Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, so we’ll get started. When we get started here in just a moment, we’ll be picking up in the Apocalypse of St. John, also known as the book of Revelation, also known as the Revelation of St. John, chapter two, verse one. So we went through chapter one last time that was sort of the beginning of St. John’s vision. He was in worship in whatever worship space he had. We know this was sort of a cave on the island of Patmos. We know it’s a cave because you can go there and see the cave. [Laughter] This was in a cave. There was a salt mine on the island of Patmos. That’s where St. John was exiled to. While he’s there in the worship space, he has this vision where Christ appears to him in glory, and he is staying there with seven lampstands. He has seven stars that are the angels of these seven churches; the seven lampstands represent the seven churches.

So these are seven churches. It’s Ephesus, the city of Ephesus and the area around Ephesus. These are the communities, the Christian communities in these cities, that St. John regularly ministered to. And we talked about how we have these letters to the seven churches now for the next couple of chapters, next few chapters, and how originally, when this was sent out, the rest of the text, which is St. John’s vision, would have been sent, a copy, to each of these seven churches with sort of a cover letter for that church. And then, once it circulated beyond those seven churches, the book, they compiled all seven of the letters into sort of the form we have now. What we’re going to see here is then at the beginning of the vision, Christ is going to dictate these letters to St. John. St. John is sort of taking down these letters. So these aren’t really epistles of St. John to this or that church, because he’s taking dictation. These are epistles of Christ to these churches. They come sort of directly from him.

This is one of those… Most of the Bible we say is inspired by God, that we encounter Christ through it, but it’s written by a human author, and when you read especially the New Testament—the Old Testament’s been edited a lot by the time it gets to us, so it’s been smoothed out a little bit, but especially in the New Testament, you can very much tell different authors by their style of Greek and that kind of thing. So there’s this human element. This is one of the rare places where this is sort of Christ speaking directly, where he says to the human— Like St. Paul was not taking dictation when he wrote to the Church in Rome. He was writing a letter, as St. Paul, to the Church in Rome. We believe that the Holy Spirit works through that letter to bring us to Christ. Whereas this is Christ saying, “John, write this down, exactly what I’m saying.” So there’s not really St. John in this.

That makes it different [from] the rest of Revelation, too, because the rest of it is going to be St. John writing down the things that he saw for the most part. There’s a couple other pieces like this, but most of it is going to be him writing down, like we saw in chapter one, the things that he saw. And so it’s sort of processed through St. John’s mind. We’re going to see, as we go forward, some of the same patterns of his writing that we saw in his epistles and in his gospel. The epistles will probably be more fresh, since we went over St. John’s gospel, like, five years ago, but we’ll see some of those same patterns as we go forward. So it’s important to sort of recognize the difference here in these letters, which are words direct, sort of direct from Christ.

So, that said, one of the reasons why I make that point and the point about the cover letters is that, as I think I mentioned, either in the introduction or last time, there are certain folks—the Puritans were a big fan of this—who try to turn the letters into, like, seven ages of the Church, like the first letter is— They attach years to it and try and map it onto Church history and stuff. That means that the sixth and seventh churches received letters that were completely irrelevant to them, because it was stuff directed at people thousands of years in the future, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. [Laughter] So that’s not what’s going on here. Sorry, Jonathan Edwards, et al. [Laughter] That doesn’t work. And that counts as a “Sorry, Calvinists,” because Jonathan Edwards was, indeed, a Calvinist.

All that said, by way of catch up, we’ll go ahead now unless there’s any other comments or questions or funny limericks that anybody heard today. We’ll start in Revelation 2:1. “To the angel of the church of Ephesus, write”— We’ll pause right there. [Laughter] I won’t do this every time, at the beginning of each letter, because it’s going to say the exact same words, just with a different city, but for the first one. Remember, and this is sort of review, because we talked about this at the end last time, when we talked about what it means to have the angels of these churches, and we talked about how a group, a collective group, has a life, has a spirit, that’s beyond just the individual lives of the individual people. So our parish here has a life, together, that we all share, and that’s beyond just my life plus Arthur’s life plus your life plus your life. [Laughter] There’s a life that we share together. That life, that body, has a spirit.

