus that was found at St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, those are very early, but the first Bibles, the way we would have a Bible that have the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament were commissioned by Constantine. He had 50 Bible collections and codex were made, and those are really the first Bibles. The way we think of Bibles, previous to that, very early on, of course, you had books circulating separately and different people had different collections. So, for example, there were collections of St. Paul’s Epistles into a book and there were the four Gospels, sort of the way we have a gospel book and an epistle book in the church even today, you know, there were collections like that of books. But where you get a Bible with the Old and New Testaments, that doesn’t happen till the fourth century.

Interlocutor: What did they use for liturgies during that period?

Fr. Stephen: Basically like what we have now, they would have a gospel book and an epistle book. The gospel book would have the four Gospels. The epistle book would have at least St. Paul’s Epistles, and then, depending on where you were, some of the others. That’s why there was so much quote-unquote “disagreement” later on about whether about 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, 1st and 2nd Peter, Revelation, some of those other books is that some churches had those in their epistle book and others didn’t, or they’d have some of them and not others. So it wasn’t actually like they were sitting there and voting on each book and arguing about it. It was that different churches were using different numbers of them in different ones.

And so, what ends up happening is sort of everyone gets together with their lists over the course of the fourth century and they hammer out the 27 books as these are the ones that are used in the churches that we recognize as being Orthodox churches, non-heretical churches, not gnostic or whatever, these are the 27 books that they use. But even after that, there are still churches that don’t use some of those books. For example, the entire Orthodox church doesn’t use the Book of Revelation liturgically. It’s never read. The Coptic Church does.

Interlocutor: What was the reason?

Fr. Stepehen: We never did. They do read it on Patmos. They do read it on the feast day celebrating it being written, but it’s not read… you’ll notice you’ll never show up at church on Sunday and have a reading from the Book of Revelation there, because we never did. So the canon, when we wrote out the list of the books that are canonical in the New Testament, it was descriptive, not prescriptive. It wasn’t Constantine or someone else, whoever you want to conjecture, saying “These are the books you’re going to read. These are the inspired books.” It was descriptive. It was describing what was these are the books that churches are using, but it never mandated. So, churches that had just never used the Book of Revelation, they didn’t come and say, “You have to start using the Book of Revelation.” They just went along not using it. They just said, “Well, you other churches who do use it, that’s fine, there’s no problem with that, it’s not heretical.” Whereas other books, they said “If you’re using it, that one you need to stop because that’s not orthodox.”

Okay, so notice also Jesus goes to pray before they sleep. He’s just given them the speech about these things that are going to happen, how they’re going to be tested, how they’re going to be tried, they’re going to be tempted. It’s not going to be like before, you need to have… Things are about to get hard. And so while he’s praying, he comes back and they’ve all decided to just go to sleep. Are they there praying about this time? No. Praying for Jesus because he’s…? No, they just all fall asleep. So when he finds them, he says, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray. Apparently, you didn’t hear what I just told you. You need to be praying right now because you’re about to face something.” And notice verse 47:

While he was still speaking.

So he doesn’t even get to finish telling them that,

Behold, a multitude, [big crowd shows up]. And while He was still speaking, behold, a multitude; and he who was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them and drew near to Jesus to kiss Him. But Jesus said to him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

So notice St. Luke tells it, Judas is going to kiss him and Jesus stops him to tell him, “I know what you’re doing. I know that you’re betraying me.” Because once again for St. Luke, Jesus knows exactly what’s going on.

When those around Him saw what was going to happen, they said to Him, “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?”

Remember, they got those two swords. “I get it. This is why Jesus told us to get the two swords, right? So we could fight these guys, fight off this crowd with two swords in the middle of the night, in the dark.”

And one of them struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus answered and said, “Permit even this.” And He touched his ear and healed him.

So Jesus makes pretty clear here “No, the sword thing, you still didn’t get what I was getting at. I was not telling you to try and attack these people, to try and harm these people.” Permit even this means you need to permit me to be, even to be arrested, even to go to my death, because this is the plan. And so, he heals even now, even for this ungrateful person who’s about to put him to death. What does Jesus do? Jesus is doing good for them. Good for them and not evil.

Then Jesus said to the chief priests, captains of the temple, and the elders who had come to Him,

So the chief priests are out there in person, right? The captains of the temple, remember, are those temple guards. Because remember, the Roman soldiers were Gentile, so they couldn’t come into the inner parts of the temple, so they had to have their own guards to guard the inner parts to make sure nothing happened. They’re there, various elders of the people.

“Have you come out, as against a robber, with swords and clubs?  When I was with you daily in the temple, you did not try to seize Me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.”

