John 21:1-4 (Matins)
1 Corinthian 10:1-4
Mark 1:9-11

The Gate of Life

But in 40 A.D. the whole Jewish lifeworld was destroyed and Jerusalem buried beneath a rubble field of stone, concrete, and dust sealing off most of our heritage. And were as if God placed a holy seal upon and then melted the edges of the wax. It is an astonishing fact that we are the generation to see many basic revelations which the Fathers did not see. Consider that most of the documents they did not have constitute the vast majority of our Christian heritage. It can only be a miracle of God that nothing has been discovered surpasses the transcendent splendor of the Four Gospels.

Nonetheless, the Dead Sea Scrolls confront us with 15,000 fragments pointing back to 850 works. That is, St. Athanasius and the other Fathers who formed the canon of Christian Scripture did not have anything close to the complete picture. By contras, the documents that they saw and which came down to us are but a handful.

These, of course, are primary materials. The associated scholarship producing secondary materials now has matured. In 2008, when Prof. Yehezkel Kaufmann of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made the following pronouncement on the television program Nova, my world shook:

You see, the impression I grew up with had been that Judaism was an ancient, ancient religion coming down us from the mists of pre-history. But then the Jews were deported to Babylon for two generation and then came back and then built the temple, and the life carried on as it had been. But the historical truth is nothing life this.

The Judahites returned from Babylon now under Persian rule. They returned under the supervision of the Persian governor Nehemiah and his "chief of propaganda" Ezra, whose primary language was Babylonian (Aramaic). We have learned that Judah-ism was an invented religion, invented in Babylon. And we know that it was pleasing to the Persians. We do not presently know what the Hebrew religion, before the Exile, looked like. Judah-ism remained a cult confined to Jerusalem for centuries, and diverse Hebrew thought-world mostly ignored it. It remained an isolated cult until the Maccabees, who used it as a weapon of war against the Romans in their attempt to unite all Hebrew peoples.

This dates the emergence of Judah-ism across the Levant to about a century or so before Jesus' birth! A century or so?! A century is nothing in the living memory of a culture. I once paid pastoral housecalls to a lady from Virginia who reminisced fondly about her high school receiving the men who had fought in the Civil War. That is, I participated in the living memory of scenes and feelings and beliefs that were 130-years-old.

The Northern Kingdom had remained alienated from the Jerusalem cult (albeit living under the yoke of temple police with the Roman Legions standing just behind them). And Jesus was reared in the northern part of the Northern Kingdom, in Galilee. This was no accident. For His grandparents Joachim and Anna were ideological northerners (as we discussed last week). Yet, the Maccabees had everywhere built synagogues which served as focal points of temple authority and headquarters for temple police.

Nonetheless, when we read the opening chapter of St. John's Gospel with our eyes now opened, we are able to detect the animus felt by Jesus' disciples towards the Jews. That is, Jesus and His Disciples, excepting the eponymously named Judas, were certainly not Jewish.

What would the Church Fathers have done had they been privy to these recent discoveries? They would have devoted themselves night and day to the diligent study of these new materials. They would have reflected on the implications of this new learning. And they would have shared their thoughts to as wide a circle of readers as possible.

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Last week, we considered key details from the first centuries. As we approach the Feast of the Theophany tomorrow, it is timely to say that the early Christians first of all rejoiced in the Lord's victory over death and gave thanks for His leading His flock through dark waters into the safe pastures of His Kingdom. The type of this, of course, is the people Israel being shepherded out of bondage, guided through the Red Sea, and settled in green pastures. (We encountered this allegory in our Epistle lesson this morning.) The symbolism that dominated early churches was that having to do with Baptism and the Good Shepherd. That is, Christianity, fundamentally, means being born into new life through the purification and transformation of Baptism and then proceeding on to life among God's good flocks. That is the Church's early vision. That is what the Apostles taught.

What is noticeably absent in these earliest worship spaces is the Holy Cross. It would take six centuries for this devotion to mainstream in the Church .... the vigorous attempts of the Emperor Constantine and Empress Helena notwithstanding.