These letters are all going to be addressed, not to the people of the Christian community in this city, but they’re addressed to that angel; they’re addressed to that spirit. They’re addressed to the collective life of that community, and we’re going to see that they address the collective life of that community. So these really are letters to the churches, not letters to the individual people in the churches.

And why that’s an important distinction is that we think very individualistically in the modern world. So if there’s something going wrong in the church or in our town or in our country or in any group that we’re a part of, our first instinct is to try to render ourselves innocent of whatever it is. “Yeah, but that’s not me! That’s the rest of those people! I’m one of the good ones. I don’t have anything to do with that!” But if there’s something wrong with the whole, then that’s something that has to be addressed by every member of the whole. If you get gangrene in your left big toe, you can’t just be like: “Well, that’s my left big toe. I’m not that worried about it, because the rest of my body’s fine.” [Laughter] Even if it’s just your— Because that will kill your whole body if you don’t do something about it. It’s something that has to be addressed by the whole.

As we read these, you’re going to see, well, really was every person in the church there doing X, Y, Z? That’s not the point. [Laughter] That’s not the point. The problem is affecting everybody, and so the problem needs to be addressed as a group by everybody.

“To the angel of the church at Ephesus,” so we’re starting with this central, big city, the main, sort of the mother church of these communities. “These things says he who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands.” We’re also going to see in each of these, there’s going to be an identifier for Christ that’s going to be based on parts of things we saw in chapter one, the way he was described, and we’re going to see as we go along there’s going to be a few other little things tossed into the mix, too, that we’re going to see later on in the visions in the book. But so this is pretty much how we just saw him described at the end of chapter one. He’s standing there, he’s got the seven stars in his hand that are the seven angels, he’s standing among the seven lampstands that are the seven churches.

Verse two: “I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil, and you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars.” So, so far, so good. And remember, these “works” he’s talking about are not like individual people; this is how the whole is functioning, how the whole community is functioning, that the community is working together. The community is being patient and suffering, that they cannot bear those who are evil. So if someone in that community has fallen into sin, they’re either bringing them to repentance or they’re out. And that when someone shows up claiming to be a teacher, claiming to be an apostle—remember, “apostle” means someone sent, so they claim they’re there, God sent them there—God’s testing them, and the ones who are phonies, they’re finding out that they’re phonies and they’re casting them out. So far, so good.

Verse three: “You have persevered and have patience and have labored for my name’s sake and have not become weary.” So this is—remember, it’s St. John; he circles around and around and around and around. So again: “You’re patient in suffering, and you keep working hard. You don’t get tired; you’re not taking breaks; you’re not resting on your laurels.”

Verse four: “Nevertheless!” Uh-oh. Takes a turn. “I have this against you, that you have left your first love.” This isn’t talking about, like, you abandoned your first wife in particular. [Laughter] But there was a state they were in when they first came to know Christ, when they first came into the community, when they first formed this community together, there was this love that they had for each other, and there was this beauty and this simplicity about it, and they’ve kept working hard, they’ve kept doing all these other things, but somewhere along the line, that love sort of slipped away. It sort of slipped away.

And this letter and several of the other letters have in the background the analogy of the Church as the bride of Christ, which of course is a development of what we see all through the prophets in the Old Testament, of Israel as the bride of the God of Israel, of Yahweh. Part of that analogy is there. It’s sort of that newlyweds, honeymoon state. He’s saying, “Look, you’re still faithful. You’re still doing good. You’re still doing the right things, but somewhere along the line the honeymoon ended. That sort of love we had has kind of gotten cold.”

Verse five: “Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. Repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.” So remember, “repent” doesn’t always just mean “you’ve been bad; say you’re sorry.” Repent means change: be healed, be transformed. So he’s saying, “You need to go back to the way things were.” Now, how can that be if they’re doing all these good things? Remember what St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13. He gives that big long list. “I can speak with the tongue of men and angels, and I can do all things through faith.” On and on; he says, “But if I don’t have love, then I am nothing.” This is that same kind of idea. You need to get back. You need to get that love back, because if all these things you’re doing aren’t motivated by love, if they’ve just sort of been institutionalized in your community—“These are the rules; if you break them, you’re out. If you break them and don’t want to be out, you repent”—and these things can all become just sort of hardened, but that can all be just going through the motions, like Israel offering the sacrifices but not keeping the commandments. So that’s what this is getting at. You need to go back to that love.

