Father Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and get started and in just a second. I know it’s been a while, but we’ll be starting in Luke, chapter seven. And since it’s been a while, just to do kind of a quick catch up to where we are.

Of course, remember the first few chapters of Luke were about the birth of St. John the Baptist and the birth of Christ. And we saw that one episode from his childhood and then it began the same way the other Gospels we read have from there, which is with Jesus’s baptism by St. John the Baptist. And then the last time, the last two times really, we were going through what is commonly known as the Sermon on the Plain, which was a sermon that Luke presents by Jesus. We talked at that time about how it’s both similar to and somewhat different than the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five. And we pretty much finished that up last time. So we had kind of a natural cut off point there.

And so, Jesus has sort of completed that sermon. We talked at that time about how we shouldn’t understand either the case of the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain, Sermon on the Plain here, is even shorter, we have a certain amount of text and it will say, for example, with the Sermon on the Mount, when you get to the end, it was late in the day. We pointed out, well, if you just sat down and read the Sermon on the Mount, it’d take you about 45 minutes an hour if you read slowly. So we’re not to understand that the disciples were sitting there with steno pads, taking shorthand, trying to get down every single word that Jesus said, the exact order he said it. That’s not what they’re intending to present. We mentioned last time that of course, St. John at the end of his Gospel points out if you were to write down everything Jesus said and did in his entire life, the world couldn’t hold all the books, including every single detail.

So as we talked about each of the Gospel writers, and this is part of why we have four Gospels and four different pictures of Jesus, is that each one is selecting out of that huge volume of things Jesus said and did, choosing certain ones, certain sayings, certain things Jesus did to present to us and to present in a certain context to say something about Jesus. And so, this is how we’ve been handling a lot of the quote unquote “conflicts”. People who are critical of the Bible like to present them as conflicts, if Matthew and Luke aren’t identical, they’re “contradicting” each other. As we’ve pointed out before, if they were all going to be identical, why have four? You’d just need one if they’re all identical.

We’re going to see this again here in just a minute in Luke’s Gospel. But you can say many different things about Jesus. The fact that they’re different doesn’t necessarily mean they contradict each other or conflict. Like I said, we’ll have another example here coming up pretty quickly in chapter seven. And so the four Gospels are giving us this picture of Jesus from different perspectives. That gives us sort of a more well-rounded depiction of who Jesus is and what he did during his earthly life.

So that said, of course, with the usual caveat, if you want to hear my big, long introduction that’s on the website. It’s actually on two websites now, so you can listen to that again and hear my big, long introduction on Luke. But that will suffice, I think, to get us caught up for now. So unless anybody has any questions before we start, we’ll go ahead and start in chapter seven, verse one.

Now when He concluded all His sayings in the hearing of the people, He entered Capernaum.

This is presented, now, Jesus finishes his sermon, his Sermon on the Plain. He’s done speaking. So now he’s going into the city of Capernaum. As we mentioned before, Capernaum is sort of the major city near the Sea of Galilee in Galilee that a lot of Jesus ministry so far has been revolving around. He’s been going around to the villages, we talked about how those villages are sort of temporary villages, that they aren’t necessarily the same place every year because they’re peasant villages. These are places where the peasants are living as they travel from place to place to participate in the harvest, whatever harvest is going on at that time or whatever other labor they’re doing to support themselves, they have to kind of move around. And Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, is one of those villages and this is why you’ll sometimes hear people say, “Well, we don’t have any archeological evidence that Nazareth existed.” Well, you wouldn’t really expect it because this is not a city. There are not permanent buildings built with stone there, right? This is a set of essentially little shacks where workmen, mostly farm labor, but workmen live.

So Capernaum, however, is a city. It has permanent buildings, permanent houses, as we saw. St. Peter’s mother-in-law has a house there. Whether that belonged to her, and sort of his family stayed there because she was widowed. Whether that belonged to him, we’ve seen he owns his own fishing boat, which makes him better off than the average peasant, which isn’t saying much. He at least has a permanent place to stay in a city and he at least owns his own boat, so he’s not sort of a migrant worker.

This has been sort of the home base, Jesus goes and he preaches in the villages at their synagogues. And again, when we hear preaching in the synagogue, this is going to be important as we go forward to the Book of Acts, St. Paul is going to go and preach in synagogues in all these cities. We may be thinking of a modern American synagogue like the two we have here in town. That’s a free-standing building and it’s beautiful and it’s sort of the Jewish version of a church building. And that’s not what synagogues were at this time in history. Synagogues at this time in history, a lot of times were just somebody Jewish’s house, basically a room in the house. Some areas with very large Jewish communities like Alexandria and a couple of other places in Egypt, there will be places where there were devoted buildings at this time already in history, but those were rare.

