The Lord of Spirits

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. It is good to be with you tonight, everyone. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and I am in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, who is broadcasting from the middle of Cajun country in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. We’re going to get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

Tonight we’re going to be talking about Mary, the Theotokos, the mother of Jesus Christ. Most Christians love and venerate her, while some prefer to marginalize her as much as possible, and some just don’t know what to do with her, assuming they see her as important at all. Most who love her point to a natural affection and affinity for her based on love for her Son, Jesus Christ, and how she directs us to him, and they may also add something about the Church’s long experience of her intercessions and care, often miraculously, over the centuries. And while all that is true and beautiful, it does not root very deeply what the Church teaches about the Theotokos and how the Church interacts with her. So those who are unconvinced remain unconvinced, and those who are convinced may not have very deep roots when it comes to their knowledge of her.

What many don’t seem to realize, though, is that it turns out that the role and the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, is not established by hints in the New Testament or experiences from subsequent Church history, but rather finds foundations in the very heart of the Old Testament experience of God, that her place is intimately connected with the lordship of her Son, Jesus Christ.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though; we can’t jump right to that. Instead, we have to go all the way back to Genesis, to the creation of man and his placement in the paradise of Eden. So, Fr. Stephen, take us to Eden.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Let’s beginning at the beginning, ‘cause it’s a very good place to start.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I feel like at some point we should record the voice of Steve saying, “Last time, on The Lord of Spirits podcast…”

Fr. Andrew: There we go! Steve, if you’re listening, take notes! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: ...and play clips from the last couple shows.

But in the last couple of shows, two shows ago we kind of mentioned, when we were talking about sort of the saints in glory, we mentioned the idea of them imaging God. We talked a little bit more in our last episode about giants about how the nephilim were sort of imagers and imaging, and that’s how they were sons to the demonic powers, by kind of bringing their works to fruition in the world. So what we’re going to do tonight is really take a deep dive into what that means and how that works for believers and for saints and for Christians, and we’re going to be using the Theotokos as Exhibit A. But we have to start, if we’re going to talk about being the image of God, as you said, we have to talk about man being created in the image of God in the first place and what that means, because there’s a lot of theorizing about that in various popular books and even scholarly books, and even going back into Church history, where man’s reason is what makes him to be in the image of God, or language, or these things. And then you get into these protracted discussions, because we find out: Hey, guess what! There’s a bunch of species of animal that have language.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Are they in the image of God? Or then maybe we should eventually do a show on this. Sometimes people speculate, “Well, if there’s alien life out there, and they’re sentient, does that mean they’re in the image of God?”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, what level of sentience would they have to have? Like if you find a dog on another planet, well, maybe not, but where does it cross the line into being human-level, if that’s your view of it?

Fr. Andrew: Right. Attributes.

Fr. Stephen: And I mean, that view is problematic for a whole bunch of reasons, because as soon as you start assigning it to qualities, that opens up… Historically, that has opened up the ability for sinful humanity to then marginalize certain people, peoples, types of people who may not possess those faculties as fully as others.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So an unborn child doesn’t have reason or language. The disabled sometimes don’t have whatever those things are. Historically people have used to that to try and argue against the humanity of other humans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it betrays this kind of biological understanding of what human beings are. Not that biology has nothing to do with what we are, but it’s sort of reductionist. It’s missing a lot of what’s going on in Genesis, especially in paradise. I remember… I know I often say on this show, “When I was a kid, I thought…” whatever, whatever, whatever, but it turns out that a lot of things that I thought when I was a kid are in fact the sort of generic version of what a lot of people believe about things.

So what do people say what was the garden of Eden like? Well, sort of this tropical paradise. Although there is actually the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Worcester, Massachusetts, [which] has paradise up in its dome. It does look very tropical, but there’s parts, if I remember correctly, that actually has pine trees and stuff. What is paradise? A lot of people think of paradise as being sort of a tropical resort. Adam and Eve are kind of walking around in this beautiful tropical—and we use that word “paradise,” don’t we? It’s just beautiful, and there’s all kinds of food available and you don’t have to work and it’s like this extended vacation.

But that’s not actually the image that Genesis gives.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it wasn’t paved over, nor did they put in a parking lot. [Laughter] But, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: See, that’s a pop-culture reference I did get. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: When you mentioned pine trees, I was going to throw in “C is for Conifer,” but no one would get that one.

Fr. Andrew: Not even me.

Fr. Stephen: The difference between a human and a chimpanzee is not a handful of genes. That’s not how Genesis presents it. This is where we have to go back to the creation of man and why—the big thing is why—humanity was created. When we go back, the creation of humanity is the culmination of the creation account in Genesis 1. Technically, it bleeds over into the first couple verses of Genesis 2, but everybody shorthands it as Genesis 1. So we get this picture in Genesis 1, and we’re going to talk about it in a couple different ways, because there’s a lot going on there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: To say the least. And we’re not going to talk about how long ago it was, so I’m sorry, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: sorry, everybody! [Laughter] This is not that show.

Fr. Stephen: One of the sort of trajectories through it is that much of the language that’s used over the course of Genesis 1 regarding the creation of the world is language that you also find in Ancient Near Eastern accounts of the building of temples.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right! This is cool stuff. Listen to this, everybody. This is really cool. You’re going to… Again, you’re never going to read the beginning of Genesis the same way after this. I love this part. [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] That’s okay. In the Ancient Near East, the construction of temples—I’m not talking about, like, the contractor’s diary: Day 3, we put up the studs—but there are these texts about the constructions of temples, where the constructions of these, especially the ancient temples, were seen as sort of these mythic events, that the god whose temple it was took part in with the people building it. So there are these accounts. Sometimes the temples almost build themselves, right?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the kind of text I’m talking about, though, to give you an idea. So these are these important myths in the sense of stories that people participated in. These temples would be dedicated and rededicated ritually with celebrations that participated in these stories and reenacted these stories.

Once the temple was built, in terms of the actual construction, and these temples took the form… Gods were believed, in the Ancient Near East, to live on mountains and in gardens.

Fr. Andrew: Or sometimes gardens on mountains.

Fr. Stephen: That’s right. That’s what I mean, both, yeah. There’s a garden at the top of the mountain, and that’s where the god lives.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which in many ways explains why it is that you can find temples and churches, I mean, which are just temples to Yahweh, as often as possible built up on hills or on the highest place of a city.

Fr. Stephen: The Acropolis, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. I’ve sometimes heard it explained, “That’s just so they’re visible from everywhere.” Well, not exactly. It’s actually because of this ancient belief about sacred geography, that gods live on high places. You think in Greek religion, the gods live on Mount Olympus. So there’s this participation with human-made temples in this sense that the divine resides up on top of mountains or in gardens, and even within an Orthodox church, usually the altar area is physically higher. So even if the church isn’t built on a mountain, there’s sort of a mini-mountain of sorts within the church, that the altar itself is sort of elevated above everything else if at all possible, which is why, when I’ve gone to—not usually Orthodox churches, although I’ve been in one or two Orthodox churches where this was the case—some other kinds of churches that are actually shaped like theaters, where you get a raked house, so to speak, where all the pews are, and then the lowest point in the place is where the worship is being centered. That’s just kind of messed up.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and—I know people love when we do this—the relationship between, for example, Greek tragedy taking place in a low place and its connection to ritual is a discussion for another time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right. We’re going to… [Laughter] We will get to that in the future.

Fr. Stephen: And this is why you have ziggurat and pyramid structures all over the place, because it’s a man-made mountain of god.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So mountains are places that are inaccessible, and gardens, if you know anything about the Middle East, lush gardens are not common, especially not naturally occurring ones. So this would be the place where the gods enjoy their life. This imagery is taken up, obviously, in Genesis with the whole idea of the garden of Eden, and it continues throughout the Scriptures. Additionally in the Ancient Near East, gods typically lived in tents on top of those mountains. Again, we’ll discuss this at some point, the tabernacle and Moses entering the tabernacle on top of Mount Sinai, and St. Peter talking about the tabernacles at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor—but that’ll be in the future. So this temple imagery carries on. When Solomon builds the Temple, there’s all of this garden imagery around it.

