Father Stephen De Young: We’re going to be picking up with Luke 9, verse 49. I know it’s been a few weeks; we got Lented [sic], but when we left off we just finished verse 48.

Before I do our sort of catch up introduction, there’s something that’s come up in passing a couple of times already and it’s going to come up again tonight. So I was going to talk about it a little, kind of reorient us on this because it’s important in terms of understanding not just St. Luke’s Gospel, but all of the Gospels. I think I talked about it in our original introduction on Matthew, but that’s been a while, over a year, so thought I’d bring it up again. And I drew this clever little graph here to show it.

But we have to remember that there are essentially two contexts when we read the Gospel, all the way through. We talk about how we need to interpret the Scriptures in context. We need to understand what they meant at the time. We need to understand what’s going on in Judea when Jesus is speaking to these people and who these people are, who he’s speaking to, and what kind of lives they live in order to understand what it is that he’s communicating. But we really have two contexts in the Gospel, and using St. Luke’s Gospel as an example here, Christ’s ministry is roughly between 28 and 32 AD. Other than the stories of Christ’s birth, obviously most of what we’re reading about in the four Gospels takes place between 28 and 32 AD, roughly. The gospel Luke isn’t written, however, until roughly, give or take around 74 AD. So everybody’s pretty sure it’s mid-70s. So we’ll just say 74. But if it’s 75 or 76, same point. So as you can see, there’s about 40 years in between.

Now there’s a tendency by certain people that you’ll see on the History Channel, reading books or hearing on the radio when they come out with a new book about Jesus, who will try to really load down this 40 years, as if it’s just this unbelievable period of time. And how 40 years later, who could possibly have remembered anything Jesus said or did? So this is just all conjecture at that point, 40 years later, please. So we could go too far in that direction where we say, “Well, okay, Luke is just having to make this stuff up because there’s just no way…” But Luke tells us, remember, that he talked to eyewitnesses.

And so, to give an analogy right now as we sit here in 2017, about 40 years, that’s about as far back from when St. Luke was writing as the Vietnam War is from us right now, and it’s a little more than 40 years ago. But kind of an example now. If I were to, not using photos, not using video, not using film, but if I was going to write something about the history of the Vietnam War, and I could go around and interview eyewitnesses, people who served, people who were generals. People who were…. their families, do you think I could reconstruct a fairly accurate history of the Vietnam War today? That’s about the same time lapse we’re talking about here. It’s about 40 years. And St. Luke tells us he interviewed eyewitnesses. Eyewitnesses of the Vietnam War are still alive. So eyewitnesses of Jesus were still alive as St. Luke is writing. So this gap is not this chasm that we can’t get across.

But at the same time, things have happened during those 40 years. We’ve gone from Christ leading a group of his disciples and followers around Judea, preaching to them out in the open, traveling from place to place, to a situation in 74 where there are churches in cities all over the Roman Empire that are worshiping on Sunday mornings, that are celebrating the Eucharist, that have received letters from St. Paul. There’s already been a New Testament written by the time St. Luke writes this. They’ve received Paul’s letters, they’ve received theological instruction from the apostles.

So, things have shifted. There is a church now, as St. Luke writes this. And remember, St. Luke’s Gospel in particular is the first part of volume one of two volumes with the Book of Acts. And so, his history doesn’t just end with Christ’s ascension into heaven, but it continues to talk about the establishing of those churches, informing these churches about their history. But so, the audience that Jesus was speaking to, Judean peasants right before his death and resurrection, and the audience that St. Luke is writing to about these events, which is a group of now Christians, mostly Gentile converts, mostly not Jewish, many of whom never set foot in Judea in their lives, two different audiences. Two different audiences.

And so this has come up a few times, so I wanted to clarify when we talk about, for example, when we ask the question why would St. Luke record this or emphasize this, sort of our knee jerk response might be, well, because that’s what happened. And it’s not untrue. I’m not saying that any of these things didn’t happen, but there are a lot of other things that happened that St. Luke doesn’t record. And St. Luke, at the very least, chose the words he was going to use to describe the events, the way he was going to describe it, what he was going to include, what he was going to leave out, what he thought was more important, what he thought was less important, what he was going to dwell on, what he was going to pass over quickly.

