Father Stephen De Young: Okay, so we’ll get started here in just a second. We’re going to be starting at the beginning of Gospel according to St. John, chapter 12.
Just to get us caught up to where we were, as we mentioned last time, we’re just past sort of the major shift in St. John’s Gospel because as we mentioned, chapters 11 through 21 of St John’s Gospel cover the last week essentially of Jesus’ life. The first ten chapters cover the rest. So we’ve made our major shift now, we’ve entered into that week last time we talked about and read about the raising of Lazarus, and this happened in Bethany, which is not far from Jerusalem.
So Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem when this takes place. And the raising of Lazarus is a crystallizing moment here in two ways, in a positive way, in that this demonstration of Christ’s power resurrecting this man who’s been dead for four days, solidifies for his followers that he is indeed the Messiah, that he is who he says he is, that what he’s been saying is true. And also on the other side, for the people who are opposed to Him, the people who hate Him, we’ve seen it crystallized their desire to get rid of Him.
And so immediately following the raising of Lazarus, we saw that the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leaders got together and agreed that Jesus needed to die. And we saw that Caiaphas told the truth accidentally when he said that it would be good for one person to die for the nation. He didn’t really understand what he was saying, how true it was. So they’re now committed that they’re going to do this. And it’s at the point where they’ve sort of put out a bounty on Jesus. They’re offering a reward to anyone who will identify Him and tell them where he is, because they’re aware since he just did this in Bethany, he’s probably coming to town, to Jerusalem. It’s the time of the Passover. They’ve put the word out, “If you see Jesus anywhere in the city, tell us and we’ll give you a reward for helping us find Him and apprehend Him,” with the intent to kill Him.
So this is all coming to a climax. We’ve had a lot of back and forth between Jesus and the Jewish leaders. But now this is coming to the final showdown here.
As I mentioned before, a few times, one of the things since St. John’s Gospel was written after the other three, and he has the other three available to him, he can go back and kind of fill in the blanks. And as we’re about to see tonight, we’re going to ultimately talk about Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And so the other Gospels, we don’t really see why there’s so much excitement surrounding, as I mentioned before, they’re all structured that Jesus takes this one trip from Galilee to Jerusalem, and when he arrives at Jerusalem there’s this huge fanfare and all this excitement and entry, well, he did some miracles and things, but why is everybody so on board? Well, St. John fills in that gap by telling us the story of the raising of Lazarus, which the other ones didn’t tell us. It’s not that the other three say it didn’t happen, it’s just you could only tell so many things. You can’t tell everything that happened in Jesus’ life and so they picked and chose other things. There are things that they have that St. John doesn’t. But because St. John is later, because the other three already exist, he can not focus on the things they focused on, he can focus on filling in other pieces of information.
And so, we see here at St. John’s Gospel the relationship both in time and directly that’s going to play out tonight as we read between the fact that he’s just raised Lazarus and now these people who saw this happen are sort of following him and accompanying him into Jerusalem and telling people what happened. And that’s what’s causing this big… because if someone can raise someone who’s been dead for four days, when there was already a stench coming out of the tomb because they were decomposing, then that’s pretty clear that this person is at least the Messiah, this is at least the person we’re waiting for. And so we’ve seen that’s what stimulates this excitement. So unless anybody has any questions or anything or comments or nitpicks or anything else, we’ll go ahead and get started in chapter 12:
Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead. There they made Him a supper; and Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with Him.
So, we mentioned before that the feast of the Passover, even though there’s one day that is the Passover proper, it’s celebrated over the course of a week that’s still true to this day. And that’s sort of the origin of our Holy Week. In the same way that we celebrate Christ’s resurrection as our Pascha, that our Holy Week comes from that week of celebration leading up to it, we see Christ as the fulfillment of that.
But so, the beginning of the celebration of the Passover has started, and Jesus has gone back into the town of Bethany to visit Mary and Martha and Lazarus, who are brother and sisters, as we saw.
Interlocutor: Were these feasts done in the temple or just in people’s houses?
Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on the feast. There were things done in the Temple for all of these, but the Passover, for example, was eaten as a family and there were particular things. Well, yeah, now, nothing’s done in the temple because there isn’t one.
Interlocutor: You said, at the time of writing this Gospel, it was understood that they had communion each week?