So, when we’re talking about a synagogue, especially in a village like Nazareth or something, we’re talking about basically someone volunteering their room to be the place where everyone gathers for worship. And this is going to be the case in many of the Roman cities that St Paul’s going to visit too, it’s basically going to be in the home of someone who’s well off, other than the very large cities which may have a dedicated building that’s been donated. And we’ll talk more about that when we get there. But this is important, when we see how St Paul establishes churches, you’re going to hear that these churches are basically meeting in people’s homes and where they got that idea, that’s not sort of a new idea. This is sort of normal for the Jewish community in a lot of these smaller towns and villages and cities. And so, when St Paul starts bringing together Christian communities, they just sort of follow the same model, do the same thing.

And of course, because Christianity becomes persecuted, we’re not going to see really free-standing church buildings that are just churches, that’s all they are, until about the middle of the third century, in any kind of real numbers, we’re going to be going with people’s houses. Even if it’s a house that someone donated to be a church, it’s still going to be a house until about the middle of the third century.

So verse two:

†And a certain centurion’s servant, who was dear to him, was sick and ready to die.

So we’ve got a Roman centurion. Roman centurion isn’t a general. Now we’re going to find out this centurion is a little bit special, but of course he’s a leader of 100, so he’s basically the equivalent of probably a second lieutenant in today’s military in terms of the Roman legions. So he’s sort of a low level officer. He’s not a tribune or something higher up in the structure, but he has an officer’s rank. He’s well to do, he’s well situated, but he’s also Roman. So Romans, of course, are the enemy as far as the Jewish people are concerned, they’re not just Gentiles. I mean, just being Gentiles makes them kind of unclean and undesirable, but these are the particular Gentiles who are oppressing them.

And he has a servant. Servant is a nice way of putting it, we’re basically talking about a slave, and we’ve talked about slavery of the Roman Empire before, it’s not the same as slavery in the United States before the Civil War in the sense that most slaves in the Roman Empire were effectively indentured servants. They were there under a contract or because they owed a debt and they were sort of working it off. Now, sometimes that debt was astronomical. So realistically, they were never going to work it off, and their kids were not going to work it off. Their kids were going to be slaves, too, and their kids after them. But there was at least the idea. And so while technically a slave was still a person’s property in some respects, it was not the same as the Atlantic slave trade, where human beings, based on their race and ethnicity were treated like animals or worse than animals. They were, for the Roman mindset, sort of the lowest class of humans, but they were still a human. And there were people who would make it out the other side of slavery, who would be free, who would work their way up in society, sometimes through the military, sometimes through other means. That was not impossible, whereas the antebellum South, that was impossible. That was not going to happen. So it was not beyond the realm of possibility that over a few generations, especially through military service, or if you just manage to impress your master, that you might gain your freedom and be able to move out of slavery.

Now, all that applies to slaves who were male. To be honest here about the culture, slaves who were female were pretty much stuck as slaves because women had no independent social mobility. The only way a woman could really move up in society in the Roman Empire was by marrying up through her husband. And if you’re a female slave, nobody’s going to marry you, except another slave. So the odds of you ever getting out of slavery additionally, it does have to be stated that it was completely acceptable in Roman culture for someone who had slaves to use those slaves sexually. They were not embarrassed of that. That was not frowned upon. When you see the term concubine, that’s what it’s referring to, it’s a female slave who the owner uses sexually. And again, that was common. And in the Roman Empire, that was common even with slaves who are children. And again, that was considered socially acceptable, mainly through the Greeks, through Greek culture, but that was considered socially acceptable at the time of the Roman Empire.

The reason I say all that is, and this is a little bit of a digression, but especially some of our atheist friends in our modern American culture don’t realize how indebted they are to Christianity. They’ll go on and on about how Christianity hates women and Christianity oppresses people, and by their modern standard, maybe they could make some argument. But compared to what came before Christianity, it’s night and day. It’s night and day. The idea that it was unacceptable for a man to have any kind of sexual relations with someone who wasn’t his spouse, that Christianity immediately started teaching, and that polygamy was not acceptable to boot, was crazy. As far as Romans were concerned. It was just a crazy idea. I’ve never met an atheist again who doesn’t take that kind of thing for granted or that children should be protected from sexual predators. But all of that came through Christianity. The end of slavery came through Christianity. All of this came through Christianity. And so people now, for whatever reason, may want to reject Christianity and then hold on to big chunks of Christian morality. But the truth is that morality that we all take for granted really came into the world through Christianity. And Christianity, even the reason I say Christianity and not the Judeo-Christian tradition is Christianity even tightened the rules from Judaism. Polygamy, for example, was practiced by Jewish people well into the 11th century.

