Father Stephen De Young: And when we get started here in just a minute, we’re right in the middle of Luke, chapter eight. When we start here in just a minute, we’re starting with verse 16.

So to get us back up to speed because it’s been a little bit since we got together. And of course, once again, if you want to hear my whole introduction to Luke, you can go listen to that in the first Bible study on the website. And here me talk to your heart’s content.

But just to sort of quickly catch us up, we’re basically right in the middle of Jesus’s teaching ministry in Galilee. As we said, he’s been traveling to various villages, that Capernaum is sort of the major city there that’s on the Sea of Galilee. That’s where Peter lived. That’s where his mother-in-law lived. That’s where his family was. That’s sort of the major settled city. And then we talked about how there were sort of all these villages in Galilee that would sort of pop up and disappear as the harvest happened and as various sort of day laborers, essentially the peasants, were working as day laborers doing this or that or the other, following the harvests around. And so those villages would sort of pop up and disappear throughout that area.

And so we’ve seen Jesus with his disciples, sort of using Capernaum as a home base, returning there relatively frequently and then going out and preaching in the villages and then ending up coming back to Capernaum. That’s sort of the pattern we’ve seen.

And where we left off last time, Jesus is right in the middle of teaching. He has just told the parable of the sower, the sower who went up to sow the seeds. He talked about the four seeds, the four types of ground, and the four things that happened to them. And after Jesus told that parable, of course, he explained that parable. And we talked last time about how St. Luke, recording that for us in his Gospel, sort of gives us a key. He says, “Okay, here’s how to interpret a parable.” So now when we hear other parables and other teachings of Jesus, we sort of have something to go by in terms of how we ought to go about interpreting them. Because you can go off on tangents otherwise.

One of the best examples of that, I think, is if you read medieval Western commentaries on when Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed”. And of course, we read that before. If you read that in context, he’s referring to about how it’s a very small seed, but it grows a big tree, so he’s saying the kingdom of God starts out small but grows into this majestic thing. But in the Middle Ages, they decided to do a lot of botanical research into mustard seeds and mustard trees and then read all of that into the kingdom of God. So you’ll find comments on what the leaves of a mustard tree are like, and you read about they’ll say, “Oh, if you chew one, it’s bitter, and the cross was bitter.” They do sort of go off on all these odd tangents, right? And so by giving us an example, we get the idea of, okay, Jesus is telling these stories with sort of one point he’s trying to get across and that they’re sort of told as an allegory where the different things in the parable represent things, but they just kind of represent one thing, right?

We’re not supposed to go off on these tangents because there’s usually a fairly simple point that Jesus is trying to get across, and he’s using this story because he’s talking to people who are farmers, day laborers, harvesting, fishermen. And so we see that the analogies he tends to use have to do with farming, fishing, day to day life, so that he could explain sort of deep theological points in a way that they’ll understand by connecting it to what they do every day.

And so, the intent was not to cause us to go and research mustard trees or planting practices in first century Palestine in order to understand the parable of the sower, we’re just to read it and understand the point that Jesus is attempting to make as close as we can to the way that people originally would have heard it.

So now, unless there’s any questions, let’s start it here in verse 16:

†“No one, when he has lit a lamp, covers it with a vessel or puts it under a bed, but sets it on a lampstand, that those who enter may see the light.

So this is one of those things that’s sort of obvious, right? You don’t turn on a flashlight and then flip over a frying pan on top of it, or turn on a flashlight and roll it under your bed, right? Because kind of defeats the purpose, right? And at this time, too, this would seem especially silly because, again, we’re dealing with poor people. Lamp oil was not free. There was not a government lamp oil program. You had to go and pay for your lamp oil. So you are not going to waste lamp oil that you had paid for by burning it underneath your bed or under a basket. This would be ridiculous. Rather, you’re lighting a lamp so that people can see. Verse 17:

For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light. Therefore take heed how you hear. For whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.”

Okay, so what’s he talking about? Well, he’s continuing from that parable of the sower when the seed is planted, because what he ultimately gets to is talking about what you hear. He’s teaching these people. They are hearing his teaching, and the question is, what are they going to do with it? What are they going to do with it?