In Genesis 1 we have this construction in the temple, and in these temple construction accounts, sort of the last step is that the image of the deity, what we would call the idol, which was seen to be a body that was created for the god, would be brought in and installed at the center. Then they had a ceremony called the opening of the nostrils of the image, the idol, in which they believed the spirit of the god would come in to inhabit it and be sort of trapped there.

Fr. Andrew: So what… I mean, what would that ceremony look like? What would they do to make that happen?

Fr. Stephen: There was a whole series of things. Beyond just the physical installation of it, it would be dressed in certain ways, not all that unlike the vestments of the high priest later in Exodus, but again that’s a topic for another time.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting, yeah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But it would be dressed. They would bring food for it, because the trade-off was once you sort of had the god trapped there in the image, you then would take care of the god by feeding it, changing the clothing, caring for it. And then in return you would then expect it, through doing the rituals, you would expect that spirit to do certain things for you to account for that. So the ritual of the opening of the nostrils was sort of the beginning of that, so the first dressing, the purification of the space, usually with incense and a lot of blood and purification of it, and then that would then allow the spirit to enter in.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then the relationship of that to what’s happening in Eden is exactly sort of reversed, that instead of mankind building a temple or a garden and putting his idol in it and opening the nostrils to trap the god inside the idol, you get: God builds paradise on a mountain. Yahweh—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—builds this, puts his own image into it, which is man, and then breathes the breath of life into him and establishes in there to image him.

Fr. Stephen: As his image.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Idolatry… Rather than… Genesis is not imitating idolatry. Rather, what is happening is that idolatry is actually reversing what happened in reality, in Genesis, that it’s a kind of inversion, that idolatry is inversion of God’s creation of man. Instead of God creating man for himself as his own image, you get man creating an image to trap a god for his benefit, the other way. It’s very selfish, very man-centered.

I remember when I first learned about this. Again, it blew me away, and I thought, “Wow. I never saw that happening there.” But it’s interesting the kinds of detail that are there when you actually then look at it, the idea of God shaping man out of the dust of the earth and breathing into him: all of these details make way more sense in the context of how ancient peoples understood the way that a temple was set up and what you did in it when you were there. And of course, again, another detail: instead of mankind having to dress an idol and take care of it and feed it, you have God taking care of his image, feeding him, providing for him. It’s exactly the opposite of idolatry. Idolatry is the mockery of the creation of man in Genesis. Really cool! Really, really cool.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s completely inverted and turned on its head. The idea of pagan religion, the idea is: here are the rituals you do and the things you do to get the spirits to do you what you want them to do or need them to do, as opposed to God creating an image for himself within his creation to do certain things for him. [Laughter] Yeah, that is a completely switch.

This is what’s behind—this understanding of idolatry is what’s behind most of the critiques of idolatry, all of them in the Old Testament and most of them outside the Old Testament, that come from a Jewish perspective. What’s being critiqued is… It’s like, okay, so: You went and you cut down a tree, and you took some pieces of that tree and you built a fire and cooked food, and you took some other pieces and used them to patch up your roof—and then you took another piece and you carved a god out of it. And then you took it and you brought it to this temple and you put it there, and you had to put nails and fasteners to make sure it wouldn’t tip over. And you have to go in there and dress it, and you have to go in there and feed it, and you have to go in there and take care of it, because it can’t do any of those things for itself, this spirit that you’re worshiping—but now you want that spirit to control the weather for you. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! It’s interesting how kind of blatantly, in-your-face that is. Like: Look, pagans, your god is just such a wimp! That’s really what it comes down to. That theme that is repeated throughout Scripture, that Yahweh is the God who can control, that everything just simply obeys him. That’s why the disciples marvel when Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves on Galilee, like: who is this that the wind and the waves just obey him? No spirit can do that except the one true God. He’s the only one who simply commands, and things happen. There’s no struggle; there’s nothing like that. Then the apologetic is like: Look, pagans; look how pathetic your god is. What you say about what your god can do and about what you need to do in order to interact with your god is so much smaller than the way that the one true God who created the heavens and the earth revealed himself and said this is how we interact with him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And nonsensical.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Can’t clean himself or prop himself back up if he tips over, but can help your wife get pregnant. [Laughter] It makes no sense.

As mentioned, God creates an image in his creation in order to get certain things done. So this is sort of the other trajectory through Genesis 1 that I mentioned before, where God in this work of creation, at the beginning of it, the beginning of Genesis 1 after God creates the heavens and the earth, there are these two problems. In Hebrew it’s funny because it rhymes. The world is tohu wa-bohu, which the King James Version translates as “formless, without form, and void.”

Fr. Andrew: “Formless and void,” yes.

Fr. Stephen: And “formless” means sort of chaotic, disorder, out of order, and “void” is “empty.” So those are the two problems: it’s this chaotic mess and it’s empty. So on the first three days of creation, God puts things in order. He separates the light and the darkness, he separates the sky from the sea, he separates the dry land from the sea, and puts those things in order. Then in the second set of three days, which correspond: On the first day, he separated light and darkness; on the fourth day, he fills the heavens with the sun, moon, and stars. A lot of the Fathers, by the way, have this as the point at which the angels are created. And then on the second day he had separated the sky and the sea; on the fifth day, he fills the skies and the seas with life. Then on the third day he had separated the dry land from the water; on the sixth day, he fills the dry land with life, culminating in human beings. So three days taking care of the formless, three days taking care of the empty.

Fr. Andrew: Cool. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But once that pattern is created…

Fr. Andrew: I never saw that pattern before, actually. That’s pretty cool.

Fr. Stephen: Okay! [Laughter] I’ll give credit to my old professor, Meredith Kline. That’s who pointed me to that. But you find it in Thomas Aquinas and even some of the Fathers, that pattern.

So then when Adam is created, when man is created, he’s given this command to “fill the earth and subdue it.” Those two things conform to the two problems still.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So Eden—this may blow some people’s minds, too—isn’t the whole earth. We’re given a location of it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we get geographic details.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a garden in a particular place; it’s not the whole earth. Adam is told to fill the earth and subdue it. Filling is filling; subdue, the word meaning “subdue” actually means to conquer, like to take a city, to conquer and take something, take control of it, put it in order. So Adam is charged to continue that work.

Fr. Andrew: So, expand Eden basically.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. To go out of Eden and take Eden with him and continue that act of creation, of subduing the world, putting it in order, and filling it with life.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and hopefully, not getting too much ahead of ourselves, that’s exactly what we’re called to do at the end of the Divine Liturgy: to take the Church, which is Eden, and to bring it into the world and expand the Church, to Churchify the whole creation.

Fr. Stephen: The dismissal is arguably the most important part of the Divine Liturgy.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So when we do…

Fr. Stephen: So stay for it! Stay for it!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, stay for it, everybody. And don’t, if I may make a controversial statement here, don’t send people off to Sunday school or to coffee hour or wherever until that final Amen, because we’re being sent out in that dismissal to expand Eden. That’s what’s going on. We’ve participated in Eden, and now we’re taking Eden on the road and laying claim to new territory for it. Yeah, that is pretty mind-blowing; it’s pretty cool.

Fr. Stephen: And right off the bat we see Adam get to work on the subduing part. That’s what the whole naming the animals thing is about. It’s not about “What should I call that stripey horse? I’ll call him a zebra.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Like God’s saying, “Look, I can’t think of anything to call these things, so maybe, Adam, you can come up with something.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: What we find—this is especially common in Hittite archaeology. The Hittites were in what’s now central Turkey, sort of south central Turkey.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, and were an Indo-European language group, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Which is super-rare in that area in that time.

Fr. Stephen: What we find is we find a lot of these bas-relief sculptures that depict a new king sitting and holding a reed and naming a bunch of wild animals. So this was an image that was symbolic of sort of kingly authority related to this idea of subduing. The wild animals or wild beasts are sort of the image of that chaos and out-of-control element of creation. So him sitting… And if you look at especially very early Orthodox iconography of Adam naming the animals, you’ll see a lot of times he’s sitting on a rock and holding a reed.