And so, there are essentially, because of those two contexts, two questions that we ask and I’ve at least hopefully been doing this as we go without making a point of it though I’m making a point of it now, and that is when we read a quote from Christ, who is Christ speaking to? What is the context of that? What was Christ saying then? And then the second question, why did St. Luke think this was important? Why did he include it in his Gospel and include it the way he did? And it’s this transition from the two contexts that explains most of the differences between the four Gospels. Because all four gospels are describing essentially the same events but they’re speaking to different audiences at slightly different times. St. Mark is writing several years earlier but it’s not just that it was five years earlier than St. Luke, it’s it that was five years earlier and the temple hadn’t been destroyed yet, so these major events have happened. So they’re speaking to different people in a different context describing the same events, the same things that Christ did and said, but different things now have more significance due to what’s happened in between.

There may be some things that aren’t recorded in any of the four Gospels that would have been very significant if you were a Jewish peasant during Christ’s life but in terms of, if you were a Gentile convert to Christianity living in Rome or Thessalonica or Alexandria, Egypt, you might not have even understood because you didn’t know the context in Judea that Jesus was talking about.

So, there’s those two questions there all the time, and this is going to come up almost right off the bat when we get into the text. That’s why I chose to sort of go back and reiterate it tonight. So unless anybody has any questions about that or anything else we’ll go ahead…

Just to catch us up because it’s been a couple of weeks there’s been sort of a turn here in the middle of St. Luke’s Gospel in that as we saw previously Christ had been sort of using Capernaum as a home base on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, doing healings and preaching in and around Capernaum and then in the villages of Galilee going on these journeys through Galilee to visit the villages, preach in the synagogues, preach out in the open air to preach the people. He’s got this group of people following him. We saw sort of the major transitional event around the Transfiguration where Christ’s glory was revealed to the disciples but he’s also started talking to them, now twice, predicting the fact that he’s going to be arrested. He’s going to die and so now he’s sort of begun the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem and he’s tried to be very clear with the disciples about the fact that this is not going to be triumphant entry where he rides in on a white horse and overthrows the Romans and sets up a kingdom here on earth. But as we saw also, they don’t get it.

And where we left off, we had just seen a couple of episodes. First where Christ came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and found the demon possessed boy who the disciples hadn’t been able to cast the demon out of, talked about the faithlessness of that generation. He then again predicted the fact that he was going to die. And immediately after he predicted that, the disciples started arguing amongst themselves about which one of them was greater than the other, showing that clearly they didn’t get what he was talking about. Now that’s where we pick up here in Luke 9, verse 49.

“Now John answered and said”, and again we start here with answered. Jesus didn’t really ask a question, but John is responding to what Jesus just said, in which Jesus responds to them debating about which one of them would be the greatest, gave him the example of a child. He said he who was least among you will be great. Try and turn that on its head. So this is what John is replying to just in case you thought only Peter would pipe up with kind of goofy things.

Interlocutor: Do we have idea of who that child is?

Fr. Stephen: Traditionally, that child would grow up to become Saint Ignatius of Antioch.

So, Jesus tries to make this point to them, right? If you want to be great, you need to be the least. You need to serve, you need to humble yourself. And now we hear John’s response.

Now John answered and said, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name, and we forbade him because he does not follow with us.î

That’s his response to “If you want to be great, you need to become the least.”  Well, what does this reflect? “We’re special. We’re your disciples, we’re your boys, right? You give us the power to cast out demons. You give us the authority to do this stuff. I saw this other guy, I didn’t know who he was, so I told him to knock it off. I told him to knock it off.”

But Jesus said to him, “Do not forbid him, for he who is not against us is on our side.î

So, Jesus says, not, “He who is not with us is against us”, right? The exact opposite. “He who is not opposing us, is on our side.” What’s the point Jesus is trying to make here? Well, first of all, this is only coming a few verses after, remember, the disciples couldn’t cast a demon out of someone and you remember why that was. Because they didn’t have faith. They didn’t have faith to do it.

