Thoughts for Eastertide

 He is risen!

 

In each of the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ the events of a single week occupy a sizeable portion of the text.  This is the week which began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah, and thus publicly announcing Himself to the nation as the long-awaited Messiah.  This is the week which ended on the Sabbath in which in the visible world His body lay in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid it while in the invisible world He in spirit had entered the other Kingdom of Death not as those who had gone there previously, a captive, but as a Conqueror. (1)  In this week, the week of Creation is recalled and fulfilled.  On the day corresponding to that in which God said “let there be light”, Christ, the Light of the World, announced Himself publicly.  On the day corresponding to that in which God made man in His Own image and so finished His work of Creation which He pronounced good, Jesus Christ just before dying proclaimed the word τετέλεσται (Jn. 19:30) which means “It is finished.”  The work He thereby proclaimed finished was the work of redemption, the work of propitiation, the work of Atonement, the work made necessary by man’s fall into sin.  Then on the day corresponding to that in which God rested from His work of Creation, His body rested in that borrowed tomb.

 

Last week was Holy Week, the week in our liturgical Kalendar devoted to special remembrance of this week of Gospel events.  It began with Palm Sunday, in which palms are waved and hosannas shouted in commemoration of Christ’s Triumphal entry.

 

On Maundy Thursday we were reminded of the Last Supper where the Sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted, where the New Commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), so like those with which the Lord summarized the Law and yet so different at the same time, was given, and where the Lord Himself set the example of this by washing His disciples’ feet, an act ritually re-enacted on the day which takes its name from the Commandment. 

 

On Good Friday the Crucifixion itself was the focus.  In outward appearance, this was the opposite of the Triumph at the beginning of the week.  Instead of “Hosanna”, the crowd cried “crucify Him”, instead of riding into the city He had to carry His cross out of it.  Beneath the outward appearance, of course, this was His true moment of Triumph.  He had told His disciples from the moment St. Peter had confessed “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) at Caesarea Philippi that this would come, that it was for this purpose that He entered into the world, that this is what it truly meant for Him to be the Christ.  He had not come to bring political deliverance to the Old Testament nation, but to bring deliverance from the slavery into which the Fall of Adam had delivered all mankind, slavery to sin and death, and He could only do this by suffering and dying Himself.  Since St. Anselm, we in the West have tended to think of this primarily in terms of the payment of a debt.  Man owed a debt but had no resources to pay, God had the resources but could not pay the debt qua God, so He became Incarnate as a Man and the God-Man paid the debt on behalf of the world.  In the East, they tend to think of it more in terms of a hostage situation in which Death, man’s enemy, has held him captive and Christ, Who is stronger than Death and over whom Death has not even the usurped claim due to sin, allowing Himself to be taken by Death so that He could destroy Death from the inside and set the captives free.  Both ways of thinking about it are taken from Scripture.  Ultimately, Charles Wesley spoke for Christians East and West when he put it “Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou my God should die for me!”

 

Holy Saturday commemorates both the resting of His body in the Grave and His Descent (as Conqueror) into Hell.  Traditionally, the second of these themes received more emphasis in the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  That this is not the case today (2) is in part due to unfortunate liturgical revisionism that has been influenced by the even more unfortunate theological revisionism which is squeamish about anything having to do with Hell. (3)  The other part is that often the only service on Holy Saturday is the evening vigil which begins with the Holy Saturday themes but moves into the theme of the Resurrection.  The evening of Holy Saturday is, by the reckoning of time established in the week of Creation (4), part of the following day.

 

That following day, of course, is the most important day of celebration in the Christian Kalendar.  In the English-speaking world we call it Easter, similar to how the Germans call it das Ostern.  Those silly and foolish individuals who come creeping out of the woodworks around this time each year to denounce the celebration as “pagan” get most of their mileage out of this name.   Even if, however, their questionable etymology of the word were to be proven correct, their argument is still nonsense because the thing itself, the feast day, was around long before this name got attached to it. 

 

The Hebrew word פסח (Pesach) is the name of the most important feast day of the Old Testament religion.  It is called Passover in English and it is the day on which the Israelites remembered their deliverance from slavery in Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. By the time of the New Testament the Israelites were speaking Aramaic more often than Hebrew and in Aramaic פסח took on a final aleph to become פסחא.  In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written and the primary language of the Church in the earliest centuries, this was transliterated into Πάσχα and at least as early as the second century this term was used for the Christian feast as well.  It retained this name in the North African/Western part of the Church where Latin superseded Greek as the primary language and in Latin it is spelled Pascha.  To this day, in the vast majority of languages the feast called Easter in English is called Pascha or some variation thereof and even in English we use the adjective “Paschal” to refer to things pertaining to Easter.

 

The history is clear.  The holiday did not begin as a pagan feast named Easter that was appropriated by the Church but as the Christian Passover.  This remains the essence of the feast regardless of what other names derived from the time of year in which it occurs became attached to it later in countries with Germanic languages.

 

Our silly and foolish friends if they are capable of pursuing their case any deeper than the superficial argument about the name may point out that the authorization for the Old Testament Passover, along with detailed instructions as to how to keep it, came directly from God, and ask where the similar authority for a Christian Passover is to be found.  The answer lies in what the New Testament teaches about the relationship between the events commemorated by the Old Testament Passover and those we commemorate in Holy Week leading up to Easter.

 

According to the New Testament, most especially the book of Hebrews, the Old Testament consists of types which prefigure or foreshadow the Gospel.  The blood sacrifices of the Levitical system were types of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world.   The earthly Tabernacle/Temple was a figure of the Heavenly Tabernacle made without human hands.  Other examples, not spelled out the way these were in Hebrews, are just as clear.  Moses, for example, the Law-Giver, was allowed to lead the Israelites up to the Promised Land but he was not allowed to lead them in, that role was given to Joshua (5) in which can be seen prefigured everything St. Paul had to say, which was a lot, about how the Law cannot make one righteous before God, only the grace brought by Jesus Christ can do that.