Fr. Andrew: He’s got the reed. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And he’s naming the animals.

Fr. Andrew: So the reed is kind of a scepter, right? Is that’s what’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And of course, then, when Christ is in his Passion, he is given a reed to hold in his hand by, yeah… And the Roman soldiers don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re basically declaring him the New Adam when they do that.

Fr. Stephen: This is also what’s behind that weird verse in St. Mark’s Gospel, where in his account of Christ going out into the wilderness before his temptation, it says that he’s out in the wilderness “with the wild animals.” So St. Mark is setting up this image of Christ being out there with the animals, and then, lo and behold, the devil shows up to tempt him, just like we see in Genesis 2 and 3.

This dominion part is… Adam gets a start on that, but then after he’s done with that, God says it’s not good for him to remain alone upon the earth, meaning we’ve got this one human; he can’t fill the earth with life as one human. [Laughter] This is the problem that results in the creation of woman in Genesis 2.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not that Adam is bummed out that he doesn’t have anybody to talk to, because God is there, and presumably angelic beings are there. Yeah. It’s not like he’s lacking for conversation. And it’s not like he knew about women so he was bummed that there wasn’t one available, because there was literally… no one had ever conceived of a woman, no pun intended. [Laughter] It’s about filling the earth, about the two of them being sub-creative with God’s grace and perpetuating—not just perpetuating, but expanding, and having more people, then, to be involved in God’s sub-creative… To be involved sub-creatively in God’s creative acts of bringing order to the world and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in the same way… Well, in a more full way, because what we talked about last time with the nephilim, with the giants, is a demonic parody of this: them trying to have their own images, people in their image and likeness, to bring their work to fruition. Part of the purpose and the gift given to humanity by God is this participation in God’s work in the world, that the work God is doing in the world, to bring it to completion and maturity and perfection, is work that he shares with us in this world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, well, I think that that’s a good stopping-point. Why don’t we go ahead and take our first break. When we get back, we’re going to start taking some of your calls, and we’re also going to discuss what all of this means in terms of as the story begins to roll down through the Old Testament. Let’s go ahead and take a break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second part of our show, and we’d like to take your calls. You can call us just as you heard the voice of Steve saying 855-AF-RADIO, 855-237-2346. We’d love to hear your voices and talk to you a little bit.

We were just talking about subduing the earth as part of the original charge given to Adam and how that means essentially expanding Eden and bringing God’s creative works and his order and his beauty into all the world. So that’s what we’re going to continue to talk about now. It expands outward, so even though Adam fails, God continues to work in the same way. God is God, so we see his character in the way that he interacts with mankind, and part of it is to continue to get mankind to engage in this commission of bringing his rule and order and beauty to the whole of creation. So let’s continue the conversation, Father.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so obviously things go wrong, and Adam and Eve do leave paradise, but they don’t bring it with them. But that doesn’t then say, well, God has to scratch his head and say: Plan A didn’t work…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “What do I do now?”

Fr. Stephen: “What can I come up with?” [Laughter] But rather, this continues to be what humanity is for and is called to do. In terms of our more particular discussion—obviously, there’s a lot more that could be said here, but we’re eventually going to get to the Theotokos here…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, people are like: “I thought this episode was about the Theotokos…?”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We particularly want to focus on this. We talked about how the image of Adam naming the animals and the subduing is this kingly image. We want to talk a little bit about how that then develops as we go deeper into the Old Testament.

First, with sort of nascent Israel, we have the first leader is Moses. Then after this episode where his father-in-law, Jethro, gives him some advice and says, “Look, Moses, you’re one guy, and you’re wasting your time listen to people argue about who stole whose goat. You need some help here to judge the people and to govern this mass of people that you’ve led out of Egypt.” That’s when these elders of Israel are sort of officially appointed, like the Greek “presbyters” of Israel, the elders of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: And there are 70 of them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, 70 or 72.

Fr. Andrew: A very important number all throughout the Bible. We’re not doing numerology magic sorcery here. It’s just when you see the same number appear over and over again, and it links up over and over again, you have to ask yourself why that’s happening. Just taking note, there’s either 70 or 72 elders who help govern Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the reason that’s significant—we’ve already talked about this some in some previous episodes: that there were 70 or 72 sons of God in the divine council when we first talked about that idea. And they were assigned, as we talked about in Deuteronomy 32:8, and as it connects to Genesis 11 and the story of the tower of Babel. They were assigned to shepherd the 70 nations, which are listed in Genesis 10. It’s also going to be not-coincidental in Christ’s ministry that he appoints 12 disciples who he says are going to sit on 12 thrones and judge the 12 tribes of Israel; and then he appoints 70 apostles for the 70 nations. He even has within the 12, he has three pillars, as St. Paul calls them, Ss. Peter, James, and John, and that pillar language goes back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the pillars of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! I don’t know why I didn’t ever make that connection before, but there it is, everybody! [Laughter] We’re all learning something tonight!

Fr. Stephen: But these structures of leadership—I don’t want to go too far down this road, but these structures of leadership in terms of the government of Israel—are carried over into the government that Christ puts over his nascent Church in terms of the leadership, so it doesn’t just go away.

So what we see now is we have Moses, and then we have these 70 or 72 elders—probably 72, since there were 12 tribes, and that gives you six from each tribe. But you start with these 70 elders, and this is an image, then, already, of the divine council. This is an icon of the divine council, where you have the one authority, but then also this council surrounding them in leadership. This is also going to be picked up by the early Church in the idea of having a single episkopos—bishop or overseer, however you want to translate that—surrounded by presbyters, elders

Fr. Andrew: Right, which we mentioned in our second episode when we were talking about the divine council, we talked about that architectural feature, the synthronon, which looks like sort of a mini-stadium behind the altar: throne in the middle, lots of seats next to him on the right and left. The throne in the middle is for the bishop; the other seats are for the presbyters.

Fr. Stephen: So this, then, once Israel’s in the land, this is going to come into the idea of the monarchy in Israel, and then later the divided monarchy in Israel and Judah, where you have a king, and then that king’s court, that king’s council.

Fr. Andrew: Right, okay, so here’s a little wrinkle. Everyone who’s read 1 Samuel 8 knows that in that chapter the people of Israel come to the Prophet Samuel and say, “We want a king like the other nations,” and Samuel goes to God and says, “They’ve rejected me,” and God says, “They’ve not rejected you; they’re rejecting me, because they don’t want me to rule over them, but give them a king anyway. And, oh, by the way, it’s going to be bad.” So you come away from that… I remember when I read that my impression was like: Okay, well, monarchy’s okay, but certainly not really endorsed by God here. He kind of sort of says, “Well, okay, here’s your king, but… Yeah.” But that’s not really what’s happening there, is it? Or at least, it’s not looking at the details closely enough?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and I know that’s how people have been taught to read that passage.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, that’s how I was taught to read that passage.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because American Christianity is Puritan Christianity. First Great Awakening, it comes from Puritanism. If there’s one thing Puritans don’t like, it’s the institutional church, but if there’s two things they don’t like, it’s the institutional church and monarchy. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so that gets written into the American Constitution, where there’s this idea that no church should be established, right there in the First Amendment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re not going to have any kings around these parts.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. No big titles, landed nobles.

Fr. Stephen: And so that was sort of a go-to passage for them, to say—

Fr. Andrew: There it is in the Bible!

Fr. Stephen: —monarchy, no good! We need to get rid of it, and have sort of a straight theocracy, which is sort of how they pictured Israel before that. Now, I would point them to the book of Judges and ask them how well that went, but the point being that we have to take this text in 1 Samuel in the context of previous and succeeding passages that talk about kingship. The first place we have to go is Deuteronomy 17:14-20, which is Deuteronomy, the end of the Torah, but in the Torah, preceding this. Deuteronomy is not disconnected from the books that follow. The books that follow Deuteronomy, the historical books, including 1 Samuel, are called by scholars the Deuteronomistic history, because what you find when you read them is that the theological principles in Deuteronomy that are described there in the Torah sort of play out in the historical narrative. It’s not just giving what we would call modern-day objective history—this happened and this happened and this happened—but it’s written from a perspective, from the perspective of: This is God’s teaching, his Torah; this is what should be happening, and, oh look, it’s not happening. [Laughter] Or here and there maybe it is happening a little bit.