And so, he’s making the point just like with a lamp, if you’re going to light a lamp, you’re doing it so that people will see… Jesus isn’t preaching to hear Himself talk. I sometimes talk to hear myself talk because I just like talking. So if people will listen to me, I will just continue to talk. But Jesus is not talking just to talk, right? He’s not telling these people these things to get the golf clap, “Oh, that was very good. That was a great story”. That’s not what he’s going for. Jesus is telling them this for a reason. You light a lamp for a reason. And so what he means by what is hidden will be revealed is that there’s going to be accountability down the road. He’s telling them this for a reason, and they’re going to have to give an account later on for what they did, with what they heard. What they did with what they learned, whether they heard it and then hid it, right? Heard it and then did nothing with it, ignored it, forgot about it, gave the golf clap, and then didn’t do anything, or whether they followed through with what Jesus intended. So, the person who has, the one who really hears, the person who has is the one who really hears, to him more will be given. So what Jesus is saying is, if we’re seeking understanding, for seeking his wisdom, if we’re trying to understand His Word and put it into practice, that that is going to be rewarded by Him.

St. Paul will say later, “he who comes to God must believe that He exists” and that “He’s a rewarder of those who earnestly seek Him.” People don’t struggle and strive to come to Christ, and he says, “You smell funny to me, buzz off. I just don’t like you.” What Jesus is telling us here is if we’re pursuing Him, if we’re working and we’re trying to put into practice what he has said, that that will be rewarded and that he will give us more. And then what do we need to do with that more that we’re given? We need to put that into practice. We need to put that into practice.

This isn’t more in the sense of, “Well, okay, Jesus told me to do this, so if I do this and be good, he’s going to give me money or a better job or a nice car or a nice house.” This is if we tried to put into practice what we’ve received from God, he’ll give us more understanding, more knowledge of Him. He’ll draw closer to us, and then we’ll be responsible for that. We’ll be responsible to put that into practice.

And so, Jesus is setting out the way of salvation that he’s preaching as this sort of continual process of continuing to draw closer to God, continuing to work out and grow an understanding in these things.

And then the flip side of that is to the person who does not have meaning, the person who’s not really hearing, you could parrot back what somebody said without really hearing it right? You can golf clap without really hearing. If you’re like me, your wife can have extended conversations with you and you can kind of go “uh-huh, uh-huh” and not really have processed a word of it, because you’re doing something else, you’re focused on something else. Well, we’re just as capable of doing that with Christ, of sitting there while he’s communicating something to us, while we’re reading the Scriptures, while we’re hearing the Scriptures, while we’re hearing a sermon and going “Uh-huh, amen”, and not hearing a word of it, because we’re concerned with other things. There’s other things we’re more concerned about.

And if that’s us, then what Jesus promises us here is even that, that we seem to have, because we don’t really have it, we haven’t really heard it then. But even what we seem to have will be taken away ultimately. So Jesus is here adding to what he said in the parable of the sower, when obviously we all want to be the seed that fell in the good earth and brought forth fruit, that’s what we want to be, He’s sort of telling us the stakes involved, that this isn’t just like, “Don’t you want to be good at what you do? Don’t you want to be the best? Don’t you want to excel?” That’s not just what Jesus is saying. Jesus is saying there’s going to be accountability for what we do, with what we’ve been given. And if we’re following and we’re putting into practice, what we’ve heard will receive more, we’ll understand more. If not, then even those things that it may look like we understand will be taken away from us.

Now, it’s important, I’ve mentioned several times, we tend to read, because obviously there are time limits. We can’t stand up in church and read an entire book of the Bible all the time, so we have to read pieces. But part of the problem with reading the Bible in pieces, sort of in chunks, is we kind of lose the flow. So these next few verses we’re about to read, it’s important to read them in the context that they’re in, because as we’ll see when we read them, these get pulled out of context a lot by some of our brothers and sisters and used sort of against what they’re trying to say.

Then His mother and brothers came to Him, and could not approach Him because of the crowd. †And it was told Him by some, who said, “Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see You.”

So Jesus is teaching all these people his mother that Theotokos, Mary, shows up, right? His brothers are with her. They want to come see Jesus, but there’s such a big crowd, they kind of can’t get up to the front to get to him. So some of the people sort of pass word up, tell Jesus his family is here.

But He answered and said to them, “My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it.”