So, he says, “Look, every day for the last week I’ve been in the temple. That’s where you guys live. You didn’t have to come all the way out here. I came to you; I was right there. You could have arrested me, and yet you didn’t. You’re out here in the middle of the night with swords and clubs.” What’s the point he’s making to them? He’s trying to say to them, “What are you doing right now? How are you acting right now? You’re coming out here to essentially murder someone in the middle of the night. And you’re the chief priests, you’re the leaders, the religious leaders of the people. This is how you’re acting.”

Why does he make this point? It’s not only is he still healing people, he’s still calling the people who are about to have him murdered, He’s calling them to repentance. “Stop and think for a second about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You need to repent. You need to turn from this.”

Having arrested Him, they led Him and brought Him into the high priest’s house. But Peter followed at a distance.

Everybody else scattered, right? Peter followed, but at a distance.

Now when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them.

So Peter’s kind of stuck along behind to see what’s going to happen, right? The guards and stuff, they’re not going in there for the important meeting with the chief priest. That’s the chief priest, with the priests and stuff. So Peter comes, slips in. Then sits with the guards around the fire. It’s the middle of the night. He’s going to keep warm and kind of keep an eye on things, see what happens.

And a certain servant girl, seeing him as he sat by the fire, looked intently at him and said, “This man was also with Him.”

So she kind of gives him the hairy eyeball, right? She’s looking at him. She’s like, “I’ve seen this guy with Jesus at the temple. They’ve been hanging out of the temple. I recognize this guy.”

But he denied Him, saying, “Woman, I do not know Him.”

“What are you talking about?”

And after a little while another saw him and said, “You also are of them.”

Somebody else said, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s one of his friends.”

But Peter said, “Man, I am not!”

I like that translation… “Listen, man” [Laughter], but notice first it’s a serving girl, right? So she’s a slave and a woman. So nobody’s going to believe her anyway. You could just say, “Oh, whatever.” Well now this is a man, okay, so he could testify in court. So this is a little more serious.

Then after about an hour had passed, another confidently affirmed, saying, “Surely this fellow also was with Him, for he is a Galilean.”

So, he picks up on the accent, he’s from Galilee. He’s got to be with Jesus. Now he’s got a real problem because now he’s got two witnesses and this one’s confident. This one’s not like, “Hey, I think…”, this guy’s like, “No, you’re one of them.”

But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are saying!”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed.  And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said to him, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” So Peter went out and wept bitterly.

So it sort of all comes crashing in on him. “Oh yeah, about a couple of hours ago I was just saying how I go to prison with him and die with him. And now I’m sneaking around out here saying I don’t even know him.” So it sort of all comes crashing down on him and he runs away.

Interlocutor: My question then goes back to the first question a little earlier, about being possessed. By these choices, are we saying that Satan gave Peter the authority to say no and deny Jesus?

Fr. Stephen: No, well, because we’ve already been told by St. Luke that Satan is testing Peter, right? And Jesus even predicted, remember, that Peter was going to fail the test, but he also predicted that he would return, that he would repent. That’s what’s going on here. This is still Peter making very bad choices.

Interlocutor: So on the bad choices, this is the temptation that we need to be delivered from?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Now the men who held Jesus mocked Him and beat Him. And having blindfolded Him, they struck Him on the face and asked Him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is the one who struck You?” And many other things they blasphemously spoke against Him.

Now, do you notice something here? Remember when we were reading the Gospel According to St Matthew, the Gospel According to St. Mark? There’s a similar passage of people doing this to Jesus. Do you remember who it was?  It was the Roman soldiers. Who is it here who’s doing this? These are the guards of the chief priests. These are the Jews who are going to turn him over, who are doing this to him. We’re going to notice as we go here through the last part of St. Luke’s Gospel, St. Luke probably because of his audience, remember we talked about St. Luke is writing to the sort of mainly Gentile Christians. He’s a companion of St. Paul. He’s writing to Christians all over the Roman Empire. We’re going to notice here as we get to the end, and this is true in Acts too, in volume two, St. Luke is going to sort of minimize the role that the Romans played in Jesus’s crucifixion, because St. Luke’s goal is not to blame the Romans. His goal is not to assign blame.

His goal, in fact, part of what St. Luke is doing, and we’ll see this even more clearly in Acts part of what St. Luke is doing is writing sort of an apologetic on behalf of the Christian Church, because at the time St. Luke is writing this, Nero has started persecuting Christians. Christians are being murdered, St. Paul was murdered, St. Peter was murdered by Nero.

And part of the way that St. Luke is presenting the story of Jesus and to the story of the apostles and of the Apostle Paul in the Book of Acts is to say there’s no real reason why there needs to be enmity between Rome and the Christian Church. Christians are not trying to overthrow Rome. We’ve seen already in St. Luke’s Gospel how clear Jesus has been over and over again saying, “I’m not that kind of messiah. I’m not here to violently overthrow Rome. I’m not here to start a revolution in a physical, violent sense.”