So the whole idea that marriage should be, that you hear all the time now, marriage should be between one man and one woman. That whole idea is purely a Christian idea and comes from what we’ll read from, well, something we’ve already read that Christ said when talking about divorce, but also from what we’re going to see St. Paul says in Ephesians. So we have to remember when we’re reading this, a lot of times our translations couch some of this stuff, so we hear there’s a centurion and he has a servant. We think, “Oh, it’s a guy in the military and he has a maid”, right? That’s not how things were then.

But so this centurion slave, who he has some affection toward, is sick and about to die.

So when he heard about Jesus, he sent elders of the Jews to him, pleading with him to come and heal his servant.

There’s a couple of interesting things here. First of all, the centurion knows a lot of Jewish people, you may say. Well, he lived in Judea. Of course, he knows Jewish people. Again, he’s a Roman. So Romans and Jews did not socialize with each other. They didn’t go to the same parties, they didn’t have the same circle of friends, right? So the fact that he knows Jewish people and they know him is surprising. But also notice he knows enough about Jewish people and their customs that he doesn’t go and approach Jesus himself. He says, “Well, okay. Jesus is Judean, right? I’m a Gentile, I’m unclean. He’s not going to want to… So, I’ll talk to my Jewish friends and get them to go talk to him.”

And when they came to Jesus, they begged Him earnestly, saying that the one for whom He should do this was deserving, “for he loves our nation, and has built us a synagogue.”

So he’s one of those people who has endowed a synagogue, right? We’re in Capernaum now. We’re in the city, so they have a more permanent synagogue structure. And he’s endowed it. We know this was common because in some of the bigger Roman cities like Corinth and Ephesus, we found archeologically these sort of stones that were out in front of the synagogue that have these lists of names of the people who endowed it, paid for the building, basically, and paid the taxes. And a lot of the names are not Jewish names.

So you may wonder, why would somebody do that? There’s a couple of factors. The first one is in Roman culture, again, this gets into their sense of ethics is very different than our sense of ethics. Our sense of ethics coming from Christianity. Their sense of ethics was based upon the concept of excellence. So when they talked about being a good person, they didn’t mean being a good person as opposed to being an evil person. When they talked about being a good person, they meant being good at being a person, in the same way that we would say somebody is good at playing football or good at playing the violin, they viewed ethics and doing good in that same kind of sense.

Interlocutor: A winner rather than a loser.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a winner, rather than a loser. And not only that, but also just that there were certain qualities that human beings had that set them apart from animals and that kind of thing, and being excellent at those things. And their list of those things, the Roman list of those things would have been art, music, culture, philosophy, right? These are the kind of things that we could do that a dog or cat can’t do or in their mind, a slave can’t do but aren’t capable of doing. And so if we become excellent at these things, we become well educated. Well-rounded, that means we are a good human being. So that was sort of your goal.

And one of those virtues that they pursued was called magnificence, and that’s how it’s usually translated into English. And that’s sort of the idea that we now have in our culture of being a philanthropist. We coined the term philanthropist that in Greek means someone who loves humanity, right? So they go and they’ll endow hospitals and endow art exhibits and that kind of thing. And they kind of have this high profile and they have a lot of money and they use it for the benefit of everyone. So that was considered one of the virtues that made you a good person.

And one of the things you would endow in the Roman world was temples, because we have in our head, this is another thing we need to get past in our head we have this sort of separation of church and state, even if we’re someone who decries the idea of the separation of church and state, it’s really built into our thinking that we think about there’s the church over here, there’s religion over here, then there’s the government over here, right? There’s sort of our civic life, then our political life. And then over here, there’s our religious and spiritual life. There was no separation like that in the ancient world. So the temples in a city to the gods were seen the way we would see like the library, the power company. These are sort of part of the life of the community because for them, sort of the gods and the rituals and all of that were part of their life as a city, their life as a community. They didn’t make that distinction of. “Okay, this is religion and this is…”. And this is part of why Christians would ultimately be persecuted. Because when Christians refuse to participate in the religious aspects of Roman life, the Romans looked at that as, “you guys are some kind of anarchist or something, like you’re refusing to participate in our civic life, there’s something wrong with you.”

Sort of like if somebody in our modern culture cut themselves off from the power grid and the water company and refused to pay property taxes, said “The government is evil, so I’m not going to do any of this”. We all kind of look at them and go, “That guy’s a little off, right? That guy’s a little fringy.” Well, it’s the same kind of thing with Christians. It’s sort of like, “We’re all having this festival, we’re all having this parade, and they’re all saying it’s evil and they won’t participate. Something not right.” This means that if I go and I help beautify or help build the temple to Athena or the temple to Artemis or whatever, I’m doing that for the public. I’m doing that for the city. This is a facility that everyone in our community is going to use.