Now, this is sometimes quoted as if Jesus is here sort of repudiating his mother and his brothers. As if he’s sort of saying “They’re nothing special, forget about them. I don’t care about them.” First of all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, if we’ve been reading St. Luke’s Gospel, St. Luke had an awful lot to say, especially about Jesus’s mother, right? And so for Luke to now all of a sudden say, “Oh, yeah, she’s not important,” after he spent a couple of good chapters showing us how important she is, that doesn’t make a lot of sense right off the bat, right? Plus, we expect to see a very different response from the crowd. If this was saying something negative, because what kind of rabbi would disown his family? What kind of rabbi would say, “Forget about my mother”, wouldn’t take care of his widowed mother, right?

So, this could be read again incorrectly if we take it out of context. It’s important that word there, my mother and my brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it, right? No, that’s of these, not a those. Those are two different words in Greek, utos and kinos. Two different words: “these” and “those”. So when they say, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside desiring to see you, right, he doesn’t say, no, those aren’t my mother and my brothers, right? He doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say that. He says, “My mother and my brothers are these who hear the Word of God and do it.” So what Jesus is saying here is he isn’t saying anything negative about his mother and his brothers. What he’s saying is, what makes them truly his family, what truly makes them his mother and his brothers, is that they hear the Word of God and do it.

What was he just talking about for the first part of this chapter, in the parable of the sower? The good seed falls in the good ground and brings forth fruit, right? It receives the Word of God and it brings forth fruit. And then talking about hiding the lamp, saying, you don’t receive the Word of God and hide it, you receive the Word of God and you do it. And so this comes at the end of that passage, right? Immediately after he says, what makes them my mother and my brothers is that these hear the word of God and do it. Hear the word of God and do it. So he’s giving an application at the end of his sermon, essentially. And therefore, those who are listening, if you hear the word of God and do it, you are a part of Jesus’s family as well, that’s the idea. It’s more important to hear the word of God and do it, that’s what makes you truly member Christ family than to just be genetically related to him.

Lots of people in the Old Testament were genetically related to Jesus. A lot of them did some really bad stuff, right. Being one of them, just the fact that you’re in the genealogy somewhere, if your life is full of wickedness, right? Jesus is descended from all the wicked kings of Judah, as well as the good kings of Judah. There are only a couple of good kings of Judah. He’s descended from them, too. But just being in Jesus’s line didn’t do them any good, unless they heard God’s word through the prophets and then did it and then put it into practice.

Interlocutor: I hate to bring this up, however, it does sound like a put-down of Jesus’s mother, because he’s saying to strangers, it’s a very complex, complicated sentence here, because I would read it in a negative way, being human, I would read it in a negative way. Because yes he’s just saying the ones here are my family. I’m just wondering did Jesus say it in another way or could it be said in another way so that the masses don’t understand it? I know I sound sort of like a heretic, but when we look at it, he’s talking he’s teaching, he’s not saying these are my friends, these are my disciples, he’s teaching to a group of people who may or may not know, who see that his mother and brothers and they’re being courteous to Jesus, and then Jesus comes back with this.

Fr. Stephen: There’s two things. I think it’s less ambiguous in the Greek than it is in English, depending on the English translation. But in Greek there is no negative particle anywhere in this sentence, there is no “no” or “not” or anything like that to indicate, like “not them”, but these over here. So the question then is who is the “these”? When he says, “These who hear my word and do it”, who is he pointing to, gesturing to, indicating? Now, some people will say that the “these” there are the disciples or someone else. That would work if he said family, right? Like if they said to him, “Jesus, your family is here”, and he said, “Who is my family? These”, points at his disciples, are my family who hear the word of God and do it. The problem is it’s mother and brothers, right? So if he pointed at the twelve disciples and said, these are my mother and my brothers, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? Which one of them would be his mother? It doesn’t really work. It doesn’t really work. So the way it’s phrased here, the only possible reference for the “these” is his mother and his brothers. And so I think it’s pretty clear, and again, we’re translating it into English, right? And partially in English, we want to read a “no” into there that isn’t there. There’s no “no” there. And so, what he’s qualifying is not who his family is. He’s qualifying what makes them truly his family. He’s making a qualification here, but he’s not qualifying who his mother and brothers are. He’s qualifying what makes them truly his mother and his brothers.