So in Deuteronomy it gives commandments for when you have a king. It says when you come into the land and you want a king, don’t have a foreign king; it has to be an Israelite. He is not to multiply wives to himself.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting. Yeah, so there’s stuff before it saying, “Look, when you get a king, this is what you should do.” And that’s the context of the rejection of what the people are asking for, but in some sense, then, giving them what they’re asking for.

Fr. Stephen: And the king is to… The main commandment for the king there is he is to make a copy for himself of the Torah, to copy and to study it and to learn it. But all these commands have already been given centuries before we get to them asking for a king of Samuel, and also it says in Deuteronomy that they should wait for the king that God is going to send them. And this is the other problem: they’re not waiting for the king God is going to send them; they’re demanding one right now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is essentially kind of a repeat of the problem in Eden, where Adam and Eve eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but it’s not that they were never going to have access to it; it’s that they weren’t ready for it yet.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And like we talked about in the context of the nephilim, knowledge that they were unready for.

Fr. Andrew: Technology, etc.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s the same kind of grasping. And what they ask for, when we read this text from Samuel in detail—or in 1 Kingdoms, if you’re reading the Orthodox Study Bible—they say, “We want a king like the other nations,” so that’s strike one, because not coincidentally, remember the other nations had, like, god-kings.

Fr. Andrew: And they were kind of like warlord/high priests.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so that’s strike one. Strike two is they say they want one of these kings like the other nations “so that he will lead us out and lead us back in.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is military.

Fr. Stephen: You might say, “What does that mean? What does that mean in English?” But that is a military reference. That’s going off to battle and then coming back victorious. Why do they ask for that? Well, all through Joshua, all through the period of the Judges, into Samuel as the last judge, it’s God who leads them into battle.

Fr. Andrew: In many cases literally. He’s appearing there and fighting in the battle with them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, he’s leading them into battle, and they’re going to be victorious when they’re following his lead is the idea. When they’re following his will, they will be victorious because he will fight for them. Well, they’re not so happy with that. Remember what we said about idolatry: trying to get God to do what you want. So they decided, in the chapters immediately preceding this demand for a king, “Hey, we want to go out to war. You know what? Let’s take the ark of the covenant with us, and we’ll put it in front…”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Big ju-ju.

Fr. Stephen: “...and when we march out with that in front, God, Yahweh, will have to come and fight for us. And we’ll use the ark to get him to do what we want.”

Fr. Andrew: Literally idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So God says, “No.” And not only are they badly defeated, but the ark gets captured and taken by the Philistines. Then there’s a whole series of stories where the Philistines try to put it in one of their idols’ temples, and all the idols fall over and bow down to it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s not that God abandons the ark…

Fr. Stephen: And then everybody starts getting boils and plague. So the Philistines get the picture and say, “Hey, you know what? We need to get rid of this thing.” So they put it on an ox-cart with no driver, and the oxen dutifully take the ark back to Israel.

So rather than learning from this, “Hey, you know what? God doesn’t even need us to carry the ark back. He doesn’t need us to do anything for him. We need to get on his side and on his page.” They take the opposite lesson and are like: “Well, we clearly can’t trust him to lead us into battle—so we’re going to need a king.”

Fr. Andrew: [Sigh]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right?

Fr. Andrew: Guys! [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Like, worst possible conclusion. So that’s why they’re condemned for asking for a king.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the wrong kind of king, the wrong time, the wrong way.

Fr. Stephen: And for the wrong reason.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not that there’s a problem with the king. Yeah, because, if God is just simply rejecting the idea of a king, then why would he present himself as “King of kings”? That would not be the term.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he presents as a monarch surrounded by a council, sitting on a throne. Yeah, there’s not a problem with that in and of itself.

So they get Saul first, and Saul is kind of a judgment on them. We won’t go through the whole story of Saul. But ultimately we come to David, and David is, from the perspective of the Old Testament, as close as you can get to the ideal human king. Clearly, the Scriptures are very honest about the fact that he was not ideal or perfect.

Fr. Andrew: But he fulfills the Law by repenting.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he is as close as you may get. And in that way, what we’re saying when we say that is we’re saying that he most fully, of everybody who’s a king in the Old Testament, is serving as this image of the icon of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And the king is called to do that in a particular way, and that’s in continuity with what we were talking about before, of this idea of doing and [Inaudible].

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Establishing the justice of God, which is not who committed what crimes and what punishments do they get, but about putting things in order. Again, it’s the exact same thing, as you were saying, that we see with Adam, who has been charged with expanding Eden. The king, God’s king, is charged with making his place paradise, setting it in order, making sure that it’s just, all of that stuff, and David is the one who does that more and better than anyone else. He’s not perfect, but better than anyone else.

Fr. Stephen: The ancient concept of justice, which is like ma’at in Egyptian, the Egyptian concept, or mishpat in Hebrew, is the idea that everything is in its proper place, functioning properly, fulfilling its purpose, so you have peace, and everything is good and at rest. This is the job of the king: to participate in what God is doing in bringing about justice, which means countering injustice. This is what he’s called to do.

So because of this, because he is serving as an icon in this way, he becomes the icon of that king whom God promised back in Deuteronomy, the king whom he would send. David isn’t the king whom he would send, but he is the image of that king whom he would send.

Fr. Andrew: And that, again, imaging is fulfilling the character of your father, of the one whom you are imaging, participating in his works, doing the things that he does. It’s not just a matter of looking like him or whatever.

This episode isn’t about this, but if you think about imaging, how that relates to iconography—wow, that opens things up pretty significantly in terms of how we understand iconography, that it’s participation and continuation of the thing, the person that’s being imaged.

Fr. Stephen: So because of this… This is sometimes what’s called the covenant with David, this announcement that Nathan the Prophet comes and makes to David. This is the context of that, of connecting David to this king who is going to come, and that this king who is going to come, who is going to be known as the Messiah—the Anointed One, which is one of the terms for a king, because that’s how you became king: you were anointed—we read about this in two different places. It’s not just the gospels where we have multiple versions of the same story. This is also true of the Old Testament, because we have 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, or 1-4 Kingdoms, and then we have 1 and 2 Chronicles.

Fr. Andrew: And I’m guessing these represent various ways that the same stories have been written down and then they’re compiled together to be what we understand as the Old Testament Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they have different perspectives. 1-4 Kingdoms is really talking about the justice of God’s judgment in destroying Israel and sending Judah into exile, showing the descent into sin and into madness that resulted from that; whereas 1 and 2 Chronicles were written later, in the exile, and they’re more about this messianic hope, that the line of David is going to produce this Messiah.

But in the two different versions of that promise from Nathan to David, one of which is in 2 Samuel 7:16 (or 2 Kingdoms 7:16), the other one of which is 1 Chronicles 17:14 and the surrounding verses. There’s this subtle change in language…

Fr. Andrew: Which is cool. This is cool.

Fr. Stephen: In the 2 Samuel (2 Kingdoms) version, the promise is that Nathan says to David, “Your (meaning David’s) house and kingdom and throne will be established forever.”

Fr. Andrew: And then the second one?

Fr. Stephen: In his descendants. And then in 1 Chronicles 17:14, the language is almost the same, except that it says that his descendant “will be established in my (meaning Yahweh’s) house and kingdom and throne forever.”

When you take those together, you have a son of David, who is going to be a king, a messiah, and who is going to sit on both David’s throne and Yahweh’s throne.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s not David, because David does not sit on the throne of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is both a critical point for the development of the whole idea of the Messiah, who Jesus is going to be—spoilers, right?—but it’s also, as we mentioned, one of the basic building blocks when we talk about—we use our theological term “Chalcedonian Christology”—the idea that comes out of the later Church councils, that Christ is both God and man, fully and completely. Again, this isn’t some idea that evolves over time. We’re in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: It’s in the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: It’s part and parcel of this Old Testament promise, and Christ himself tries to point the Pharisees to it when he quotes the psalm and says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool at your feet.” He says, “How, if the Messiah is David’s son, how does he call him ‘Lord’?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, because normally no son would ever be called ‘Lord’ by his own father. It never goes that way. But because Christ is God, he is the Lord of David as well as being his son.