This focus on life-not-death dominated the thought of the Early Fathers. Athanasius wrote in his landmark work, De Incarnatione, that the fact of the Creator touching the Creation with His Own Person produced a cosmic shock so great that the télos (the blueprint, the destiny) of humankind was flipped from death to life. Astonishing! Here is our salvation! The One more expansive than the universe emptied Himself of His Glory and entered the horrible confines of our broken humanity unalterably transforming the entire Creation. For His Life had entered the very composition of our lifeworld being organically we to humankind. He restored our lifeworld in its essence to the pristine state of Eden. To quote from Jesus' culture, "One drop of wine in the sea interpenetrates every part of the sea."

Other Fathers developed this theme. At no time did they write about atonement with God attained through a blood sacrifice of His Son. The idea would have seemed absurd and indecent to them. As we went over last week, Jesus and the Disciples did not celebrate the Passover of the Jews. As far as we known, they probably did not eat meat ( as John the Baptist did not eat meat ). If they followed any precedent at all, it probably would have been the Passover of the Essenes, who offered "the sacrifices of righteousness" (Ps 4:5). Jesus does not teach a religion of blood sacrifice. And the Apostles never teach it. Indeed, Jesus, His Disciples, the Essenes, and the Hebrews who fled Jerusalem — with the arrival Nehemiah, Ezra, and their blood cult — abhorred this practice. Indeed, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, He contrasts a religion of blood sacrifice to a religion of virtue and pointedly asks, which one, do you suppose, was justified before God? And Jesus riotously protests in the temple, actually beating those who sold sacrificial animals for purposes of securing salvation. There are numerous other examples in the Gospels, and I enjoin you to go out and read them.

When John the Baptist calls Jesus "the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29), the furthest thing from his mind is blood sacrifice or the Passover of the Jews which he avoided. First of all his reference is patently pastoral. We are to think of sheep and shepherds. Now, the shepherd represented the bottom rung of the social ladder. But who were lower than shepherds? Their sheep. And who was least among the sheep? The lowly lamb. The lamb is both the image of lowest humility as it is the icon of innocence. The spotless lamb. That is, the Baptist exhorts us to follow the Lamb, for the Lamb will lead us to the Kingdom of God. Jesus says you will not enter the Kingdom unless you have the innocent heart of a child.

Then what shall we say about the Cross? Let us take a step further into this question. What shall we say about the Passion of the Christ? His Passion began when He emptied Himself of His Divine Life, whose dimensions are beyond our calculations, and entered the minuscule, foul-smelling, little box of our broken humanity. That horrible confinement was brought to a climax with unspeakable cruelty — spitting on Him, stripping off all His clothing publicly to humiliate Him, mercilessly beating Him, torturing Him, and then finally murdering Him in the most ignominious way possible.

Do you see that the Passion and Cross is an essence. It is a distillation of the injuries and affronts of the previous thirty-years, beginning at His Nativity in filthy feeding trough (a manger), in a dark cave surrounded by the dung-stained hay of barnyard animals. The fail to recognize God Who is before you is an affront. And those closest to Him failed to venerate Him. Do you recall the scene in Mark's Gospel in which He says, "Someone has touched Me." And the Disciples' reply is basically, "You idiot! Your're standing in a crowd, and You say someone touched You?!" .... which insolence He passes over in silence.

I say, He was executed in the most ignominious way possible. In the year 4 B.C. — the year of His birth according to the Gospel accounts in which years are reckoned by the reigns of kings — the Roman General Publius Quinctilius Varus pursued 2,000 Judean rebels from Jerusalem to Galilee. And in a single afternoon, he crucified all of them along a roadside stretch three miles from the village of Nazareth. As before each cross, as each man looked on, his family was butchered at the foot of his cross. The Cross then is an instrument and image that distills within it all the depravity and hatred and ungodliness of which man is capable. This really happened, of course. But we see that the Cross is also a most toxic symbol. It is an egregious affront to Heaven. Surely, it expresses the sin of the world. That is its primary significance. That Jesus could forgive such an affront — For forgive them, Father .... literally from God to God, — reveals the depth of the Divine Love for us. That we had anything to do with this heinous crime I will go into later.

Yet, His Cross and Resurrection distill in one image, many of the primary things we already knew about Jesus. To those closest to Him the Resurrection was no revelation. They already knew

These things were all known before His death. His identity as God was known before His death. As my Patristics professor said to me (she visiting professor from Oxford to Yale), "Jesus did not have to go to the Cross to save mankind.") Well, this shocked me. I suppose it would take me ten years to come to terms with that. I suppose it was harder for me to come to terms with something else: the fact that all this is still true today. We know God to be God, and do nothing in response.

