Enacting the Kingdom

Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri discuss three prompts based on a patron's insightful questions posed during the Salvation Is from the Jews series: How do the Synoptic Gospels and Acts portray early conflict between Christ-followers and synagogue authorities and in what way does John's Gospel deepen, reflect, or reinterpret this dynamic? How can we responsibly talk about early Jewish opposition to the Jesu...

Having solved all the world's problems regarding the relationship between the Jewish and Christian traditions, we're bringing the season to a close.  We jest! We have, however, come to a good time to pause and reflect on what we've discussed so far, before we return with a follow-up season later on. We also are sharing a talk that Fr Geoffrey gave at a conference titled "The Orthodox Church and th...

A full blown Christology was in place long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. There was an understanding in ancient Judaism that God related to the world through a property of Himself that was called Son of God, the Word of God, and God's Glory. One aspect of the parting of the ways between what is now called Christianity and what is now called Rabbinic Judaism is a result of theological wrestlin...

In this episode, we move out of the discussion on New Testament writings and into the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (or to borrow Fr Yuri's turn of phrase, "The Bible: The Next Generation"). How are they speaking to their communities about Jesus-following Jews continuing to follow Torah, and also gentiles coming in to the church who find this practice attractive? We've already seen how for Pau...

Today there is clear distinction between Judaism and Christianity, but it wasn't always so. The family resemblance is quite strong! Rather than think of Judaism and Christianity as having a mother-daughter relationship, its helpful to think of them as sisters, both born from the womb of Second Temple Judaism. As any siblings who fight, it can get quite nasty at times, and they can squabble over se...

In today's episode, we're going to go "there". We're going to step back in to the Graeco-Roman world and learn about some unquestioned medical truths of their day, held by Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle, which pertain in particular to hair and why Paul is so concerned about veils. Once you know about it, you'll see it everywhere in ancient literature, and things will start to make more sense. Bu...

In light of a listener question, Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri discuss a passage in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, where Paul speaks about women covering their heads while praying, "on account of the angels". We can consider this a case study into how Paul, a Pharisee who believes Jesus is the Messiah, engages with a pastoral topic in a community. We must bear in mind that this was a particular...

Some imagine that the the first people in Jerusalem who accepted Jesus as the Messiah radically broke away from the Jews, forming a new religion. We might even picture the apostle James, brother of the Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem, wearing Byzantine Orthodox robes and serving at a Christian temple across from the synagogue. Of course, this was hardly the case. So what did the first century e...

What does the coming of the Messiah of Israel mean for the nations, and does it mean something different for Israel?  With a careful reading of the first three chapters of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, especially as we consider the pronouns used, we see a distinctness in terms of Jew and gentile, as we also witness them coming together. Emphasizing their distinctness does not deny their unity; o...

We take a closer look at chapter 11 in the letter to the Romans, where Paul is talking about the relationship between Israelites and gentiles, and in particular how the gentile believers should relate to the Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. By inference, it should give us something to say about how we as Orthodox Christians should be relating to Rabbinic Jews today. If we are to belie...

What did Paul really think of the Torah?  In this episode, Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey discuss the Old Perspective on Paul, New Perspective, Fresh Perspective and Radical Perspective (also called "Paul within Judaism"). Paul insists that gentiles should no longer have to abide by the covenant markers in order to worship the God of Israel, but does it follow that he believed the Torah was now abolished...

Did Paul really convert on the road to Damascus? As a Torah-observant Jew, conversion would have meant turning away from the one true God of Israel, so Paul certainly would not have considered it as such.  Clearly, there was a change of heart, but how can we properly understand this in light of what we have learned through this season so far? We discuss how, from Paul's point of view, his understa...

The people of the first century lived in a god-infested world. In fact, we still do, though in our society we experience it more as a god-vacuum, as our theological imagination is devoid of divinity and the spiritual realm. At the time of Jesus, it was understood and accepted, even by Jews, that every nation was associated with multiple gods. Jews were not monotheist in that they believed there wa...

Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri field a question from one of our listeners in regards to the Pharisees at the time of Jesus. We reflect on the four roughly divided sects of the Judaisms of the first century (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes) and also how some Jews probably intersected more than one of the categories, or never properly belonged to any of them. Mapping geography on top of this adds...

There were many different ideas among the various Judaisms about what and who the Messiah might be, that coalesced around one or more of three central expectations having to do with land, kingship and temple. Many Christians think that Jesus was rejected because he wasn't what the Jews had expected, for instance, a spiritual teacher instead of a military leader. On the contrary, Jesus touches on e...

In today's episode, we take a closer look at the Gospel of John, the gospel from which we drew the title of this series, "Salvation is from the Jews". It is generally considered to be the odd one out among the other gospels, telling the story of Jesus from a very different angle. Some claim that it is even antisemitic, as the opponents of Jesus are often blanketly called "the Jews". Often? In actu...

Jesus is a Pharisee.  This might be hard to take, as many of us grew up equating the word "pharisaic" with "hypocritical" - sadly, a definition that still can be found in the Oxford Dictionary. So what is it that the Pharisees believed, and how can we say that Jesus was one? Today we'll do a deep dive into understanding the different Jewish groups that existed in Jesus' time. As we talked about in...

Jesus often seems to be transgressing against the Torah and upsetting the experts in the Law, overthrowing their strictly rules-based religion in favour of a grace-filled one, yet is that really what is happening in the Gospels? Far from it. As we've discussed in this season, these inter-Jewish debates were actively being held in his day, and his viewpoints were shared by other rabbis. In many cas...

Judaism, from the beginning, in all of its multiple forms, had a built-in inter-family debate over what the proper way of being Jewish is. Everything we have written in the New Testament is Jewish literature, and part of this inter-family argument, debating principally over whether Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. Yes, the argument can become strident, harsh and difficult, but not necessarily anti-...

We continue to work through the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus gave to his disciples who asked to learn how to pray, beginning with "Give us this day our daily bread." Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri explore how this traditionally Jewish theme (e.g. manna as daily bread, relying solely on God's provision) also points to the Christian practices of receiving Holy Eucharist, and participating in the Messianic ag...

In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus teaches his followers how to pray using what we now know as The Lord's Prayer. As Christians, most of us would claim this prayer as quintessentially Christian, however we will find that it is also quintessentially Jewish in nature. Again, we see how Jesus, far from rejecting his tradition, lived and taught in fulfillment of it. In this episode, Fr Geoffrey...

In John's Gospel, we find a unique narrative of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well. He shows her deep compassion, speaking with her, honouring her, calling out her sin while calling her into the Kingdom. As a Samaritan, she represents the gentiles, the nations who are not part of the covenant community, being brought in. There is a particular line in this narrative that we will use as the f...

This final episode of the season, recorded on 5 November 2024, is available in full for subscribers to our Patreon channel. This is an edited version of the original episode which discusses more of the varied responses to the response we drafted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Please do check out www.archdiocese.ca/orthodox-church-and-indigenous-peoples-canada to see what is now being...

Fr Yuri presents a first draft of a statement to post on the Canadian Orthodox Church's website that will serve as a (somewhat informal) response to the TRC, that he prepared based on the previous episodes of this season. Paragraph by paragraph, Fr Geoffrey offers suggestions on how to strengthen the message, making sure that the theology is clear, and yet also accessible to both Orthodox and non-...

In this week's episode, we focus our discussion on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Parsing out each word in that title - what does it mean to be a "person", and "indigenous", what are "rights" - there is plenty to talk about, and we draw on ideas from Fr Thomas Hopko, Martin Luther King and Tom Holland (the historian, not the Spiderman actor!), among others. Fr Geoffrey and...