Fr. Stephen: His son because he’s human. So this is embedded right there in this very basic promise.

Fr. Andrew: So Christ moves the Davidic kingship, which is this sort of icon of God in his divine council, into full reality, where you’ve got: he is God in his divine council, because he is Yahweh; he is the Son of God.

Fr. Stephen: Rather than being David surrounded by his council being this icon, now that is combined and is the divine council. David’s throne and God’s throne are the same throne that Christ sits upon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. We’ve got a call, actually, that’s coming in from Cody, who is in Texas. He has a question specifically about what we were just now talking about. Cody, are you there?

Cody: Yeah, howdy from Texas!

Fr. Andrew: All right! Nice to hear your voice, Cody. Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Cody: My question relates to the typology between the Davidic kingdom and the Queen Mother role that we see. What other positions are there within the kingdom, specifically relating to Isaiah 22:22. I hear that a lot in the proof-texts, specifically in Roman Catholicism, when they’re talking about the prime minister and Jesus quoting that in Matthew 16:18. But not in apologetics specifically, but how does the role of the prime minister in the Davidic kingdom—is it fulfilled in the new covenant?

Fr. Andrew: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that, but maybe Fr. Stephen does.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll go into it a little more. The issue with the Roman Catholic interpretation with that is not really their interpretation; it’s how they restrict it to St. Peter. So there is a connection in imagery there with the keys, with the steward, the chief steward of David having the keys to lock and unlock. That image is picked up, but the keys aren’t given in the gospels only to St. Peter. They’re also given to all of the apostles. The Orthodox understanding of that is not that that connection doesn’t exist; it’s that that connection exists, but that the binding and loosing is a function of the Church rather than of a single bishop within the Church. That steward role is there.

There are other roles. For example, we see, going forward in the narrative of David’s life, that Nathan the Prophet is part of his council, and we see that as part of the role that St. John the Forerunner—and I’m sure we’ll do an episode on St. John the Forerunner at some point—that he takes on in the divine council. There are these other roles, and we’re going to—I think the rest of the show now is going to be about that Queen Mother role that you mentioned.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Does that answer your question, Cody?

Cody: Yeah, I think so. I think that things don’t fit between the Old Testament and the New Testament fulfillment. It’s not a one-to-one match, I guess, because we have one Queen Mother, the Theotokos, but I guess it’s a type of and not a… all analogies fail, I guess.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, Cody, for that call. Good to hear from you.

Cody: Thanks, y’all.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, you know the one thing I wanted to add about what we were just talking about, about Christ fulfilling the Davidic kingship and sitting on both the throne of David and of Yahweh, is that we talked about David as an icon of God, and one of the things that was pointed out to me, years and years ago, actually, when I was still in my undergraduate studies, I recall one of my professors actually talking about this question of how words function. Of course, words are essentially in a way icons of the things that they talk about. He made the point; he said: But there’s only one word that means himself, that doesn’t point to some other thing, and that’s the Word of God himself, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He unites both, to use modern linguistic terminology, referrer and referent. He is the Word who means himself. Whereas all other words mean something other than themselves, like words don’t mean the sounds that we are making; they refer to a thing. If I say, “book,” I’m referring to the object, not to those sounds. I always loved that, and it was one of the ways that I began to understand what it means for Christ to be the Word of God. Cool, cool stuff.

Okay, well, we actually received a recorded message from Ben, who had a question very much related to what we’re just about to talk about. Our engineer this evening is Matushka Trudi, so, Matushka, could you please play that recorded message for us from Ben?

Mr. Ben Bauman: Hi, Fathers. This is Ben Bauman, calling from Grand Rapids, Michigan. My question is in regards to the phrase, “The queen stood at thy right hand,” kind of in general. How would an ancient Jewish person have understood this? Would they have seen this as a correlation to something within their culture? What I’m getting at is the idea that, as far as I can remember, there aren’t any queens of Israel mentioned in the Old Testament. So how would they have really seen this? “The queen stood at thy right hand”: what would that have been in reference to in their minds? Thank you, Fathers, and love the show!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that is an excellent question, and we are going to discuss that as soon as we get back from our second break. Let’s go ahead and go to break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of Lord of Spirits. We do want to hear from you, so call us at 855-AF-RADIO. This episode turns out to be a very similar pattern to our previous ones, where we say we’re going to be talking about this, and then we spend the first hour talking about things that don’t seem to be about that, but actually, as we are about to discover, lead right up to it. [Laughter] First we had to establish what it means for man to be in the image of God and his role in paradise; then we had to establish exactly what it means that Israel is governed by a king, how that continues man’s role in paradise, that exact same role; and now that we’ve established this idea of the kingdom of Israel, and especially the court of David in particular—and we’re going to talk about why David in particular—not just because he’s the best example of this, but there’s something about his kingship, his line that’s really important here, and now we’re getting to the point where we’re actually going to be speaking explicitly now about the Mother of Jesus Christ.

All right, well, we got that question from Ben: What would an ancient Israelite, ancient Jewish person have thought about if we talked about that phrase from the psalms, “The Queen stood at thy right hand,” which of course is the title of this particular episode?

Fr. Stephen: So now in the third half we get to our topic.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right! [Laughter] But you’ll see how this is necessary. We can’t just jump in; we have to set it up, because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.

Fr. Stephen: What we see—again, this close reading of the Old Testament Scriptures—in terms of queen— I do have to say to Ben, when he said he didn’t know of any queens of Israel mentioned in the Bible, I do have to say, “Bro, do you even Jezebel?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, right? Although hopefully…

Fr. Stephen: Not a good example…

Fr. Andrew: Right! When you’re reading Psalm 45, you’re like: Oh, yes, that’s about Jezebel—no, no, not about Jezebel!

Fr. Stephen: That’s not about Jezebel. [Laughter] We do see that there’s this pattern, and it’s unique to Judah. It’s unique to the southern kingdom of Judah.

Fr. Andrew: Because we have to remember that Israel gets divided into the southern kingdom of Judah, and then there’s the northern kingdom that is often just called Israel. And that’s where you get, for instance, the Ahab and Jezebel stuff. It’s two different places now. It gets split up, so there’s two different kingships happening.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s important to give a little historical context to this, because we don’t think about it this way. The amount of time that Israel was united as one political entity is about a century? [Laughter] It’s about a hundred years. Before that you just have tribes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s mostly… Yep.

Fr. Stephen: Then Saul sort of manages to get the tribes into a loose coalition. David really starts the monarchy, and then everything spins out of control with his son Solomon. That’s 80 years between the two of them, and then things divide again. The northern kingdom of Israel only existed for another about 200 years, a little less.

Fr. Andrew: And then—boom. It’s all over.

Fr. Stephen: So there was a political entity called Israel for a grand total of maybe 300 years. In the Old Testament Judah lasts a little longer than that; it lasts another 140 years, a little less, 135, and then it is taken into exile. So just to give that perspective. And David was actually made king of Judah before he was made king of all of Israel. He had to settle a rival claim from one of Saul’s sons. Judah and the rest of Israel were never welded together that strongly. It’s sort of like the American North and South between the founding of the country and the Civil War. Technically, they were one country, but it wasn’t good.

Uniquely in Judah, we see, beginning with Solomon, that the person who is considered to be the queen is not the favored wife of the king.

Fr. Andrew: Because the king has more than one wife.

Fr. Stephen: Well.

Fr. Andrew: Also.

Fr. Stephen: Except they also had more than one wife in the northern kingdom, and in all of Judah’s neighbors.

Fr. Andrew: Right, polygamy is the norm, especially amongst the powerful.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so while that’s an easy explanation, sometimes you’ll hear that from folks who don’t want to go down the trail we’re about to go down, that, well, it’s just because of polygamy. You only have one mother; you have lots of wives.