Well, the Jewish equivalent of that is the synagogue, because they only have the one temple in Jerusalem, but they have these gathering places. So, in places with a large Jewish community, in addition to giving somebody to this temple over here and this temple over there and that temple over there, if there’s this large Jewish community, you show how magnificent you are by also throwing some money over here to the synagogue. So that’s one piece of why he would do it. Secondly, I mentioned this before, I think, when we were going through the Gospel of Matthew, but there was at this time in history, sort of a Jewish fad amongst Romans. They were very intrigued by Judaism for several reasons.

Number one, because it was ancient, sort of this ancient tradition that’s foreign to their ancient tradition. They had the same kind of fascination with, like, the Egyptians, their culture, their society, because they knew it was ancient; it seemed kind of ancient and strange. So there was that level of fascination, and again, the Jews already, not to the extent that the Christians would later, but the Jews already sort of stood apart from the Gentiles. They sort of had this independent tradition, so that made it kind of interesting.

But the thing they found most interesting about Judaism was the fact that Judaism didn’t use idols, didn’t use images, because every form of paganism they knew of, by paganism, I just mean religions other than Judaism and Christianity really, at this point in history, used statuary images of the gods. And we’ve talked before about the fact that they believed that because the gods were spirits, they don’t have bodies, so for me to interact with them, that spirit needs a body to inhabit. And they did that in one of two ways, either through possessing a human being, which, of course, the Bible takes a different view of than they did, but they viewed it positively, the oracle at Delphi was supposed to be possessed by Apollo, people would go there to talk to Apollo and get advice from Apollo. So it would possess a human or it would possess a statue. So you make a statue body. And so if I go to the Temple of Athena, there’s this huge statue of Athena. It’s not just a statue, right? I’m not worshipping a big block of marble. The idea is that when they’re offering the sacrifices of that kind of thing, Athena comes and is in that statute, so I can go there and interact with her and make requests and whatever else. That’s how they view religion.

So the Jews? No statuary. And even though they didn’t have any in their synagogues, the Romans were absolutely sure that they must have something in the Temple, especially because they weren’t allowed to go in there, which just tantalized them more. They couldn’t even get near it, according to the Gentiles, is way out, right? But they’ve heard, okay, if you go inside, all the priests could go in here. And then there’s the curtain, and behind the curtain, only the high priest could go. One day a year, they’re just like, “What’s back there? I got to know!”

Well, when the Roman General Pompeii came and conquered Judea and annexed it to the Roman Empire, he barged into the Temple and went back behind the curtain, and there was nothing there, just a big empty space, because the Ark of the Covenant was already gone, which blew his mind. He wrote about it; it just blew his mind that there was nothing there.

So the phrase that the Romans use to talk about the Jews of their worship is that they worship sola mentes, only in their mind, only with their mind. And so that to them said, wow, this is like a philosophical religion. This is better than paganism. They don’t have these material things that we use. They’re operating on this higher level so that created this big fascination with Judaism.

Now, fascination is one thing, getting circumcised is another. So for the most part, these Romans did not actually become Jewish, because again, there’s not a separation between church and state. It wasn’t like now where if you decide I’m going to become Orthodox, you go through a process and you become an Orthodox Christian, right? It wasn’t just change religion. If you quote/unquote “change religion”, you were changing ethnicity. You are ceasing being a Roman and becoming a Jew. And most Romans, especially Romans who had citizenship like a centurion, were not going to give up all the benefits of being a Roman citizen and all of this in order to become a Jew.

So, they stayed around the fringes, sort of the fringes of the Jewish world. They were interested, they were fascinated, they’d have friends, they engage in dialogue. They might even, on certain holy days, be spectators and be kind of interested, and read, do a lot of reading of rabbis and that kind of thing, but they never fully came in. And these people are often referred to as we’ll see more going forward, especially in the Book of Acts, as proselytes or “Godfearers”. Proselyte was a term for someone who’s sort of in the conversion process, even though most of these people never actually converted. Godfearer was just that, these are people who have some kind of respect for Israel’s God.

And a lot of St. Paul’s early converts. When we read that St. Paul has all these Gentile converts, this is mostly where he’s getting them from, this group of people who they have a knowledge of the Old Testament because they’ve read it in Greek, it’s available in Greek translation. They’re sort of aware of Jewish customs. They’re intrigued by it. St. Paul comes to them, tells them about Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and then says, guess what? You don’t have to get circumcised, you don’t have to follow the food laws, you don’t have to do all those Jewish things that were a barrier to you. And that’s why that becomes such a big crisis in the early church, because the Gentiles love that and start converting en masse to Christianity. But a lot of the Jews, even Jewish Christians, are looking at that, going, “Wait a second, why are we lowering the bar? Who are these people you’re just taking in? I don’t know about this.”