Fr. Stephen: The Christians who are reading this yes.
Interlocutor: In their homes or in like, the Jewish temples?
Fr. Stephen: Well, in the very earliest stage of the church, we’ll talk about this more when we get into the Book of Acts next. The very earliest phase, the apostles continued going to the Temple, but they weren’t sacrificing animals, but they continued going to the Temple and praying. But after that, after the destruction of the Temple, at the very earliest stage, Christianity and Judaism were not separate religions. Now, they are, clearly, but at that time, there were Jewish people and Gentile converts who accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, and there were other Jewish people who did not accept him as the Jewish Messiah, but they were still sort of all mingled together. That really happens in the second century when after the destruction of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem in the second century, the Pharisees basically get control of what becomes rabbinic Judaism, and they expel the Christians from the synagogue. They say, “You’re not Jews”. And so that’s when the two sort of separate.
Until then, Christians would go on Saturday, on the Sabbath, to the synagogue to hear the reading of scripture and preaching. And there were Christian synagogues. I mean, it wasn’t like they were going to a place that didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. But they’d go to the synagogue, and they would preach the Old Testament scriptures because the New Testament wasn’t composed yet, and hear the preaching. And then on Sunday, they would gather on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day. They would gather in someone’s home usually, but it wasn’t just the family. It would be the whole community would gather in someone’s home.
Interlocutor 2: And we’ve found a lot of these house churches archaeologically.
Interlocutor: So they did Vespers? [Laughter]
Fr. Stephen: Well, this is where the two parts of our liturgy come from. And they would come and then on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, they’d gather and have what was called an agape meal. And the Eucharist would happen at that meal. They would say the prayers. And so, what happens is when the Christians get expelled from the synagogue, they take the synagogue service and move it to the Lord’s Day also and put it before the Eucharist. So, if you look at the first half of our liturgy, we sing Psalms, and then we have the Epistle and we have the entrance with the Gospel, and then the Epistle and Gospel readings and preaching. If you go to an Orthodox synagogue, you’ll see the same things, including the entrance. They do a procession with the Torah scroll the same way we do one with the Gospels. So the Christians took that part and sort of Christianized it and put it at the beginning and then the second part, then we have the Eucharist. So that’s where that comes from. Those two were combined. So that’s how that worked at this at that point.
But so at this time, the people would as a family or as a social unit, I should say, because we’re going to see Jesus and the apostles do this, or the disciples at this point, do this at the mystical supper they’re gathering to eat, would gather together and do it independently. The lambs that were killed, if you’re in Jerusalem, if you were out in a farm in rural Galilee, you’d kill your own lamb and prepare it and everything for your family. But in Jerusalem, the lambs were killed in the temple and then were distributed so that they could celebrate the Passover. But that’s how it was done.
And interestingly, Deuteronomy says that what you should do with your tithe is save it up all year. And then when the feast comes, referring to Pascha, to the Passover, go to Jerusalem with your extended family and use that money to buy food. And it says wine or other strong drink. So, it prescribes alcohol, wine or other strong drink and eat and drink them before the Lord and celebrate. And so what Jesus and the disciples are doing is in that mold of what’s done in the Old Testament, that feast. And for any of our Baptist friends who might be listening, that verse of Deuteronomy is the proof that Jesus had actual wine at the Last Supper because he was being obedient to what Deuteronomy says. [Laughter]
Okay, so Jesus has come. Now he’s being hosted. We know that this family, they’re his friends.
Interlocutor: I’d be pretty good friends with anybody that raised me from the dead!
Fr. Stephen: Right, but they were friends before that, remember? That’s why they came and they said, “Lazarus, your friend is sick.” So these were already people whom he knew. Remember when we read the story of the raising of Lazarus? This is another one of those. St. John isn’t really good at keeping spoilers from us. He identified Mary as the one who anointed Jesus with the ointment, but he’s about to tell that story. So he sort of spoiled it in the last chapter.
Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.
So this is a pound of ointment. That’s a lot of ointment. That’s why it says the smell filled the house. This is a considerable…
Interlocutor: Do we know what spikenard is?