The Magi, likely scholar-scientists from Persia who were universally respected, venerated Him. He evinced His Identity as Creator, creating new eyes from mud. He evinced His Identity as Providence, feeding the tens of thousands of people in the wilderness with a kind of manna .... twice. He evinced His Identity as YHWH wresting order from primordial chaos, commanding the winds and the waves. He evinced His Identity as Law-giver, pronouncing new laws from a mount as a kind of counter-Sinai. He raised the dead three times. That is, long before the Crucifixion and Resurrection, And He insisted on this point at Caesara-Philippi by asking His Disciples directly by saying, "Who do you say that I Am?"

Then what finally is the meaning of the Cross? We might say that the climax of Gospels, rendered in a kind slow motion, now commanding the attention of all in every place (as the Emmaus Road narrative attests), so that everyone, everywhere, including those who were too stubborn or too indifferent, might know that this was God.

By the way, this is a techique Jesus uses elsewhere. When He wants to teach a great principle, He first sets the stage, and uses rising dramatic action. The greatest climax in the history of humanity is stage to announce something that everyone would hear and know to be true: this was God .... this is God.

You Sisters know that I wear a Crucifix around my neck. I have done so for decades. It is like a little vial containing an essence, the essence of who we are.

But the Cross as a religious ritual? A blood sacrifice? The whole burnt offering of a lamb? Jesus is never called a sacrifice in the Gospels. And, as we discussed last week, Jesus' Passover was not the Passover of the Jews and did not include the slaughter of a lamb. The main point, in any discussion of the Cross or of blood sacrifice, must be grounded in what Jesus calls Himself: "a ransom for many" (Mt 20:28, Mk 10:45), which is a very different thing (which unaccountably receives very little attention).

Before we begin a discussion of the ransom, though, I must adduce a principle (saying the obvious): God must meet us where we are — so lowly and so far beneath him. We love the verb stoop. He must stoop down to us because He knows us so intimately, yet He is transcendent God. He must reach down at least through our language, our culture, and our puny comprehension. Indeed, we cannot speak of anything in the world or of previous worlds since the Creation, without owning a primary principle. called σηνκάταβασις / synkátabasis — literally "with descent" or more colloquially, "condescension." Our relationship to God is only made possible through His condescension. In a sense this one word captures both the Creation and the renewed Creation (i.e, the Incarnation) and all of our intimations about God. Our relationship with God is only made possible through this condescension. And He speaks into the hearts of all of His children especially the lost and the blind.

Let us take the simple case of God's willingness to speak into culture and hear human ponderings in the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. What were the shared values of Jesus' culture? What were its imperatives? What was honored, and what was despised? In general, our understanding of first-century culture in the Levant is not helped much by reading the Hebrew Scriptures. The Psalms and Major Prophets, especially Isaiah, were quoted. Certainly, Genesis and Exodus were generally known, but Jesus provides counter-examples to the familiar scenes in those two books. As I mentioned, He assumes the role of Creator, Order-bringer, and Providence. Indeed, in the Prologue to his Gospel, the Beloved Disciple writes a counter-narrative to the Creation found in Genesis. This gives something away: these books were not untouchable or worshipped. They were freely re-written imaginatively.

The general culture, though, was dominated by Graeco-Roman values, ideals, and sayings. The Levant had been conquered by Alexander the Great in roughly 333 B.C. and would remain Hellenized until the mid-seventh-century A.D. That's roughly one thousand years. Everything happens in that shadow of the Classical culture. To visit the Holy Land today is to wander through the remains of Roman cities, as the Decapolis evinces (shown here as artist's rendering). But getting back to the first century A.D., the Romans were trained in Greek and upheld Greek values. Judeans were also trained in the same curriculum called the Paideia. We imagine that Zacchaeus, Matthew-Levi, the wealthy young ruler, and the penitent Publican all excelled in their youth at the gymnasiums. Jesus and His Disciples spoke Greek and quoted Scripture from the Septuagint as Werner Jaeger pointed out a half-century ago (Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, Cambridge, MA, 1961). It is not clear that Jesus or His Disciples spoke Hebrew.