And then what’s the danger? The danger is, if they don’t do that, he’s going to come and remove the lampstand. That symbol— We’re talking about the lampstand. This is the seven-branch candlestand, like the one that was in the tabernacle, the one that was in the Temple in Jerusalem. If you’ve ever seen the Arch of Titus, the scene commemorating his destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem is what? Them carrying away the lampstand. And so this is referring back. That’s not narrated in the New Testament, but what’s narrated in the Old Testament is when the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple.

And leading up to that, the prophets were saying the same thing. They were using that language of Israel as God’s spouse, they were coming to them and saying, “Look, you’re going through the motions. You’re offering the sacrfices, and you’re doing this stuff. God’s saying, ‘Your heart is far from me. The love isn’t there.’ ” And what ended up happening? That Temple was destroyed. So that’s what he’s talking about. This church in Ephesus is a temple, but you can go down this same route that Israel went down, that Judea went down, and it’ll have the same kind of consequences if you do.

Verse six: “But this you have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” So, when you’ve got this going for you, you don’t like them Nicolaitans… [Laughter] So traditionally, there’s no other identifier. I mean, this is the last book written in the New Testament, and it’s written around—probably written around 96, remember, because St. Irenaeus told us that St. John had this vision in 95. So we don’t have other stuff about the Nicolaitans; that’s why I say “traditionally.” You find this interpretation in the Church Fathers, but it’s not in, like, the Church Fathers immediately after this. You don’t find the second-century Church Fathers talking about the Nicolaitans. You find fourth-century Church Fathers and fifth-century and sixth-century Church Fathers where they talk about this part of the book of Revelation, explaining who the Nicolaitans are. So that’s what I mean by “traditionally,” to be real specific about it.

And they identify it as coming from— “Nicolaitan” literally means the party of Nicholas. This is obviously not St. Nicholas in the fourth century; this is another Nicholas. This is Nicholas the Deacon, traditionally. In the book of Acts, they appoint seven deacons. Remember, St. Stephen’s one of them, who gets martyred; St. Philip is one of them: he has daughters who are prophetesses. And one of them is Nicholas, Nikolaos, literally. And so, traditionally, that Nicholas, that Nikolaos, who was made a deacon by the apostles, went into business for himself, shall we say, and started his own kind of sect with his own beliefs, and tried to use his authority as a deacon appointed by the apostles to command authority in churches and to sway people into joining his movement. This would— Just contextually, regardless of what we do with that identification, this would be one of those false apostles and false teachers that were discussed earlier in this letter to Ephesus, whom they had sort of tested and decided was false. One of those was the Nicolaitans.

Notice it doesn’t say, “You hate the Nicolaitans, whom I also hate.” It says, “You hate the works of the Nicolaitans. You hate what they’re doing. You hate what they’re doing to the Church and in the churches,” which Christ also hates, what they’re doing. That is an important distinction, because people who think that God hates heretics kill them, whereas people who think that God hates the works of heretics try to bring them to repentance, a very different approach.

Verse seven: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” That’s a very— How many times does Christ say that in the gospels? During his parables: “He who has an ear, let him hear.” “What the Spirit says to the churches: To him who overcomes, I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” We’re going to see in several of these letters that the person, the “saved person” in our modern parlance, the person who does what is right, the person who does what Christ is acting of them, is the one who overcomes, literally the one who conquers.

This has a lot of resonance in the Roman world, because that’s what imperator means, which we translate as “emperor.” You couldn’t get away with calling yourself king in Rome; the word “king” had a bad rap from the tyrants. [Laughter] So it was imperator, the conqueror, the victorious general. But Christ is here using that to describe the Christian who is faithful to the end of their life. That’s the one who is victorious in the battle, victorious in war, and the one who’s crowned. That’s where that crowning language comes from.

