Son of David

Today, we have come full round. We began Great Lent seeking to understand Jesus of Nazareth in the historical Kingdom of Israel, untainted by Judah-ism. As Son of David, He is born King over the Northern and Southern Kingdoms alike. He has promised restoration of the ancient religion — Abraham's "Kingdom of Heaven" religion: the religion of angels, of the dazzling Afterlife, of Eden, and of theosis — which is to say, personal transformation.

Excited at this momentous news — Nathanael exclaims,

Today, as Jesus enters the ancient Jeru-Salem, we behold this very Sovereign. The people cry out,

The light of His holy presence shines into every corner of the old city revealing a Salem that has fallen away from God — into apostasy, heresy, and desecration. We read in our Troparia that Jesus rode into Jerusalem to strike down idolatry and that evil men had stolen the true religion replacing with a "con." In this holy light, many who had fallen for the "con" now awaken from their trance and see their so-called religion for what it is and defected from Judah-ism. They chose instead to follow Him:

May I ask the obvious? How is it that for centuries Sunday schools have taught that Jesus was a Jew? If "many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus," does not this explicitly state that the teachings of Jesus are opposed to Judaism?

This is a hard question for authors who have spent years demonstrating Christianity's roots in Judaism and for the many faithful who have committed themselves to this view. Yet, how could it be possible for the Hebrew followers of Jesus to subscribe to Judah's reinvention their own, original religion? The answer is equally obvious: it is not possible.

Do you remember St. John's other comment:

Without question, he contradistinguishes Jewish custom from the Hebrew life observed by Jesus and His Disciples. "The Passover is their festival," he says plainly, "not ours!"

This will be hard for many people to accept, especially those who venerate what they understand (or perhaps misunderstand) to be sacred tradition. The question before us, then, is more basic than "which scholar believes what." It goes to heart of understanding Jesus and His identity in the lifeworld of His birth. How is it that we could call the Passover a central part of our sacred tradition? Or must we admit this error and be faithful to the Gospel of St. John the Theologian, which is the bedrock of our Christian faith?

In this, we stay with the spirit of our Lenten meditations for 2023. We have seated ourselves before the Lord Jesus near the headwaters of the Jordan at Banias, and we have fixed our minds on that most important question:

To wrongly answer this question, which is more a Divine command than a query, .... or far worse, to ignore it, is to be lost, is to be separated from God. He lays this out before all as His condition: "Who do you say that I Am?

But let us first ask a simpler question. What is Holy Orthodoxy? What are the traditions that have defined our true and ancient way?

So many people describe differences between the Eastern and Western Church in terms of things indifferent: making the sign of the cross from the right versus the left, bowing versus genuflecting, communion spoon versus receiving on the tongue, consecration prayers behind a screen versus in the midst, icons versus three-dimensional statues, the Rosary versus the Jesus prayer .... the list goes on and on and on. All of it is adiaphora, things indifferent. In the end they will not matter. You will not face God after your death and say, "See! I have made the sign of the cross from right, not the left," and then gain admittance into Heaven. Our religion is rooted in the Identity of God and our Identity in Him.

That the East and West are very different is beyond dispute. Indeed, they amount to different religions. And this basic difference will greatly matter in the end, deciding who we are and the state of our souls.

Not surprisingly, these two traditions trace back to the beginnings — to the appearance of God among us and to the beginnings of Christian faith, what was called "The Way." And they mirror, together they mirror two other, first-century, traditions, which tore the Levant apart, especially in the years just preceding Jesus' birth. For the Advent of God came about as the Lost Tribes of Israel stood at a crossroads. On one side, they beheld the "Kingdom of Heaven religion" requiring a transformation of heart and soul associated with the signature command, Metanoeite!. This was the religion of Abraham, whose only sacrifices were the bread and wine of his high priest, Melchizedek. And we recall that the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mt. Moriah was to pronounce a Divine imperative in bold strokes: one does not offer blood sacrifice to God, much less the blood sacrifice of one's own son!

On the other side was the religion of the Second Temple associated with civil religion and blood sacrifice. It was an imported, hybrid religion introducing Mesopotamian customs into the Hebrew lifeworld and into its revised Scriptures. It centered the believer on blood sacrifice to appease a chronically wrathful god. ("Oh no! Our cranky god is wrathful again! We better make blood sacrifice before him!") This religion would be named for its region: Judah-ism, contradistinguishing it from beliefs of the historical Northern Kingdom.

This Judean belief system led one into a soporific state unto passivity. For objective sacrifice, not requiring transformation of heart and soul, would make atonement for all people, healing any rupture between the people and their god, similar to the belief systems of Babylon and Persia.

Even the shape and character of Eastern and Western church buildings give away these elemental differences. The Eastern churches are constructed and designed to accommodate a cloud of witnesses, who have completed their journeys of theosis. Congregations are active and standing amongst these figures expectantly. The atmosphere is electric .... and eternal. Soon Jesus will appear amongst them feeding them with Divine food necessary for their own journeys of theosis.

By contrast, Western church buildings accommodate viewers seated on one side in rows of galleries passively watching .... on the other side a sacrifice is in progress. You've seen these Old West pictures of hangings — on one side the passive onlookers in silence, on the other the man to be executed. The high point of the Western Mass is the executed One lifted up to appease the chronically wrathful god: a different religion. Where does this elemental difference come from?

Let us join the crowds in Jerusalem greeting the royal procession with palms. For much can be explained here, bearing always in mind St. John the Theologian's axiom: the Passover is their festival, not ours. For the confusion begins here, at the Passover, which celebrates the blood sacrifice of a lamb.