So if this person is casting out demons, it doesn’t say, “We saw someone trying to cast out demons in your name,” right? It says “We saw someone casting out demons.” This person is going around casting out demons and healing people in the name of Christ. So that means obviously this person what? Has faith, right? This person has faith.

And so, the point Jesus is making here is disciples are still focused, even John here is focused on this idea of status, right? Which one of us is the greatest, who is the most important? We have this special status. And what Christ keeps trying to get through to them is that it’s not about having some special status or office or position, that it’s about having faith. And if that child who we put in front of them has faith, then he’s better off than the faithless disciples.

But now, remember what I was saying earlier, that’s what Jesus is saying in context to his disciples. But why would this be important for St. Luke? Because we don’t find this in the other gospels. Why would St. Luke include this?

Interlocutor: He had a Gentile audience?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah. This goes back to who his audience is. He’s writing to Gentile converts to Christianity. And we’re going to see when we get into, especially Galatians, that as the church was beginning, there were certain segments of the Jewish Christian population who considered themselves to have a special status. They’re particularly associated with the church in Jerusalem. Many of them associate themselves with St. James and they believed that as Jews, as the chosen people, that they sort of had this special status in Christianity as opposed to these Gentile converts who are sort of guests in their house. Right, this is our house, but we’ll deign as long as you meet certain conditions that will set, we’ll deign to let you come in as well.

Well, the point that’s being made here is what? Is that now… he doesn’t use the term the Holy Spirit here because the Holy Spirit hasn’t come yet in the Book of Acts, but if these people have faith, if they have the same faith and they’re doing the same things, casting out demons, then they are by no means second class to the disciples. In fact, if they have more faith than the disciples, which is what was suggested here, this person who’s not part of the in-crowd, part of the in-group is actually in a better place and a better stead than the disciples.

And so, St. Luke includes this not just to sort of point out once again because he’s made that abundantly clear that the disciples didn’t get it,  and were still too concerned about status, but to make the point to his audience that there are no sort of first class and second class Christians. What counts, what makes you a Christian is your faith. And that faith, although again, like I said, he doesn’t use the Holy Spirit. Here we’ll see the Book of Acts, how this gets further developed. But what’s sort of nascent here already is that that faith that allows you to do wonders. That brings the gift of God is what makes you a Christian, what puts you on Christ’s side, what makes you with Christ. Whereas as we’re going to see, Judas, for example, may have been one of the twelve and had this important position, he was the treasurer after all, right? Is not on Christ side. Is not on Christ’s side, in the end.

Now it came to pass, when the time had come for Him to be received up, that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before His face.

I talked about that transition, that “Now, it came to pass” as a nice sort of King James-ism, and it’s actually a holdover from the Old Testament and from Hebrew. In Hebrew, one of the ways that they start sort of a new section or transition, “This happened and then this happened, and then this happened and then this happened”. Is those “this happens” are a word hinneh, you could tell where the word hinneh appears in Hebrew of the Old Testament in the King James Version because it says “behold” usually, “and behold he went to….”, “behold!”. You’ll see all those transitions or “Lo and behold” sometimes you even get, they double down on it, and that gets sort of taken over into the way this was not written in Hebrew. But if you’re primarily a Hebrew and Aramaic speaker and you’re speaking a second language, some of your grammar and some of your phrasing is going to sort of creep over into the other language.

For example, when I was working in San Diego, nobody came to me and asked me if I spoke Spanish. They asked me if I spoke “Espanish”, right? Because they were carrying over “Espanol” into English because that’s how they were used to saying it, right? So you get those sort of things when you have somebody who’s primarily an Aramaic speaker writing in Greek. They’ll pick up sort of little turns of phrase that aren’t really correct Greek, but they go back to their first language. This is one of them. And so it gets translated literally as “it happened” in Greek, but it’s holding over from that. So this is a transition essentially, okay, we’ve had this sort of discussion leading up to this. Now we’ve got a break, we’ve got a new part starting and this is sort of the pivot point of the Gospel. I mentioned how we’ve been transitioning really since the Transfiguration. But now what it says here is that it happened when the time had come for him to be received up. So what’s he referring to? What is the time when Jesus is going to be received up?

Interlocutor: Being crucified?