Interlocutor: It’s says “but”, is that in the original Greek, like he’s contrasting…?

Fr. Stephen: No. This is getting a little inside football, but there’s a particle in Greek and it’s pronounced “de”, and it can mean “and” or “but” or “then” it’s just sort of a way of introducing a sentence, right? This is going to get really inside football. Now it’s covering up a particle in Hebrew and Aramaic, there’s a particle, “wa”, And there’s a similar one in Arabic, actually, but in Hebrew and Aramaic that occurs at the beginning of almost every sentence in the Old Testament. And basically, you put that at the beginning of a sentence just to say that your story is continuing. And then when you get to the end of a story, you have sort of a hard break. When the new story starts, you have that particle at the beginning of every sentence. It just indicates that it’s continuing. And so what you find in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and then carrying through into the New Testament is that they tend to use “de” the same way, when the story is still going on. So you can translate that, but you could translate it and you could just say, and he answered and said to them, or then he answered and said to them.

It could be so he answered and said it’s just sort of saying, continuing the story. So, yeah, that’s the idea there. There’s not really a disjunction there. And again, the fact that he says “mother and brothers”, again, I don’t see another logical way to interpret that as referring to any other group of people. If you said brothers and sisters, even maybe that could be more ambiguous, right? Who are my brothers and my sisters? It’s all of you. Something like that. But mother and brothers makes it very specific.

So verse 22:

Now it happened, on a certain day, that He got into a boat with His disciples.

So here we’ve got a break. This is not continuing. This is a break in the story. It says on a certain day. That means some time has passed. That’s the conclusion of that teaching. So on a certain day, he got into a boat with his disciples.

And He said to them, “Let us cross over to the other side of the lake.”

The lake here being Lake Kinnereth or the Sea of Galilee.

And they launched out. But as they sailed He fell asleep. And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in jeopardy.

We read a version of this in St. Matthew’s Gospel. This one makes the situation even a little more dire. It’s not just that there’s a storm. There’s a storm, but they’re taking on water, right? The boat’s going down and Jesus is still asleep in the bottom of the boat.

And they came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!”

Okay, so they run down into the bottom of the boat where he sleep. We could yell, “We’re all going to die!” Wake him up. All right, this is it.

Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. But He said to them, “Where is your faith?” And they were afraid, and marveled, saying to one another, “Who can this be? For He commands even the winds and water, and they obey Him!”

You see already right off the bat, from the way that ends. This is another example of what we talked about before, where St. Luke never lays it out and says, “Okay, Jesus is God and man. He has two natures.” He never breaks it down that way. But what he does is he shows us Jesus doing things only God can do. And then he shows us Jesus doing things only a human being can do. Because he shows us… eventually, he’s going to show us Jesus suffering, but he shows us Jesus getting tired, sleeping, right? Shows us Jesus doing these human things. Then he also shows us Jesus doing God things, doing things only God can do.

But in addition, there’s sort of another level here. There’s another level here. Can anybody think that? I’m not referring back to Matthew. I’m referring to the Old Testament of a story in the Old Testament that is similar to this. I won’t wait too long or play the Jeopardy music.

Interlocutor: Jonah?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you get the gold star. Jonah is sitting there minding his own business, and God comes to but says, “Rise. Go to Nineveh”, capital of the Assyrian Empire, the most bloodthirsty empire on the face of the earth at that time, he says “I want you to go to their capital, I want you to walk in, I want you to tell them that in three days, I’m going to destroy the city”.

So, Jonah rises and he goes in the opposite direction, remember? And at the time we went through Jonah, we had a good object example because Nineveh was where Mosul is today, same spot. So it’s sort of like in today’s terms, right? If the Word of the Lord came to you and says, I want you to get up, I want you to buy a plane ticket, I want you to go to Mosul and tell them I’m going to destroy ISIS in three days, right? So before we get too judgmental of Jonah, I might try and go in the other direction, too, right? I might head for Canada, too. If it was… I’d definitely be sure it was God before I bought the plane ticket.

