https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PDtDpf_fgeI
My kind of whole project over the last 20 years has been looking at, you know, soteriology, how salvation works through the Father’s interpretation of the Bible. And before I started working on sacrifice and expiation, I looked at justification. And so, I put out a little book back in 2010 based on my research on that, and it was focusing on the Desert Fathers. And so, the Desert Fathers were picking up on the Gospel of Luke. We’re in the Gospel of Luke in the parable of the publican, the Pharisee. The publican basically, by accepting all blame, he descends down and he’s the one who’s vindicated or justified by God, because he descends down by taking on all blame, and God’s the one who vindicates and lifts him, right? He exalts him. And then the Pharisee, he exalts himself and God lowers him, right? He brings him down and condemns him. And of course, the word in Greek for to justify or vindicate, vikio, its opposite is kata vikio, which means to condemn. Those two words are used in the parable. So, it’s the opposite of to vindicate, right? He gets condemned down. And that gets picked up in Orthodoxy in the hymn for one of the troparia for that Sunday the Pharisee during Lent. It says for the publican exalted himself or lowered himself, based himself, and he was exalted up and the Pharisee exalts himself and he was abased. He was brought down low. So we have this idea that when we take on the blame, when we take on and become that offering, we allow God as judge, Christ as judge, to be the one to lift us up and exalt us. And he’s the one who takes us up to the heights rather than ourselves. So it’s kind of linked to this. That’s why you see this this sort of language throughout, especially like the ascetical writings and epic fathers, the desert fathers. Yeah, and the understanding that way makes so much sense of so many Bible stories, even from the beginning, from Genesis. And so that’s how you can understand that what God is asking of Adam to not raise himself to not himself take the fruit, to not pull himself up. What God wanted for him was for that God does, that God was going to raise Adam up. And you see that in the in the scripture. And sometimes it’s tricky for people because people might find it hard to see that in the text because it’s like, well, you know, it’s a bit tricky of St. Ephraim to say that God wanted to give him the fruit. It doesn’t say that in the text. But if you take the entire scope of scripture and you kind of see it together, you realize that it’s there all through. Like even the story of Solomon, when it’s like God asks Solomon what he wants. It’s like, I will give you. And then he says, I want the knowledge of good and evil. And God is like, good. Yes, that’s exactly what you should ask for. And I’m going to give it to you. But he’s not trying to take it for himself. So this weird moment in Solomon shows us already that this was there in the whole narrative scripture, this idea that what was received from above is different from what is taken for ourselves. It’s the opposite in some ways. And we’re lifted up when we when we abase ourselves. It seems contradictory. But once you kind of see the logic, you’re like, well, actually, no, that’s really how reality works. Yeah, yeah, it’s so prevalent throughout all of the at least in the I’m not as familiar with the Western liturgical tradition, but in the Eastern liturgical tradition, I mean, this idea of humbling yourself is just ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. I mean, it’s just I mean, all of all of Lent focuses on that, right? All the the hymns and the various themes of the services is almost always about how do we humble ourselves before God? Repentance is, of course, part of humbling, which is so important during the fasting seasons, because repentance is about admitting that that we are against God and turning back towards him and reestablishing relationship because we’re in the wrong. We take on the blame and the more we take on the blame, you know, we allow God to be God because when Christ says that, you know, that he says, Judge not lest he be judged, he’s not talking about a lack of discernment, right? Because the same word, Crito is the same word to judge or to discern. They’re not two different words. We sometimes translate them differently, but they’re the same word used in different parts positively and negatively in the New Testament. What he’s saying is, is don’t usurp my position. I am the Lord. I sit on the throne of judgment. I hold the keys to life and death. Don’t usurp my position. It’s not your place to determine the outcome of human affairs or individual humans. You have to humble yourself and see yourself only in comparison to me, he says. And so again, in the Desert Fathers, there’s this idea of, you know, it says, you know, who is man that, you know, he’s made a little lower than the angels. And they take that and they say, you know, God placed us down here, you know, in this reality. And, you know, this idea of up and down, right above and below, we should only be looking up. We should only be we should we’re down here only looking up at the Lord and comparing ourselves only to him and we compare ourselves only to Christ. We can’t really exalt ourselves in any way. You know, in fact, this ties into like in Isaiah six, when Isaiah, who’s probably the holiest man of his time, right? He’s this incredible prophet and he gets initiated into the throne room of God. He’s there in probably what St. Paul would call the third heaven or something like that. And and he says, I am undone. I’m a man of unclean lips. So there’s this idea that the that the that the saints have that the more we focus on Christ, the more we are moving towards Christ, the more we have to humble ourselves, more we have to sacrifice ourselves and lower ourselves because we recognize how, you know, how flawed we are, how sinful we are in comparison, right? That comparison, it’s like it’s like this weird inversion where we’re moving towards Christ and maybe to an external observer, it would seem like we’re becoming sanctified. Our own perception of it, we realize how much further we’re getting away from him simultaneously. So various various saints would say, like at the end of their life, you know, oh, I haven’t even begun to repent, you know, or, you know, or I’m afraid, you know, they’re glowing with the uncreated light. And then and the people there hear him talking and say, you know, oh, he says he’s he’s responding to the demons. I don’t have any hope, you know. So these kind of inversions of that, this like a simultaneous movement toward God and the sense of moving away because we’re just so, I hate to say repugnant, you know, because of our sins, but it’s our perception of that, right? It’s not saying anything about God’s perception of us. It’s only speaking about our perception of ourselves when we start to really know ourselves in relationship to Christ, you know, and the more we’re able to offer ourselves up freely to Christ, the more we move towards him, but the more we realize how much more work we have to do in offering ourselves up. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see like, you know, you can see how this applies either at lower levels, you know, when you think, you know, when you think of the problem of the politician, you know, the problem of democracy, for example, which is that you end up with like narcissists, you know, because you have to, you have to fight so much to get it. Like you have to do everything, you know, and basically to get that position of power, you have to be willing to do anything, lie, do whatever it takes just to get there. Whereas what we really want is something like a reluctant king. Like that’s what we would really want. Someone who we know is the best to be the king, but really he doesn’t want to be the king. And we always have to force like to say, no, you’re the king. You know, like all these stories of the ancient bishops, you know, they go get the monk in the cave and see, say, okay, you’re the bishop and you would just run away and bring it back. No, no, we do it. We know that you’re the bishop. So that’s what we would want, but it’s a, it’s, yeah, it’s difficult to. Yeah, it’s, it’s at the one hand impossible, you know, it just feels impossible. But on the other hand, you know, that it has to be that way. And that’s the, that’s actually the best image of reality.