Fr. Stephen: Spikenard is basically a thick fragrant oil. And this is a huge amount. The idea is that kind of amount, as it says, is very costly. And remember where we are. We’re in Bethany, beth ‘ani, the house of the poor. These are not wealthy people who are doing this for Jesus. And people would keep small amounts of this oil around. I mean, we forget we’re very hygienic in our modern Western culture. But you have to remember, these are people who bathed occasionally. The Jewish people were cleaner than most other people because they had to, to go into Jerusalem and go to the Temple, they had to go through the ceremonial washings. But on a day-to-day basis, unless you were going to the temple every day, unless you were a priest or something, they were not bathing very often. Maybe a couple of times a year. They basically wore clothes until they wore off of them. So you’d wear the same set of clothes for a year. You’d sleep in it, you’d walk around in it, you’d wear it. This is why we see people washing feet, because when you’re on a journey, you’re going to get mud and stuff over your feet. We’re going to see that coming up here. You would have small amounts of this just because there’s no deodorant, this kind of thing. So you’d use a little to kind of give a fragrance. But this is not a little… this is not even a bottle of perfume.
Interlocutor: Do Muslims do these same washings?
Fr. Stephen: Yes. Islam, the same thing. And that’s why, interestingly, the Black Plague did not hit the Middle East as hard as it hit Europe because the hygiene was much better, because of the washings. So, the disease didn’t spread as badly as in Western Europe where there was no hygiene at all.
Interlocutor 2: Actually, I read a book on that and it hit the Middle East very hard.
Fr. Stephen: Well, it did hit them hard, but it didn’t kill a third of the population.
Interlocutor 2: No, it did. According to the guy who wrote it. Because first of all, sanitation has nothing to do with the spread of Black Plague. If the Black Plague spreads by fleas and rats, the traditional belief…
Fr. Stephen: Hmmmm, OK. Okay, so she uses this sort of super abundant amount of ointment.
But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, who would betray Him, said, “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”
We mentioned that before, that St. John can’t mention Judas without sort of spitting on the ground after saying his name. “So, just so you don’t forget, this is the traitor”. 300 denarii is his rule of thumb estimate for how much this was worth. Remember, denarius was sort of one day’s wage for the average workers. So this is like a year’s salary for your
“minimum wage” worker. So this is a huge amount, again remember, these are people who are living in poverty who just did this. Now, St. John wants to note, though:
This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it.
So St. John just wants us to know this wasn’t because Judas was legitimately concerned for poor people. It’s because he’s the treasurer and he’s embezzling, basically. And so he’s saying, “Hey, why didn’t you put that in the money box?” My dad was the church treasurer the whole time I was growing up. And he said, you should always keep an eye on the church treasurer because he has Judas’s job. [Laughter]
Interlocutor: Is Judas the patron saint of embezzlers?
Fr. Stephen: [Laughs]
But Jesus said, “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial. For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always.”
And so, she does this sort of huge expression of love. And so, Jesus says to leave her alone because she’s kept this for the day of my burial, meaning she’s preparing him. Because the only time you would use that much, you wouldn’t dump that much onto a person, normally. You would use that, however, to anoint a dead body because you’re trying to counteract the smell of decay.
So now, the second sentence, “For the poor, you have with you always, but you do not have always” is often, shall we say, taken out of context and misapplied. Frequently people say, “Oh, the poor will always be with you,” as if Jesus is saying, “Oh, don’t worry about the poor. There’s always going to be poor people. There’s nothing you could do about it. Go about your business.”
The problem with that interpretation is, remember, Judas wasn’t actually concerned about the poor. And how has Jesus been portrayed all the way through St. John’s Gospel, right? He knows what everybody’s thinking. We’ve seen people will be thinking something and he’ll respond. So he knows full well what Judas is thinking too. So, he’s obviously not saying, “Oh, well, Judas is concerned for the poor, why?” That’s obviously not what he’s saying.
Part of this is related to, we mentioned Deuteronomy a minute ago. One of the commandments in Deuteronomy that God gives is there shall be no poor among you [Deuteronomy 15:4]. Remember, in Deuteronomy, he’s giving his law for how Israel is to structure their society. He’s saying there shall be no poor among you. Because if you have a brother who’s suffering, who’s starving, doesn’t have enough food, you need to be giving him and his family food. If he needs a place to live, you need to be giving him a place. So there shall be no poor among you.