Fr. Stephen: Right. To be received up, given up would probably be… or given over, right? Or taken up. So the idea is He’s going to be crucified, he’s going to be taken and lifted up on the cross. That’s what it’s referring to. And so, what does this tell us right away by the way he describes it, “When the time came for this to happen”, what does that mean? It’s planned, right? It means it’s planned. It hasn’t happened yet. But it’s not a surprise. What causes Jesus, because it’s going to say, he steadfastly, set his face to go to Jerusalem. He set his face to go to Jerusalem. What cues Jesus, okay, it’s time to go to Jerusalem because it’s time now for Him to be crucified. He’s already predicted it, but Luke is making the point that when Jesus predicted it, he was not just saying, “Oh, man, we’re going to go down there. I’m probably going to end up getting crucified.” He’s not just being a pessimist. Thinking, “Man, that’s probably what’s going to happen”. It’s not that kind of prediction. He knows it’s his plan to be crucified. That’s why he’s able to predict it, because this is the plan, this is what I’m going to go do. And now we see that that was to happen at an appointed time. He says, “Okay, it’s almost time for this to happen, so it’s time for me to head to Jerusalem.”

Interlocutor: There were three Greeks that wanted to see him and see says it’s not time yet?

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s in St. John’s Gospel. Some Greeks come to see Him and he says it’s not time yet. What’s being presented here by St. Luke is that Jesus is on a timetable. Jesus is on a mission. He’s doing something very deliberately.

So he starts the journey to Jerusalem “and sent messengers before his face”. That’s another little Hebrew-ism, the word for presence, for where you are, the place where you are, your presence in Hebrew and Aramaic are both “face”. So that’s a very literal translation of that kind of idea. So the idea is not that he said, “Get out of my face”, but from Him. He set them out ahead of where he and the disciples were. So he sends the messages before him.

And as they went, they entered a village of the Samaritans, to prepare for Him.

Why would he send them to talk to the Samaritans all of a sudden? Remember the Samaritans? It’s probably been a little while since we talked about this, so just real quickly: the Samaritans are sort of a mix. When the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians, what the Assyrians did to make sure they never had rebellions, because if you come in and you conquer a place and you set yourself up as king over a people, you always have to worry they’re going to try and stage a revolution and throw you back out. Well, they would take the people, or most of them, the vast majority of them, and ship them off somewhere else, somewhere else in their empire. Then they bring people from somewhere else in their empire and bring them in and settle. So the people who are settled on the land you just conquered aren’t natives, which means they have a lot less reason to try and fight and try and overthrow you, because this isn’t their ancestral home. This isn’t their great-great-grandfather’s house, right? So it disconnects the people from the land. So that was part of their strategy.

So they did that when they destroyed the Northern Kingdom. And the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel was Samaria. Samaria was both the name of the city and the name of the region around it. And so, they deported the Hebrews who are living there to different parts of the Assyrian Empire. And then they brought in people from other parts of the Assyrian Empire who are not Hebrews and settled them there. And the few Hebrews who are left there sort of intermarried with the Gentiles who had been brought in. And so they made this mixed group. And after the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, the Southern Kingdom, took them into exile. And then when the people returned, the Samaritans didn’t welcome them back, right, because the Samaritans had used that opportunity to expand their territory, because all of their cousins to the south were deported and so they were not exactly welcomed back.

The Samaritans had also sort of developed their own religion because they didn’t have access to Jerusalem and the temple there, so they’d built a temple on Mount Gerizim, their own sort of competing temple. They had come up with their own version of the Torah, of the Pentateuch that’s still to this day, We have copies of it. It’s called the Samaritan Pentateuch and it changes a lot of things, right? Every reference to Mount Zion becomes Mount Gerizim, and all these things already get moved around so that they all happen in Samaria.

And so, there was this conflict between the returned Judeans and the Samaritans that culminated under John Hyrcanus in the second century BC, the 100th BC. John Hyrcanus was the king and the high priest at the same time of Judea and got into a war with the Samaritans and decided he was going to end this once and for all. So, he destroyed their temple on Mount Gerizim and that temple had still not been rebuilt, at the time that Christ left.