So we’ll see that conflict play out in the Book of Acts and in St Paul’s epistles, but this is also what gets a lot of the Jews mad at St. Paul, because these are the people who have been endowing their synagogues. These are the people who have been supporting their communities, and now all of a sudden they’re Christians and they don’t really care about the non-Christian Jewish community anymore. So that’s kind of hitting them where it hurts. So this is why we’re going to see as St. Paul goes around and starts converting these people, the non-Christian Jews are going to start running St. Paul out of town on a rail, because this is hitting them in their pocketbooks. This is affecting their community in a negative way, losing these folks.

Interlocutor: We must remember that Paul claimed his Roman citizenship so that he could go and appeal before Caesar and argue for Christianity. Now today when we talk about the Godfearers, it kind of reminded me of Messianic Jews. They’re not really Jewish, most of them are Gentiles out of a Christian background, so they say we are Christian and we are Jewish. And according to some of the rabbis that I know, they say, “No, you’re either a Jew or you’re a Christian” and that’s sort of how I look what you were saying about the Godfearers. The Romans really, to understand your enemy, Jew if you will, or whoever they fight against, they must have their culture. Perhaps in knowing that culture, they accept it because there are miracles happening through all of where Jesus went. And all of society was affected from the poor to the elite. And here is somebody being healed who is part of the elite.

Fr. Stephen: I think that’s kind of a useful parallel to Messianic Judaism and to some other movements in Evangelicalism in the sense of understanding that kind of fascination with Judaism. And that actually happens at several points in Christian history. For example, St. John Chrysostom did a series of sermons against the Judaizers because at the time he was preaching an Antioch. The synagogue was actually still bigger than the church in terms of number of members and size. And because Christianity was still a relatively, quote/unquote “new religion”. We know it was about almost 400 years old at that point.

But for the perspective of when it became legal in the Roman Empire, we’re talking about 50, 60 years old. There were a lot of people who had recently become Christians who were sort of, again, fascinated by the ancient traditions of Judaism and that’s carried over today to a lot of our evangelical friends.

And I would argue this is because in a lot of ways, especially American evangelical Protestantism, has kind of cut itself off from the older Christian tradition. They see a lot of the Christian tradition as being Roman Catholic and bad. They don’t want vestments. They don’t want historic liturgy. Sacraments are kind of creepy and kind of distance yourself from historic Christianity in that way. Once you do that, all of a sudden the Jewish traditions and the high priest vestments and the temple practices and all those things and the Jewish holiday, right? We’re not going to celebrate the holidays of the Christian year because that’s Roman Catholic and bad. But we get all excited, We start having Passover seders and we start having stuff for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah and stuff in Christian churches because having distance themselves from the Christian tradition, they want this sense of tradition still. And the Jewish tradition looks really… so it is a similar kind of phenomenon where they’re, of course, pagans, not Christians, but where Judaism just looks really attractive and interesting. Nobody’s going to go whole hog and convert, right? There aren’t Evangelical Christians converting to Orthodox Judaism either, at least not en masse, but there’s that fascination there and so they sort of hover around the fringes of that community.

Interlocutor: At this time, was the Ark still in the temple?

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s long gone. So, remember, the Ark disappeared at some point before the first temple was destroyed in 586 BC. So this is the second temple as it’s been expanded by Herod. So this temple has never seen the Ark.

Interlocutor: So what happened?

Fr. Stephen: I would argue that our Ethiopian brothers and sisters probably have it. I don’t know that. I think all of the legend and story as to how it got there is necessarily 100% historically, literally accurate. But I think it’s there, and I think that it being there is the origin of those stories. So that’s where I think… they make the best case to having it. But that’s a big digression, so I won’t totally go into detail on that. Now, there have been a couple of good books about it that came to a similar conclusion. The last thing I watched on the History Channel about the Ark of the Covenant said aliens built it. Yeah, I’d pass on that. Pretty sure aliens weren’t involved.

So, this centurion is one of those Godfearers; he’s one of those people who has endowed and supported the synagogue. And so, he sends these people from the synagogue to pray them to Jesus to vouch for. Right. We need you to heal this Roman centurion slave. “Wait, this is a good one”. So they sort of vouched for him.

Then Jesus went with them. And when He was already not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to Him, saying to Him, “Lord, do not trouble Yourself, for I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof. Therefore I did not even think myself worthy to come to You. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man placed under authority, having soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

So he sends word to tell Jesus he doesn’t have to come, not because something’s already happened to the slave, but because why?

Interlocutor: He has authority.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s part two. Part one is he respects Jesus, because what would it mean if Jesus as a Jewish person, went into a Roman house? He’d be unclean. And he says, “That’s why I didn’t even come to you.” It’s because he respects him. This may not impress how unusual this is, but being a Roman centurion, if he wanted to, he could have walked up to Jesus and said, “You get to my house now,” and if Jesus said no, he could have had him executed, literally.