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We must try to rid overselves of images in Hollywood movies, which often depict a shared and unbridgeable division between the Romans and Jews. This simply not true. The Judeans by and large wanted their children to succeed. And these young men attended the Greek academies and some of them were sent to Rome as part of their post-studies development. This was a well-integrated society .... a thousand years .... can you imagine. A thousand years ago we would be living in an America deeply formed in what we would call Indian ways and values without the slightest hint of a European invasion centuries hence.

Foremost among these universally held values was the ideal of friendship, which the Romans signified with the Latin word amicitiā. The Roman saw this as a spiritual category touching the highest reaches of human conduct. For example, amicitiā transcended the quotidian world. It was understood to be higher than marriage .... though marriage might aspire to attain these heights.

Jesus, too, saw Friendship as being the highest attainment. Is this not true? I put it to you: which ideal in the Gospels is more transcendent? Gregory the Dialogist, a sixth-century pope in Rome, understood this when he enjoined all Christians in his famous homily entitled Be Friends of God!. Consider the Divine dimensions of the Master's understanding of Friendship. I believe that these words and the ones following it are most important words in the Gospels.

We know, reading ahead two chapters, that these bonds of Love in godly Friendship will be expressed in terms of One-ness with the Son as He is One with the Father, what I call salvation:

You know, whenever I have celebrated the Holy Mass and later when I have celebrated the Divine Liturgy, I come to the place which is called "the Elevation," and looking at an icon of the Divine Supper, I whisper a prayer, "Ut unum sunt." Because that is the point of the Mass, of the Liturgy, of our lives: to become One with the Son and He and the Father are One. Here is the highest good, the farthest goal in the journey of life, which we call Theosis: One-ness with the Holy Trinity in the same bonds in which they cohere. You see, we actually become part of the Holy Trinity. Jesus the pioneer of our faith has opened the Way for us because He is fully-man and fully-God, and He is a Person of the Trinity. Therefore, the Holy Trinity is open to relationship with these precious creature, which God loves so well, called humans.

Roman amicitiā did not reach to such heights. How could it have? But it did express Friendship in terms of the highest good. Cicero, one of the most widely read authors of Jesus' time, used the Latin word amicitiā to express this transcendent state of life, which

Are not these the same qualities St. Paul insisted upon among Christians?

But the icon (we would say) that hovered over all was of "heavenly twins," Damon and Pythias — heavenly in the sense that they represented the highest good and twins in the sense that Jesus and Thomas were twins, that is, "my other self." The story of Damon in Pythias was among the best known of the ancient world. No one went through the Paideia without reading this story, probably in Cicero's De Officiis (On Moral Duty).

The two friends visited the city-state of Syracuse, among the most powerful in ancient Greece and always an armed camp, vigilant for enemy spies. During their stay, Pythias was accused of plotting against the Tyrant Dionysius I and arrested. He petitioned the Tyrant that before his execution he might travel home to ensure his affairs were in order and his family provided for. When the Tyrant laughed, asking Pythias if he thought him such a fool, Pythias' friend Damon spoke up. I will stand in as Pythias' ransom if you would release his friend. And, Pythias, said Damon, would assuredly return and make good on the ransom. The Tyrant agreed to this arrangement marveling at what he considered to be Damon's spectacular naïveté. And then the day came. Damon was taken to a place of execution. Yet, Pythias was nowhere to be seen. Dionysius wryly commented on Damon's foolishness. But at the last minute, a young man could be seen on the horizon running towards them. It was Pythias. So amazed and deeply moved was Dionysius, that he released them both and entreated them if he might be a third having a part in so lofty and noble a friendship.

When Jesus used the term friends in chapter fifteen of St. John's Gospel, everyone present understood what He meant through the prism of Damon and Pythias, for this was the universal icon depicting lofty friendship. And when He said,

no one failed to quake before the holy story of the heavenly twins. For here was the highest state of the virtuous soul. Did I say "holy"? St. Ambrose, an Early Church Father, authorized the Damon and Pythias story (found Cicero's De Officiis) as reading for Christians.

Ransoms rarely die. Slaves or soldiers or other disposable persons are never offered as ransom. They have no value. A ransom value lies in the prestige or greatness of the person being held. The Latin word Cicero uses for "ransom" is vas. We know what a vase is — something precious or which contains something precious.