So, the fact that there are poor, the fact that there is a Bet ‘ani, the fact that there is this sort of slum outside Jerusalem is a condemnation against nation of Judea, that they’re not keeping God’s law. And remember, we talked about how the chief priests have been hoarding the money, they’ve taken control of the land, they control all the wealth in the country. And so, there are all these poor.
So, Christ’s comment, “The poor you will always have with you,” is sort of a sarcastic indictment, because they’re not keeping the Torah, based on the fact that he knows, well, Judas doesn’t really care about the poor, that Judas is trying to put that money in his own pocket.
Interlocutor: Well, it’s also connected to his saying that she’s doing this for his burial because he’s telling them that he’s not going to be with them always.
Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the next part of that. “I will not always be here with you.” The reality is, of course, Christ should always be with us and there should be no poor.
Interlocutor: He was really positive that Judas Iscariot was this thief when he started?
Fr. Stephen: Yes, they see, when he started, he volunteered to keep track of the money and he spent…
Interlocutor: They knew always?
Fr. Stephen: Well, no, they didn’t know all the time, but they knew later. And so St. John again, every time he mentions Judas, he wants to fill us in editorial comment, and he wants to make sure no one reads this and thinks Judas really cared about the poor. “No, that’s not why.” That’s important because, again, we’re leading up to this showdown between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. And this is part of why that showdown has been happening. Remember, Jesus never has criticized the Pharisees for being wrong. He never said their wrong. Over and over again, He calls them hypocrites because they’re saying all the right things. They’re there reading the law; they’re there talking about God’s commandments. At one point, he says to the disciples, “Do whatever the Pharisees tell you to do, but don’t do what they do.” Because they’re hypocrites.
And so, they would stand in the synagogue and read Deuteronomy and read everything else in the law about how you’re to care for the poor and read about how the Levites are not to own any land while they’re collecting money renting tenant farmers’ land back to them. They would read all these things and study all these things and proclaim all these things, but what they’re doing is very different. And so Jesus’ comment here isn’t just indicting Judas, it’s indicting the whole system. It’s indicting the whole way that the people who, going back to when he spoke to Nicodemus, remember, he tries to talk to him and Nicodemus is sort of clueless, and says, “What do you mean?” He says, “You’re one of the teachers of Israel and you don’t understand these things. You’re supposed to be leading everyone else.”
And so, this is why the showdown… and this is why they want to kill him. It’s not just they’re scared of the Romans. It’s that they also realize he’s a threat to their authority and their power and their way of their way of doing things. Remember, the Sadducees don’t even believe in an afterlife and they control the chief priesthood, right? So they’re all about keeping what they’ve got in this world and this life. So Jesus is a threat to that too.
And so when Jesus talks about people who are consumed with the cares of this world and choosing the things of this world rather than the things of God, that’s exactly the type of thing that he’s talking about.
Now a great many of the Jews knew that He was there; and they came, not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might also see Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead.
So, the story has gotten around, and so people are sort of taking the trip out there because they hear Jesus is there. “Did he really raise somebody from the dead? Well, I hear the guy he raised is there. Let’s go ask him. Let’s talk to him. Let’s ask him.” And I know almost everyone today would love to meet him so they could say, “What happened during those four days? Where were you and what was going on? Tell me all about it.”
Interlocutor: Is this the first record that he raised someone from the dead?
Fr. Stephen: In St. John’s Gospel, yes. There are in other Gospels, they raise people, but not someone who had been dead for four days and was decomposing, and not this publicly. Like when he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, he goes and he throws everybody out of the room and it’s just him and a couple of disciples. This is a big public… I mean, the whole town that was gathered there to mourn, everyone saw it. So this was a big public thing. So this is the first time he’s done it that way, that openly.
But the chief priests plotted to put Lazarus to death also, because on account of him many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus.
So now they now we want to kill Jesus. They want to kill Lazarus to cover up what Jesus did, because all these people who find out about it are coming to be followers of Jesus. So now this, this is the lead up to Palm Sunday, the triumphal entry. This is why there’s all this excitement from the common people and all this hatred coming from the Jewish leaders at the moment this event happens. Remember, they’ve put the word out, “If you spot Jesus somewhere, if you find him, tell us and we’ll give you a reward,” because they’re going to kill him. In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus knows full well that’s what they’re planning. And we’re going to see how he chooses to enter into the city. Spoilers, He’s not going to sneak in at night.
