Episode 14 - The Mystery of Christ with Father John Behr

0:02 Welcome to the Jesus Podcast with Michael Kulianos. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Jesus Podcast. It's a privilege to be with you, and today's episode, I believe, is going to be a very, very powerful and sacred time together. So privileged to have Father John Bear with us today. Father John, thank you so much.

0:25 I have really good to be discussed to make us.

0:29 It's been my honor just to get the time together that we've had and excited about time together in the future. It's a real privilege to have you. And um, we have a deep, deep respect and honor for the call of God on your life, for the work you've done. So thank you so much, Father. It means a great deal having you.

0:48 Father John is the Regis Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen since the summer of 2020. He taught at St. Vladimir Seminary since 1995, serving there as dean from 2007 to 2017. Father John hails from England, though his family background is Russian and German, and we're going to get into some amazing, amazing detail in that area.

1:15 Father John studied at Oxford under the leadership of Bishop Kalystos Ware. And Bishop Kalistos also supervised his doctoral work, which was supervised by Father Andrew Loud and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Incredible. And before becoming dean in 2007, Father John served as the editor of St.

1:37 Vladimir's Theological Quarterly. Many of you would be familiar with that. And the popular patristic series, which has really been used to bless the world. I think many of our viewers and listeners would have engaged with those writings. I know my children have and I have for years. Father John did his doctoral work on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on Irenaeus.

1:59 You're going to hear, I'm sure, a good a lot of Irenaeus today, which is such a privilege. He's written books on uh the formation of Christian theology, the way to Nicaea in 2001, the Nicene Faith in 2003, The Mystery of Christ, Life and Death in 2003, and many more. I know from listening to you, Father John, that becoming human, a theological anthropology in word and image is one of your favorite projects that the Lord has called you to.

2:28 And next, his other passion is cycling, especially restoring and riding vintage bicycles. Cycling is to Father John what golf is to me. So, Father John, thank you. What a true joy and privilege to have you.

2:43 It's really my joy. Yeah. Really my joy.

2:45 Father, I'm gonna I wanna start with your before we went live, we had a chance to just talk about your upbringing. So can we talk about the kind of home you grew up in and then move us into those teenage years?

2:57 Yeah. So my father was um a priest ordained by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. And I think gosh, she was ordained before I was born. I think my my sister had been born, but he was ordained before I was born. But the background goes much, much beyond that. So in fact, it was my great-grandfather, who was the first Russian Orthodox priest sent to England after the revolution back in 1926, so hundred years ago, he was sent there.

3:23 He had been some kind of diplomat in Brussels, and then he was sent to look after the Russian emigre communion community in London, 1926. My grandmother had ended up in Paris, where she grew up as a kid together with Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Andrew Bloom, but he was then known. And they both ended up in London.

3:41 She served as choir director for him for many years and so on. And really it was Metropolitan Anthony that was the first real ecclesial influence in my life. So he baptized me. I learned how to serve with him, you know, as an altar boy with him, confession with him during my my ch childhood years, and so on.

4:01 Yeah. So that that was kind of an environment I grew up in. Oh my word.

4:04 Could you just briefly just inform the listeners and the viewers as to who Metropolitan Bloom was, for those who who may not know, just his impact on the on the world of the world.

4:18 Yeah, there are a few that are placed in that category. I'm sure we'll talk about him, Archimandrax Safroni, Calistrat. Um other people as well, like Father Alexander Schmermann. You know, these people had a really great impact um in terms of their spiritual teaching and reached out and touched so many people, so many people.

4:39 Uh Anthony Metropolitan Anthony was a a major public figure in the UK. You know, he'd appear regularly on television. There's some interviews with him on television that have become really classics, uh debating with atheists and that kind of thing. Yeah.

4:53 Mm-hmm. So you grew up in a very strong Christian, Orthodox Christian home and then got a little older and went your own way for a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please. Czech Baptist preaching family.

5:09 Yeah. From Czech Slovakia and a preaching family. Uh he was a preacher, and then he went to study with Karl Baut in Basel, and that's where he met uh his wife to be, who was from an old Swiss family. Yeah. Wow, and then they got married, he ended up being a pastor in in Heidel in Hanover. Amazing.

5:28 So take us further, father.

5:30 Oh gosh. Um, like most kids of Orthodox priests, uh, during my teenage years I stopped going to church. My parents always took the line that as soon as we were old enough to stay at home without somebody looking after us, we could make up our own mind whether to go to church or not. And well, we all decided not to.

5:48 My sister, a couple of years old, and my brother likewise, we stopped going to church. Um, and I got into all sorts of other things. Don't know if I need to repeat them here, but really all sorts of other things, until about a week after my 17th birthday, I woke up one morning and said, Enough of all of this, a really traumatic night.

6:07 I don't know what it was, but I woke up and said, Enough of all of this, can't do this anymore. I'm off to a monastery.

6:13 Gosh.

6:13 Not to become a monk. Not to become a monk, just I'm off to a monastery. And I went off to the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, which had been founded by Sophoni, Archimandra at Safhoni, now St. Sophoni. Gosh, I think my my parents had taken me there a couple of times during my young childhood.

6:32 You know, when I was at five, six, seven. So I had a deep memory of that. And I woke up knewing this is what I had to do. And I'm so glad that my parents, it was a real blessing. My parents let me drop out of school. Really? I was I was doing my A levels, you know, uh high school equivalent. I was doing my A levels, but they've, you know, the they realized there's something I had to do.

6:54 I was also able to teach myself, so I taught myself for the state examinations and went off to the monastery for four or five months. Okay. And while I was there, you know, I didn't really do anything. I did whatever they asked me. I think it was do working in the garden um, you know, in the morning, did my school work in the afternoon.

7:16 I was there from basically from Christmas to after Easter. But their basic form of worship, apart from the regular divine dish on Saturday, Sunday, and once or twice during the week, would be to do two hours of Jesus prayer communally in a very small chapel. It was a very small community at the time.

7:36 So my entry back into the church was sitting down next to Sephora Saint Saphoni doing two hours of Jesus prayer morning and evening.

7:42 Oh my word.

7:43 From I think it was five o'clock to seven or six to eight, and then five to seven in the evening. Yeah, that that was kind of how many monks were at the monastery at that time? It was only like eight or something like that. So you're all jammed into this little chapel. Wow. Yeah. In their small chapel before they built all their new buildings.