 

The Old Testament Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance from Egypt.  Israel had gone down into Egypt during the years of famine in which Joseph was the highest official in the land under Pharaoh whose favour he enjoyed.  They remained there four hundred years after which another Pharaoh, who feared rather than favoured the growing nation, had them enslaved.  Moses, Hebrew born but adopted into Pharaoh’s family, met God in the wilderness Who told him that He was sending him to Pharaoh to plead for Israel’s deliverance.  Multiple times Moses and his brother Aaron entered Pharaoh’s court with God’s demand that His people be set free, each time Pharaoh refused and a new plague fell upon Egypt.  In the final plague, the angel of death was sent to take the firstborn of every family in Egypt – only they, to whose door posts and lintels the blood of the Passover lamb had been applied, i.e., the Israelites, were spared.  Pharaoh then commanded Moses to take the Israelites and leave, only to change his mind again once they were gone and pursue them with his army to the Red Sea.  God opened a pathway for the Israelites through the Red Sea, then brought the waters down on the Egyptian army.

 

This entire event forged Old Testament Israel’s identity as a nation.  It also prefigured another, greater, deliverance.  The salvation of which the Exodus was but a type was not a deliverance from physical servitude but of spiritual servitude to sin.  Nor was it merely the deliverance of a nation but of the entire world.  This is the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ on the Cross which event took place on the Old Testament Passover.

 

Since that of which the Old Testament redemption of Israel was a shadow has come to pass, we who believe in Jesus Christ look back to that rather than to the shadow.  That there would be an annual Christian Passover celebrating Christ’s redemption of mankind was settled very early in the Church.  When it is first mentioned as such in the writings of the second century, it is treated as having been long established.  This would imply that it is Apostolic in origin and, indeed, the Apostles were barely in their grave before a dispute arose not over whether there should be a Christian Passover but over when it should be held. (6) Those who held the Quartodeciman position argued that the Christian Passover should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover (the fourteenth of Aviv/Nisan on the Hebrew calendar), others held that it should fall on the Sunday after.  Although the sides in the controversy tended to fall along regional and ethnic lines, there is clearly an underlying theological issue here of whether the Crucifixion or the Resurrection takes precedence.  The first ecumenical council of the Church, which met at Nicaea in 325 to address the heresy of Arianism, also ruled on this matter.  Ruling against the Quartodecimans the council determined that the Christian Passover would be held on the Sunday that follows the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. (7) 

 

The ruling of Nicaea I made it clear that the Christian Passover would be a commemoration of the Resurrection rather than of the Crucifixion although by this time Holy Week was starting to take shape with Good Friday being already firmly established. (8)   In this, can be seen a parallel to the decision made by the Apostles that the Church would meet on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath (Saturday).  That this decision was made, we know from the New Testament in which the Church is depicted as meeting on Sunday (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2). Although neither the decision itself nor the occasion for it are recorded, the reason why Sunday as opposed to say Monday or Wednesday, was selected is quite obvious.  The Sunday after Christ was crucified on the Old Testament Passover, the women among His disciples went to the tomb to complete the burial which had been done in haste due to the onset of the Sabbath.  They found the stone that sealed the tomb rolled away, the grave clothes in which He had been buried folded up and empty, and an angel there to tell them that He was not there, He was risen.

 

The importance of Christ’s Resurrection cannot be overstated.  St. Paul explains it exquisitely in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians.   Against those who took the Sadducees’ position that there will be no Final Resurrection, He argued that if the dead do not rise then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen we are without hope, but that since Christ is risen, then we know that the dead will all rise.  We are all dead in the first Adam because the sin by which he brought death into the world passed from him to all of us bringing death along with it.  Christ underwent death for us that He might remove the sting of death which is sin.  His victory over this final enemy is our victory, in Him, the last Adam, we are made alive.  His Resurrection was the firstfruits of the Resurrection in which we one day will all fully share even as we are to participate in it even now by walking in newness of life by faith.  His Resurrection, while in the same body in which He had died – He displayed the scars in His hands and side to His disciples – was not to the same life that He had left behind in dying, but to a new and higher kind of life which death can never touch.

 

In this we have a clue as to why the day of the week on which Christ rose was so important to the early Church that they set it both as their weekly day of corporate worship and the annual Christian Passover.  In the New Testament it is called the “first day” with reference to the week that follows.  The early Christians, however, also called it the “eighth day” in reference to the week which preceded it.  The week signifies the week of Creation, and, as we have seen above, this was especially true of the week of Jesus’ life and ministry on which the Gospels concentrate, the week we remember in Holy Week. What then does the eighth day that follows the seven which signify the Old Creation signify?

 

One early Christian writer described it as “a beginning of another world” (9).  St. Augustine argued that the Sabbath day of rest of the Decalogue was but a figure of the eternal rest to which the eighth day, revealed to the Christians in the Gospel, looks forward. (10)  The eighth day, then, is the day which comes after the seven of the Old Creation, the day of the New Creation, the life of which Jesus entered in His Resurrection, and in which we can share even before our own resurrection on the Last Day because we participate in His life as members of His mystical body, the Church.

 

How appropriate and how utterly unpagan is that annual Lord’s Day of Lord’s days, the Christian Passover of Easter in which after the reflection on our sin and mortality in Lent, culminating in our remembrance of the week which led from the Triumphal entry to Golgotha and the tomb, on the eighth day we joyously proclaim He is risen!

He is risen indeed.

 

Alleluia!