So the fact that, number one, he sent people to vouch for him and persuade Him, and then two, that he shows them this respect is a huge thing socially and culturally. Jesus is essentially a homeless peasant. The centurion is a wealthy landed Roman citizen in the Roman military. Rather than just ordering Jesus to do what he wants them to do, he pays him this respect. And then secondly, not only does he understand the concept of authority, but he’s saying that Jesus has this authority. What is he saying that Jesus has the authority to do here? To order around disease the way he orders around soldiers. Who could do that?

Notice again, we’ve seen this already, I know it’s been a while since our last one, we’ve seen this already in St. Luke’s Gospel, that he has Jesus healing and doing these things by speaking all the time. Some of the other Gospels, they’ll just talk about Jesus healing people. Or he’ll say he touches them and they’re healed. Or they touch Jesus and they’re healed. But with Luke, he sort of commands diseases and commands demons to come out of people and commands things that he speaks and things happen, right?

We talked before about how that’s very much connecting it to the Old Testament idea of God’s word. God creates by speaking. He says something and it happens. And it’s been a long time since we went through Genesis, but that’s not what you find in other creation accounts from the time that Moses would have put together Genesis 1 and 2, you don’t even find the gods sort of making things right, like on a pottery wheel or something, fashioning things. There’s usually some kind of war, right? There’s usually some kind of war between the gods and then something happens that accidentally the world gets created. The Babylonians, you’ve got two dragons getting a fight and one of them dies and the one that dies becomes the earth. You get this sort of thing, and then one of the other gods cuts that dragon open and the blood comes out and the blood turns into people. That’s the kind of thing you get in the other creation accounts.

Interlocutor: Like video games.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They didn’t need them. They had religion.

So the idea that God creates through his word by speaking, it’s a very different concept of who God is and how he operates. And so when St. Luke sets up Jesus is doing these things by speaking, it’s not that Jesus comes and heals the disease. That’s what he does. But it’s not presented just as healing disease. It’s presented as you can order this disease to leave, and it will leave. You could speak and it will happen. This centurion being a Godfearer, and the Torah being available in Greek, it’s pretty clear here what the centurion is saying. And as we read about prophets in the Old Testament doing a lot of miracles, but then you noticed something about when the prophets did a miracle, let’s talk about one of the most fantastic ones: Elijah raised the widow of Zarephath’s son from the dead. Raising the dead is pretty much as big as you get miracle-wise. But do you remember what Elijah did? Did Elijah walk up and say, “Hey, kid, get up, be alive?”

Interlocutor: He called upon the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: He called upon the Lord. He prayed and asked the Lord to hear his prayer and raise the boy from the dead. So there’s a fundamental difference here in what St. Luke is showing us of how Jesus heals and how Jesus does miracles and how a prophet heals and does miracles. And the centurion here is acknowledging that difference.

So this is, again, we’ve talked about this before, but a big part of the way St. Luke presents to us who Jesus is by what Jesus does, he shows us Jesus doing things that God does, and he shows us Jesus doing things that human beings do. And so while St. Luke doesn’t sit there and spell out that Jesus is God and man in all of our theology, he’s presenting that to us by showing us Jesus doing both things. We see Jesus commanding demons and they obey him. And then we see Jesus praying to his father. We see both pictures. And so as I’ve said before, our later theology that Jesus is both God and man, that Jesus has two natures, is a way of explaining what St. Luke is telling us. It’s not making up a new theology. It’s not coming up with a new idea. It’s coming up with something to explain the fact that St. Luke shows us Jesus doing God things and Jesus doing human things at the same time interchangeably. So we can’t just look at St. Luke’s Gospel and say, “Okay, well, Jesus is God. He’s just disguised as a man” because he does these very human things. The same time, we can’t look at St. Luke’s Gospel and say, “Well, Jesus is a great prophet, he’s some great religious figure” because he does things, only God does. So the only way to explain it, if we didn’t already have the Council of Chalcedon, if we didn’t already have the idea that Jesus has two natures, human and divine, we’d have to come up with it to explain what St. Luke is doing.

Interlocutor: Now that we know that the centurion believes that Jesus can do this, what is the relationship, do we know, of the other Roman officers to this centurion? I wonder how that would affect that camaraderie, that command, that intelligence formation of saying, “Wait a minute, we have a Roman centurion here, who’s not quite all Roman because he called this guy Jesus, a Jew, to come and take care of…”

Fr. Stephen: Requested. He didn’t just send for him, he requested.