8:05 Yeah.

8:05 And what when you think of those days praying the Jesus Prayer with Saint Sophroni, what what stands out to you the most?

8:11 I generally don't think about it. I think it's just kind of there now in my my own background as part of who I am. Not something I really think back upon. But if I were to, it would just be what a wonderful, peaceful time it was.

8:24 Is there anything that is most preeminent in your memory of him? What stood out the most, or what maybe a grace or from the spirit?

8:31 I didn't really spend long time talking with him. It was just kind of being there and doing the the prayer together and all the rest of it. Um but he did have a fairly wicked sense of humour. I'd heard that. So one of the things I remember most vividly is him telling me at one point that, you know, he came over to England when he was, I guess, in his fifties and he didn't know English.

8:55 He'd, you know, he'd been in Greece, he'd from Russia, lived in Paris and so on, had to learn English. And he told me that he really liked the English language because of the connection between the word monk and monkey. And that the thing monks and back on that, all Christians really need to do is to learn to laugh at themselves.

9:15 Our whole team's laughing behind the cameras right now, Father.

9:18 So that works. That's not true.

9:28 Why why why am I getting upset about this? You know, what is it? Nothing.

9:33 You know, I've heard that as a common denominator with a lot of canonized uh servants of the Lord. Even in the West, like they say that of Padre Pio that he was just always cracking jokes. I've heard the same about that St. Paesios had the same type of personality. It's really interesting to me. You're right.

9:50 I I think we take ourselves too seriously at times.

9:52 Yeah, yeah.

9:54 So so you were there for for about five months at Essex?

9:58 Then I finished my state examinations, went to London to do um my undergraduate in philosophy, went to Greece for a year to start learning Greek, and then ended up at Oxford doing a master's there in theology and then my doctoral work with with Metropolitan Callistos.

10:16 So was Metropolitan Callistos over that entire program?

10:20 Yeah. Okay. So he's my supervisor for three or four years.

10:23 Okay.

10:24 And the Irenaeus and it's only looking, you know, he was the one who put me onto Irenaeus, and I'm ever thankful to him for that.

10:31 So he recommended that to you?

10:32 Yeah, I told he I told him the kind of things I was interested in, and he he said, work on Irenaeus.

10:38 Do you mind me asking what you told him you were interested in? I'm wondering why he turned you toward Irenaeus.

10:43 I don't even remember. But it's the kind of questions that have dominated my life ever since. The question of what it is to be human, how to live as a human being, how we as human beings are related to Christ, the question of Adam and Christ, all of those kind of things. You know, culminating my work on being human or becoming human.

11:04 See the theme running through the book and the Gospel of John. Greg of Nissa on the human image of God. And it really is it's a perennial question. Just what what is it to be human?

11:15 It's so easy to disconnect that thought from the glory of God, too, unless you're reading.

11:19 Well, the glory of God is a living human being. As we all know, very few people quote the second half of that sentence. You know, the glory of God is a living human being, and the life of the human being is to see God. Wow. But of course, no one can see God and live. The cross. So the living human being is the martyr.

11:42 Yes. In Iron Age's Age of Martyrdom, or those who take up the cross now.

11:47 So you studied with under Bishop Calistos and then moved to St. When did you move to St. Vladimir's?

11:53 When I was finishing, I did gosh, I went up to Oxford in 89, um, got married in 91, met my wife in Oxford, and I think it was 92 or 93 that Father John Meyendorf at St. Vladimir Seminary died. Um, and Father Tom Hopker, who was a dean then, asked Metropolitan Calystos, who would supervise a lot of people, who he'd recommend, and he mentioned my name.

12:16 Then they invited me to come over for one year. They tried out different people, you know. Working in a seminary because it's such a small community, yeah, and you're living on campus, it's got to be a right fit. Very good. So they set up they they started a program of trying out different people. They asked me to come for the year 93, 94.

12:33 My wife and myself went, loved it very much. They had somebody else from 94 to 95, and then they invited me back permanently in 95.

12:40 Okay. Yeah. And you were there how long?

12:42 25 years.

12:43 How did you like New York?

12:44 Oh, I loved it. Yeah. Really loved it. Um, I mean, you know, the St. Cladmine Seminary is what about half an hour north of Manhattan? Yeah, it's in the kind of Scarsdale Bronxville area. It's very quiet, very green, very boring. But you're half but you're half an hour away from Manhattan. So you've got the best of both worlds.

13:02 So we were going occasionally, probably not as much as we should have done, but whatever.

13:05 So, Father, when did you begin your work in the popular patristic series? And because I know a lot of our viewers would be very familiar with that series and your work there.

13:13 So they invited me to come over um as a faculty member, but to be a faculty member at St. Vladimir's Seminary at that time required you to have a degree from an Orthodox institution. Okay. And so although I had a doctorate from Oxford supervised by Callistos, I had to do a master's. When I first arrived.

13:34 And for that master's, I did a I did a first coursework, and then for the thesis, I did a translation of Irenaeus's work, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. And then that was published in the Popular Patristic series, which had been dormant. It wasn't even really a series. It published a few odd volumes over the past decades.

13:53 But then when I finished this, um I took it to the press and we decided to actually make it into a series, and then it developed thereafter.

14:01 Okay. When did you when do you feel like you started sensing I'm gonna camp out in these first two centuries and really give my time and attention to that era in the church?

14:11 It worked out that way. Um so I started lecturing. I inherited Father John Mandor's courses, I eventually performed my own lecture series and did all of that. And then those those lectures formed the basis for the two books, The Way to Nicaea and the Nicene Faith. Okay. Which are basically sketches of different fathers over the first four centuries.

14:32 Okay. Um they were my lecture notes. And I was going to continue all the way up to the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Okay. Okay. But I realized that in order to do the following volume, which would have been to Chalcedon and Beyond, I had to really do a lot of work on Diodo of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

14:49 I did that. And then I realized I also had to do a lot of work on Evagrius and 6th century Origenism. But the only way to really understand that properly was to go back to Origen himself. And that's where I ended up doing the new edition of On First Principles, just to try and understand what he's doing.

15:05 So that I was going forward, but then I went backwards. And then having gone backwards, around the same kind of time earlier, I did a translation of Athanasius on the Incarnation. And then working through all of those close textual analysis translation and so on, I became convinced that people were not thinking in the way we've come to think, and that the only way to really really kind of test this or to explore this was to work on the Gospel of John.