We’re going to see that one who overcomes. That means what he’s calling on them to do when he says, “Return to your first love,” is not about being sentimental—it’s not about rekindling romance, getting touchy-feely, getting that tingle on your spine when you hear the hymn at the beginning of the church liturgy—that’s not what he’s talking about. [Laughter] What he’s calling them to do is going to be a struggle. They’re going to have to struggle; they’re going to have to struggle to get back to where they were, but to the one who does that, the one who enters into that struggle and comes out the other end victorious, what are they going to receive? They’re going to get to eat from the tree of life in paradise. Well, what was that? God expelled humanity from paradise so they wouldn’t eat from the tree of life while they were evil, because that would make them immortal, and if you’re immortal and evil, that’s a demon. God didn’t want humans to become demons, so he cast them out into this would and gave them this life in order to repent, so we wouldn’t end up like the demons if we take that opportunities. So Christ is saying to the one who overcomes, he’s going to give immortality; he’s going to give eternal life. You’re going to be able to do what they were not allowed to do. So that’s letter one. One down, six to go.

Verse eight: “And to the angel of the church in Smyrna, write: These things says the first and the last, who was dead and came to life.” This is also language that we saw in chapter one for Christ. “I know your works, tribulation, and poverty, but you are rich.” [Laughter] We’ll pause there. So he knows their works: he knows what they do. He knows their tribulation: he knows the suffering they’ve gone through. And he also knows their poverty, but then he clarifies, “But you’re rich,” meaning, in terms of money, in terms of how they view themselves, they’re rich, but they’re actually poor. That’s going to get developed some more here.

Q1: Wait. So they are in a material sense rich? Poverty is…

Fr. Stephen: Spiritual, right. Yeah. “And I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” That’s pretty blunt. What this means is at Smyrna at this point, there’s… We talked about how Christianity and Judaism are not separate religions even in 95. You have synagogues and gatherings of Christians, who are of Jewish backgrounds and non-Jewish backgrounds; and you have obviously still gatherings of Jewish people who are not Christians, who do not accept that Jesus is the Messiah. So this group is not being called a synagogue of Satan just because they haven’t accepted Christ, because it’s saying he knows of the blasphemies of those who say they’re Jews but aren’t, are the synagogue of Satan. This is a group that is sort of deliberately—we saw this a lot in the book of Acts—deliberately stirring up trouble for the Christian community, probably with the Roman authorities.

And we talked about how it varied a lot from place to place, what relations were like between Christian-Jewish communities and non-Christian Jewish communities. Some places they were mixed together, all going to the same synagogues; other places there was more tension, from both sides. From both sides. But where that sort of crossed the line would be when you get like the civil magistrate involved, when you get the Roman authorities involved, to try to disadvantage, persecute, imprison, whatever, the other group who is your rival. So that’s what this is indicating. In Smyrna at this time, there is a non-Christian Jewish community that— The problem is not that they were a non-Christian— because there were non-Christian Jewish communities in every one of these cities; they’re not singled out in every city. This one, this is a group of people who are actively using their own authorities to persecute the Christian community. So he’s saying he knows about this.

Verse ten: “Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer. Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation ten days. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

That’s pretty clear. [Laughter] The biggest concern for them is not that they need to do something that they’re not doing, they need to stop doing something they are doing; there is this external persecution coming. So what they’re going to need to do— Their lives in the near future are going to be consumed with remaining faithful despite that persecution, because all this persecution is in the form of: “All you have to do is stop being a Christian, and all of this goes away. You’re going to be a happy member of the pagan community, a happy member of the non-Christian Jewish community. You just have to say a couple of words.”

So Christ is saying, “The one who is faithful until death,” and some of those deaths are going to be in prison. Some of those deaths are going to be after torture. Some of those deaths might be executions. Some of those might be deaths 50 years from then, and they’re going to need to remain faithful that whole time, and there’s going to be good times and bad times. But the one who endures until their death, they receive the crown of life. So that crowning, conquering, victory language again; we’re going to see it again here in verse 11.

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches: He who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death.” There is here a first death; there is a second death. Everyone is going to experience the first death—every human, at least. A couple exceptions: Enoch, Elijah, fair enough. [Laughter] But exceptions that prove the rule. The rest of us, we’re going to all die once. But remember that language that’s applied to Christ even in chapter one: Christ died; he will never die again. This is the same promise being made to the one who’s faithful to Christ. This is referring to the eternal state.