Interlocutor: Right, he requested. If you were the Roman commander, I mean what would you think? If he requested this Jew to make things happen, is this centurion really a true Roman?

Fr. Stephen: We don’t have obviously any direct knowledge of it. Now, we do know, obviously, there’s a whole lot of Christian saints, especially from the early centuries, who are in the Roman military, and they’re almost all martyrs. So something very similar to that idea, the idea that somehow they’ve betrayed their allegiance to Rome, does come to be the understanding over time,

Interlocutor: Sort of like what you said earlier about the Jews, and “Hey what are you doing now, you’re messing this up.”

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Interlocutor: Yeah that’s what I’m saying, because what is he doing associating with the enemy, now look at the rebellion of the Maccabees, now you’re associating with the enemy, and you command 100 soldiers, can I trust you on my right or left flank? I don’t think so.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It probably hasn’t gotten to that level yet, but it will. As I said.

Interlocutor: Two things. Luke is writing to his friend and promising he’ll give him the facts, that’s one. But is he not a physician and he’s writing matter of fact, look, I want to find out how this man heals also, and here is the evidence, and I find Luke out of the other three Gospels to be the most accurate, the most profound the most direct, this is it, this is what I found as a physician. If he weren’t a physician, a historian, a lawyer that type of training for a scientist.

Fr. Stephen: There weren’t really scientists at this point in history.

Interlocutor: He’s really saying this is what happened, I’m telling you this is what I know, or are we discovering something else.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there are a couple of things there and that Luke does. As we mentioned before, he writes as a historian. His Greek is very similar to Thucydides, so he’s writing in a historical manner. As somebody who… “I went and researched this”, and he said that at the beginning of the Gospel, “I went and researched this. Here’s the account of what happened.” He also does we’ve seen this already and we’ll see this continuing. He describes Jesus’s healings in addition to the way I was just saying a little differently in that he is much more specific, and I’ve pointed this out a couple of times, he’s much more specific about diseases and disorders and that kind of thing. And as we saw, he makes a very clear distinction between demonic possession and illness. And that would come from his background as a physician and his experience with these kind of things, where he had a little more understanding of that than St. Matthew, who had been a tax collector, or St. Mark, who, as far as we know, was mostly uneducated.

So, you get that idea that’s come through. You can see his education, both his writing style and in the way he talks about, particularly, disease.

Interlocutor: Was Theophilus a patron, kind of like the centurion?

Fr Stephen: Theophilus was St Luke’s literary patron in the sense that he would have sponsored the work of the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts. Yeah, he was a patron, but he was endowing a different thing.

Interlocutor: Does his name mean he loved a god, or something like that?

Fr Stephen: It can. To get at what it really originally would have meant, we would have to know whether that’s a Christian name or a pagan name. It’s Greek, but we don’t know for sure which it is. So it could mean just like “divine friend” or it could mean “friend of God”, but we’re not totally sure of his circumstances of Theophilus’s birth to know which way that would have gone.

†When Jesus heard these things, He marveled at him, and turned around and said to the crowd that followed Him, “I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!”

So Jesus appreciates what we were just saying. Why is this faith so great? Why is this faith so impressive? Well, because he apparently is the only one so far who has really keyed in on who Jesus is. And he’s some Roman who isn’t the recipient of the Old Testament, who isn’t worshiping in a synagogue every week, who isn’t part of the Jewish community, who doesn’t have all these rituals that we’re supposed to point them to Christ.

And those who were sent, returning to the house, found the servant well who had been sick.

So, they go back and the person is already healed. I want to pause here a second to point out again, this is a place, this is the one I was mentioning in my non-introduction introduction. This is a place where we see a difference between Matthew and Luke. Remember the way St. Matthew presented the relationship between Christ coming to the Jews and then to the Gentiles? We had Christ during his ministry saying, “I came only for the lost sheep of the tribe of Israel.” And then at the end of his ministry, before his death, he starts telling parables, like the parable of the tenants, the man gives the vineyard to a group of tenants. They’re evil, they kill his messengers, they kill his son, and then the landowner comes in and wipes them out, drives them out of the land, and then the land is given to another group of tenants.

So, St. Matthew, pretty clearly, we saw, presents this idea that Jesus came to the people of Judea, to the Jewish people. They rejected him, and so the Gospel went to the Gentiles. That is not the perspective we’re getting from Luke. St. Luke, and we’ll see this again in Acts, does not have that paradigm. We’re only in chapter seven here, and who is the greatest example of faith we have so far? A Gentile, right? It’s not, “Okay, the Jews rejected me, so now I’m going to go to this centurion.” So St. Luke is presenting it as the Gentiles were always part of the plan. And we saw that in the Old Testament all the way through, starting after the Flood, Noah’s prophecy, he talked about Shem, who the Israelites were going to be descended from, and how God was going to bless Shem, etcetera, etcetera. Then he said, you’ll throw open your tents to descendants of Jason, whose descendants were the northern Europeans, whose descendants were the Gentiles.