15:33 Okay. And so did a book on the Gospel of John. I spent you know a number of years reading a whole bunch of Johannine scholarship and all the rest of it, and went back to that. And basically that book tried to put together what I'd been reading in people like Irenaeus and Origen, Greg of Nissan and so on, with, in dialogue with, what contemporary scholars were saying about the Gospel of John.

15:55 It's kind of like a dialogue between ancient and modern readers. And then I also had a section in that book on a French phenomenologist called Michel Henri, whose last three books were basically a meditation on the Gospel of John. So that was a way of actually me being able to bring in my first study of philosophy back into the dialogue.

16:14 So wow.

16:15 And going backwards. And I'm I'm thinking about going backwards even further to write a book on Paul. Um, but at the moment I'm engaged in doing a tech doing a new critical edition and translation of Irenaeus of the complete work.

16:27 I love the way you summarize Irenaeus' work on apostolic preaching and on the incarnation by Athanasius. People ask me who've not read the book on the incarnation. I'll I'll often use one of your quotes. I'll say, I want you to count how many times the Bethlehem Nativity scene is mentioned in comparison to the Passion.

16:47 And it'll give you an entirely different view than maybe you have on what it on what incarnation actually is. Yeah.

16:54 Yes, totally.

16:55 And I mean, and the way you summarized Irenaeus is so powerful as well.

16:58 It was it was right, you know, it's doing the translation of Irenaeus' demonstration of the apostolic preaching, which only exists in Armenian. So, you know, it's a huge struggle to to work through all of that. And I just kept on scratching my head, you know, why does he call it the demonstration of the apostolic preaching and he never quotes a New Testament?

17:19 What's going on with that? And that took me back obviously to Emmaus, to Emmaus and so on. And then likewise with Athanasius' work on the incarnation, you know, doing doing a translation is much, much more than reading a text. You know, you can read a text in English, and you can read and you you get a lot from it, and you know, we all we all do that.

17:38 But when you translate a work, you've got to be attentive to the way every word is used across the whole of the work. Amazing. You know, even even a single word like towards or to or whatever else, you've got to be you know how is he using these words across the whole of the work? And then you get to a kind of a deeper level of understanding of the text and how they're thinking and how they're holding thoughts together.

18:02 And as you mentioned, with this work on the incarnation, the classic work on the incarnation, which we all summarize by saying he became man that we might become God, and yet he never talks about about Bethlehem. So what on earth is going on in that? How is he thinking? Yeah, and that's why I had to go back to the Gospel of John.

18:21 You know, what is John 1.14 actually all about?

18:24 He's actually thinking that the one on the cross is the word of God, right?

18:28 Yeah, totally. That's well, that's what he says at the beginning of the work.

18:31 Right.

18:31 I'm gonna show in this work that the one on the cross is the word, the logos of God, uh, and therefore the Christian faith is not a logos, irrational. It's got its word, it's got its logos, it's got its reason, and it is the one on the cross. Yeah, and the order of identification is not I'm gonna show you that the word of God took flesh, grew up for 30 years, and then ascended across.

18:54 No, it's the one on the cross is the word of God.

18:57 Yes. Well, gosh. Okay, Father. So, um, and then after St. Vlad's you've you've moved to Scotland?

19:03 Yeah, I did twenty-five years at St. Vlad's. I did 10 years as Dean. I could have stayed on um and you lived on campus. And I lived on campus for 25 years.

19:11 Father, I don't you deserve a separate you deserve a separate reward for living. I don't there's no way I could live on campus with our students.

19:17 Yeah, but you know, going the the worship at the chapel at St. Vladimir Sunday is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And so, you know, for 25 years being immersed in all of that and being immersed in all of that hymnography sung in English, not in Greek or Slavonic, but sung in English, really opened up different ways of seeing things.

19:39 Makes sense, yeah. For the viewers who are not familiar with um orthodox hymnography, it it's kind of hard to express. Orthodox hymnography basically all derives from the first millennium at different points across the first millennium. Yeah, pretty pretty much settled by the end of that period. And it is basically uh uh totally scriptural, playing together with all the different imagery from scripture, putting it together in different ways to expand a particular feast of the particular figure.

20:07 And so it's kind of you know, opening up scripture and seeing it in a particular way. So doing that while studying and reading the fathers, yeah. And also never at that point having studied New Testament in in terms of New Testament scholarship and being forced into that particular kind of discipline, just opens up other ways of looking at things.

20:25 Don't you love the symphony of all of that? I I feel like sometimes we put a scalpel to what the Lord never intended us to put a scalpel to with hymnography, with the study of scripture, with the worship and the the life of the church. For some reason we tend to fragment all of this and it doesn't work like it should when we're when we live there.

20:42 And that's especially that's also true in the discipline of theology. You know, people do Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, early church studies, it's all all fragmented. One of the I think one of the great moves in contemporary theological scholarship is an attempt to reintegrate all of that.

20:59 Yeah. And you see that especially amongst the crossover between New Testament studies and early Christian studies. Probably everything that could ever be written has been written on the New Testament as a field within itself. But then to kind of extend it and go beyond it and see, you know, and consider what people Irenaeus and others are doing and how they're reading scripture and how that might inform us about I don't know what Paul is doing or what John is doing or whatever else it might be.

21:28 Wow. Yeah.

21:30 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh wouldn't you say that Irenaeus' work on apostolic preaching, he is basically preaching the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus via what we call the Old Testament. Yeah, yeah.

21:41 It's it's not as good as Melito, though.

21:43 Well, Melito's Paschal homily, I get emotional reading that.

21:52 Whereas Irenaeus' demonstration is more of a kind of a catechetical over catechetical overview, you like.

21:58 You know, it was you that's Said and this this part I had never heard. I think I sent this to you by email, but I never considered the prophetic aspect of that homily in that the Lord, I never read it as the Lord speaking through the letter there.

22:14 Yeah, so it's phenomenal. He goes from the reading of Exodus on the night of Passover. Yeah, we could talk more about Passover Pasca as a single event encompassing the death, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost. A single event. Starts with the reading. He says, Now the scriptures of the Exodus have been read, and he goes through really sophisticated and beautiful patterns.