Fr. Andrew: But there’s often a favored wife. “I’m going to pick this one.” Well, there’s Jezebel, for instance.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the mother of the heir. They dealt with polygamy and still having a queen who was the bride of the king quite well in every other nation in the world except Judah. So there’s this unique institution in Judah where the queen is reckoned as the queen mother. This starts with—I don’t know if you want to read this from 1 Kings or 3 Kingdoms—Solomon.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, okay. This is 1 Kings (or 3 Kingdoms) 2:19. You may remember, everybody, that of course Solomon is the son of David, the immediate son of David, and his mother is Bathsheba, who had been the wife of Uriah, whom David arranged to have killed so that he could cover up his sin of adultery with Bathsheba. So this is 1 Kings 2:19.

Bathsheba, therefore, went unto King Solomon to speak unto him for Adonijah, and the king rose up to meet her and bowed himself under her and sat down on his throne and caused a seat to be set for the king’s mother, and she sat on his right hand.

So it’s another throne that he’s sitting directly on his right hand. Remember, that’s the place of honor after the king; that’s number two after the king.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the highest position.

Fr. Andrew: The highest position without being king: at the right hand. I’m sure I mispronounced one of those names there. Adon-EYE-jah? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Adon-EYE-jah is the usual English pronunciation. It’s actually a-doni-YAH. It means “my lord is Yahweh.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there we go. Yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t just a thing that Solomon does because he loves his mom. This isn’t just: Solomon’s a mama’s boy. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, within a monarchy, within a traditional monarchy, the king’s court is the king’s government. We don’t think of this now, because, say, the president of the United States is sitting and meeting with somebody in the Oval Office: he doesn’t have a throne, and the person at his right hand isn’t the vice president necessarily. It just doesn’t work that way. But in a king’s court, the people in the court are the ones running the place, again. That’s what the divine council is in God’s court.

Fr. Stephen: Those positions at the right and left hand are particularly important, because when the king is sitting on the throne in judgment and he’s making decisions, the people who have access to him, in order to influence his decisions, or for him to seek advice, are the ones sitting at his right hand and at his left hand.

Fr. Andrew: Immediately next to him.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and this is why that comes up later with Ss. James and John and their mother in the gospels!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They ask, “Hey, can we sit at the right hand and the left?”

Fr. Stephen: “In your kingdom.”

Fr. Andrew: And it’s like… No…

Fr. Stephen: We want the top spots.

Fr. Andrew: Those are reserved. And actually have been for centuries upon centuries.

Fr. Stephen: But this is the position that’s given, and it doesn’t stop with Solomon. As you go through—and I’m going to rattle the verses off. No one’s going to have time to look these up as I rattle them off, but I’m going to do my best Jack Van Impe, because no one could rattle off verses better than him, the late, great Jack Van Impe. [Laughter] As you go through all of… I’m not going to give all the Chronicles references; this is just 1 and 2 Kings; they’re paralleled in Chronicles, every single one of them. But from 1 and 2 Kings (or 3 and 4 Kingdoms), what we’re going to see is that every time a new king of Judah is coronated, there’s this pattern. There’s this stereotypical phrase that’s used where they’re named, they become the big king of Judah in a certain year, and then it says, “And his mother was… so-and-so.” And those occur in 1 Kings 14:21, 15:2, 15:10, 22:42; 2 Kings 8:26, 12:1, 14:2, 15:2, 15:13, 15:30, 15:33, 18:2, 21:1, 21:19, 22:1, 23:31, 23:36, 24:8, and 24:18.

Fr. Andrew: Boom. And if you look that stuff up, people—and I did—you will see. “And this so-and-so became king, and his mother was…; and so-and-so became king, and his mother was…” This is one of those details that, unless you’re looking for it and understand what it means, you’ll probably just roll right by it. But, again, like Father said, this is only the king of Judah; it is only the kings of David’s line, not the northern kingdom of Israel; you don’t get this pattern there. It’s only here. They always mention who his mother is, and it’s because the king’s mother, the queen mother, is the one who is at his right hand.

Fr. Stephen: And—

Fr. Andrew: I recall when looking into this, by the way, if I could just interrupt. I recall when looking into this that this is so institutionalized, it’s so much in office, that you can actually get deposed from it. It’s not sort of automatic. It happens one time when one of the kings’ grandmothers is occupying the position, and she falls into idolatry, so he deposes her from it. That it’s so much of an office that you can actually get kicked out of it.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s an office with power that you can use for evil, because there is an evil one at one point. Athaliah, who is one of the daughters of Ahab, who gets married off to the king of Judah, and then decides to try to eradicate the line of David: have them all killed off so that she could install Ahab’s line in the southern kingdom also. But because she was in this queen mother position, she had the power to try to control who was going to be the next king and to have people assassinated. This was a governmental role.

Fr. Andrew: So the position then consists of… It’s not just someone who gives advice or influences the king, but also someone… Like, if you know that someone is close to someone of power, then you will go to that person and say, “Hey, would you mind talking to the king and asking for this? I know he’ll listen to you.” So within especially the human context, that makes total sense, that his mom should go to him and say, “Hey, I think we should do this.” So there is this role of the queen mother receiving petitions and passing them on, a totally normal thing for the person standing at the right hand of any king to be doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it also goes the other way. And this is a place where it is kind of analogous to our president and vice president, where the president can say to the vice president, “I’m going to put you in charge of getting this through Congress.”

Fr. Andrew: So there’s delegation happening.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s not delegating in the sense of, “I’m going to take some of my authority and divest myself of it and give it to you.” Like we’ve already talked about with the saints, it’s “I’m going to administer XYZ through you.”

Fr. Andrew: Through you, yes.

Fr. Stephen: “You’re going to be my representative in terms of doing XYZ.”

Fr. Andrew: “You let them know this comes from me.” Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And being his mother—

Fr. Andrew: Just like when I say to one of my kids, when I send one of my kids to go fetch another one, “You tell them I sent you.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! That goes both ways with this office. As you mentioned, all those verses I rattled off, later when this is a recorded podcast you can go back and pause and look those up. But if you go and look up in between, in between it talks about the succession of kings in Israel. It’s mixed right in there in the northern kingdom—never mentions their mothers. So in the same book…

Fr. Andrew: So it’s not just habit. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: This is this unique institution with the Davidic king and the Davidic line. Because the king, the Davidic king in particular, as the anointed one, has this particular iconic imaging relationship with Yahweh the God of Israel, we get these psalms—Psalm 45 from which the title of this episode came, is not the only one, but it’s one of the major ones—you get these psalms that are sort of odes to the beauty and the glory of the king of Israel.

And this has something important to teach us about veneration, too, going back to a topic we talked about a couple podcasts ago, that there didn’t seem to be a problem with a psalm praising God’s king; that that did not seem to be taking away somehow: “No, you’re only… We shouldn’t be singing psalms to the king; we should only be singing psalms directly and about Yahweh and that’s it.” Why? Because the king is the icon of God and of his rule.

Fr. Andrew: So honor given to the king passes to the One whom the king is the icon of.

Fr. Stephen: Right, is honoring God because that’s his king whom he established.

So when we get into Psalm 45 and into the details of this praise, it includes not only the king but also the—in Hebrew it’s Gebirah—this queen mother role. I don’t know if you want to read that section?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! This is Psalm 45, beginning with verse 9-11, then skipping to 13.

The queen stands at your right hand in gold from Ophir.
Listen, daughter, and consider, and incline your ear, and forget your people and the house of your father;
Because the king will greatly desire your beauty, because he is your lord. Worship him.
All-glorious is the daughter of the king within the palace. Her clothing is woven with gold.

Praising the queen.

Fr. Stephen: And notice—

Fr. Andrew: And talking to her directly.