So going all the way back to Genesis 8, we’ve got this prophecy, and then all the way through in Isaiah, everything was that the end game always included the Gentiles coming to worshiping God, because God is the God of the whole world, not just of one little country.

So, St. Luke is picking up on that element, saying, “No, Jesus came for everybody right from the start”. And so, when he gets into the Book of Acts and he starts talking about St. Paul going out to the Gentiles and preaching them the Gospel, what’s he saying? He’s saying, this isn’t some afterthought. This isn’t some weird idea St. Paul came up with, right? Paul got tired of getting stoned and flogged by Jews, and he said, “You know what? I’m going to go talk to them Romans. Maybe they’ll treat me better.” That’s not how it happened. That what St. Paul is doing, is continuing the work that Jesus started. Jesus starts this work in Galilee and then in Judea, and then St. Paul takes it to the rest of the world.

Now, the question is, is that a contradiction? Because there are plenty of people today who, again, are sort of critical of the Bible, who will present that as a contradiction. They will say that St. Matthew’s Gospel is antisemitic, ironic since he was Jewish, but still, they’ll say it’s antisemitic. Matthew hates Jews. Whereas St. Luke has a more cosmopolitan view of the Gospel because he hung out with St. Paul, and St. Paul was such a wonderful egalitarian guy.

But is that really a contradiction? The historical fact is, what happened? Jesus came to his people. Most of them, not all of them, I mean all of the apostles were Jewish, so not every Jewish person rejected Jesus. There’s 3000 Jewish people who become Christians on the day of Pentecost, right? So, not all of them, but a lot of them, and probably most of them don’t accept Jesus, and so then the Gospel goes to the Gentiles and the Gentiles become Christian en masse. That’s just the historical fact. That’s what happened.

So, since that’s what happened, and since St. Matthew is writing after that has happened, St. Matthew is writing probably in the 70s AD. The temple has been destroyed. The Jews have for the most part rejected Jesus. Temple has been destroyed. Gentiles are coming into the faith through St. Paul’s ministry. So he’s seen all this happen. So when he describes that as happening, what’s he really saying? He’s really saying that what happened was part of God’s plan. Once again, the Gentiles aren’t plan B. “Jesus really wanted to just save the Jews and just be their king. But no doggone it. They just wouldn’t let them. So Plan B, we’ll go to the Gentiles and see how that works out. Fortunately, that one worked out better.”

No. Matthew was saying, no, this was part of the plan. This is part of the plan. It’s part of what God was doing. What did we just say St. Luke is saying, by the way he presents it? That the Gentiles being included was always part of the plan. So, St. Matthew is focusing on how we got there, how we got to the Gentiles being included, which was the Jews, many of them, rejecting the gospel, whereas St. Luke is focusing on where we got; he’s focusing on the Gentiles accepting it. So those two things do not contradict each other. They do not contradict each other.

And the place we’ll see, when we get there, when we get to the Book of Romans, St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, specifically chapter nine, he’s trying to sort all this out. I shouldn’t say trying. He sorts this out pretty successfully in terms of explaining, “Okay, if the Gentiles coming in was always part of the end game, was always part of the plan, why not all the Jews? Why did most of the Jews reject Christ?” And to explain that, not to go too far afield here before we get to the Book of Romans, but to explain that he uses the example of Jacob and Esau. For God to bless Jacob, to bless Jacob and bring the nation of Israel out of him, right? Because his twelve sons are the fathers of the twelve tribes. For him to bless Jacob, what happened? Esau lost his birthright. Remember, Esau was the older son. Esau got cut off. Esau was faithless. And it had the result that God blessed Jacob. But then what St. Paul wants to remind us of is the end of that story, which a lot of times we forget. The end of that story was that Jacob and Esau were reconciled, remember? Jacob ended up saying to “Esau seeing you is like seeing God with the joy that this forgiveness brings me”. And so, St. Paul’s ultimately going to say in Romans eleven, Israel, yes, has been cut off now so that God could bless the Gentiles. But how much greater will the blessing be someday when Israel returns. Just like with Esau, the fact that they’re cut off for a time doesn’t mean God is done with them.

But so, it’s important to talk about this now. And the reason I did digress as much as I did is it’s important that we see this theme running through St. Luke’s Gospel. That he’s very concerned to say the Gentiles are not an afterthought, they’re not a plan B. Just as God is the God of the whole earth and the creator of every person, not just the creator of Israelites and the God of this little strip of land in Palestine, but of the whole world. The same way Jesus comes not just for people, but for the whole world, including the centurion and his slave.