"The World Itself Could Not Contain"

In these startling words a principle found only in St. John's Holy Gospel, calls us to a reckoning: the Four Gospels do not include all that Jesus taught. But we already knew that, for the Lord Himself repeatedly makes this crucial point:

We heard a variant of this teaching just last Sunday reading the Parable of the Talents. The essence and kernel of the Lord's Divine teachings are never written down. May I say that again?

Him most important words remained unwritten, hidden, secret, to be shared only with a select few.

Thus, the Gospels we have comprise what we might call introductory courses. The advanced course, which reveals the inner meaning of God's things, does not begin until after the Resurrection. Only then, a most remarkable forty-day period commences when the Risen Christ teaches in plainly spoken language unfolding the Heavenly mysteries.

On the Emmaus Road,

The fact that even own His Disciples could not recognize Him suggests a division between those who can see and can grasp the light and those who cannot. We see that the mystery of the "breaking of bread" will also play a role, again suggesting a fellowship of the initiated:

The fact that the Gospels do not include the teachings of the Risen Christ is a most serious matter. For these teachings, as the Emmaus Road episode discloses, are all-important. They are life-transforming. The Disciples report,

These teachings, manifestly the most sacred of all Christian doctrines, were protected within a holy spiritus. The living breath of a human, whose repository is the eternal soul, was the proper medium for this most sacred content. This was a topos that persisted into the Middle Ages: living words breathed out of a human are holy; words written on paper are profane. Transmission of these hidden teachings would be oral as it had been for the Gospels. Perhaps this is the significance of the famous image of St. John ingesting the scroll. To commit the holy to written scrolls or codices would have been to desecrate them. The Apostles jealousy guarded these most holy secrets, writing nothing down, confiding them only to their disciples, the Apostolic Fathers, who in turn would have been passed them down to the next generation of trusted and initiated men and women for centuries. This became known as the "Hidden Tradition," copiously documented by Margaret Barker, — e.g., The Revelation of Jesus Christ (Edinburgh, 2000) (commended by both His Eminence Hilarion Alfeyev and His Beatitude Jonah Paffhausen) and The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God (London: 2007).

St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was born not long after Jesus' death, said that he had been taught

St. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, also wrote of details concerning the Kingdom of Heaven (Demonstration of the Gospel). During the following century, St. Basil the Great in his landmark work On the Holy Spirit wrote,

Today, we celebrate the feast day of the greatest teacher in Holy Orthodoxy, second only to the Master Himself. He embraced the Divine teachings enthusiastically and skillfully. He opened his mind and soul to the brilliant light of Heaven. He would be called "the one whom Jesus loved" (Jn 19:26). and "son of the Mother of God" (Jn 19:27). He would be the great inheritor of Jesus' teachings and ministry. And he would weave a veil in the form of a Holy Gospel and a book of sacred visions near the end of his long life revealing (in some measure) the Hidden Tradition fittingly.

Consider the differences between the three Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of St. John. Mark, Matthew, and Luke depict a wandering teacher who is also a miracle worker. In brief moments Jesus' Divinity is glimpsed — at His Nativity (Lu 2:13), at His Baptism (Mt 3:17), in an impulse of St. Peter at Caesarea-Philippi (Mt 16:16), on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mt 17:2ff), at His Crucifixion (Mk 15:39). "Truly," the centurion says at the foot of the Cross, "this was the Son of God" (Mt 27:54), closing off the Gospel of St. Matthew.

But the Divine Figure we meet in St. John's Gospel is not merely glimpsed. He is boldly and openly the Living God Himself, from Chapter One, visiting His people as one of them, the Son of Man:

What would the New Testament be without St. John's witness and teaching? In the Synoptic Gospels we enter a shadowy world where the Divine breaks through in moments. Indeed, St. Mark's Gospel inducts us into "a Messianic secret" (say the Biblical scholars). By contrast, St. John's soaring Gospel (he is called "the eagle") brings us into the presence of God and His Son, Whose most ardent desire is to unite us with the Father (Jn 17:21).