And the second death, or eternal death, is one of the many metaphors that’s used to describe the bad way that can end up, none of which are literal. They can’t be literal because they contradict each other. So if you’ve got an eternal fire, you can’t be in eternal darkness at the same time, because fires give off light. [Laughter] So we have different metaphors of this, all informing us that this is really bad and we don’t want it to happen to us, none of them telling us that it for certain is going to happen to anyone in particular, but it’s there as a possibility. It’s there as a possibility, a potential future for us. And so, in light of that, the one who overcomes, the one who’s victorious, the one who is faithful doesn’t have to worry about that. That is removed from the realm of future possibility.

I will briefly say, so there are some folks out there. I don’t know if they still call it this; I’m sure they’ve come up with a new term, probably with another eight syllables. It used to be called annihilationism, where they believe that people who find eternal life in Christ have eternal life, and then people who don’t just cease to exist, like at the last judgment or when they die or somewhere in between. There’s some point at which they sort of cease to exist. The reason I bring this up here is that they take this second death language and say, “Well, see, second death. So they just die.”

Here’s the problem with that argument. That argument assumes that “death” means “cease to exist.” Does the first death mean you cease to exist? So why would the second death mean you cease to exist? They’ve got to equivocate on the word “death”?

Q2: How could that mean you cease to exist? I mean, your body’s gone…

Q1: If you have an immortal soul…

Q2: Okay! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I mean, you don’t cease to exist; your soul is separated from your body, and then in the resurrection they’re restored to each other, but you don’t—[Snap]—cease to exist. So you have to equivocate on the word “death.” You have to say, “Okay, death, in the case of the first death, means your soul is separated from your body, and death in case of the second death means you completely cease to exist.” And by calling it the second death, you’re doing the opposite of saying that these are two different things; you’re saying that they’re in some way similar. So it doesn’t make sense, then, to say that the word “death” means two different things in the same comparison, because then it’s not a comparison. If I say my car is similar to my dog, you’re going to be confused. If I say my 2004 Ford Escape is similar to my neighbor’s 2001 Ford Escape, you’re going to say, “Ah, yes, those two things would be similar.” [Laughter] I’d be making a sensible comparison. But that was just an aside, just because sometimes people bring that up. I’m heading off a future email to Ancient Faith, asking me about that.

Verse twelve: “And to the angel of the church in Pergamos: These things says he who has the sharp two-edged sword,” again from the first chapter, that was coming out of his mouth. We talked about how you’re not supposed to literally try to draw that.

I know your works and where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is, and you hold fast to my name and did not deny my faith, even in the days in which Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was killed among you where Satan dwells.

Okay, so this is written to the Church at Pergamos, also known as Pergamum, same place. Latin name, Greek name, for the city. This “throne of Satan” that’s being referred to is a literal physical object that you can go see in Berlin. [Laughter] Because at the Acropolis, the high point of the city of Pergamos, there was a great altar to Zeus that depicts in statuary the gigantomachy, the Olympian gods battling the giants. It is a massive affair. This was up at the highest point over the city. They were offering pagan sacrifices on it to Zeus, Jupiter, king of the gods, continuously, so there’s smoke rising up from it. The whole city is in the shadow of this pagan—gigantic pagan altar celebrating sort of the glory of this pagan god.

So why is Zeus in particular associated with Satan, other than, you know, the gods of the nations are demons, this guy’s the king, so he must be the devil? That is part of it, but that’s not the only part of it. It’s that when you find the devil described in the Old Testament— Like in Isaiah and Ezekiel, there are these sort of poetic narrations of the fall of the devil, and in those—one of them’s debatable, but in pretty much both of those, he’s compared to Baal: the story of Baal in the Baal cycle, the Phoenician god Baal, but who was worshiped throughout Canaan and Palestine. The pagan god, Baal—Baal is a storm-god who, in the Baal cycle, stages a revolution with his fellow gods against the most-high god at the time and defeats him and makes himself the most-high god, and his dad, El. So that story is what’s called the succession myth, because it’s repeated over and over again in Ancient Near Eastern cultures; there’s some version of it—Marduk does it, and, famously, Zeus does it. Zeus kills his father, Chronos, and becomes king of the gods. That’s kind of payback, because Chronos castrated his father, Uranos, in order to take over. And Zeus is a storm-god.