So, Jonah takes off, gets on a boat, remember, goes fleeing up the coast, and a storm kicks up on the sea, and Jonah is down below, asleep, not coincidentally. And so we read that all the sailors are all calling on their gods, right? They’re all yelling to whichever gods they worship to save them because they’re going to die in the storm as far as they’re concerned. They’re throwing the ballast over, they’re throwing the cargo overboard to lighten the ship, right? They go and find Jonah down there asleep. They wake him up and they say, “Well, why don’t you pray to your God, like we’re doing? Maybe your God will bail us out, right? Let’s cover all our bases.”

And Jonah kind of realizes, “Yeah, me and my God are kind of on the outs. Because he told me to go that way, I went this way.” But Jonah knows what’s exactly what’s happening, right? Jonah knows exactly what’s happening. He knows that God sent the storm. He know that God can get rid of the storm. And so what does he say? He says, “You guys just toss me overboard and then you’ll be fine because this is my God doing this to me.” They grab Jonah, they throw him overboard. As soon as they chuck him overboard, the sea goes calm. And then Jonah gets swallowed by the fish and his story continues, right?

Interlocutor: They were about to throw Christ overboard?

Fr. Stephen: No, but if we compare this story, those sailors in Jonah were pagans, abject pagans. But when they were stuck in a storm at sea and things were looking bad, what did they do?

Interlocutor: They prayed.

Fr. Stephen: . They prayed. Right? They believed that their god, falsely, that their gods were in control of the storm. What do the disciples do?

PANIC! Right? “We’re all going to die”, right? They don’t come to Jesus and say, “Jesus, we’ve seen you do all these amazing miracles. We know you could save us from this storm.” They don’t hit their knees in the boat and pray to God to save them from this storm. They just freak out.

And so this is why Jesus says to them, he goes and takes care of it. But then he says, “Where’s your faith? Where is your faith?” Remember, this is the inner circle. These are the people who Jesus is explaining everything to. Remember the parable of the sower he tells the parable, he goes and explains it to the disciples. They’ve got the inside track. They’ve heard more than anybody. Remember the teaching we’re just coming out of, the disciples have heard more than anybody else, right? And yet now, when the chips are down, “ahhhhh”!

What does this show that they understand about who Jesus is? Not only do they not come to him and say, “We know you could do something about this storm, after all the things they’ve already seen”, not only do they not do that, they apparently think Jesus is going to drown with them, right? So much for him being the Messiah, I guess. “Well, we kind of thought he was the Messiah, but now we’re all going to drown, so I guess not.”

And so we had sort of the one object lesson, Jesus gave us an example of some people who hear the word and do it. Now we see some people who have heard an awful lot. When the chips are down in life, it’s not there. It’s not there. And so St. Luke, by putting these two things one after the other, he told us what we need to do. But then he’s shown us pretty much how most of us act in reality.

Because when I go out to my car and try and start it and it doesn’t start, my immediate response is not to pray, not to trust God. This is going to be okay. There’s some reason, right? I might think that maybe a couple of days later. My immediate thoughts are not repeatable here as they’re being recorded, and sometimes my immediate words, right? And then what do I do? Well, I tried to figure out what it is using my own brain, try and fix it myself and then complain about the money I’m probably going to have to spend to get this fixed. Because of course, I’m not really trusting God to take care of me in terms of money either. I’m kind of relying on myself for that, and complain about all the hassle it’s going to be to take it down to the mechanic. Then maybe three or four days later, maybe if I started and it runs, at that point I’ll say, “Oh, thank God”, and not really mean it, but I might say that.

So, we can be very judgmental of the disciples, right? But having your car not start is pretty minor compared to being in a boat that’s taking on water in the middle of a storm. I have trouble dealing with minor day to day hassles with faith, let alone life or death situations. But that isn’t to make an excuse. “Oh, look, even the disciples didn’t get it”. That’s to point out how easily we fall into these same patterns. That’s why these things are recorded in Scripture.

That’s an important thing to remember always when we read Scripture, the quote-unquote “bad guys”, the bad people, the evil kings of Judah I was just mentioning, and all the rest of them up to and including Judas himself, are not there in Scripture for us to wave our finger at. “Boy, I’m glad I’m not like that guy. What a jerk!” I like superhero movies as much as the next guy, but this isn’t superheroes and supervillains, and the good guys beat the bad guys, right? That’s not what these stories are about.