For centuries commentators have leapt to the conclusion that the Last Supper — the cornerstone of our Eucharistic religion — is a Passover Seder. This hasty assumption has been the glaring link between Judah-ism and Orthodox Christianity from the great age of heresies to the present time.

To make matters worse, no one knows what a first-century Passover Seder looked like. No reliable record has survived. As Jacob Neusner has argued, the rabbinical record cannot be accepted as a historical archive in the sense that a professional historian would use that term today. And first-century contemporaries Josephus and Philo do not describe the meal. They only describe what the Jews did in the Temple by way of Passover sacrifice.

Most important, we have our most precious record, the Holy Gospel According to St. John, which narrates that the crucifixion of the Lord took place the day before the Passover Seder, so the Lord could not possibly have presided over a Passover Seder. Impossible!

Yes, Jesus did preside over a meal in the upper room. That Mystical Supper, so incommensurably holy, was the self-sacrifice of Jesus' Body and Blood, mysteriously associated with bread and wine. What happened on Golgotha hill the next day repeated what already had taken place in the upper room as Henri de Lubac has brilliantly observed. The Son of God said, "Take. Eat. This is my Body" (Mk 14:22, Mt 26:26, Lu 22:19, 1Cor 11:24) — the most consistently attested words in the New Testament.

What is more, recent scholarship has pointed out the obvious, utterly dismissing the idea of a Passover meal: the Eucharist was celebrated at least weekly (if not daily) by the earliest Christians. (I should have thought of this a long time ago!) The Eucharist, after all, was the signature act of their gathering.

Now, if the first Christians were Jewish and if their Eucharist had been patterned on the Jewish Passover Seder, then the Eucharist would have been celebrated annually according to strictest regulations. Indeed, the word Seder means order (Western Catholics would say, ordo) .... unrepealable. They would have celebrated the Eucharist once a year if had been patterned on the Passover Seder.

Finally, in the earliest teachings of the Apostles, the Didache, we find that our earliest Eucharistic prayers are derived from table blessings to be offered at any meal every day, not at the Passover Seder.

What unfolds before us as the King enters the Holy City is no "King of the Jews," but something far more ancient and venerable. It is the royal progress of the Priest-King Melchizedek entering Salem. It is King David processing into his Royal City. It is the "Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9) riding into His Kingdom of Peace (the meaning of Salem). He reigns over a distant Kingdom (He tells Pilate), yet it has "drawn near."

The ancient religion, tracing its roots to Abraham, was rooted in theosis. Leaving Babylon, Abraham lived as a "Desert Father." His life, distant from the cities of Cain (Sodom and Gomorrah, for example), was one of continual purification.

Then, Babylonian and, later, Persian invaders, injected the Land of Promise, also rooted in desert purifation in the Sinai Wilderness, with a seductive innovation. New ideas rolled out across Judah like a deadly vapor introducing a whole new conception of religious life. A new promise was offered: you need not seek personal purity; you need not become new creatures in God's Image. Instead, you need only offer blood sacrifice. Your high priest, instead of offering bread and wine, must now stand in the Holy of Holies offering goats and bulls. And he will fasten your sins onto the back of a goat, who will carry them away into the wilderness for you!

We can picture groups like the Essenes, or like the followers of Jesus, scoffing .... saying, "Preposterous! What an absurd caricature of the religion of theosis!"

As we suggested in past reflections, the difference between these two, starkly different religions is captured in the two Temples. Solomon's Temple was a shrine to the journey of theosis. The court outside represented the fallen world. Inside, the spiritual journey was represented in an antechamber called Eden. The walls were painted with palms as we see in the posted icon of the Bosom of Abraham (Paradise / Eden). And prominently displayed were the Heavenly host. Here was the abode of the blessed.

By contrast, the Second Temple, built under the supervision of Mesopotamian overlords, forbade angels. For angels were synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven religion. As with Jacob at Peniel (Gen 32:22-32) or the Lord Jesus calling His Disciples, a defining feature of the religion of the Patriarchs is the presence of angels, who visited Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre. Angels are the epitome of transformation the ascent of the "soul life" over "body life." Jesus tells a group of sarcastic, carnally-minded men that animal sex is not a custom of the Kingdom of God "but [people there] are like angels in Heaven" (Mk 12:25). How different is this from a religion of "saving your own hide" through the offering of animal blood!

How starkly different are these two traditions: ancient religion versus recent innovation, First Temple versus Second Temple, personal transformation versus objective blood sacrifice, "angel life" versus earthbound civil religion.

Our Priest-King Melchizedek has entered Salem. The people cry out, "Hosanna in the highest!" This is no priest in the line of Aaron. This is no Levite. No Sadducee. But far more ancient than that. People wave palms at Him erecting a living wall of Eden on either side recalling the First Temple. Is this not the expected behavior of people who followed and believed in the Man of Eden, John the Baptist? Could we not call the Baptist's religion, the "Eden religion" — the restoration of purity and the company of God?

But the Baptist was merely a royal herald who preceded the King's progress. "Hear ye! Hear ye," he said. "The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near! Prepare yourselves!"

And we see Him even now riding on the humble foal of an ass. He rides into the holy precincts of our lives, too. Are we ready?! Is our inner kingdom prepared?! Let this be our only thought and occupation. For He comes. He comes. This is what will matter in the end. And no army of theologians or "spin" or seductive innovation can impede His royal progress.

His Sovereign presence and the radiant light He shines into every corner cannot be impeded. He cannot be perturbed or turned away. He is Lord of all He surveys. And His destination is each one of us.