 

 (1)   The two Kingdoms of Death are the Grave in the collective sense, the place where the body is placed, and Sheol/Hades/Hell, where the spirits of the dead go.  When Jesus died on the Cross, His divine nature remained united to both His body in the Grave and His human spirit in Hades.  Jesus’s death, like any other human death, separated His human body from His human soul.  It could not separate either from His deity.  The Hypostatic Union in which the Eternal Son of God received a full and flawless human nature into His Eternal Person in the womb of the Virgin Mary the moment she said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38) can never be broken.

(2)   In the West.  In the East, the Descent into Hell is still very much the focus of the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  Due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, of course, the Eastern Holy Saturday and the Western Holy Saturday do not fall on the same day.

(3)   The Hell in the Descent into Hell, is the Hell referenced in note 1, vide supra, and not Gehenna, the place to which those who render themselves incurably wicked by rejecting Jesus Christ will be condemned at the Last Judgement.  That Christ did indeed descend there as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is Scriptural despite the claim of certain evangelicals to the contrary.  St. Peter, in his sermon on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost), quoted Psalm 16:10 and applied it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:25-31).  If the Resurrection fulfils “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell”, then Hell, again Sheol/Hades, is clearly where it was prior to the Resurrection.  There is no conflict here with Christ’s words to the dying thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).  Paradise is wherever Jesus Christ is.  On the original Holy Saturday, Hell itself was Paradise.

(4)   “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5)  It is because of this pattern in the Creation account that days in the sacred Kalendar of Christianity are counted sunset to sunset, as they are in the corresponding sacred calendars of Judaism and Islam, regardless of how days in the civil calendar are counted (midnight to midnight).  In the Bible itself, this is the one of three ways of counting days, and certainly the primary way in the Old Testament.  The other two are to count from sunrise to sunrise (morning/evening rather than evening/morning) and to count from midnight (only St. John does the latter, which is why the hours during the Crucifixion account in his Gospel differ from those in the Synoptics, which count from sunrise).

(5)   Joshua is the English spelling of a Hebrew name which, taken from Hebrew into Aramaic then Greek, becomes the name of which Jesus is the English spelling.

(6)   According to Eusebius the controversy broke out as early as the time of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in what is now Turkey and personal disciple of St. John the Apostle who was martyred around the middle of the second century.

(7)   This calculation formula translates the date of Passover in the Hebrew lunar calendar (Aviv/Nisan is the month of spring, the fourteenth is the Ides or full moon of the month) into an approximation in the solar calendar.

(8)   The commemoration of the Crucifixion on the Friday prior to Pascha/Easter is referenced as early as Tertullian.  The name “Good Friday”, of course, came much later. Note that this was no concession to the Quartodecimans.  The 14 of Aviv/Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, like the dates on the civil calendar, move across the week from year to year.  Commemorating the Crucifixion on the Friday before Easter, follows from commemorating the Resurrection on the day of the week on which it occurred.

(9)   The Epistle of Barnabas, 15.

(10)                       St. Augustine, Letter 55, 12-13.

Holy Week

 We are in Holy Week, the week of the Christian liturgical Kalendar that leads up to the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is Pascha or Easter depending upon where you live and what language you speak.  The celebration of Pascha/Easter goes back to the very beginning of Christian history.  In the early centuries of persecution before the legalization of Christianity there were disputes as to when and how the Christian Passover – Pascha is the Latinization of Πάσχα which is the Greek transliteration of פֶסַח (Pesach), the Hebrew Passover – was to be celebrated.  The majority regarded the Christian Passover as a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and held it on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.  Some, primarily among the churches of Asia Minor to which the book of Revelation was addressed, thought that it should be a commemoration of His death to be held on the date according to the Hebrew calendar on which He died.  Since that date was the fourteenth of Nisan these were called Quartodecimans from the Latin for fourteen. A variation of this, held by a much smaller number of Christians located mostly in Gaul, celebrated on the date He died according to the Roman calendar, which was the twenty-fifth of March.[1]  Settling this controversy was the main non-doctrinal accomplishment of the First Council of Nicaea in 325.[2]  The earliest extent mention of the observance of the entire Holy Week dates to the last half of the century prior to that.[3]  Towards the end of the fourth century, just prior to the second ecumenical Council (the First Council of Constantinople, 383), the Spanish nun Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in what is actually a long letter but which also reads as an early example of a travel journal[4] provided a detailed account of the Holy Week services held by the Christians in Jerusalem whose bishop at the time was the important Church Father St. Cyril.  This was the most elaborate celebration of the Holy Week at the time and through accounts such Egeria’s Jerusalem’s practice came to influence other Churches throughout the Christian world.

 

The observation of Holy Week seems like an inevitable development.  The four Evangelists present a much clearer picture of what Jesus said and did in the week of the Crucifixion than of any other period in His earthly ministry.  The week begins with Palm Sunday, remembering Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfilment of Zechariah 9:9-12.  We might begin it with the eve of Palm Sunday, when the anointing of Jesus by Mary at the supper in Bethany took place.  SS Matthew and Mark tell of this event in the middle of their account of Judas’ pact with Jesus’ enemies to betray Him for thirty-pieces of silver.  By doing so they indicate not when the supper occurred but that Judas’ decision to betray Jesus began with this event.  It is from St. John that we learn that the anointing had taken place a few days earlier than Judas’ deal with the high priests, which took place on the Wednesday of the week of the Passion.  St. John connects the two events in a different way by identifying Judas as the one who had voiced the objection to Mary’s act.