The reason these quote-unquote “bad guys” are in Scripture is because if we’re wise, when we read them, we look at them and say, “Well, that’s kind of me.” I do that and I say, that’s up to it, including Judas. Because we say, well, Judas sells Jesus out for money. But how many of us have sold Jesus out for money, for popularity, for something we wanted at the time? When the chips are down, we can do what we know Jesus wants us to do. Or we could stand up for Christ, or we could talk about Christ to someone. How many of us have folded? It just says, I’d rather have this. I’d rather have this. We do that every day. So Judas isn’t there for us to just sort of curse at and call evil. Judas is there so we can look at it and say, “I’m kind of a betrayer too”.

And he’s set there… and we’ll talk more about this when we get toward the end of St. Luke’s gospel. But he’s set up there with St. Peter who also denies Jesus because we could see the two responses of two different people who have denied and betrayed Christ. And we need that because we’ve all denied and betrayed Christ.

And we could respond to that realization in two ways. We could respond like St. Peter did with tears and with repentance. We see forgiveness. Or we could respond the way Judas did and fall into despair and destroy ourselves. And it’s obvious which one Christ wants us to do.

So just a note, again here with the disciples, the Gospel of Mark was even worse in terms of how hard it was on the disciples in general, Peter in particular. But even here, the disciples are not here just for us to laugh at and think of how dumb they were and how they didn’t get it. We tend to have this overwhelming amount of pride where we assume that “If I lived back then, I would have known who Jesus was and I would have followed him.”

And we sound a lot like St. Peter did. Remember, right before Jesus went to his crucifixion and St. Peter said, “Oh, no, I’ll go to my death if I have to before I let anything happen to you.” We know how that worked out. If we don’t follow Christ now, again with the sort of day-to-day hassles and day to day problems we have then there’s definitely no way back then facing down death, facing down rejection by our people, by our families. There’s no reason, based in fact for us to assume we would do better than we do now. So we should read about the disciples and think about what they’re being portrayed negatively and think about how often we behave a lot more like them than we do like the people who are positive examples. Not so that we fall into despair about how wicked and evil we are and roll around in that wallow in it, but so that we can repent, receive forgiveness and endeavor to do better.

Interlocutor: What you mentioned brought a memory. I was reading a book, “Thirty Steps to Heaven”, or something like that. Do you recall the title of it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I know which one you’re talking about. It’s a commentary on the ladder of divine ascent.

Interlocutor: Yes, yes. And in reading the first chapter, if you want to join the monastery and be a monk and be alone, you have that option, but for people who have families, who are married, who have jobs, who have responsibilities for what they are doing, it’s almost seems like it’s overpowering to say, “How much does God want of me, to serve him?

Fr. Stephen: Everything.

Interlocutor: Well, yeah that’s the sad part about it, I mean my human nature realizes the inadequacy that I have, so it’s almost saying if you believe, God wants us to believe in the impossible because he is the impossible.

Fr. Stephen: I want to push back a little bit on what you said with monasticism with monasticism versus being in the world. Because we have to go back to what we read a few weeks ago. Remember the contrast that Christ made between himself and St. John the Forerunner? Remember, He said St. John the Forerunner came neither eating nor drinking. And he said the Son of God came eating and drinking and he said he was a drunkard and a glutton. And he used that analogy of the children in the marketplace. We played the flute and you didn’t dance. We played a dirge and you didn’t mourn. Play the happy song and you’re not happy. You play the sad song, you’re not sad.

It is a very bad myth that one or the other way of the Christian life is more or less difficult. They’re difficult in different ways. They have different challenges. Being a monk is very difficult. Being a married person, a married person with children, being living in the world with all the distractions and being a Christian is very difficult. And different people are called to different things. But part of this, and I’m about to say something that’s going to sound unbelievably heretical, but I’ll explain, is that we forget sometimes that Jesus is married. Doesn’t that sound heretical? Not to a human woman, not to St. Mary Magdalene. He’s married to the church.

When St. Paul talks about marriage, what marriage does he use as an example? Christ’s marriage. Christ’s marriage to the church. This is why Jesus refers to himself as the bridegroom repeatedly. This is why he came eating and drinking, because he’s a bridegroom. Yes, he lived a chaste life, but he lived the chaste life of a bridegroom preparing to be wed to his bride. And we hear this in our hymnography, still a couple of months away from Pascha, we still have to go through Lent, but repeatedly it says that Christ emerged from the tomb as from a bridal chamber. The life of Christ speaks as much to married people, people living in the world. Because Jesus lived in the world. He ate at people’s houses. He had his family around, he took care of his mother. His brothers were there. Jesus didn’t live in a monastery somewhere, right? St. John lived out in the desert. He shows us the monastic way of life. But Christ lived in the world, right? He came into the world. That’s sort of the whole point of the incarnation.