22:35 The work is divided up in various ways, but then it and it's just using the Old Testament. Yeah. I mean, there are allusions to the New Testament, you know, the raising of the dead and so on, but it's all testament. And then he ends up speaking in persona Christi in the person of Christ. Yeah. Yeah.

22:52 Oh, and when he starts speaking to Israel, I just I I had to put it down. I have a little study at the house. I put it down and it just sat there. Yeah. It was, it's just phenomenal. Yeah. So, Father, I I I want to continue down this road, but for a moment, I I'm gonna ask you some questions that might sound very basic, but I I feel like, you know, we're on the ground tier with hundreds of students now, and I feel like I have a pretty decent pulse on rhetoric and conversation with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, with and, you know, actually throughout different denominations and context.

23:25 So I want to simplify. Well, I want to ask you some questions that might sound simple, but I think the answer is gonna bring a lot of clarity and a really needed foundation. So my first question would be this Who is the Lord and how has He revealed Himself?

23:40 So I would, you know, when people ask me that qu just ask me that question, I would just start with the narratives of the Gospels. Okay. You know, we've read the Gospels, you read the Gospels. That's a kind of our starting point. And when what what's most striking about the narrative of the Gospels, especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John is kind of different, but what's most striking, I don't want to offend anybody, but how slow the disciples are.

24:06 They are with him for all that time, they just don't get it. You know, they see him working miracles, he's uh they talk to his mother, they seem transfigured on the mountain, they see him multiplying bread, raising the you know, healing the sick and all the rest of it, and they just don't get it. Only time that one of them gets it, really, is Peter on the road to Caesarea Philippi.

24:26 On the road to Caesarea Philippi, Christ asks them, you know, in in Matthew 16, uh, who do men say that I am? Well, they say some say you're the prophet returned, and whatever it might be. Turns to Peter, who do you say that I am? He says, Peter says, You're the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Okay, sounds really good.

24:42 But note, Christ then says, You did not know this by flesh and blood. So you did not know it by empirical perception, yeah, but you know, seeing me physically. You knew it by a revelation. The word is apocalypse. It's been unveiled to you by the Father. Then he goes on to say, by the way, Peter, uh he gets he goes on to say, you know, you're the rock, Petrus rock.

25:03 On this rock I'll build my faith. Whatever you bind, whatever you loose, we're bound in heaven. Uh the gates of hell will never prevail against this. And then he says, By the way, Peter, I've got to go to Jerusalem to suffer. And Peter says, No, let it never happen. And Christ says, get behind me, Satan.

25:19 Yeah. The only one who Christ calls Satan is Peter. Having just said he's a rock upon which, upon which the gates of hell will never prevail. I mean, the you know, when we read the Gospels, when we read any of Scripture, you know, because we know we're reading holy texts, we're not prepared to see the humour in it or the irony.

25:40 The only one who's made a confession, two verses later, gets called Satan. Right. And then you have to stop and ask, why is he called Satan? Yeah. And it's it doesn't say Peter stop listening to Satan or Satan get out of Peter. He called Peter Satan. And it is because Peter's just said, no. Let it not happen.

25:58 You're not going to go to the cross, you're not going to go and suffer in Jerusalem. So you could really say Satan is anyone who tries to take Christ apart from the cross. Amen. Amen. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, that's that's the lesson to be learned from it. Anyone who tries to separate Christ from the cross, Satan, the divider, the avalas, and so on, or who tries to take Christ on any other terms.

26:22 Okay. But then on the other hand, when they see him on the cross, they still don't get it. The Gospel of John is different. We could talk about that, but they um but in Matthew Mark Meek, they still don't get it. And Peter, you know, the disciples run away in fear, and Peter denies him. So seeing him on the cross doesn't do it either.

26:38 When they when the women see the empty tomb, they don't get it. Well, an empty tomb is ambiguous. It doesn't prove anything that it was empty. Has someone stolen the body? It takes an angel to explain to them, no, he's risen from the dead as he said he would, like go and tell the disciples, and the disciples don't believe their report.

26:56 And then when they encounter the risen Christ, they still don't get it. Yeah? So true. You know, they walk on the road to Emmaus, the risen Christ turns up, and they say, Who are you? Are you a stranger? Haven't you heard what's been going on? We were following this guy called Jesus, and we thought he was going to deliberate us from the Roman Empire, but he went and got himself killed, and now the tomb is empty, and we've got no idea what's happening.

27:16 Aren't they in a sense asking the Lord if he's ever heard of himself and his own thousand?

27:23 You have to hear the irony in it, yeah. But it's doing all of that to make a point. He then opens the scriptures to show how Moses and all the prophets spoke about how the Son of Man had to suffer to enter into his glory. The disciples' hearts start to burn, they persuade him to stay their night, and then their eyes are open in the breaking of their bread, and as soon as they recognize him, he disappears from sight.

27:43 Okay, so the first couple of points to get from all of this is that the way the disciples come to know the Lord is as the crucified and risen one who is known through the opening of the scripture and the breaking of the bread. And I've taken it all simply as factually, historically true, just following that narrative.

28:08 That's the lesson to be learned from all of that. Okay? Now that is hugely important. Hugely important. First of all, that opening of the scripture and the breaking of the bread is what we still do. When we come to church, the scriptures are open, the reading, the homily, the hymnography, the iconography, if you have it.

28:27 Opening the scriptures. So we shouldn't think of the church as being a physical building. When you say, I'm going to church. No, the physical building in Greek is called a temple. I'm going the Naos. It's not an ecclesia. The ecclesia is a gathering of the people in this particular mode. So the church is a space which is created, fashioned, whatever the word would be, by the opening of the scripture and the breaking of the bread.

28:52 It forms like a matrix. And matrix means womb. So it's a womb in which we're born. So when we are in church, we are literally on the road to Emmaus.

29:03 Yes.

29:03 Yeah. Not being it's just hugely important because it means you didn't have to be there back then to get it or to encounter him. Those who were there back then didn't get it. The way they got it is to open the scripture and breaking the bread, which is what we still do. Yeah. You know, when I was at seminary, I used to ask the students from time to time, if you'd been in Jerusalem in the year 25 AD, having a cup of coffee, you know, at Starbucks, and you saw Jesus walking down the street, would you have said, Oh, look, there goes the word of God incarnate?

29:37unknown Right.