 

St. John also tells us that Jesus had arrived at Bethany six days prior to the Passover.  This was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, six days before the Passover on the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Some see a conflict between St. John and the other Evangelists on the day of the Passover but the conflict disappears upon closer examination.  When St. Mark tells us that “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (Mk. 14:12) this does not mean that the Passover lambs were killed on the Thursday before the Crucifixion.  St. Mark, like St. Matthew and even the Gentile doctor St. Luke, used the Jewish method of counting days as starting with the previous evening.  This is rooted in the creation account of the book of Genesis, where of the days of creation it is repeatedly stated “And the evening and morning were the X day.”  We also use this method of reckoning days when it comes to holy days in our sacred Kalendar.  That is why the twenty-fourth of December is called “Christmas Eve” and the thirty-first of October is called “Halloween” (short for All Hallows Eve).  Clement Clark Moore was wrong.  “Christmas Eve” is not “the night before Christmas” but rather the part of Christmas that falls on the evening of the twenty-fourth.  When the Synoptic Evangelists tell us that the disciples prepared the Last Supper on the day when the Passover lambs were killed they are counting the evening of the first Maundy Thursday as part of Good Friday.  In the Hebrew calendar it was already the fourteenth of Nisan.  Jesus died at the ninth hour of daylight - three pm - on the fourteenth of Nisan.  This was the hour the sacrificial Passover lamb was slain.  By the method of reckoning days used by the Synoptic Gospels this was still the same day on which the Last Supper had taken place. 

 

This raises the question of what was going on with the Last Supper. It took place, as the Synoptic Gospels say, on the day the Passover lamb was slain, at the beginning of that day, the evening prior to the slaying.  This would seem to rule out it being a Passover meal proper, since this was eaten on the evening following the slaying of the lamb, the evening that begins the fifteenth of Nisan.  St. Luke, however, seems to clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  He calls it such himself (Lk. 22:13).  He records Jesus’ calling it such “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  He includes details indicative of a Passover meal such as the first cup (the Kiddush) at the beginning of the meal (Lk. 22:17), before the institution of the Eucharist with the breaking of the bread (Lk. 22:19) and the cup after supper which if this was a Passover meal would have been the third of the cups signifying redemption and blessing.  .

 

The answer to the question is present in the Scriptural texts.  Yes, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and yes, it was eaten before the Passover lamb was slain, a day before the Jews in general ate the Passover that year.  For the only lamb mentioned as being present at that meal was the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”  He offered Himself to be eaten at meal in the bread and the cup.  “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” He said after breaking the bread while giving it to His disciples (Lk. 22:19) “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” He said over the cup after supper (Lk. 22:20).  Chronologically, it would not be until the following afternoon that His blood would be shed and His body given, but He offered His disciples His body and blood in the first Eucharist the evening before, just as they were eating a Passover meal the evening before the Passover was slain. 

 

There is an important lesson in this.  Although the events in which the salvation of mankind was accomplished, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, are historical events, events which occurred at a specific place and specific time in the history of the world, at the centre of these events is a Person Who is not bound or limited by space or time.  This Eternal Person Who entered the world of space and time in order to redeem and save, is declared by the Scriptures to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

 

The Law of Moses specified that the Paschal lamb was to be selected and separated from the rest of the flock on the tenth of Aviv (“Spring”, the original name for the month re-named Nisan in the Babylonian Captivity).  Note how St. Mark concludes his account of the Triumphal Entry: “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” (Mk. 11:11)  The impression that this verse gives, that after the Triumphal Entry, Jesus had a quick look around and then went back to Bethany is reinforced by His promise to the donkey colt’s owners that “straightway he will send him hither”, (Mk. 11:3) i.e., that He would return the animal immediately, which only St. Mark records. This is the only indicator in any of the Gospels of the time of day of the Triumphal Entry.  It was late on Palm Sunday, as the afternoon was turning into evening, at which time the ninth of Aviv/Nisan was ending and the tenth was beginning. 

 

In sermons the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday are often contrasted.  The crowds that welcomed Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday became the mob that screamed “Crucify Him!  Give us Barabbas” on Good Friday.  The contrasts are important but the underlying harmony between the two events should not be overlooked.

 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday He publicly presented Himself to Jerusalem, King David’s city, the capital of national Israel, as the Messiah they had been awaiting, the Christ.  He had not hidden His identify before this.  That He is the Christ was the import of His remark in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His public ministry about the prophecy of Isaiah being fulfilled.  What He said about Himself in His sermons and parables and in His controversies with the Pharisees and scribes would be very strange, to say the least, if He did not claim to be the Christ.  He had identified Himself as Christ to individuals such as the Samaritan woman at the well from before His public ministry even started (the encounter with the woman took place prior to the arrest of John the Baptist and hence prior to His public ministry) and when St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, confessed Him to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:15) He praised this as having been divinely revealed (Matt. 16:17).  The Triumphal Entry, however, was His official presentation of Himself to the nation as their Messiah or Christ.  The crowds who met Him with palm branches and shouted Hosanna recognized this, of course.  What they didn’t recognize was that by presenting Himself as the Christ, He was presenting Himself as the true Paschal Lamb.  Neither did His disciples recognize this even though He had begun explaining it to them following St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:21) and at His anointing at Bethany, intrinsically connected with His official presentation of Himself as the Christ the following day in that it was a literal anointing of the “Anointed One”, He had again made the connection by saying that “against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (Jn. 12:7). 

 

The disciples, like the rest of Israel, were familiar with the prophecies of the Messiah, the Anointed Son of David, Who would deliver Israel, restore David’s throne, and establish it and rule it forever.  Their Scriptures also predicted that He would suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,[5] Daniel’s prophecy of the Messiah being “cut off, but not for himself”[6], the 21^st/22^nd Psalm[7], prophecies of this nature are found throughout the Old Testament, including in the words spoken to the serpent “and thou shalt bruise his heel” in God’s very first promise that He would send a Saviour.[8]  Prior to their fulfilment, of course, it was difficult to see the connection between these prophecies and those of the triumphant Son of David.  The Genesis prophecy was the key connection.  There were no nations when that promise was made.  The promised Saviour was for all mankind.  Israel, in the Messianic prophecies, is the kingdom of priests Exodus 19:6 declares her to be, performing the priestly function of representing the entire world of mankind.  The promised deliverance, is not mere deliverance of the nation from political subjection to empires such as Assyria, Babylon or Rome, but deliverance of mankind from bondage to the enemies that took mankind captive in the Garden of Eden – Satan, sin, and death.