And so, the Scriptures… monasticism is a calling by God, but it’s a minority calling by God. Most of the humans in the history of the world have not been called to be monastics. Most of us are called to be in the world and be Christians. And the New Testament speaks directly more to those people. None of St. Paul’s letters were written to monastics or monastic communities. They’re all written to churches in cities and big urban centers of the Roman Empire, Christians living in these cities.

So, the particular work you’re talking about, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”, was written by an abbot to his monks. But the fact that a lot of our literature is monastic literature does not somehow cast aspersions on our life in the world or say that it’s any more impossible than the monastic life. I think both are impossible. They’re both impossible. It’s impossible to live as a Christian in any context under our own power, which is why we don’t try to do that, which is why we received the Holy Spirit at baptism, right? And it’s Christ living in us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, who lives the Christian life.

And this is the big transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. Remember Jeremiah 31 and in Isaiah, when it contrasted what we call the Old Testament with the New Testament. What was the contrast always? I’ll put my spirit within them and writing the law upon their heart. In the New Testament. In the new covenant. So the Old Testament. We had external in the Old Testament, we had, “Okay, here’s the law, here’s the Torah, do it.” And no one could do it, because in our own power, we can’t do it.

And so God says, in the New Covenant, “I’m no longer going to command you to be holy. I’m going to make you holy.” And so in the New Covenant, in the New Testament, where we live, the time in which we live, God has placed this holy Spirit within us. And that allows us, in whatever context we’re called to, whether we’re called to be a monastic, whether we’re called to be in the world and unmarried in the world and married in the world and married with children in the world and married without children. Whatever it is, whatever the particulars of the life that God calls us to, we have his spirit who empowers us then to do it. And so, as Jesus says repeatedly, what is impossible with man is possible with God.

Interlocutor: Is it fair to say the vast majority of the saints were monastics or clergy?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the issue there is the question of whether the vast majority of saints were monastics. The issue there is, are we aware of the vast majority of saints? Because God creates saints and God gives saints as a gift to his church. Whether or not we recognize those saints at any given point in time is based on our own sinfulness.

For example, St. Raphael. You may not know this because they’re talked about a lot less now that he’s a saint. There were a lot of political issues surrounding St. Raphael during his earthly life. He did not get along well with some patriarchs in the Middle East. He stood up to them, and they did not like it. If it were just up to politics and us to decide whether Saint Raphael was a saint or not, I don’t know if he would have become a saint. But the way Saint Raphael became a saint is when they exhumed his body to move it from one burial place to another, they discovered that he was incorrupt. So, God showed us that he was a saint. God revealed to us that he is a saint. That’s an example.

So how many saints we might have here at St. George on a given Sunday who we don’t recognize because, again, saints aren’t superheroes. They aren’t wearing a costume and flying and doing magic tricks. There may be someone who sits at the back of the church and doesn’t come to coffee hour or ever talks much to anybody, but who is spending eight or ten hours a day praying for all of us. And miracles are happening in all of our lives that we don’t acknowledge because we’re sinful, but miracles are happening in our lives every day through their prayers, and we don’t even know.

So, I at least personally, wouldn’t want to generalize about the majority of saints because I don’t think we have a complete list.

I don’t think we have a complete list in order to make that statement, Elder Sophrony said he’d only ever met one person in his life who had the gift of unceasing prayer. Being able to pray continuously day and night without ceasing. He only met one person in his life. It was a Russian woman with ten children who lived in Idaho who came to hear him speak once. And he recognized that in her, she’s not a monastic. She’s got a lot of distractions. Ten kids, that’s a lot of distractions. So I think we more readily recognize the sanctity of monastics because they live in a way that’s different than us, so it makes it easier for us to see. Whereas I think we overlook a lot of the people in our midst who aren’t wearing monastic garb, but who are also very holy. I am not one of them, but there are some. So, I would want to nuance that.