The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out:
“Hosanna!
‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!’
The King of Israel!”
And this is from Psalm 118. So they come, they’re singing, they’re singing the psalms. This is a messianic psalm. So they’re essentially signaling, here’s our king. He’s riding now into his city. Jerusalem is David’s city. The Messiah is the son of David. This is all happening. The Romans are on their way out. You’ll notice in the heading, although this is not the original text, the little heading in the Orthodox Study Bible, it says the “Triumph of Palm Sunday”, sometimes called the triumphal entry. “Triumph” is a technical term. It’s not just talking about Jesus as sort of victorious. We actually get the word triumph from this. The Romans, when a Roman general or Caesar or someone won a military victory, they would stage what was called a triumph, and that was their entry. When they came back to the city, they went out. Caesar goes out, divides Gaul into three parts, comes riding back into the city. There’s this huge procession, there’s this huge victory procession…
Interlocutor: All the captives and all the loot…
Fr. Stephen: ...Are brought in with paraded in with him. He and his generals ride in and wave to everyone and everyone chants and cheers.
So this was something in Roman life that was understood. And so, remember, St. John is writing this in the western part of Asia Minor at the end of the first century, which is what’s now western Turkey. So he’s writing this to people who live in Roman cities. They understand what this is about. So this is really Jesus being received in a parallel way to, for example, Caesar. And so this by itself, if Jesus had sort of staged this, this by itself would be enough cause for the Romans to kill him. So if we’re wondering about the motivation, we’ve talked about the motivation of the chief priests a little bit why they would want to kill Jesus. If you want to know why the Romans would want to kill Jesus, this right here, setting himself up as some kind of king or some kind of leader of the people would be seen as a direct challenge to Caesar. And peasants don’t go around challenging Caesar and getting away with it in the Roman Empire.
Then Jesus, when He had found a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written:
“Fear not, daughter of Zion;
Behold, your King is coming,
Sitting on a donkey’s colt.”
That’s from Zechariah 9:9. If you look up Zechariah, chapter 9, the whole chapter is about God returning to the people of Israel. That’s why it says, “Fear not”. It’s written after the exile. So they don’t have a king, they don’t have a land, they don’t have any of this. But the prophets have been prophesying, including Zechariah, that God is going to return to his people. And this is part of one of those prophecies, “Behold, your king is coming.” It’s referring, this is not clearly, again, we don’t have time to go to Zechariah 9, but it’s not referring to a human king, it’s not even referring to the Messiah, it’s referring to God himself returning to his people to save them, to rescue them from the exile. So St John applying this to Jesus is, again, as St John has already done several times, pretty clearly saying that Jesus is God, that the way God returns to his people, the way he returns to end the exile is in the person of Jesus.
Interlocutor: Before we get too much further on, I wanted to ask what is the literal meaning of “Hosanna” and what language is that?
Fr. Stephen: That is Hebrew. Which basically means sort of “Praise Him”. Praise in a general sense. So, yeah, that’s sort of an excited sort of the way we would use Hallelujah, although they also had “Hallelujah”, but hallelujah involves the name of the Lord, so they would use that a little more reservedly. Hosanna just means “praise him”. You’re leaving the hymn kind of open. You’re not saying the name. The “Yah” at the end of Hallelujah is the beginning of Yahweh.
Interlocutor: What language is Hallelujah?
Fr. Stephen: It’s Hebrew, originally. Halal is the verb “to praise”. And then the Yah at the end is the beginning of Yahweh, is the beginning of the name of the Lord.
Interlocutor: So it’s not Greek.
Fr. Stephen: No, in the Bible, in Greek, they just transliterate it. They didn’t translate it. There’s a few words like that. The other major word like that in the liturgy is we say Lord Sabaoth, which is not related to the word Sabbath in any way. A lot of people think it is because it’s spelled similarly in English. But that’s actually… the Hebrew verb sava means “to be many”. So, for example, when God creates the world in Genesis 1, and he says, “Let the seas and the skies be filled with life,” that verb, “teemed” in English is sava, in Hebrew. It’s full of fish. And so as a noun, the noun sava refers to a big group. And often it’s used to describe an army in a military setting, a big army. And so Sabaoth is the feminine plural ending in Hebrew. So it means many, “manys”, and usually, like in our bridegroom matins during Holy Week, Yahweh Sabaoth is translated Lord of hosts. That “-oth” is the plural of lots of, Sabaoth. It’s actually savaoat. But Sabaoth is that “Lord of Hosts”. The idea that he’s the lord of these great angelic armies. And in fact, when you find that in the Old Testament, several times in the Psalms, it’s Yahweh savaoat, “Yahweh mighty in battle”. So it’s that kind of imagery. But yeah, rather than translating it in our liturgy, it’s just transliterated. So he says Sabaoth. Anyway, but that’s what that refers to. Hosanna is just transliterated here.