 

The way the Messiah would defeat these enemies was by meekly submitting to their killing Him.  For the only claims Satan, sin, and death have over mankind arise out of mankind’s voluntary entrance into bondage by sinning in the Garden.  The Messiah is the eternal Son of God, Who when He took human nature to His Own eternal Person in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, became Man but without sin.[9]  He bore the sins of mankind on the Cross, because His death was the true Day of Atonement as well as the true Passover, but He had no sin of His own.  Satan and death, therefore, had no claim on Him, and when He allowed them to take Him anyway they found that they had captured Him over Whom they had no claim and could not hold.  The final day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday, remembers the day when Jesus’ body lay in the grave, the one kingdom of death, while He entered Hell[10], death’s other kingdom, not as captive but as Conqueror.  Note His promise to the repentant thief on the Cross “Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”[11]  While Paradise and Hell are ordinarily thought of as opposite places far removed from each other – think of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus[12] - at the ninth hour on that fourteenth of Nisan that was the first Good Friday, Paradise invaded Hell.  When on Easter Sunday He rose again from the dead, He left behind Him a Hell the gates of which He had smashed to pieces, and whose captives He had set free.  As Conqueror, He claimed as His spoils, all those that Satan and death had taken captive in the Garden, i.e., mankind.

 

Therefore, while the difference between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the demands for crucifixion on Good Friday may illustrate the fickle nature of the whims of the mob, ultimately there is a unity between the two.  By joyously receiving their Messiah on Palm Sunday, the crowds of Jerusalem had selected and separated the true Paschal Lamb, and by demanding His death on Good Friday, they sent Him to the death for which He hand come into the world, by which He accomplished the salvation to which the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt on the original Passover pointed.

 

Have a blessed Holy Week!

 

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[1] The Crucifixion was one of several events – the first day of Creation and the testing of Abraham with regards to the sacrifice of Isaac are among the others – which ancient Christians, going back to at least the second century, believed to have taken place on the twenty-fifth of March by the Julian calendar.  That the early Christians also regarded this as the date of the Annunciation – and therefore the conception of Jesus Christ, nine months before Christmas, His birth – is believed to be derived from its having been the date of the Crucifixion.  While you won’t find the “integral age” theory spelled out in any Patristic source, that the early Christians were thinking in such terms seems to be a reasonable deduction from the coinciding of the date set for the Annunciation and the date of the Crucifixion.  That the figure through whom God established the Old Covenant, Moses, died on his 120^th birthday, seems to be the implication of Deuteronomy 31:2, and was certainly held to be the meaning of this verse by the ancient rabbis (see Sotah 12b in the Talmud) who held this to be also true of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and King David (see Rosh Hashana 11a in the Talmud) on the basis of a general principle extrapolated from Exodus 23:26 and the example of Moses.  While a direct application of the rabbinic concept to Jesus would have placed Christmas rather than the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth of March, the reason the early Christians would have been thinking in terms of the conception rather than the birth in Jesus’ case is fairly obvious.  The Annunciation and not Christmas was the date the Incarnation took place.  In the early centuries, the Church was challenged by heretics who taught that the union of the divine and human in Jesus took place at some later time.  The most common form of this heresy was to say that it took place at the baptism of Jesus.  The orthodox doctrine, however, is that Jesus’ human nature was united to His Person from the moment of conception, that it was never the human nature of anyone but the Eternal Son of God, that the Incarnation was not the fusion of a human person with a divine person or the possession of a human person by a divine person, but a Divine Person taking a complete human nature that was formed to be His own to His own Person.  Therefore it made more sense to the ancient Christians that the Son of God would die on the day He became Man rather than on His birthday like Moses.  This also lined up better with the Biblical evidence as to the time of His birth.  From the fact that when Gabriel visited Zechariah in the Temple all of Israel was assembled there (that is the significance of “and all the multitude of the people” in Luke 1:10) this had to have been Yom Kippur for no other day in the course of Abihan’s two weeks of duty involved a national assembly (its first week of duty earlier in the year fell on the week after Shavuot, the Hebrew Pentecost) therefore the Annunciation had to have taken place around Passover in March.

[2] The council ruled that Pascha or Easter was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the twenty-first of March.  This was a translation into the solar calendar of the day when the Resurrection occurred which was the Sunday following the Jewish Passover.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar – a calendar in which the month’s following the lunar cycle takes precedence over the year’s following the solar cycle and so each month begins on the new moon – and Passover occurs in the middle (on what would be called the Ides of the month on the old Roman lunar calendar) of the first month, which is the spring month, ergo the full moon of the month when spring starts.  By the council’s ruling, spring is considered to start on the twenty-first of March, although astronomically the vernal equinox can occur anywhere between the nineteenth and the twenty-first (this year it fell on the twentieth).  

[3] Apostolic Constitutions, 5.13-19.

[4] Peregrinatio Egeriae. There are numerous variations of the title both in Latin and in translation. In some of these there is a “th” instead of a “g” in the nun’s name.  The 1919 SPCK translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, is an example of this.  It can be read here: The Pilgrimage of Egeria

[5] Is. 53.

[6] Dan. 9:26.

[7] 22^nd by the Hebrew numbering, which our Authorized Bible uses, 21^st by the numbering of the LXX and Latin Vulgate.

[8] Gen. 3:15.

[9] Heb. 4:15.

[10] Hell, when used in this way, should be thought of as “the depository of the souls of the dead” rather than “the place to which the incurably unrepentant will ultimately be consigned” although there is a great deal of overlap between the two concepts.  This is the original meaning attached to the word, although today it is more commonly used of eternal punishment. The Bible brings the two together in Rev. 20:14 when it speaks of Hell, in the original sense of the word, being cast into the Lake of Fire which is Hell in today’s sense of the word, at the Last Judgement.