Fr. Stephen: But also, just like we were talking about with Psalm 110 and the Messiah being both David’s son and his Lord, notice that the queen we’re talking about here is both the queen mother and the daughter.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. That only works if the king is God. The psalm does double duty, just as David with “The Lord said to my Lord” in Psalm 110. Cool!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and so with Christ and his mother, what we would expect, if Jesus is the Messiah, if Jesus is the Christ, then the announcement that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus is the King, Jesus is the Davidic King, would be immediately followed by: Mary is his mother. And she is both his mother and therefore the queen mother to his King and Messiah, and his daughter, because he’s her Creator and Savior at the same time. That psalm can really only be fulfilled in Christ and his mother.

Fr. Andrew: She therefore is the Mother of God and the Daughter of God at the same time. She’s his mother by virtue of his humanity, and his daughter by virtue of his Godhood. Cool, cool stuff. When you get to the point where we’ve led up to now, all I can kind of do is marvel. It’s just so astonishingly beautiful. It’s like a great poem that just sort of stretches over thousands of years, a poem that God is composing, and everything comes into place, and we see then. We’re leading up to or just a few weeks away from the Nativity of Christ, so this is a perfect episode to have before our Nativity episode. That there she is, holding God in her arms as a Child, and she is both his mother and his daughter at the same time. Cool.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so to be right to the point, I am saying here that when the apostles went out and preached the Gospel, the Gospel is—and we’ll get more into this in the future—the report of Christ’s victory that has led to him being enthroned as King. So when they’re announcing that Jesus is the Messiah, he has won this victory over the powers and over death and over the powers of Hades, they are also announcing who his mother is. I’m saying the apostles did that. You may say, “Well, how can you prove that?” And I say, “I can prove that.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] Prove it for me, Fr. Stephen! You can’t just leave me hanging there!

Fr. Stephen: And the way I can prove that is from one of the earliest anti-Christian writings that we have.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right. So we’re… You listen to this show for the deep cuts, everybody. This is it. [Laughter] Pretty deep.

Fr. Stephen: Around 150 AD, middle of the second century, 150, 160, there’s a fellow named Celsus—or “Kelsus” depending on who taught you Latin [Laughter]—who was a pagan and who wrote what was considered by the Church Fathers to be the most scathing and pointed point-by-point pagan attack on Christianity and the Christian Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he was doing a take-down.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this was his… If this was on YouTube today, it would be: “Celsus DESTROYS CHRISTIANS!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Celsus would totally have been a YouTuber.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, except he wasn’t an atheist.

Fr. Andrew: Right, but he’s irascible like a lot of those YouTube apologists. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So we have to remember Celsus now, in 150, 160, he’s never been to a Christian worship service, because they didn’t allow outsiders in and he’s a pagan and an opponent. So he’s only heard rumors about that stuff. The stuff that he knows about the Christian Gospel that he’s attacking is just the stuff that’s in the public proclamation, the stuff that Christians were preaching as they evangelized and went out.

Fr. Andrew: The stuff that’s on the website, to put it in modern terms.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so all the stuff that he’s attacking is publicly known: This is what Christians believe; this is what they teach. In this case, he’s specifically attacking the Gospel. He’s attacking the idea that Jesus is God and that Jesus is the Messiah; he’s the King. Those are the two particular points he’s attacking because those, of course, are the central points of the Gospel itself.

So we have a number of responses to Celsus written by different Fathers and different early Christian writers. The most famous one is the one written by Origen, Contra Celsum, appropriately enough. And we don’t have the whole text, Celsus’s original whole text, but we can reconstruct a lot of it from the Church Fathers and early Christian writers who quote him to respond to him, so you can kind of put back together from the quotes “here’s what he said.” If you’re interested in early interactions with paganism, a lot of this anti-Celsus literature goes really in depth into some of the ancient pagan beliefs. Like Origen starts talking about the Pythians and deep cuts of Greco-Roman paganism.

Anyway, one of the things that Celsus goes after is Mary. We find out pretty quickly that he knows a bunch of stuff about Mary.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where did he get that from?

Fr. Stephen: Where did he get that from, right? Where would he have gotten that from?

Fr. Andrew: Because she… We should remember, she was not an important person as far as the world was concerned. No one was writing biographies of Mary who was a Jewish court official or a Roman. The only people talking about her are Christians.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he’s hearing these things that he knows about her in the public proclamation of the Gospel by Christians, so she’s a part of that proclamation. He thinks that attacking her is a way to undermine the whole thing, so it’s not like it’s some detail that he heard them talking about. He thinks this is an important part of the proclamation. I’ll read this quote, if that’s okay. [Laughter] This is some of the things. He says a lot of things, some of them very nasty, but this is some of the things that he says about Mary. He says that Christ was

born in a certain Jewish village of a poor woman of the country who gained her subsistence by spinning. It was improbable that the god would entertain a passion for her, because she was neither rich nor of royal rank, seeing no one even of her neighbors knew her.

So how is Celsus attacking the Christian Gospel? By saying this Mary person is a nobody. She’s a peasant. Nobody ever heard of her. Her own neighbors, the other people in the village probably didn’t even know who she was. Why, how could she be the mother of, from his pagan perspective, how could she be the mother of a king, let alone the mother of a god?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, recall, in the ancient world, this idea of the rags-to-riches story or local boy makes good, the underdog wins—that stuff is all nonsense to an ancient pagan. If you’re on top of things, that’s because that’s the way it’s supposed to be; the gods set that up. No one makes it big, coming from nothing.

Fr. Stephen: Or if there was somebody who came from humble beginnings, they tell all these stories about how, as a child, they were already exceptional and doing amazing things.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, so Celsus thinks that if I just point out that this god that they worship, his mom is some nobody, then that just shows how ridiculous this Christianity thing really is.

Fr. Stephen: Right. She can’t possibly have been the mother of a king. That’s how he attacks the Christian Gospel, which means the Christians were going out there as part of the Gospel and preaching: She’s the mother of the King and the mother of God.

Fr. Andrew: Which would have been important and meaningful for Israelites, but not important or meaningful to a pagan in the same way.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So 150, 160 AD, we’re talking less than 50 years after the Apostle John died.

Fr. Andrew: And long before the canon of the New Testament is clearly recognizable over the whole world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that her identity as the queen mother and the mother of God is a central enough part of the Christian Gospel proclamation that Celsus thinks refuting it undermines the whole thing. I could add on, on top of that, that St. Irenaeus, who’s a spiritual grandson of St. John, is writing about how the Theotokos is the second Eve, all of these other things, basically about his grandmother: the theological significance of his grandmother in God’s purposes of redemption. So this is not something that develops later, that comes into Christianity from paganism in the fifth century or something. [Laughter] This is the opposite. This is thoroughly Jewish. This comes out of the Old Testament. It’s part of the Gospel in that it’s part of Christ’s identity as King. And affirming her as the mother of God is part of his identity as God, and those things are tied together in the idea of the Messiah by David’s throne.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so therefore we get hymns like we sing all the time in the Orthodox Church, “More honorable than the cherubim, more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim.” That’s not just a way of saying she’s really, really glorious. It’s talking about her position in the divine council, because—think back to our first couple of episodes, everybody—remember we talked about the throne guardians: that line of hymnography specifically is talking about the throne guardians who are at God’s throne. He’s enthroned upon the cherubim; he’s surrounded by the seraphim. And they are the ranks of angels that are the closest to him; they are at the very top of the divine council in that sense. And we’re saying in this hymn that she’s above them. Why? She stands at his right hand.

She stands at his right hand, she’s the queen mother, he is the son of David; therefore she’s the queen mother in this line of Davidic kings. And she’s his mother, but she’s also his daughter because he’s God. The thrones of David and of Yahweh are united in Christ. So because of who she is, we cannot help but proclaim her as his mother as we proclaim the Gospel. It can’t be left off, because otherwise we’re proclaiming a Gospel that has nothing to do with God’s kingship and his throne and being the son of David and the Messiah, etc., etc., etc.