So, the Samaritans are not big fans of the Judeans and they believe that they are the real descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and their temple was the real one, that they’re the true worshippers of God. And the Judeans look at them and say, “No, you’re not. You’re a bunch of Gentiles, you’re half-breeds. You’re heretics, we want nothing to do with you.” So they were sort of worse than Gentiles because they were Gentiles who are claiming to be Jews and having this heretical religion.

Interlocutor: What were the differences between them.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they only accepted the Torah. They didn’t accept any of the rest of the Old Testament other than their version of the Pentateuch or the Torah. And their actual rituals, aside from the temple, were different. Like their Passover ritual was different. They didn’t celebrate any of the later feasts, just the ones that were in their version of the Pentateuch. And they generally claimed sort of all the promises. They had their own version of the Messiah, who they believed was going to come and rebuild their temple and take out the Judeans who were fakes and pretenders.

Interlocutor: But they were still following the same covenant, with Moses and all that?

Fr. Stephen: They believed so.

Interlocutor: What were the differences?

Fr. Stephen: Well, as I said, their religious rites and practices were different. The stories, like I said, were reshaped so that everything happened in Samaria and so that the Judeans were sort of phonies. They falsified their own history because, of course we know the Northern Kingdom was involved in idolatry from the very beginning, so they’d sort of rewritten history to make themselves the real people of God and not the Judeans. So there’s a whole series of that. And you can’t underestimate religious practice, right? We tend to think about religion primarily in terms of beliefs that you’d write on paper, right? But for the average person in the Old Covenant, in part, that view of religion comes from Christianity, because Christianity is based on what we were just saying, faith.

But you don’t find a lot in the Old Testament about faith and theology and beliefs. It’s about what you do. The Torah is primarily about how you worship God and how you live your life, right? The only real doctrinal statement is the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God. The Lord is one.” There’s one God. That’s about as far as it goes. There’s one God. His name is Yahweh. He’s Israel’s God. That’s about it, right? You don’t have the Holy Trinity, you don’t have the dual nature of Christ.

Interlocutor: Did they practice idolatory while the Judeans were exiled?

Fr. Stephen: We don’t believe they practice idolatry. Now, the Judeans accused them of practicing idolatry, but it looks like that was just a jab, because if you read Josephus, you find these sort of horrible things he says about the Samaritans that it turns out are hyperbolically not true. Like he says, they have no Jewish blood in them whatsoever, which we know is not true, and that kind of thing. So you get kind of these sort of hyperbolic Jewish statements about them at the time that probably you can’t believe in all their details. So they claim that they were still worshipping a golden calf in their temple before it was destroyed, but it looks like that’s not the case. It looks like that’s not the case. But my point about that being for us, it’s like, “Okay, well, yeah, they do their Passover ritual a little different than the Jews. What’s the big deal?” But when the worship practices and the ethical rules are the core of your religion, those kind of differences become huge, right? They looked at sacrificing goats instead of lambs at Passover, the way we’d look at someone who denies the Trinity, right? Like an Arian, it’s the equivalent to them. So we have to put it in that perspective.

Interlocutor: Is that part of the reason Christ was reaching out to them?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to see what happens here. We don’t see a lot of that here. We’ll see a little more in Acts, in St. Luke’s Gospel and in Acts we sort of see this process that Jesus summarizes, you’ll be my witnesses in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

So there’s sort of this process, that’s how it plays out. So we’re not going to see a lot with the Samaritans in St. Luke’s Gospel until we get into Acts. We’re going to see the Apostle Philip is going to go to the Samaritans after the Gospels are preached in Judea. So there’s sort of this process as he travels through the Roman Empire and Samaria’s sort of the second place.

It’s also different, just as a note in St. Matthew’s Gospel, I don’t remember how much we talked about it. I think we talked about it a little, but St. Matthew seems to be harkening back some traditions, some Jewish traditions at the time that saw Galilee, Samaria and Judea as sort of Israel now disconnected. And Judea was, of course, the purest, like Judah in the Old Testament was. But that part of what Christ did. In St. Matthew’s Gospel we saw a little bit with the Samaritans there was that he restored all of Israel, not just Judea. That was in St. Matthew’s gospel. And we’re going to see in St. John’s Gospel when we get there, of course, St Photini, the Samaritan woman being the famous example. But in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is going to go to the Samaritans almost right off the bat.