[11] Lk. 23:43.

[12] Lk. 16:19-31.

Christ is King!

It is Holy Week.  We are entering the Paschal Triduum, which begins with the remembrance of the Last Supper in the evening of Maundy Thursday and ends with the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the morning of Easter Sunday.   In between we are taken through the climax and culmination of Jesus Christ’s vicarious redemptive suffering on our behalf in the remembrance of His Crucifixion on Good Friday and through the intermediate period between His Death and Resurrection on Holy Saturday in which to His followers on earth all appeared lost as His body lay in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea while in the unseen world His Triumph had begun the moment He commended His Spirit to His Father and entered Death’s realm of Hell not as Death’s captive but as his Conqueror.   Holy Week began, as it always does, with Palm Sunday, in which was commemorated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah.  In this event Jesus presented Himself openly to Jerusalem and by extension the nation of Israel as the promised Messiah, the Son of David, and He was initially accepted as such by a crowd that was expecting the Messiah to save their nation from its political yoke and was not ready to truly accept a Messiah Who had come to save them and all the other nations of the world as well from their true oppressors – Sin, Death, and the Devil.   By the end of the week the same crowd that had shouted “Hosanna” and “Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord” as He rode into town was crying “Crucify Him” and mocking Him as He carried His cross down the Via Doloroso towards Calvary.

 

A strange controversy started up on Palm Sunday this year over the expression “Christ is King”.   The controversy apparently began among American neoconservatives in connection with the parting of ways of popular commentator Candace Owens and The Daily Wire, the neoconservative media organization founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing.  This estrangement seems to have something to do with Mr. Shapiro’s unwillingness to accept anything less than 100% support for everything the state of Israel does from Christians and conservatives.   When I first heard mention of the controversy I paid it little attention as I assumed that it had something to do with American neoconservatism’s obsession with democracy and republicanism and that they were blasphemously demanding that Jesus Christ abdicate His throne at the Father’s right hand and run for the office of President of the Universe in a popular election or some such nonsense.  Later, I learned that when Candace Owens had tweeted, or whatever the term is now that that platform has changed its name, “Christ is King” on Palm Sunday, her former colleagues accused her of sending out an anti-Semitic “dog whistle.”  The reasoning, if it can be called that, behind this accusation, is very similar to that employed by the type of organizations who gave us the expression “dog whistle.”   It goes like this: Person X is a bad person.  Person X said Y.  Therefore everyone who says Y is a bad person like Person X.   This is, of course, an example of what in formal logic is called the association fallacy.   If they were to refrain from using it, groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network would have very little to say.   Replace “Person X” with “Nick Fuentes” and “Y” with “Christ is King” and you have the substance, as it were, of the accusation against Owens.

 

This controversy quickly grew beyond the confines of the circles in which it originated, as these things tend to do.  Presumably, for many if not most of those who jumped in on the “Christ is King” debate it was little more than a way of voting for who they liked better, Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro.   It was appalling, however, to see how many people considered to be conservative Christian leaders began regurgitating the fallacious reasoning that Owens’ accusers borrowed from the ADL et al., in some cases even if they carefully avoided joining the condemnation of Owens.

 

St. Paul provides us with an example of how to handle a situation where someone is preaching Christian truth for what we suspect to be unworthy motives:

 

Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will:  The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds: But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.  What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.  For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. (Phil. 1:15-19).

 

Christ is King.   Indeed, even if we were talking about the title rather than the Person, this would be true.   Christ is from the Greek word for “anointed”, which translates the Hebrew word that is Anglicized as “Messiah” which also means “anointed”.   This title was bestowed upon Him for Whom ancient Israel looked  because that Person was to be the Promised Son of David, that is, the King Who would inherit the throne of David are rule forever.   That Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of God, is that very Promised King, is the confession of St. Peter (Mt. 16:16) that secured from the Lord the promise that upon this rock He would build His Church and it is also the belief to which everlasting life is promised (John 20:31).   This is not a secondary or peripheral doctrine.   It is the central Christian truth.   All true Christians believe and confess this truth.   To deny it, to deny that Jesus is the Christ, the Promised King, to deny that Christ is come in the flesh, is the spirit of what the New Testament calls antichrist. (1 Jn. 2:22)

 

In the second chapter of the same epistle in which St. Paul rejoiced that “whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached” he gives an account of the temporal mission of Jesus Christ from His humiliation to His exaltation:

 

That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;  And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:10-11)

 

Every tongue will one day confess that Jesus Christ is Lord which is another way of saying that Christ is King.   Either one will willingly and joyfully confess this in faith in this transitory life or one will acknowledge it along with his own ruin when he is brought before the Judge he rejected in life and made to give account.

 

There is no room for anyone to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when you say it” much less to say “Yes, Christ is King, but it is bad when so-and-so says it, and when you say it I suspect you are saying it like so-and-so.”   Christ is King, He is Sovereign over all the Universe, and we are to rejoice whenever this is proclaimed regardless of what we think of the person who says it or suspect about that person’s motives.   Otherwise, we would be saying that we consider whatever we find objectionable in this person to be more important than the truth that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.   The other truths confessed in the ancient Creeds are just as important, but nobody is taking exception to “Christ is King” over anything having to do with any of these.  

 

Indeed, it is even worse than a case of idolatrously elevating a lesser matter above the central truth of Christ’s Kingship.   Those who claim “Christ is King” to be an anti-Semitic dog whistle – remember, that if you hear dog whistles that makes you the dog – are in effect allowing a religion to which rejection of Jesus as Christ is fundamental to tell Christians that we are not allowed to confess a central tenet of our faith, the very tenet that divides Christiana from Jews, because it is offensive to them and their religion.   Such dictates cannot be submitted to without betraying the faith and the Lord and Saviour Who purchased us with His own Blood.