Think of the New Testament without St. John's writings. Our conception of Jesus would be a riddle. Our conception of Christian life and its purpose, theosis, would be fragmentary. His Letters instruct us in living the Christian life: we are to be in the world, but not of it. And his Book of Revelation comes down to us as the solitary representation, however veiled, of the Hidden Tradition taught by the Risen Christ. Small wonder, the Orthodox Church should hold this Apostle, Evangelist, and Divine in such high esteem. He is called the Theologian. His are the words of Divine life in a different stratosphere.

In the other Gospels we join Jesus roaming all about the Levant. We are with the Disciples as they are seated near the head waters of the Jordan in the far north. We travel through the Ten Cities with them. We stand upon the slopes of the Sea of Galilee and hear Jesus' Beatitudes. By indirection, we are introduced into a world divided along religious lines: the Hebrew vs. the Jewish. We realize that eleven of Jesus' Disciples are Hebrews, descended from forefathers not carried off to Babylon. Their tribal traditions have nothing to do with Judaism, which is a hybrid religion of Babylonian and Persians beliefs and customs laid out in a revised Hebrew Bible, presenting Moses as spokesman for these new ideals. To these men, Jerusalem is toxic. Why would anyone go there? Peter asks. It is synonymous with suffering and death.

By contrast, St. John's Gospel is set mainly in Judea. And we come to realize that the plot line of his Gospel is about a confrontation between the untainted Hebrew religion versus the Jewish religion with its Second Temple, which he describes as filth and abomination (Rev 17:4). Indeed, while the other Gospel writers use the phrase "the Jews" a handful of times, St. John uses it sixty-six times. For this is what his Gospel is about: what happens when God enters the heart of the counterfeit religion, or, to say it in St. John's language, what happens when the Warrior YHWH turns His face of flint to the whore of Babylon, which is the Second Temple, whose construction Mesopotamian emissaries supervised. She sits on many waters (Rev 17:2); that is, she represents an imperial power. The kings of the earth have committed fornication with her (Rev 17:2); that is, they have become her vassals. The inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with her wine (Rev 17:2); that is, Second Temple religion has corrupted generations of Judeans .... and continues this pollution of Hebrew religion to the present time, which has influenced us.

Antagonisms between the religion of the Patriarchs, on the hand, and Judaism, on the other, permeate the Holy Scriptures. Abraham was called away from Babylon and its religion of animal sacrifice. This central, cultic action was to appease Marduk or Baal or Bel in exchange for domestic tranquility, military power, and agricultural prosperity.

Notice the civic-military conception of religious life. The pagan god is treated as a foreign power to which tribute must be paid. Nebuchadnezzar boasted "Markduk never ate so well!" once he became king. There is no hint of Divine experience and certainly no thought of uniting with the pagan god in his sphere and life.

You see, this god is a distant figure. It would be as if we laid out our offerings in the desert and went home. The goal is not to encounter him but to placate him.

The Hebrew religion could not be more different. Following the example of Abraham, who is a proto-desert father, religious life is intensely personal — purification in a series of wildernesses, illumination through communion with God both in words and the breaking of bread, and finally acceptance and entry into the Divine sphere itself. Notably, Abraham's high priest is

By contrast, the priesthood of the Second Temple is not royal, nor are its sacraments celebrated in the communion of bread and wine. Its priestly caste is a controversy between the Levites and the Aaronites. Which is the true priestly caste? No one really knows.

Abraham is called away from all this, away from Babylon. He is cleansed of Babylon's filth and abominations (Rev 17:4). He avoids cities, such as Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19) much as Jesus' Disciples abhor Jerusalem. His goal is relationship with God. He builds altars and places of devotion everywhere he goes.

The kings of Judah, bent on centralizing all power in Jerusalem, would tear down these altars and high places and pillars. The Romans in Jesus' time favored this authoritarian control over the localities permitting Herod the Great an elaborate rebuilding project to magnify the Second Temple's importance.

Nonetheless, St. John represents this temple and its religion as the Whore of Babylon, arrayed in purple and scarlet color (i.e., blood sacrifice) and decked with precious stones and pearls (Rev 17:4) like Herod's luxurious Temple.