He isn’t going to treat those differences as being a barrier. He acknowledges them. Like when he talks to St. Photini, the Samaritan woman, and she asks “Your people say we should worship here. My people say we should worship here.” He does say that the Judeans are right and the Samaritans are wrong. He does acknowledge that. But he goes on to say more importantly, these other things.

So, St. John wants to talk about how the Samaritans are sort of included from the get-go. But Luke, there’s going to be sort of a progress. Gospel starts here and then explodes outward. So, that’s who the Samaritans are. And Samaria is in between… you’ve got Galilee in the north around the Sea of Galilee. You’ve got Judea down in the south surrounding Jerusalem. Samaria is in between. It’s in between.

So, if Jesus is in Galilee and he said, “Okay, now I’m going to Jerusalem,” he’s going to have to go through Samaria. So before he passes through Samaria, he sends people ahead of him to the villages to say he’s coming. And that’s part of the reason also why we’re going to see more of Samaria in St. John’s Gospel is as we’ve seen in Matthew, Mark and now Luke, their structure around Jesus starting in Galilee and making one big trip to Jerusalem, in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is going to go back and forth three times.

So if he goes back and forth three times, that means he’s going to pass through Samaria essentially six times: twice each trip. But that’s getting ahead a little bit. We’ll see that in St. John’s Gospel. So he sends these messages before him into these Samaritan villages to announce that Jesus is going to be passing through. Unfortunately, verse 53:

But they did not receive Him, because His face was set for the journey to Jerusalem.

So, he said that they don’t receive Him. Why? This can be kind of confusing, right? Because if you take it literally the way it’s translated, they didn’t receive Him because he was determined to go to Jerusalem? But what it’s getting at is, he’s a Jew. He’s going to Jerusalem. What time of year is it? What time of year was it when Christ died? Passover. Right. So he’s a Galilean Jew who’s going to Jerusalem for the Passover. So why would the Samaritans…? He’s going to worship at the wrong place, essentially. So he’s not one of us, right? It’s not just that he’s Jewish. He’s clearly dedicated to Judaism, which the Samaritans believe is a false religion. So they refused to receive him.

And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?”

This is John, who is the “I stopped him from casting out demons”, John. Okay, so twice now Jesus had to pull them up short on this stuff. Have they figured it out yet? Noooo, right? In fact, they didn’t get the message of the last thing Jesus said, because what was the last thing Jesus said? “He who is not against us, is on our side.” Not, “He who is not with us, is against us.” He who was not against us is on our side. So these people don’t want to receive Jesus? “Burn them, right? Burn them, the whole village, men, women, and children. Let’s do this, right? Goats, cattle.”

Interlocutor: Well at least he had the idea that Jesus was God.

Fr. Stephen: Well, at least he was a prophet. Correct? Because they’re talking about Elijah, right? It’s like, “oh, man, we need to just…” Does that remind you of anybody from the Old Testament aside from Elijah? They want to be like Elijah, but who are they more like? Remember how the Book of Jonah ends? Remember in the Book of Jonah, he gets sent to Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, to say, “God’s going to destroy this city”, and they all repent. And so at the end, Jonah goes up, and he’s sitting on the hill, to get a good view for the barbecue, goes and sits up there, just waits. He’s like, all right, get to see these guys fry. And then they repent. And so God forgives them and doesn’t destroy the city. And then, remember, Jonah gets all mad. He says, “I knew this was going to happen. That’s why I didn’t want to come. I knew they’d repent. And you’d let them off the hook.” And remember, God says to Jonah, there’s how many people here don’t know their right hand from their left hand, he says, and many cattle, right? Because it’s like, if you don’t care about any of the people, you should… come on, the cows? I’ve got to kill all the cows?! Jonah at least, have pity on the cows. They’re innocent, right, to sort of make the point.