29:39 Most of them would put their hands, say no. Occasionally you get a student who'd say, Yes, I would, to which I'd then say, Well, you must be demonically possessed, because only the demons get it, not the disciples. So true. Go and see the dean of students. Go to exorcism. Yeah. So opening scripture, breaking the bread, we are on the road to Emmaus.

30:03 The historical distance of 2,000 years doesn't count for anything. We're not at a remove. Okay. And the second point is they encounter the Lord as the crucified and risen one.

30:16 Yes.

30:16 Yeah? Because they didn't know him, you know, when they saw him multiplying loaves of bread or whatever else it might be. Through his death and resurrection. Now, why that is so important is because it then means that he shows us what it is to be God in the way he dies as a human being.

30:36 Yes.

30:37 Not by working miracles, not by giving a homily on the mount, not by whatever else it might be. They didn't get it from that. It's only through the passion that they get it. He shows us what it is, not who, what, what it is to be God. God, after all, is his father, he's a son of God. Truly, this is a son of God, as the centurion says.

31:05 So opening the scriptures, which means fundamentally that you cannot read scripture in any other way. Yes. Yeah? Because a veil's been lying over it. Right. If you're reading scripture purely in historical key, which is fine and legitimate, but you're not reading it as scripture. To read it as scripture is to read it unveiled as speaking about this one.

31:31 This one who shows us what it is to be God in the way he dies as a human being. Now the other reason why that is important is because in fact, death is the only thing we've got in common. Had he shown us what it is to be God by doing things we think gods do, throwing lightning bolts, whatever it means, you know.

31:51 Right. Thus or whoever. Well, I can't do that, yeah. Had he shown us what it is to be God by being a first century Palestinian Jew, well I'm not. Had he shown us what it is to be God by being rich and powerful or poor and outcast, well again that divines humanity. Yeah. The only thing we've got in common from the beginning onwards is that we will die, you know.

32:16 It's a truism that's known to the fathers, following on from Aristotle and way back. Whatever comes into being passes away. Absolutely. Yeah. So we've come into existence with no choice. Nobody asks me if I want to be born, as one of Dostoevsky's characters put it. Nobody asks me. My parents got together and here I am.

32:40 I had no choice about the matter. I've been thrown into existence in which whatever I do, I will die.

32:47 True.

32:47 Yeah. I'm as good as dead already. I might be able to extend my so-called life by a few years, but I really die. What Christ has done, however, is to turn that death inside out. Yes. Literally inside out. You know, the Pascal Traparian in the Orthodox tradition. Christ is risen for the dead, trampling down death by death.

33:08 Yeah? So he's turned that death inside out. So that rather than being a passive victim of death, which is how I come into the world, no choice about it, whatever I do, I'm going to die. I'm passive with regard to that. Christ, as Hebrews puts it, has feared us from the fear, has released us, freed us from the fear of death, so that we can voluntarily take up the cross and embrace our mortality and live in a Christ-like fashion and in that way enter into a mode of life which can't be touched by death.

33:43 So it hasn't been done away with, but transformed.

33:45 It hasn't been done away with at all. You know, often Christians like to say that Christ has conquered death. Well, he has, but that doesn't mean it's been removed.

33:53 Right.

33:54 When people tell me that Christ has conquered death, I say, Are you going to die? Well, should I have a double take on that one? Yeah. Christ has conquered death not by obliterating it and sending it elsewhere, but by turning it to his own pedagogical use. It becomes an instrument by which we can now freely and voluntarily enter into that paschal mystery.

34:18 A womb. Yeah, a womb. The womb, the womb of the church. And death can be, gosh, death has got so many different elements, positive elements for the early fathers. So one of them would be death puts an end to sin. You know, we while we're active, we sin. When we die, let's put an end to it.

34:39 Fair enough.

34:40 Another one would be um only in fact by the experience only in fact that I don't have life from myself.

34:50 Yes.

34:51 Yeah. You know, you can tell somebody tell you blue in the face that that their life is not their own, yeah. But we all ultimately think it is. Even if I know it intellectually, I don't know it in the guts. Yeah. Of course I know my life is a gift from God, and I'll give him Sunday mornings in return.

35:10 That part of it belongs to him. The message is mine to do it as I like, because it's my life. Yeah. Only when we actually die and are deprived of life do we know in our guts that we depend upon God for life.

35:24 You're right. We always say he holds our breath until we can't keep it. Do we really know? Yeah.

35:29 Yeah. And so only through that experience of death do we then come to hold on and cling to God ever more fully. As Irenaeus would put it. So uh you know, it all goes back to that paradox of the cross, which is strength and weakness. Only when we're finally dead do I finally know and experience my own weakness.

35:53 But that's exactly where the power of God is made manifest.

35:56 So true.

35:57 You know, when I finally die and I'm placed in the earth and my body decomposes in the earth, then I will learn that in fact I am earth. Right. And the word humility comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth. So I will learn humility in and through all of that.

36:15 And finally experience the fulfillment of my baptism as well, right?

36:19 Fulfillment of my baptism in anticipation of our death.

36:23 Right.

36:23 If you have died with Christ in baptism, Paul says, you will rise. It changes from the past tense to the future tense. Yeah?

36:30 Yes.

36:31 Simply because you're not yet dead. Right. Simple as that. And even more than that, um, even if I take up my cross now, I try to do every day, in in every way and all the rest of it, the very fact of taking up my cross shows I'm not yet dead, because I'm the one doing it. Very true. So I'm kind of caught in the first person singular.

36:54 I'm learning to die to myself by taking up the cross, live for others, and all the things one can say. But the very fact that I'm doing it shows I'm not yet dead. True. Yeah. I'm living into it, but it won't finally be complete until I'm finally in the grave. In the in you know, uh in the earth from which God takes the earth to fashion a living human being.

37:16 Yeah. This time no longer animated by a breath of life, like in Genesis 2, but rather the life-giving spirit. And then a third way of thinking positively about death is what you see with the martyrs. Yeah. So Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to Rome to be martyred, he he describes to the Roman Christians, before he gets he sends them a letter saying, Don't, don't stop me being martyred.

37:41 Don't don't don't try and bribe the judges that talk me out of it. And he says, I am God's wheat, and I'll be ground by the teeth of the wild beast so that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. So he sees his own death as him becoming the Eucharistic offering. Right. You know, so as we enter, as we voluntarily embrace our mortality now, by taking up the cross, not living for myself, but living for others, with all the paradox we've just spoken about, and then live that life in that priestly way, because to be a priest is to sacrifice, we're sacrificing ourselves in this way.