From its beginnings, following the Babylonian Captivity, Judaism is proposed to be a state religion, whose purpose, like the cult of Caesar, is to control the people. Its aspiration is to suppress Divine aspects of religion. Why? Because that de-centralizes religion. Religion becomes located here in our breasts, in the individual person. Supplanting this with the Law, which would regulate every detail of social life (blending in the animal sacrifice), enforces an opposite model for religion. Of course, the Hebrew Scriptures would have to be rewritten, a process begun on the eve of the Babylonian invasion with King Josiah's invented fifth book of Moses, Deuteronomy Upon the return to Judea, the prophet Ezra then supervises a general revision project of the Hebrew holy books as Margaret Barker has documented. Ezra will style this the new religion the "true Israel" (Hans-Georg Wunch, 2021)

As Margaret Barker has shown (The Older Testament (London, 1987)), also suppressed were the holy books, such as 1 Enoch, which emphasized Divine life: the realm of Heaven and the angels. The suppression of 1 Enoch is egregious as the discoveries at Qumran reveal. For it is by far the most attested book among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

By contrast, the Sadducees, who administered the Second Temple, forbade talk of Divine life, of Resurrection, and of angels. This is our background for understanding Zechariah, who dismisses the authority of the Archangel Gabriel. For angels, by the lights of the Second Temple, were not supposed to exist.

The primary purpose of St. John's writings is the restoration of Divine life. His Gospel inducts us into a world that is frankly Divine. Jesus is unabashedly presented as the Son of God. Indeed, He is indistinguishable from the Father. His Gospel alone depicts Jesus making a whip of cords, driving out those who make His Father's House οικον εμφοριον, (oikon emphorion), a house of trade, i.e., animal blood traded for salvation.

Do you see what I mean when I single out "impersonal religion"?

Jesus speaks in code when He tells Nathanael and the other Disciples that they will be in the company of angels, attested only in John's Gospel:

This occurs in Chapter One of St. John's Gospel.

His words signify that the old ways, the ways of the Abraham and the Patriarchs, the ways of Divine life and unity with God, are being restored. The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near (a familiar phrase). And the pollution of the Second Temple and its paganism and its blood sacrifice and its every abomination are all passing away. "I will destroy this Temple!" Jesus declares.

The Letter to the Hebrews (remarkably, not the Letter to the Jews) calls Jesus our Great High Priest (Heb 4:14). He is not in the Levitical or Aaronite priestly lines but

His spiritual heritage is that of Abraham:

St. John as Jesus' principal heir, is also to become a high priest as we learn from Eusebius.

The high priest would ascend to Heaven once a year stepping up into the Holy of Holies, which was built upon the highest ground, to become transfigured, rising above his animal self into an angelic state. Here was the religion of the First Temple. In this state the high priest sought expiation for the sins of the people. He offered himself as sacrifice symbolically. The animal spirit is broken. The heart is cleansed and made pure:

All of this underlay St. John's understanding of the Crucifixion.

The Synoptic Gospels remember the Last Supper as being the Passover Seder. The other Evangelists implicitly accept the blood-traded-for-salvation model of religion. St. John's Gospel alone fixes the date of the Crucifixion on the Passover, indeed, at the very moment that the Passover lambs are being slaughtered as part of the ritual. As Christian hymnody would record, as the blood of the lambs is daubed on the door lintels of Egypt that the angel of death might "pass over," so the blood of God's Son is daubed over the lintels of humanity that death itself be nullified.

Here is the Great High Priest (Heb 4:14), Whose sacrifice is not symbolic. Here is no goat or bull or dove, but rather God, who teaches us that the animal self must be diminished in order that the pure spirit within might be magnified.

He offers Himself as sacrifice is intensely personal. It does have to do with them over there. It has to do with us right here.

Here also is the High Priest who ascends to Heaven not in ritual, but to Heaven itself as King of kings and Lord of lords.

Let us celebrate the Feast Day of St. John the Theologian as true heir to the purposes and promises of Christ. Let us open our hearts and minds. Let us reset ourselves to understand our religion aright. For his Gospel and Revelation have revealed to us Divine life. His letters teach the Christian how to make a path through this toxic world. And in his tradition we find our own way ahead and above to Heaven.

We are indeed blessed. For we are the generation on whom a great light has shone. Thanks to major discoveries of ancient texts and thanks to a half-century of Herculean scholarship, we are the generation that finally begins to understand the New Testament and the preeminent place accorded to St. John the Divine, the Evangelist, and the Theologian.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.