 

I wish you all a most blessed and holy Paschal Triduum.

 

Christ is King!

 

The Meaning of Holiness

 

This week is Holy Week – the week in the Christian Kalendar (liturgical calendar) that begins with Palm Sunday, ends with Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, and includes Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  Each of these days is a remembrance of important events that took place in the week immediately prior to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the event remembered on Easter itself.     The account of the events of this week and of the Resurrection itself occupy about a third of each of the Synoptic Gospels and just under a half of the Gospel according to St. John.   The Death and Burial of Christ, along with His Resurrection are the events proclaimed in the Christian Gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-4).   That it commemorates the most important events in Christian salvation history, the events at the heart of the Christian kerygma, explains why this week is Holy Week.  In this essay we will be considering the what rather than the why.   What does it mean to say that a week – or anything else for that matter – is holy?

 

Probably the most common mistake made about holiness – the condition of being holy – today is to regard it as being the same thing as purity.   It is a subtle mistake since holiness and purity are very much related.   The concept of separation or apartness is essential to both.   (1)     Purity, however, is a separation in which the from is emphasized.   Water is pure, when it is has been separated from all contaminants or, as we are more likely to think of it, when all contaminants have been separated from it, by a filter, for example.   Holiness, by contrast, is a separation that emphasized that for which something has been set apart.   Something is made holy by being set aside for God.    While holiness implies and includes the kind of separation involved in purity – you cannot separate something unto God without separating it from something else – the reverse is not the case, you can separate something from something else without separating it unto God or anything else.    That having been said, holiness, properly understood, does not have the same implications about that from which the holy has been separated as purity does.   When something is consecrated – made holy by being set aside for God – this suggests that everything that has not been consecrated, everything from which the holy has been set apart, is ordinary, everyday, common and mundane, but not necessarily that it is in some way bad.

 

The Fourth Commandment (2) illustrates this point:

 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.   Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.  (Exodus 20:8-11)

 

The commandment is to keep the Sabbath holy.   The rest of the passage is the explanation of the commandment.     It would be absurd to read into this that the labour in which the Israelites were engaged during the rest of the week was bad or sinful.   That is obviously not what we are supposed to take away from this.   Rather, the point of it all is that for this day to be reserved for God, it had to be kept apart from the usage of ordinary weekdays, and hence from their labour, good and necessary as that may happen to be.  

 

The word “reserved” is an especially good one for explaining the meaning of holiness.   We all understand the concept of a restaurant table or a hotel room or a cabin at a ski resort being “reserved”.   This is what happens when the restaurant, hotel, or resort takes the table, room or cabin out of general availability and reserves its use for a specific party.   If you think of God as having made a reservation for one day out of the seven (the Sabbath), one nation out of the nations of the world (Israel), one tribe of priests out of that nation (the Levites), one building and its furnishings (the Tabernacle/Temple) so that they are no longer generally available but are set aside for His Own use this will give you a pretty good grasp of the notion of holiness as it applies to people, places, and things other than God Himself.        

 

The holiness of God Himself, it needs to be noted, cannot be explained this way.   Try it and you will see just how strange it sounds.   Earthly holiness, however, is the illustration God has given us of His Own holiness.    The better we understand earthly holiness – how the Sabbath, Tabernacle, etc. were holy – the better a picture we will have of God’s holiness, provided that we remember that as an illustration of God’s Own holiness, earthly holiness is rather like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave and that analogies can only go so far in what they say about God before they become mostly apophatic, that is, telling us what God is not like rather than what He is like.    When used of God Himself, holiness speaks of His supreme transcendence over all Creation that makes all earthly holiness seem ordinary and common by comparison.   A glimpse of it, such as that which the prophet Isaiah caught in his vision of the divine throne room and the seraphim singing the Sanctus, invites the prophet’s response: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seek the King, the LORD of hosts” (Is. 6:5).

 

In the Old Testament, the Ceremonial Law – the dietary restrictions separating “clean” from “unclean” animals, the designating of the weekly Sabbath and certain annual Feasts as holy days, the establishment of the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrificial system and the elaborate instructions for consecrating everything involved in these – well illustrates the earthly holiness, the setting of times and places and people and things aside and reserving them for God, that is itself an illustration of God’s transcendent holiness.    In the events that we remember in Holy Week, Jesus Christ fulfilled the Old Testament promises that God would establish a New Covenant that would be superior to the Mosaic Covenant of which the Ceremonial Law was a part.    In the Book of Acts and the epistles of St. Paul, the New Testament makes it quite clear that the Ceremonial Law of the Mosaic Code is not binding upon the Church established under the New Covenant.   The reason for this is also made clear – in the Church, believers in Jesus Christ whether they be Jew or Gentile, are united in one body and so that which had kept them apart is removed.

 

This does not mean that holiness is any less important under the New Covenant than under the Old.   The New Testament frequently speaks of holiness, most often in reference to God, with the vast majority of these references being mentions of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, i.e., the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptures, prophets, city Jerusalem, Temple, Sinaitic Covenant, and angels are all called holy.   There are also uses of the term that are distinct to the New Testament.    It is applied to both individual Christians and to Churches.  In the salutation at the beginning of almost all of his epistles, St. Paul addresses the members of the Churches to which he is writing as “holy ones”, or, as the Authorized Bible renders this expression, “saints”.  (3)    The Church is called a “holy temple”, a “holy priesthood” and a “holy nation” (4) and the root of her very name in the original Greek New Testament has connotations similar to those of the words meaning holy. (5)

 