38:17 We also become the one who's offered. I'm the offer the one who offers and the one who is offered. Yeah. And that culminates with our death and resurrection in Christ, at which point we finally become the body of Christ, that Eucharistic offering.

38:31 And experience sacrament as we should. Fully. Fully. Yeah. So, Father, so when you think about the Caesarea Philippi account in Matthew 16, when obviously the Lord Jesus tells Peter that the Father has revealed this to him, that he answered correctly, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Is it fair to say that Jesus, in a sense, gives definition to what it means to be Christ, Son of the Living God, by telling Peter, I am going to Jerusalem to die?

39:02 In other words, this is what that looks like.

39:04 Yeah. But you also have to remember that all the Gospels are written after the event. Yeah, we tend to read them simply as narratives before the event culminating in that. But actually, we must remember that they're written after the event with a particular purpose, which is to show that this crucified one is in fact the Lord.

39:26 Which to a Jew at that time, definition of Messiah would not have included being held to a cross.

39:32 So to put so to put the idea of the Messiah together with Isaiah 53 just didn't happen. Yeah. You know, and the disciples weren't expecting that. As I said, the disciples are really slow. So even after all of that, Luke 24, we get to Acts 1. Yeah, you know, following on from Luke 24. And the disciples are asking him, Are you finally going to s to redeem Jerusalem?

39:56 They're still thinking politically and naturally.

39:58 They're still thinking of a political Messiah, yeah.

40:00 Uh-huh. So it's so any attempt to divorce the Lord Jesus, to any any attempt to divorce our definition of what it means to be God from the Passion is the work of Satan.

40:12 Yeah. Yeah. And what one could take it even more than that, but in a slightly different way. Any way to take the cross as an instrument of power is equally satanic.

40:23 Yes.

40:24 Yeah. You know, to use the cross as I mean, in the Orthodox hymnography, we talk about the cross as being a weapon of peace.

40:31 Mm-hmm.

40:31 In the life-giving cross.

40:33 Right.

40:33 The life-giving cross. It's a weapon of peace. It's not a it's not a more powerful arm uh b armoury in a in an arms race. Right. Yeah. It's a weapon of peace which destroys evil by voluntarily taking it upon oneself.

40:50 Which would be in line with the Proto-Evangelion in Genesis 3.15. This is the way conquering takes place, through bruising. Is that correct?

40:58 Yeah. Conquering death by death. Yeah. Not by not by using a cross to beat up other people.

41:04 Right. We don't win with volume, intimidation. We this kingdom advances through the laying down of life.

41:11 Right. Yeah. Right. I just put it on an even simpler way, you know, when Christ tells us to turn the other cheek, it's not because, you know, some of some kind of sadomasochism, but if you if you return a blow for a blow, you'll end up, you know, in in an ever greater arms race. Right. Yeah. But if you accept the anger of the other person upon yourself, you dissipate it.

41:34 That same kind of logic's going on in that.

41:36 And the serpent's skull is crushed through this bruising, which is the antithesis of worldly dominance. Yeah.

41:43 Yes.

41:43 Yeah. And you see this as an ethos in the disciples when they're in the apostles, when they're rejoicing after having been counted worthy to suffer, like you mentioned earlier, they had plugged into this life flow through suffering that confounds the wise and discovers strength.

42:02 Because the life comes through death. Yes. Yeah. And you know, Paul talks about in Corinthians 15 the first Adam is animated by a breath of life. The last Adam is a life-giving spirit. Right. There's a contrast between breath and spirit. So we come into existence with a breath of life. All of us do. You know, we come out of the room, we take a breath.

42:27 And the most characteristic feature of a breath is that it expires. That's what a breath does. So we live our so-called lives by expiring. And then Christ tells the disciples very clearly, and it's kind of lost in the English, but it's repeated in all the Gospels. If you try and preserve your life, and the Greek there is psychi, your soul, not zoe, yeah, life.

42:55 It is you try and preserve your animation, your breath, you'll lose it. Wow. So if you try and preserve your breath, you know, either by holding onto it while you die quicker in that way, or if you try and preserve your breath by eating really healthily and exercising and doing all the things, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but if that becomes obsessive, is it's it's it's dangerous.

43:17 But even if you try and preserve your life in a healthy way, you're still going to end up dying. Your breath is going to expire. Just no doubt about it. You might live a few more days longer, but it still will expire.

43:28 And then the psalmist write about that order, Father, that's it.

43:31 Wait, wait, wait, wait. Before that, let's finish the second half of Christ's uh statement. Um, but if you lose it for my sake, for the gospel, for the kingdom, for the neighbor, and all the things one can say, you gain it. Yeah. In Luke, actually, it's even more interesting. It is Zoogoniste, you will beget life.

43:50 Yeah, so it's a movement from breath to life. Yeah. And the reason is this animation, this breath will expire, it's going to, but If I use it in a Christ-like way, not to try and preserve it, but to live in service for others as a loving offering for others, then I'm entering into a mode of life which can't be touched by death because I'm entering into it through death.

44:15 Wow. Yeah? And that's life. So when Christ says, I've come that you might have life and have it in abundance, we tend to hear the latter part, have it in abundance, and then get into all of that kind of prosperity stuff. But actually the first half is a more important one. If he says I come that you might have life, well, it means you don't have it.

44:35 What you've got is not life. What you've got is animation, breathing, not life. Yeah? You say you're going to die whatever you do. You're as good as dead already. Let the dead bury their dead. It's referring to us. Yeah. Um, and then you've got that, you meant you talk about the psalm verse, was it Psalm 103, 104?

44:53 You take away their breath, they die in return to the dust. You send forth your spirit, and they will be created. Kecti side, future tense. We've yet to be created. Yeah. You know, we tend to think, we tend to read Genesis and think, at the beginning, you know, God took clay from the earth and so on, and then we all come from that.

45:15 Well, in fact, none of us have ever been earth. But all of us are going to become earth. Yeah? So earth is not my beginning. Earth is in fact my end, which then becomes my beginning.

45:27unknown Wow.

45:28 Yeah? That's the movement from Genesis one to Genesis two.

45:31 We could do it, we could do a lot about that, but Well, Father, so the this is right in line with Pilate's announcement over the Lord. I mean, he's been tortured, beyond recognition, striped and beaten, and he says, Behold the man. In other words, I mean, John is very specific and careful to include that.