When Alexander the Great got to what became the city of Antioch in Syria, for which our patriarchate is named, when he got to where that city would end up being, there was an ancient shrine there to Baal, and he rededicated it to Zeus Boanerges, Zeus the Thunderer. For several centuries it has been sort of accepted that Zeus and Baal were sort of the same dude, were sort of hypostases of the same god, different versions of the same god. And so it’s very natural, then, if Baal is sort of a picture of the devil… Of course, in the devil’s own propaganda, he wins his rebellion; he wins his insurrection, and so everyone should worship him. And then from the Old Testament perspective: “Naw, you lost. That’s why your palace is in hell.”

In the Baal cycle, it’s interesting. Baal goes and fights Yam and Nahar; he goes and fights the most-high god and “totally wins” and then descends into the underworld. When he gets to the underworld, he fights Mot, the god of death, and again “totally wins” but just decides to stay there and build his palace there anyway. [Laughter] It’s sort of a— Even built into the Baal cycle, there’s sort of this: “Really? You won, huh? All right… It seems a little odd, but all right.” And that gets played with in the Old Testament and gets sort of thrown back at the devil. This idea that Zeus is Satan that’s being used here sort of off-handedly was off-hand for Jewish people at this point in history, like, yes, these Romans are all worshiping the devil and demons, and this is sort of false worship.

But that reference has this reference because this is a Christian community that’s constantly living in the shadow of that. That’s what you see when you look up at the skyline is the smoke belching up into the sky. And this is a center of imperial power. This isn’t just the high altar for Pergamum; this is one of the primary high altars for the Roman Empire at this time. Generals, major Roman officials would go on pilgrimages there. They would go there, especially if they were on their way to the eastern front, go there and offer sacrifices to Zeus. They’re sort of in the middle, the dead center of hostile territory where they’re living. We read here that there’s even been this Antipas who’s been killed by the Roman authorities for being a Christian. So they’re congratulated: You’re living deep in enemy territory, you’re facing this persecution, someone’s been killed, but you’re still staying faithful.

Verse 14: “But I have a few things against you, because you have there those who hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality.” So we’ll pause there. Notice when he says, “I have a few things against you,” he then talks about people who are in the community. Notice again, he’s writing to the community, but those people in the community, he’s not just writing a letter to them, chiding them or telling them to repent; it’s the community. The community needs to deal with this.

So this is somewhat cryptic, because this is referring to people from the book of Numbers, and I know Numbers is everyone’s favorite book of the Bible. [Laughter] You do daily readings from Numbers, especially the genealogies and the census. It’s just everybody’s favorite stuff. But Balaam, you probably know the story with the donkey. [Laughter] Yeah, that’s related to this, because Balak is the king of Moab, who hires Balaam to come and curse Israel.

Q1: Is that the same one who was…?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s— We’re going to get there in a second, yeah. And Balak is not to be confused with Balok from the “First Federation” in the first season Star Trek episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” [Laughter] He is also not to be confused with Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It takes place much later, even though the ark of the covenant’s involved.

Balak hired Balaam. Now, notice here that’s kind of reversed. Balaam taught Balak something, because we’re moving to a later incident than the story with the donkey, where he tries to curse Israel and fails and ends up blessing them over and over again. This is a less funny story. That story has the talking donkey. You have him going and trying to curse Israel, and then he says a blessing, and then they’re like: “Doh!” And it’s kind of funny. This one is far less funny.

So this is— They get to Ba’al Peor. Peor is a place where there’s a high place, meaning there’s a hill where Baal, Ba’al, is worshiped. When Israel gets there, Balaam—this is where the “teaches Balak” thing—says, “Okay, look. The reason we had so much trouble the first time is that their God was protecting them. So what you need to do is you need to get them to offend their God, and then their God won’t protect them any more, and then you can get them.”

And the way that he suggested the men of Israel in particular be lured out from under God’s protection was that they send— So you usually get “priestesses” in English Bibles. These are not priestesses; these would be what would be more correctly termed “shrine prostitutes,” although “prostitute” implies money, and this was more a religious function. I don’t want to go into this too much, but Baal being a storm-god also has this element of sending the rains for fertility. One of the primary ways in which fertility gods like Baal were ritually worshiped in the Ancient Near East was the idea of fertilizing the land was enacted with a woman who was at the shrine for this purpose. So men who were farmers would come and engage sexually with these shrine workers, and that would enact sort of the fertilization of their soil and their crops to guarantee a good harvest.