St. John does that a lot, actually, in the Book of Revelation, maranatha, he doesn’t translate, he just flips it into Greek. And what that probably means is that just like the examples I just gave, is that these words were being used liturgically by Christians, even who weren’t of a Jewish background. They were singing “hallelujah”. So they didn’t need to translate it, they could leave it because the readers would be familiar. Oh, yeah, we sing the “Hosanna Maranatha”.
Interlocutor: Maranatha is Syriac?
Fr. Stephen: It’s Aramaic. Well, Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. So they’re very close. They have a different written alphabet, but they’re very close in terms of the words.
This is important because again, St. John is teaching here a different idea of the Messiah than what most of these people, even the people who are receiving Him in the triumphal entry, from their perspective, “Oh, this is the Messiah, this is our new King. God has sent us another king from the line of David. He’s going to get rid of the Romans.” That’s their understanding of the Messiah.
But what St. John is doing here with this quote is he’s bringing together the idea of the Messiah, of the King who’s coming, and the idea of God returning to his people, God himself coming in person to his people and combining them in the person of Jesus. So Jesus does fulfill those messianic prophecies about the coming King, but he does more than that. He also fulfills God’s prophecies that he was going to come and return to his people and judge his people, which is also clear in the prophets and we talked before about how that judging is already sort of happening by how the people are dividing related to Jesus.
His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.
So, St. John is here admitting, because he’s one of the disciples, “We didn’t really understand…” even the disciples. So the disciples at this point, we’ve seen them confess that Jesus is the Messiah. But what St. John is saying here is they were sort of on the same page as the other people in the crowd. They thought, “All right, this is the big moment. Jesus is the Messiah. Here he comes, he’s going to set himself up as king this time.”
Interlocutor: By this time, isn’t there a lot of assumption that the Messiah is at least to some degree supernatural? I mean, he’s got supernatural powers. He’s not just a human king. More than that.
Fr. Stephen: It’s difficult to say. It’s difficult to say. There are some shades of that around the same time. Most of it comes from the first century. It’s not very widespread, though. We’ve got to remember, we think of Judaism at this time like there’s just one united religious group who all basically believe the same things. And that’s not the case. Judaism at this time was as diverse as, for example, Christianity is today, where we’ve got Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and various forms of Protestantism and all these other groups. The same way, Judaism was very diverse at this time in history. So for example, as we already mentioned, the Sadducees don’t even believe in an afterlife, whereas the Pharisees believe very strongly in the resurrection. And you’ve got groups like the Qumran community, who most people think are Essenes, who are sort of withdrawn, these semi-monastic kind of communities because they think the final judgment is very near. So you’ve got these kind of apocalyptic communities, so it’s hard to generalize. Sort of the mainstream at this point sees the Messiah very much in the vein of like Judith Maccabeus, John Hyrcanus, these kings of the recent past who overthrew the Greeks and gained independence. That’s sort of the mainstream. Some of the apocalyptic groups, like in the Similitudes of Enoch, which is written probably in the first century, they connect, and this is important for understanding the New Testament. But that group, which was a Jewish group, not a Christian group, connected the Son of Man who’s talked about in the Book of Daniel, who’s sort of this angelic being, at least, we would say it’s Christ, the pre-incarnate Christ, but they saw as sort of this spiritual being with the Messiah.
So that wasn’t completely absent, but it wasn’t the mainstream at this point in history. And what’s going to happen in Judaism after the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem is that a lot of that diversity is going to disappear because I mean, the Qumran community is going to get wiped out by the Romans. These other groups, and in particular because of conflicts with Christianity, messianism is going to steadily decline to the point that most rabbinic Jews today, the mainstream of rabbinic Judaism today, doesn’t even necessarily think there’s going to be a Messiah. There are groups that still do. It’s not gone, but it’s steadily declined. And you can trace it in rabbinic writings.