45:50 And doesn't that tell us this is what it looks like to be fully human and fully alive? Yeah, but it's even more than that, isn't it?

45:58 So I mentioned earlier that the synoptics are different to John. We looked at Matthew, Martin, Luke, we looked at the kind of narrative and how the disciples only get it at the end. In the Gospel of John, the scriptures are opened at the beginning. Yeah. You know, Philip and Nathaniel. We found the one of whom Moses and Law spoke, and the prophets also.

46:15 Right at the beginning of the Gospel. But they didn't quite understand because they say Jesus, the son of Joseph of Nazareth. Not quite. The scriptures are opened, but John's going to take us to a whole further level. That's the key thing. Yeah. In the Orthodox liturgy of John Chrysostom, fourth century liturgy, there's a line in which the priest says, In the night in which he was given up, or rather gave himself up for the life of the world.

46:43 When I first ordained it, it really used to annoy me. I said, Chrisostom, which one do you mean? Given up or rather gave himself up? And if you mean the latter, well, cut out the former. And then it you know, over time it dawned on me that it's a movement from one to the other that's important. So in the synoptics, he's put to death.

47:00 The disciples don't get it. Only at the end is scripture opened. In the Gospel of John, the scriptures are open at the beginning, and now we're taken to a whole other level. So in the Gospel of John, Christ is not put to death. He voluntarily goes to his death. And he's in control all the time. Now is not the hour, he says to the woman at the marriage in Cana.

47:21 When I'm ready, you know, he's the one in control all the way through. And then his passion is depicted so differently. It's depicted as an act of love. Having loved his disciples, he loved them to the end. Greater love is no man, they lay down his life for their friends. It's all an act of love. And even more strikingly, I'm still trying to get my head around this one, he says, This is the reason the Father loves me because I lay down my life.

47:51 Oh no.

47:52 It's not I love the Father and I'm going to do what he wants. It is, no, the Father loves me because I lay down my life. And then that love is traced back to God Himself. This is the way God loves the world. John 3, yeah? Right. It's all a movement of love. And as a movement of love, it is unconditioned.

48:10 It's not a response as it might be in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. You know, a sacrificial offering and all the rest of it. We're now taken up to a further level beyond that. This is the way God loves the world, and it originates in the love which God Himself is.

48:25 Yes.

48:26 It's all of that, okay? Um, and then you've got the final, you've got Pilate saying, Behold the man, and you've got Christ, his final his words on the cross are so different to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And his final word in John is it's finished, tetelister. And because we don't pay attention to the difference between the synoptics and John, the way I've just described it, we hear it in the same kind of way.

48:50 My works come to an end, I'm going to go back to the Father, that kind of thing. Yeah? Whereas in fact in Greek, tetelister really means it's completed, it's perfected, it's finished. And so you have to ask, well, what is finished? Yeah. And John gives that away because he starts his gospel with in the beginning, alluding to the book of Genesis in the beginning.

49:11 So John's telling you, if you want to read my gospel, you've got to read Genesis at the same time, because I'm playing with Genesis. So go back to Genesis, and we can now see a fundamental distinction. Genesis 1 opens with God speaking everything into existence. In the beginning, God created heaven, let there be light, let there be waters, let the firmament be gathered, let there be plants, whatever.

49:36 All these imperatives. Let there be, let there be. It is, it's good, it's done, end of the day, next day a few more imperatives. And then he says something completely different. He says, Let us make a human being in that language. It's not an imperative, it's a subjunctive. We're often called by the plural, let us make, but the real key difference is it's a subjunctive.

49:59 So he speaks everything into existence. There's a scenery upon the stage, which is now going to work. In the Gospel of John, before the Passion, Christ says, My father and I are still working. The work hasn't yet finished.

50:12 Oh my word, yeah.

50:14 In the Gospel of John, he's crucified on the great Sabbath. Uh-huh. Or crucified from the day of preparation to line the tomb on the great Sabbath in the Gospel of John. So let us make a human being, finishes on the cross in the Gospel of John, behold the human being. And then Christ and God rests from all his works on the great Sabbath, which is the entry into the eighth day.

50:38 And then John could do is to play with that all sorts of ways. So you know, when he says that in chapter 2, destroy the temple in three days I'll read it. He knows a three-day language, but when it comes to describing the resurrection, he doesn't use that anymore. He uses first day and eighth day. Wow.

50:55 On the first day of the week, and the week later, on the eighth day. Yeah. So he's transposing three-day language into first day, eighth day, creation, new creation. Yeah. So that means then that not only does Christ show us what it is to be God in the way he dies on the cross, he shows us what it is to be human.

51:14 Yes.

51:15 Yeah. And so one can then say to be human is to live by voluntarily laying down your life in love for your neighbour. Now, if that's what it is to be human, then I'll be so bold as to say God could not say let there be a human being. Because to be human is to live by voluntarily laying down your life in love for your neighbour.

51:42 So we're the ones who having come into existence with no choice, animated by a breath, which whatever we do, we will die. We're the ones who then have to say, Let it be to the only work which is God's own work. So we have to say, let it be, as Christ does, as Mary does, as we do, by taking up the cross, let it be.

52:08 But then you have to ask, but this has to be for another time, I guess. If God's intention is to make a human being, let us make a human being. But we're the ones who've got to say let it be. And you know, Paul's very keen on that as well. Christ shows us a human being in whom there's neither male nor female.

52:24 So if God's intention is to make a human being in his image and likeness, why did he make males and females?

52:31 This is this Wow, Father, as you're talking, I'm just thinking that whole from Adam to Christ flow.

52:39 But why did you make male why why why did you make males and females when in the prototype, in the true human being, in Christ is neither male nor female? My answer, but this would take a long time to expand fully, would be the horizon of male and female and the power of Eros is the only power that's capable of overcoming the fear of Thanatos, the fear of death.

53:02 That's true. So you know, you fall in love to say this person's happiness is more important than my own.

53:09 Martyrdom.

53:10 So marriage is martyrdom, not boy, how long do I have to put up with her?

53:16 And that's why the martyric hymn is there in in the in the wedding ceremony. That one always confused me as an altar boy. I was thinking, or I was like, what in the world? Why are we singing to honor martyrdom?