Well James and John, they want to be like Elijah, right? Oh, yeah. We’re going to show them. Like when he smote the Baal worshippers. Yeah, a bunch of no-good Samaritans. We’ll show them. But who are they really? Like, really? A lot more like Jonah, right? A little bit pompous. A little bit embittered.

But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of.”

Let’s pause there. Now, “spirit” there isn’t capitalized. But it should be. It should be because it’s saying you don’t know what kind of spirit you have, that you’re human beings. It means you don’t understand who God is. You don’t understand who God is.

“For the Son of Man did not come to destroy menís lives but to save them.” And they went to another village.

Interlocutor: I thought he meant that they were speaking for Satan.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he’s saying that they don’t know who God is, and so they don’t know what mission they’re on. We just saw Jesus, the time has come. Jesus is on a mission. They apparently think they’re going to war to wipe out the Samaritans. And Christ pulls them up short and says, “You don’t even know who God is if you think you could call down fire from heaven and kill all these people in these villages.” Because that’s not the mission. The mission wasn’t to come here and destroy people, but to save them.

This is critically important because you could turn on TBN and even in its worst moments, EWTN and see people all but calling down fire on the people who they perceive as their enemies. Whether it’s another political party or whether it’s some group of sinners who they think is destroying everything or some other religion or some other form of their religion, who all need to be wiped out. Who all need to be… they’re the enemy. They need to be destroyed. So we have this progress here. Not only is your fellow servant of Christ not your enemy just because they’re not same ethnicity or race or whatever as you, but the sinner out there, right? These are people who rejected Christ. These are not innocent or holy people. So people who rejected Christ, refused to speak to him, refused him hospitality, right? So they sinned against Christ, but Christ isn’t here to destroy them. Christ is here to save men’s lives.

And this is speaking in an even larger sense about who Christ is. Because for God to judge sinners, for God to judge us for our sins, for God to send us to hell, right? For God to destroy us. Jesus didn’t have to come. Jesus didn’t have to become incarnate. He didn’t have to suffer; he didn’t have to die. He didn’t have to do that for God to judge the world, right? So if who God is, is Jesus Christ, the whole purpose of Him becoming man, the whole purpose of his suffering, dying, rising again, was for us to escape judgment, for us to experience salvation, for us to be healed, for us to be restored, for us to be made holy.

And so, as he said, by calling for this, the disciples showed they didn’t know who God is, because who Christ is and what he does shows us who God is. That’s why we repeat over and over again in liturgy, “He’s a good God who loves mankind, who loves human beings.” One of the prayers we’re saying right now in St. Basil the Great’s Liturgy, talks about how we fell into sin. And God did not abandon us in it. He did not just walk away from us and say, “Okay, well, you made your choice,” but he did not stop until you done all things for us to restore us back to heaven.

So, God is not a God, primarily, of judgment, of destruction, of wrath, of vengeance. He is primarily a God of love, compassion, kindness. Christ came to save us. Now, if we reject that salvation, as we heard about in the epistle reading today, if we turn our back on that salvation, if we reject that, if we don’t want it, then what’s left to us is God’s wrath against the things we’ve done. But that’s based on our rejection of it. God in Christ has accomplished everything that needs to happen for us to find salvation.

And that’s what Christ is trying to here communicate to the disciples again, because they still don’t get the nature of his mission and who God is, right? And that’s why they don’t understand the fact that he’s about to go suffer and die. Because their version of the mission is he’s going to go there and fire is going to come down from Heaven and incinerate Pontius Pilate, and angels are going to come out of the sky and hack up the Roman armies and they’re going to set up this kingdom on earth and it’s going to be fabulous. And because they’re Jesus’s best friends, they’re going to get all the choice positions of the new government and go from being peasants to being rich.

So they’re not tracking because they don’t understand who God is and what Jesus is here to do. And that accomplishing that isn’t going to involve killing a bunch of people, isn’t going to involve judging and condemning a bunch of people, but it’s going to involve Him rather sacrificing Himself to save people.

And so notice at the end there, they just go to another village, right? Remember what Jesus told the disciples when he sent them out into the villages in Galilee. He said, “If a village doesn’t receive you, kick the dust off your shoes, go to the next village.” And so that’s what Jesus does too, right? No destruction necessary. He just goes to the next village.