A good example of that is in the servant songs in Isaiah talking about his servant. It’s very clear in Jewish interpretation for the first century, the second century, the third century even, that they identify that as the Messiah. You could find examples even all the way to the 10th century, Maimonides and other rabbis saying, “That’s talking about the Messiah.” But once you get past about the year 1000, more and more they start saying, “Oh, that’s just talking about Israel.” And if you ask a modern Orthodox rabbi today what’s the servant songs about, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s about Israel, that’s not about the Messiah, that’s not about Jesus. That can’t be about Jesus, that’s just about the nation of Israel.” So that transition sort of happens. And it’s because of Christianity. There’s sort of an effort to go back and reread those passages that Christians are interpreting messianically about Jesus and say, “No, it has nothing to do with that at all,” and move in the other direction in terms of that.
And to be fair, you see something similar happening in Christian interpretation of the Old Testament after Saint Jerome. Not a lot of people are interested in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and even St. Jerome at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, his contemporaries thought he was an oddball for studying Hebrew. Like, “Why would you want to go and do that? Why on earth would you want to? You’ve got a perfectly good Greek Old Testament there for you, why waste your time?” So Christians were less and less concerned with the original Jewish context of the Old Testament and moved much more quickly to just, “Oh, this is about Christ, so we don’t have to worry about the rest of it.” But yeah, that polarity happens.
And when he says “these things”, he’s talking about, for example, that quote from the prophet he just gave, he’s saying, “We didn’t understand that really, that this was it, that this was God coming to his people.” This was a much bigger event than we understood at the time. We thought we were part of a messianic movement of which, as we mentioned before, there were a lot in the first century. Jesus wasn’t the first who people claimed was the Messiah, he wasn’t the last that people claimed was the Messiah. And that’s probably Bar Kokhba. Because the destruction that brought about it became very unpopular to go around claiming you were the Messiah after that.
So he’s saying that they, even the disciples, even the people closest to Jesus, who had seen all these things close up until after Jesus was glorified, till after that point. They didn’t really get it either. They were still thinking. And we’ve seen this contrast in St. John’s gospel all the way through, again, going back to Nicodemus. Jesus is trying to speak to him about being born again in a spiritual sense, “Am I supposed to go back into my mother’s womb?” We see all these people misunderstanding. Jesus says, a little while and I will be gone and you will not be able to find me. “What, is he going to Greece?” Where people interpreted these in a very earthly way and don’t understand. And so St. John is saying the same thing. We interpreted what he was doing even as he’s riding into Jerusalem and being hailed as the Messiah. We interpreted that in a very earthly way instead of really understanding what was happening.
Interlocutor: Even on the Road to Emmaus.
Fr. Stephen: Yes, even when they were on the Road to Emmaus, at the end of Luke’s Gospel. They’re walking and are sad. And Jesus asks them, “Well, why are you sad?” He’s like, “Oh, well, all these things happened. And we thought he might be the one who was going to redeem Israel. We thought, but guess not.”
And what’s especially interesting about the road to Emmaus is not only it’s not just, “Well, I guess he wasn’t because he was crucified,” it’s, “Oh, yeah. These women showed up with this crazy story that he arose from the dead. But I mean, who could believe them?” So yeah, it’s that same kind of… so that Jesus had to explain, to open their minds and open their hearts.
Interlocutor: If you’ve never heard the idea before, it’s pretty unthinkable that this guy that you’ve been hanging around with who seems to be really special is actually God. That’s really hard to take on.
Fr. Stephen: Well yeah. We have to give them credit, even though in St. John’s Gospel is clearly presented as telling them so. Yeah, it’s still you’d be tempted to be like, “Oh, well, I mean, he means this is a metaphor. He’s very close to God. He’s a godly person.” Because it’s hard to see.
Interlocutor: You just don’t take that idea on board that easily.
Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’ve often said we’re overly hard on, for example, St. James, who we celebrating a couple of days ago, who was the Lord’s brother, because we’re told that his brothers didn’t believe while he was alive. Well, if one of my siblings claimed to be God, I’d have trouble believing it too. It is sort of outside the outside the realm.