So these women come to Israelite men who are very cooperative and go with them to the shrine, engage in this ritual immortality, also engage in offering sacrifices to Baal, and that, then, sort of wrecks everything. A plague comes upon the people.

So Christ is referring back to that as sort of an example, saying something similar is happening there, that there are people being lured, and there are people doing the luring within, to get members of the Christian community to participate in the sexual immorality and the pagan sacrifices that are going on in the city, because, again, this is the big temptation. The whole reason people are being persecuted, the whole reason Antipas gets killed is that the Christians aren’t willing to participate in the festivals, aren’t willing to participate in these rituals, aren’t willing to participate in these sacrifices. “So if you just go do it, everyone will leave you alone. And you can still be a Christian. I mean, you can still go to church and stuff. I mean, you just do what you have to do to get along, right?” And so there are people— Not only are the people in the community doing that, which is obviously not good, but there are people in the community saying, “Yeah! I mean, you don’t need to get killed over this. Come on, man. Just go along with it.”

So that’s a problem that has to be dealt with by the community. Most of them are standing strong, but if you have people making excuses and leading other people, that has to be dealt with. So there’s that going on, which is not good.

Verse 15: “Thus you also have those who hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate.” [Laughter] Back to them again! So they must be in the area, because all of these cities are in the same area. So he says some of them have started following the Nicolaitans. Notice again, he doesn’t say, “whom I hate”; it’s “which thing I hate,” meaning it’s referring back to the doctrine that’s hated, not the people.

Verse 16: “Repent, or else I will come to you quickly and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.” Notice he doesn’t say, “Repent, or I’m going to come kill all of you.” [Laughter] He says, “Repent, or I will come to you quickly, and I will fight against them.” So judgment is coming for the people who are doing this. We have to differentiate within the community and this being a community issue, and innocent people getting punished along with those who have been doing the wrong things. Remember Abraham with Sodom and Gomorrah, trying to sort of haggle with God: “Well, what if I can find 50 people? What if I can find 45 people? What if I can find 40 people?” [Laughter] Sort of working his way down.

But the command to repent is directed to the whole community. So the whole community is to repent. Why? For the sake of saving those people from the consequences that will come if they don’t change. That is the opposite— The idea of kind of communal repentance is the opposite of our natural instinct. Our natural instinct is to justify ourselves. Our natural instinct, if we were in this city, reading this, would be: “Well, I’m certainly not doing that. I’m one of the ones who’s been suffering because I’ve been resisting. Say, you know what, I think God should come and take care of those people who aren’t doing what I’m doing. I kind of resent it!” [Laughter] This is the opposite of that.

We find this idea in a lot of the Desert Fathers and a lot of the monastics, where monastics will repent of other monks’ sins as a way of showing solidarity in Christ. If we’re one in Christ, and you’re my brother in Christ, my sister in Christ, and I see you fall into sin, what am I going to want to do? I want you to find salvation. So I’m going to repent—hopefully with you. The repentance part is something the community needs to do together. We all need to get right. We all need to get on the same page, together, and do what we should be doing, for the sake of those who are going to perish if they continue in the way that they’re going.

Verse 17: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches: To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna to eat, and I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it.”

That’s sort of two parts. The first one, we have that “overcome” language again. The first part, “give some of the hidden manna to eat”—manna, remember, is the bread of heaven, the bread that comes down from heaven and that is sort of completely nourishing and satisfying. And it’s being contrasted with— Remember it mentioned food offered to idols, because that’s how sacrifices are meals. Sacrifices are not about killing things; sacrifices are meals, and the way you participate in it is by eating some of it. You go to the feast, they bring in the meat from the animal that’s been sacrificed, you all eat it: that’s how you participate in the worship. So they’re commanded not to eat, which, for a lot of early Christians, St. Paul says when he talks about food offered to idols, means being vegetarians, because a lot of these cities, like Corinth, like Athens, at this time in history, pretty much all the meat that was out for sale in the meat market came from the temples. So they’re denying themselves food; Christ promises that he’s going to give them the heavenly food that really nourishes and really satisfies, over against the sort of demonic food that’s coming from these temples.