If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know. I mean, this is the podcast where I’m blowing my mind! But if that doesn’t blow your mind… It’s really astonishing. She’s not this add-on, and it’s certainly not an attempt to import paganism into Christianity. It’s none of that. It’s deep, deep. It goes all the way back to Genesis, as we were just saying. Amazing.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And you may notice in most Orthodox churches behind, in a high place above the altar, there is iconography of Christ enthroned, and he is enthroned twice in that iconography. As man, he is sitting on his mother’s lap, but then if you look at what’s surrounding him, as God he’s enthroned upon the cherubim.

Fr. Andrew: And then on the iconostasis, on almost every Orthodox iconostasis, you see Christ, his icon, right next to the holy doors. To his right—to his right—his mother. To his left, the prophet of God, the Forerunner, whom we’re going to talk about—we will, I promise you! Yeah, we are definitely going to have a whole episode about John the Forerunner. We’re looking at the divine council right there in the iconostasis as well.

Fr. Stephen: And so in this role, she has that same sort of two-fold ministry as part of the divine council, where she intercedes, meaning she prays, and passes on prayers from us, from those in the Church, and the other direction, where God, her Son, works through her in his administration of the world in the same way we’ve talked about him working through angels and saints in a general sense, but in a special way through her. So when you look at the prayers and hymnography surrounding the Theotokos, you see these two things. You see on the one hand the idea of seeking her intercessions and her prayers for us, and you see this idea often of protection and those kind of things, where it’s talking about Christ working miracles through her and through her prayers. That takes place in both directions.

What we’re saying about her is what we’re saying about all the saints, but her in this special, unique sense, as sort of the highest of the saints and the closest of the saints, being in that right-hand position, in the same way that we talked about ranks of angels, in terms of their closeness to the throne of God.

Fr. Andrew: She’s not a different species from us, but the place that she holds is different. Wow! Wow.

Well, all right. Given everything we’ve just said, then, let’s offer some final thoughts to wrap up this evening’s episode about our Lady, the Theotokos. I just want to speak from a personal point of view. I recall when I first encountered the Orthodox Church, now 23 years ago, more than 23 years ago, I had been raised Evangelical Protestant, and of course as an Evangelical Protestant, we didn’t venerate the Virgin Mary. Now, I wasn’t in a kind of anti-Mary part of Protestantism, but it was just not there. We sort of liked her and kind of rolled her out a little bit more around Christmas, but not really important. I remember, though, when I encountered the Orthodox Church, I had Orthodox people who asked me, “Is Mary a problem for you?” Because there’s a lot of people, a lot of Protestants, who, when they encounter Orthodoxy, they just can’t get over that. Like, it’s just kind of too much.

But I remember at the time, when they asked me that question, I thought to myself, and I said, “I… No, she’s not. She’s not.” It just sort of… Her place just sort of made sense to me. Now, I didn’t understand everything we’ve just been talking about. Maybe one percent of it at the time. But I remember that it just made sense to me, and I think the reason it made sense to me is because of this sense of what Orthodox worship is, that it is entering into the presence of God and to his throne room and offering sacrifices to him. So within that image of what worship is, when in that reality—I shouldn’t just say that image—but in that experience of what worship is, if there’s a king there, then it makes sense that those who surround him would have this very elevated place, not to be elevated above mankind to be some different kind of thing; she is still human, just as I’m human, just as you’re human—but nonetheless it made sense to me. And then over time, as I began to learn how to sort of get to know her and so forth, it became just more and more natural to ask her for her help, because she’s close to the King and it makes sense to be able to ask her for that help.

But when I got to the point where I understood what we were just now talking about and how utterly deep the roots of her position go into the Old Testament, then there was for me this experience of—[Sigh] I don’t know—it was an experience of beauty. It was like hearing a big symphony, and then there’s that final, last note, where everything resolves, and all the melodies come together, and it’s just glorious. And then, if you’re at a concert, you stand up and you’re clapping, and you just feel this elation. That’s how I felt when I encountered this understanding of the Queen Mother as shown so many places in the Old Testament and then fulfilled in the New Testament and then preached, as we noted, by the apostles.

My hope is that, whoever you are listening this evening or whenever you’re listening, that you might have some of that same experience. So that’s my thoughts. Father?

Fr. Stephen: I think sometimes the things we’ve just been talking about, about the Theotokos and about her, about the Virgin Mary in general, are treated as kind of ancillary.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of a bonus.

Fr. Stephen: This is sort of a thing, an issue, an issue to itself, and it’s not central to theology. We have our theology, we have our Orthodox theology and our Orthodox worship, and then there’s this Mary piece, and a lot of people kind of have trouble with it, as Fr. Andrew was just saying. But I want to point out that, really, what we’ve been talking about tonight and what she exemplifies is really the core of the Gospel and the Christian proclamation, and it’s a core that’s gutted a lot of American Christianity of the materialist variety.

We have in that kind of American materialist Christianity a very anemic, skeletal form of Christianity where there’s sort of this partition between God and the world, between God and humanity, where Christ ascended into heaven and now he’s sort of gone and people die and now they’re sort of gone or they’re separated from us by this partition. There’s not really a way through it. What’s on the other side of it is kind of hazy. But so I do what I need to do to get saved and then I try to be a good person for the rest of my life here in the world and try to have confidence that when I die and when I go to the other side of that partition, I’ll end up in the good place.

That’s not the vital Christianity that’s alive and that is made a fire that you find in the Scriptures and that you find the apostles preaching. St. Paul not only says over and over again that all of those partitions and dividing walls have been broken down, but begins when he writes a letter to a church, writes a letter to a church where they’re experiencing some pretty horrific problems with sexual immorality, with heresy, with false teaching and a false gospel and all of these things—he starts by talking to them about the fact that they are sons of God, that they are seated in the heavenly places, that they’re like the angels, that they’re part of God’s divine council, that they’re in communion with God and with his saints, that they’re part of God’s plan and his work in the whole creation. That’s where he begins, and then works from there to get down to the details of: Hey, here’s how you should treat your wife and your kids. Hey, here’s ways that you can and can’t act in the world.

So what we see with the Theotokos is Exhibit A of that. We see a human who has fully come into what God created her to be and who he created her to be, who has reached the kind of maturity and completion as a person formed into the image of God that the Scriptures are constantly talking about as the goal of our Christian life. She’s done that. She’s crossed that non-existent partition and is still connected to us, and we can see her there in the heavenly places, awaiting us at the end of the journey.

And the fact that the person who has most fully done that in the Christian religion is a woman is not to be underestimated, because the Christian proclamation, including who Christ’s mother is, did more to change the role and the understanding and the value and the freedom and the appreciation of women in this world than any human ideology ever has and ever could. The transformation from the way the ancient world looked at women is 180°.

That, despite all kind of “goddess worship,” because a goddess isn’t like me or like a human woman. A goddess is some other type of being. But the Theotokos is like me. She’s a woman like my wife and like my mother and like my sisters. She’s one of us—who has achieved and has received what we’re all striving for, and therefore is an example to all of us, a beacon to all of us, an intercessor for all of us. And that’s not just some ancillary thing; that’s not just some obstacle I have to climb over if I’m not Orthodox and want to join the Church. That’s central to what we understand salvation to be and who we are in Christ and the value of every Christian, but especially Christian women. So those are my thoughts at the end of the day.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, before we finish this evening, I just want to note that of course we will be back in two weeks, being the fourth Thursday of the month. However, on the new calendar that both Fr. Stephen and I are on, that is Christmas Eve, so we’re not going to be live that night. We’re going to have a pre-recorded show, so if you want to submit questions or comments for that one, make sure you send them to us by email or also by our speakpipe connection that you can find on the Ancient Faith Radio live webpage. So just please note that the December 24 episode will be a pre-recorded episode.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to be talking about astrology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Oh yeah, there you go.

Fr. Stephen: And not that it’s just bad. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during this live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but we can’t respond to everything. I’m sorry; I wish we could. We get so much email! We do save what you send for possible future use in later episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts—except for next time—on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, and don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits Facebook page while you’re at it, join our Facebook discussion group, leave a recommendation, and then invite your friends.

Fr. Andrew: And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever you get your podcasts, then that raises the visibility of this show and gets more people connected.

Fr. Stephen: Finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and may God bless you through the prayers of his mother and of all of his saints.