As the guard at Syracuse had descended on Pythias, so the temple police descended on the disciples. Significantly, on this night Jesus addresses Judas as "Friend," a term rarely used in Matthew's Gospel. The disciples begin to fight with swords, so Jesus stands forward as the ransom. He identifies His high value by telling the temple police that He could call upon "twelve legions of angels" if He so desired.

The Gospel of St. John sets out the ransom relationship explicitly — a "them in exchange for Me" — and the reason for His ransom is clearly stated:

You see, His Disciples have been entrusted to Him. He cannot lose one. And immediately we think of the Parable of the Lost Lamb:

Perhaps no depiction of Jesus spoke more powerfully to the earliest Church than this one. As we considered last week, of the four third-century ecclesia that have survived, two contained no images or artifacts of any kind. Yet, two did — one in Rome and one in Nicaea, and both preserved depictions of the Good Shepherd with the lost lamb carried upon His shoulders.

Jesus is taken as hostage. The scene is set. He is the Damon who stands in for His Disciples (meaning by extension for you and for me and all lost lambs). And now the suspense begins. Will Pythias return in time? All eyes (at least in the first centuries) are fastened upon that horizon. As each horrific hour of Christ's Passion unfolds, early readers ached for the Ransom's release. But who will save Him? He had fed tens of thousands of people who witnessed a Divine miracle in the wilderness. Will they take up arms and come? People had gathered by the thousands to feel His healing touch. Do we see a crowd on the horizon with clubs and torches? Who will now speak up for Him?

Pilate approached the crowds not once but three times exhorting that if only one would simply raise his voice, the Ransom would be released:

He stood forward as a Damon. But on that horizon no Pythias was to be seen.

Thirty-years of our indifference towards God, our rejection of God, and our hatred for God distilled into three hours. His Divinity was revealed in three days to those who willfully ignored Him for three years. We could have saved our ransom (Mt 20:28) by offering one word (Lu 23:22). Instead, we offered two: "Crucify! Crucify!"

Here is the noble Damon, for whom no one would lift a finger, standing not before the dangerous and forbidding Tyrant Dionysius I, but before Rome's pleading governor, the sympathetic Pilate, who repeatedly begged anyone to say something .... while Jesus Disciples remained in hiding.

Here is the meaning of the Cross. The Cross signifies our cruelty, our indifference, and our fickle nature. It is not God's Cross. It is ours: a Cross-roads at which we must choose one way or the other.

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Much later, during the missionary journeys of St. Paul (Acts 28:11-12), Luke stands in a harbor at Syracuse, the scene of Damon and Pythias' drama. He calls our attention to the prow of a ship adorned with the Διοσκούροις / Dioskoúrois, which is often translated, the "Heavenly Twins" or the "Twin Brothers" or simply left untranslated. Now, the ship's adornment would likely be a depiction of the mythical demigods, Castor and Pollux, who were believed to rescue sailors. But this would be the literal level of meaning, the cultural level.. The spiritual meaning comes into view when we ask, Why would Luke divert our attention over here? And why would he set the reference in Syracuse? But the icon writer and Evangelist saw a deeper meaning. Who proclaims through these words the following message:

You see, God had prepared the whole world to hear this message which would be spread throughout all lands by St. Luke, by St. Paul, and all the other Apostles: Greater love hath no one ....

This is Christianity. This is the faith of the Fathers. And this was the faith during first six centuries for all Christians.

Now I understand that we have been reared and cajoled and even moved to tears by another and different grisly theology, especially in the last five hundred years. It is seen everywhere. We cannot do anything about it, but grieve.

But we must awaken up to the Lord of Life. The cannot reinvent His faith. We must claim it as it was taught for the first half a millennium (at least) and continues to be taught throughout Holy Orthodoxy today.

We must wake up to our holy responsibilities — for we are invited into spiritual warfare, not passivity, looking for God to offer every sacrifice for us. That is not Friendship with God .... or if it is, this is a friendship that is all one-way, always taking, but never giving.

But if we should drift into this moribund mind and soul in the face of all evidence to the contrary — that the Lamb must be sacrificed, so we can get our salvation; the Lamb must be offered up, so we can bathe in His blood — then it is difficult to see how we are any different from those who cried out those two words spoken in the darkest moment of human history,