The second part, about being given a new name on a white stone that no one else knows… So when someone gets a new name—this is something that happens throughout the Bible. We’ve seen a bunch of examples of it. Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel, Simeon, Simon bar Jonah, becomes Simon “the Rock” bar Jonah: he becomes St. Peter; he becomes Petros or Cephas, given a new name. Saul—Saul sort of becomes Paul. Those are really the Latin and Greek versions, but he stops using one and just uses the other. But those other examples are kind of better examples than St. Paul, because in all of those cases it’s God, meaning Christ in these cases, who gives this person a new name as a mark of the intimacy between them, their knowledge of each other. They’ve come to know God. Jacob is Jacob for most of his life. When he finally, before he goes to meet Esau and reconciles with him, and he ends up throwing down with the angel of the Lord in the middle of the night and wrestling, he gets the name Israel; it means “struggles with God.” It’s a marker of their relationship, and him having come to know God through his whole life, and God knowing him. And Christ calls Simon “Rocky.” [Laughter] It says something about his character. And Abram becomes Abraham; Sarai becomes Sarah. It’s all this intimacy.

So the promise here is that— is not just “Christ is the king, he’s up on a throne somewhere, like, say, Zeus, who’s enthroned off somewhere remote, terrible.” Zeus is pretty terrible. He needs to get retuned really badly, and he has violent moods. [Laughter] That’s not the kind of God who Christ is. The promise of Christ is that he’s going to get you, is going to come to know you intimately, and that you’ll come to know him intimately, so that he’ll have what we would call like a pet name for you. You would have something he calls you that no one else knows, that’s just something you share with him.

Q1: Is the stone in there like a rock, or is it like a gemstone?

Fr. Stephen: It’s hard to tell. It’s probably just a stone, like a flat stone. But so that’s the idea there, and that’s radically different than anything you find in pagan religion. Nobody’s singing “What a Friend We Have in Zeus.” [Laughter] Everybody’s— You don’t want Zeus to be your friend. You spend a lot of your time hoping the pagan gods don’t notice you, because that usually goes very badly. They make you mad and then they destroy you, I think is the order, right? [Laughter] So you want to keep them kind of away. It’s like in Fiddler on the Roof with the Tsar: “Keep him far away from us.” [Laughter] You don’t want them around. This is the exact opposite.

This is being said to a group of people who are not like the wealthy upper crust. Like, Zeus would probably know who the emperor is, they would figure, because he’s an important person. He’s kind of a god himself sort of, or close, so, you know, they make talk. Caligula used to do that. He had a big anvil, and he’d go bang on it whenever there was a thunderstorm and say he was talking to Zeus. Little crazy, but, you know.

But, you know, the gods didn’t know who your average peasant was, and didn’t care. We were talking earlier, the Romans looked at them as livestock, basically. “These are the livestock that are on our Roman land that we came and seized. They have their uses, so we’ll keep some of them around. We’ll cull them occasionally if the population gets out of control.” But they didn’t think that any of the gods, let alone the Most High God who created the heavens and the earth cared to know who any of these people were inside, like they were anything inside. They were a bunch of bodies; they were slaves.

So this is a massive change. This is one of the primary things, if not the primary thing, that made Christianity so attractive to people in the Roman world, because it offered something that no other religion at the time did, that no other religion even thought of. The whole idea of the Incarnation was ridiculous to them. A Platonist would laugh in your face if you suggested something like that. [Laughter] Aristotle thought that God could only think about himself, because he couldn’t lower himself to think about any lesser thing than himself! So Aristotle’s god is essentially just a super narcissist, just admires himself all the time. That’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with in the rest of the world. Though there are plenty of passages in the Old Testament that can get you there, especially in the book of Deuteronomy, for example, that talk about God’s love, even in most—not all, but most—sects of Judaism at that time, in the first century, it was more God’s love for the collective, God’s love for Israel, for his people. It was less sort of specific; it wasn’t the Most High God, Creator of heaven and earth, has a pet name for me.

That becomes so much more intense because of the reality of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is what does that trick, that God became human and not like the emperor’s son. He’s born in a cave, in an animal feed trough, dirt poor, doesn’t own anything. That’s who God is. That is what inverts this whole thing from the pagan world. Part of what’s going on in this short little letter is contrasting Zeus—Satan—and his throne on the one hand, and Christ on the other.