In reference to Christian believers and Churches, holiness can either be something attributed to us on account of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us by His Death (Heb. 10:14) or it can be something to which we are called to strive (Heb. 12:14, 1 Pet 1:15-16).   Clearly there is a difference between these two kinds of holiness and the difference is comparable to that between two different kinds of righteousness that the New Testament also speaks about, that which St. Paul discusses at length in his epistle to the Romans as being credited to the believer on the basis of grace (Rom. 4) and that which St. James attributes to the believer’s works (Jas. 2:14-26).   It should not be assumed that because of this parallel usage in the New Testament holiness has become merely another word for righteousness.   Holiness retains its primary meaning from the Old Testament of being reserved or set apart for God.  By His Sacrifice on the Cross, Jesus Christ has reserved us who believe in Him, individually and as the spiritual society that is His Church, for Himself.   By the same Sacrifice He has taken away our sins and given to us the righteousness whereby we are accepted by God.    Although accomplished by the same Saviour in the same Sacrifice these are two different things and our understanding and appreciation of what our Saviour has done for us is diminished if we blur them into one.   Similarly, when St. Peter calls us to be “holy in all manner of conversation (6)” (1 Petr 1:15) the holiness of which he writes must be distinguished from what is often called practical righteousness.   Since both pertain to everyday behaviour it might be harder to conceptualize the difference here, but think of practical righteousness and practical holiness as two different aspects of the behaviour to which the Christian is called.   Practical righteousness is the aspect defined by it being right rather than wrong.   Holiness, however, is the aspect that sets it apart from the behaviour of the world.  The opposite of the holiness to which the Christian is called is worldliness.   Worldliness is the condition of being of the world.   “The world” in this sense of the word means neither “God’s Creation” nor “human civilization” but rather the evil that operates in these and which forms, along with the flesh in the sense of the evil in fallen human nature and the devil the triumvirate of the Christian’s spiritual enemies.   It consists, St. John tells us, of “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16).   Worldliness is conformity to these things, holiness is being set apart unto God from them.  

 

That the New Testament does not provide the Church with a lengthy and elaborate set of rules about consecrating places and times to replace the Ceremonial Law of the Old Testament does not mean that reserving these things for God is any less important under the New Covenant than the Old.   The Old Covenant operated on the principle of Law.   The New Covenant, the Covenant of the Gospel, operates on the principles of Grace and Liberty.   The Christian’s liberty, St. Paul tells us in several places, is not to be used as a license to sin and the Christian living out his liberty under the Gospel should, actually, manifest a higher level of righteousness than that attainable under the Law.   Since, as we have seen, holiness is no less important under the New Testament than the Old, what is true of righteousness is true of holiness as well.   Those who take Christian liberty to mean that the Church, no longer under the Ceremonial Law that separated Israel from the Gentile nations, ought not to consecrate the spaces and places in which she meets to God, or to reserve the day of Resurrection for God each week as the Lord’s Day, or to set Holy Feasts and Fasts in commemoration of the events of the Gospel such as those remembered this week have twisted the matter entirely beyond recognition.   Christian liberty means that the Church is free to do precisely this and since her appreciation of and capacity for holiness ought to be greater under the Covenant of Christian liberty than what was available under the Law and we should expect more places, people, and days to be reserved for God under the Gospel than under the Law rather than fewer and have no business sneering at the holy days celebrated in Christian liberty in remembrance of the Gospel as “man-made” or “pagan”.

 

   (1)   The primary words used for “holy” in the Hebrew Old Testament – קָדוֹשׁ (qadosh), Greek New Testament -  ἅγιος  (hagios), and in the Latin liturgy – sanctus, all belong to word families  that stress the ideas of  “separate”, “set apart” or even “cut”, as do the primary English synonyms for “holy” – “sacred” and the archaic “hallowed”   Oddly enough, this is not the case with the word “holy” and its German cognate heilig.   These belong to a family of words including “health” and “whole” which would seem to have almost the opposite flavor, that of completeness rather than separation.

   (2)   This is the Fourth Commandment by the Jewish, Reformed, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox systems of numbering the Commandments.   The Roman Catholics and Lutherans number it as the Third Commandment.

   (3)   Obviously this does not apply to the epistles addressed to individuals rather than Churches.   Interestingly though, in his epistle to Philemon he twice uses the same term to refer to the Christians in the Colossian Church to which Philemon belonged.   In his first epistle to the Thessalonians he uses a similar expression “holy brethren”, albeit at the end of the epistle when he gives instructions for its reading (5:27).   In Hebrews there is no formal salutation at the beginning of the epistles, but he calls those to whom he is writing “holy brethren” in one spot (3:1), and instructs his readers to “salute…all the saints” at the end (13:24).    This leaves the Galatians as the notable exception to the rule.

   (4)   St. Paul twice speaks about a “temple of God” in 1 Corinthians.   The second time, the nineteenth verse of the sixth chapter, would seem from the context to be talking about the literal, physical, bodies of the Corinthian believers.   The first time, however, in the third chapter verses 16-17, which begin with “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God”, the wording suggests that they are collectively the temple of God, meaning that the Corinthian Church is in view, which makes sense considering that schism is the topic that is being addressed in this earlier section of the epistle.   The references to the Church as a “holy priesthood” and “holy nation” come from 1 Peter, verses 2:5 and 2:9 respectively.   St. Peter is addressing the same mostly Jewish Christians in what we now call Turkey to whom St. Paul wrote the epistle of Hebrews and in these verses he makes his point by employing the Old Testament’s language regarding Israel.

   (5)    Ἐκκλησία when used in non-religious contexts would usually be translated “assembly”.   The legislative assembly of Athens, for example, was called by this word.   It was formed by adding the preposition meaning “out of” in both Greek and Latin to the verb καλέω which means exactly what it sounds like as it shares a common ancestor with its English equivalent “I call”.    The “assembly” is formed of those who are “called out” (cf. Rev. 5:9-10).       

   (6)   “Conversation” in the English of the Authorized Bible does not mean what it means in present day usage.   We use it to mean talking to each other.   In 1611 it meant conduct or behaviour as carried out in society, in the company of others.