53:28 And the crowns on their head, to the crowns of martyrdom, yeah. So marriage is martyrdom in which we learn to lay down our life in love for another, which can then expand to the whole of the human race, in through which we become human. And as we become human, we increasingly no longer see the other one as the lustful object of my of the the the opposite sex, the lustful object of my eros, but we come to see them as human.

53:57 So we are humanized in marriage.

54:00 Wow.

54:00 Father. The power of eros drives us out of ourselves to live for another, in and through which we become in Christ in whom there's neither male nor female. Not that we stop being males or females, but it in a sense it no longer registers. We see each other in the modern language, we see each other as persons, not as objects of lust.

54:23 And this is the great mystery Paul refers to, where Jesus, the the crucified Lord who laid his life down, is is the model and definition of what marriage looks like. Incredible.

54:34 Yeah. You got time for another little bit more? Oh yeah. Are you kidding me? Please. But we we got this file. Let's do Genesis 2. Please.

54:41 Yes.

54:41 Go ahead. Okay, so we're looking at looking at what John does with Genesis 1. And when we start talking about, well, why did God make males and females? Well, John is also playing with Genesis 2. Okay. You don't need to look at your Bible to to to figure this one. Okay. In Genesis 2, what happens? God takes clay, molds it into a into a breathe into a human, breathes a breath of life into it, places it in a garden to work at.

55:06 Right. Yeah? And then he says, it's not good for man to be alone. And then he brings him all the animals. Right. Yeah. Why? It's not good for man to be alone, and then he brings him all the animals to see what Adam will call them. But he just said it's not good for man to be alone. Is it by the time you get to two verses later, three verses later, whatever it is, it says, But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him.

55:29 Right. Yeah. And that's in the passive. It doesn't say who found it. Who found there was no helper fit for him? Is it God or was it Adam? Adam. Well, the only two possibilities, either God or Adam.

55:38 Yeah.

55:39 So when God is bringing all the animals to him, is it for him to try and find a mate? Here, try a giraffe. No, it doesn't work. Here, try a butterfly, no, it doesn't work. Obviously not, yeah. Who knew that it was not good for man to be alone? God knew. Adam needed to discover it. Adam needed to discover it.

55:57 He discovers it by seeing all the other animals. Right. They've all got mates. Where's mine? For Adam, they have not found a helper fit. And at that point, God puts him to sleep. Takes a rib, builds the rib into a woman, leads the woman to the to the to the man, yeah. Um and then Adam uh Adam says, This at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

56:20 She should be uh called woman, she's taken. For this reason, a man shall join himself to his mother. For this reason, a man will join himself to his wife and the two will become one flesh. Man will leave his father and mother, join himself to the wife, and become one flesh. Okay, what's odd about that?

56:36 For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and join himself to the woman.

56:40 I would say biblically and culturally, it's it would be the opposite. Usually the It's the opposite. Yeah, the man doesn't go looking.

56:48 So so what's it talking about? The Lord. Jesus because he left in his life. He left his father's side to join himself to the spouse. Okay. So you cannot read that verse historically because it just wasn't a cultural practice. You cannot read it as a prescription because no one tried to do it. You have to read it Christologically.

57:07 Okay, I see where you're going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's the man who left his father's side to join himself to the spouse, and the two become one. Okay? Okay, now you can go back. Um Adam was put to sleep, Christ is put to sleep. From Adam's side comes a rib, from Christ's side comes a blood and water.

57:25 The rib is built into a woman a woman who's called the mother of the living, but all her children die. The blood and water from the earliest times is taken as symbolizing the church, but in order to be born of her, you've got to die.

57:40 Isaiah 54.

57:42 Isaiah 54. Yeah. Okay, now one further, just one further thing before you wrap up. One further thing. When Eve was led to Adam, who would she have thought Adam to be? I don't I don't never thought of that. Again, I'm not asking you to speculate. How's Adam been described?

58:00 As the one as the one who leaves all to find the No.

58:04 God took the clay, moulded it, breathed the breath of life, and placed him where? In the garden. To do what? To tend and to work with it. To work it. Okay, so when Mary, different Mary, but Mary nevertheless, approaches the risen Christ, who does she think he is?

58:19 A gardener.

58:20 There we go.

58:28 Father, can I ask one question before we end? Or do you need to go? No, it's okay. Okay, so uh it's it's an honest question. So I mean, if this is the way clearly the apostles engage the scripture and the fathers engage the scripture with a Christological passion cross-shaped lens, let's just say, shouldn't we all come to the scriptures the same way?

58:52 Is that or is that too large? Is that too big of a statement? I mean, have we become too fragmented in our viewpoint?

58:58 I said that earlier. You know, you can read scripture, this Old Testament scripture, as in a historical key. Because obviously they'd be they were written in the hundreds of years before Christ, in different contexts, whatever else. Yeah, you can read it in that historical key. But if you're reading it like that, you're not reading it as scripture, you're reading it as historical documents.

59:21 Okay, so to read it as scripture is to read it as speaking about Christ. Yeah? But I would also add that the more that you study these scriptures in any possible way, and that would include historical study, because they were written thousands of years ago in a language we don't use, and you've got to, you know, do all of that, the more you and not everybody's able to, but the more you're able to do that, the more you will get from it.

59:51 Let me ask you this does the heart only burn if I read it as scripture? Okay, so I can stay blind reading it in another way.

59:59 Sure. But you know, only by learning Hebrew and Greek will you be able to see what plays the Greek translator made with the Greek or what plays there are within the Greek and Hebrew that enable you to see Christ even further in it. Yeah. But again, not everybody's able to do that, and that's totally fine because there's plenty there to be going on with.

1:00:21 Wow. Yeah.

1:00:22 Father, thank you. What an amazing, amazing time. Thank you, everyone, for watching. I I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And uh, Father John, I would be so honored if you'd come back sometime.

1:00:34 Oh, sure.

1:00:35 Yeah, what a good one. Look forward to very pleasure. We love you all. Be sure to subscribe, stay tuned. It's gonna be a wonderful season ahead. Love you, thank you. God bless you.

1:00:42unknown Bye-bye.

1:00:44 Thank you so much for listening to the Jesus Podcast with Michael Kulianos. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find online courses, books, and more at michaelculianos.org. You can also join us in person or online every Sunday at Jesus Image Church. For more information on Jesus School, local and nationwide events hosted by Jesus Image and resources, visit Jesus Image.tv.