This is revolutionary, but it’s revolutionary in a spiritual sense, right? How clear he’s been. That’s part of St. Luke’s modus operandi. So he’s not in the business of saying that Rome killed Jesus. He’s not in the business of assigning blame in that regard, although clearly, he’s still going to tell the truth. He’s still… Pontius Pilate’s still here. I mean, he’s still going to be crucified right, by the Romans. He’s not lying, right? But he’s emphasizing the culpability of the people to whom Jesus came in the first place, that it was Jesus’ own people who betrayed him and turned on him and handed him over to the Romans to be killed. That’s his focus, is that this is coming from Jesus’ own people, and this is going to be a focus in Acts as well. That it’s going to be St. Paul’s own people, his fellow Jews, who are going to be stoning him and throwing him out of cities, who are going to be stirring up riots, who are going to be doing these things.

So, it’s a matter of emphasis. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Ultimately, everyone, everyone who has ever committed a sin is responsible for Jesus’s death. There’s plenty of blame to go around, even at the time between the Romans and the Jewish leaders and Judas and everyone else who’s here involved. But St. Luke’s emphasis is on the fact that Jesus was betrayed by his own. He was not staging an attempted revolution against Rome that went awry, and he got executed for it. Rather the very people who he came to, who he healed, who he preached to, who he came to be their Messiah and to save them. Those are the people who turned on him and killed him. That’s the point. Satan striking. That’s why even right here, when he’s being betrayed and they’re arresting him, he’s healing the high priest servant, and he’s preaching repentance to them. That’s what St. Luke is trying to bring down. And so that’s why he emphasizes, I mean, we could be quite sure Jesus was mocked by both the servants of the chief priest and the Romans. But St. Luke chooses to focus on the one because he’s trying to make that point.

As soon as it was day, the elders of the people, both chief priests and scribes, came together and led Him into their council, saying, “If You are the Christ, tell us.”

So this is their first plan of attack, right? They bring them in front of the chief priests. The scribes are there. They lead him in front of them. They say, “If you’re the Christ. If you’re the Messiah, tell us. No more hinting around, no more parables. If you’re the Messiah, tell us right now yes or no, are you the Messiah.”

But He said to them, “If I tell you, you will by no means believe. And if I also ask you, you will by no means answer Me or let Me go.”

So he says, “If I tell you”, meaning what? The answer is yes, right? But if he just says, “Yes, I’m the Messiah,” none of those people there are going to say, “Oh, okay, you’re the Messiah. Well, we’ll let you go then. Oh, sorry, our mistake,” right? That’s not happening. They’re not going to believe him. And he says “If I ask you, if I ask the chief priest, if I’m the Messiah, you’re not going to answer me. You’re not going to answer me.” So this is the point. Basically, he’s saying, “I have nothing to say to you, because there’s nothing I’m going to say to you that you’re going to listen to, that you’re going to believe. That’s going to change what you’re about to do.”

But then he says:

“Hereafter the Son of Man will sit on the right hand of the power of God.”

He says, you’re going to do what you’re going to do and what’s going to be the ultimate result? This is the ascension, right? For St. Luke, the ascension is very important. We’re going to see, the Gospel of St. Luke ends with the ascension, and Acts, Volume 2, begins with the ascension. It’s a pivotal event. So the ascension is very important to St. Luke. It’s the end. It’s the culmination of all of this. Christ dies, He rises again, He appears to the apostles, and then he ascends to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God. So that’s where this is going and so Jesus is saying to them, “You’re going to do what you’re going to do. I know what you’re going to do. But here’s where this is going to end up. This is going to end up with Jesus Christ seated at the right hand of God the Father.”

Then they all said, “Are You then the Son of God?”

So is what you’re saying that you’re the Son of God?

So He said to them, “You rightly say that I am.”

Notice he doesn’t say “yes”. He says, “You just said that I am. And you’re right.”

Interlocutor: The italics on “rightly” mean it’s not there in the original?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the word “rightly” isn’t there, essentially, you might translate it as sort of, “you say so yourself”, “you say the same”. It’s kind of ambiguous how to translate it into English. That’s why they put it in italics that they’re giving you that’s sort of a free interpretation of what it says.

And they said, “What further testimony do we need? For we have heard it ourselves from His own mouth.”

They say, “Well, there you go. Look, he just claimed to be the Son of God. That’s blasphemy. Forget about bringing in witnesses. We all heard it. We’re all witnesses. We just heard it come out of his mouth. That’s blasphemy. The penalty for blasphemy is death. So as far as they’re concerned, the trial before the chief priest is over.”

So, this based on time and based on being a chapter break again, is where we’ll leave off for tonight.