Gospel of Saint John

00:00
Welcome to this Bible study. My name is Najee Mawad. I'm also known as Michael. You can also call me Bob if you wish. I'll answer to any of those. Before we begin, show of hands, how many of you have, this is the first time you're in a Bible study with me. Please raise your hand. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. That's very helpful. So for those of you who have been

00:29
two Bible studies I've given before. There's going to be some repeat material you've seen. I'll ask for your patience. Anyway, it's a good repetition. um

00:42
What I want to tell you at the outset is the reason why we are studying Scripture isn't so we become Scripture specialists. That's not what we're here for. I suspect most of you, maybe all of you, are not in a theology department.

01:05
You have lives to lead and you're here because you have questions and you're on a quest, you're on a search. We study scripture because it's a mirror to our soul and in the back of that mirror is the face of Jesus Christ. So we study scripture to better know ourselves, which is why this is a 15 lecture long study of the Gospel of St. John.

01:35
I could have done it in one lecture, in four lectures. The reason why it's 15 is because it's formative. My hope is that at the end of the study, you would have...

01:52
done the two things that our Lord is asking us to do. Repent and convert. That's an ongoing process for all of us. As long as we live here, we're supposed to do that. I hope this will help you do precisely that.

02:09
All right, with that in mind, I want to thank Father Soroki and Paul Jonah for making this possible. had taught, I've taught scripture in different churches, but mostly at St. Ephraim, Maronite Catholic Church. I'm a Maronite. That's Maronite, not Marionite, not Mennonite. If you're wondering about that, Maronites are Catholic.

02:38
And the Maronite Church was founded by Saint Marin, hence we take after his name, fourth century saint. And the one distinctive feature of the Maronite Church is that it's the only patriarchal church in the Catholic family that does not have an equivalent outside of the Catholic Church. So, you know, the Latin right has the Protestants who left. There are no...

03:08
Maronites outside the Catholic Church. We've been Catholic all the way through. We're a very small church. um

03:20
But.

03:28
OK. um But we've.

03:38
Okay. We're here in San Diego. We have this one parish and that's where I've given most of my Bible studies and then I stopped after a number of years. And then Paul Jonah is the one who yanked me out and asked me to do it again. And here we are. um

03:56
Let me tell you a little bit about how this is going to work. It's a bi-weekly Bible study, so it's every other Wednesday in 15 parts. The format is, well, I try to finish at 7.55, but I don't promise that. But we'll try. There'll be a five minute break for those of you who would like to leave. You can do so for those of you would like to stay for Q &A. We'll have a 30 minute Q &A right after.

04:23
My audience are folks who are Catholic, adults, and the children can be here at the parents discretion. But primarily I am addressing adult Catholics. There are folks who are not Catholic who attend and they're absolutely welcome. They just need to know where I come from.

04:46
My style is direct, pretty much a two by four. I don't know why people keep coming, because I don't have a nice style.

04:57
I'm the first one to admit it. In fact, not too long ago, I was at a church. My son, I have seven children, by the way, and six girls, one son, one boy, and he's at the seminary becoming a priest. And I some persons who came over to me and they're telling me, Anthony, his name is Anthony. Anthony is wonderful. When he smiles, you see the face of God on him. There's just going on and on about how wonderful my son is, and I'm kind of a little bit kind of, yeah, I don't have that. You get my drift, right?

05:27
So, but I want to be nice, so I told them, well, yeah, well, he takes after his mother. And the dear woman, without missing a beat, says, yes, I know.

05:39
She said, when you go up to read, you put the fear of God in us. I don't know why, I'm not trying to, but that's my style. So just be aware. I love clarity. I don't like ambiguity. So most of my statements are going to be very crisp. And if I can't, I'll tell you. I address Catholic living, like I said earlier. I'm not trying to form theologians.

06:07
I want to bring to your attention certain things that are important for all of us as Catholics to grow in our faith. um I tend to follow the scriptures standard because I read scripture. So if you hear me say man, I mean humanity. I use the word in its old meaning. I'll try whenever I can to remember to include both gender. I'm not very good at it. There is no intent behind it. It's just habit. ah

06:36
I don't tend to say we, that's not my style, I'll say you, because I'm talking to you, and when I say you, I mean you. And if I don't, I'll let you know. I do tend to meander, it happens, so just bear with me. And um if you want to bring stuff, you can at least consider...

07:00
getting a copy of the RSVC CE Bible. It's the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition. um It is not the easiest to read. New American Bible is much smoother, but it is far closer and faithful to the original, which makes it a better Bible for study.

07:19
Not necessary, just that's the Bible I use. Most of the text that you will see quoted here come from the RSVCE. So if you have a different version, you might see variations. ah Bring a notepad and pen, take notes if you want, water, and then please feel free to donate cookies for all the folks who are here. That would be fantastic.

07:43
Odds and ends. First, even when 15 lectures you'll see were basically scratching the tip of the iceberg, I don't claim that I'm going to tell you everything about the Gospel of St. John. Like St. Ephraim said, if you go to a source of water and you have a sip, do not be jealous that you did not consume all of the source.

08:12
someone else might come and have a bigger sip of a different one. Just rejoice. What you'll hear from me is one aspect of the Gospel of St. John. There are probably others that I'm not touching on, but some other teacher might be able to do that for you. ah Nevertheless, for those of you who are new, it will feel like getting a sip out of fire hydrant.

08:41
This is a heady Bible study. It's serious. And I would like you to be patient with me. You're going to be hit with a bunch of concepts you probably never heard before. And you can talk to some of the folks who are here and you will see they'll tell you the same thing after five or six lectures. It'll start to click. So be patient and hang in there. And the last thing I'll say, don't bring me broccoli.

09:11
In my Bible study, oftentimes if I want to talk about moral issues, specific issues that may pertain to addiction, since I do have younger folks, I decided that I'll talk about people who are addicted to broccoli and leaving to people's imagination to fill in the blanks. That's what I did. Guess what? Some folks thought that I love broccoli.

09:39
And so they started bringing me organic bags of broccoli. Let me be very, very clear. I tolerate broccoli because my wife puts it into the food. If I had my drudders, I would never eat that thing. No broccoli. Thank you.

09:58
Now, for those of you who would like to do so, no obligation, you can grab that QR code and that will allow you to submit questions anonymously throughout the study. So if there's a question that you're thinking about, you can do so. During the Q &A, you're more than welcome to raise your hand and ask the question as well. This is just to facilitate it for those of you who would like to do it. I would like to emphasize there are no silly questions.

10:29
Don't let that thought stop you. If you have a question in mind, be assured 50 other people have the same question. So please ask it. I welcome all of your questions, all of them.

10:44
All right, you guys got that? Perfect.

10:50
Here's the plan. These are the 15 lectures. um

10:59
Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to review all of this. I'm just showing it to you to tell you there's a plan.

11:08
The only thing I'll point out, and I'm going to repeat that, is that you see that there is this division that I already indicated between, well actually this arrow, this top thing should be a little lower, there's the prologue, which we're to cover two weeks from now, and then we get into the book of signs, and then the book of glory. That's a pretty standard division for the book, for the Gospel of St. John. That's all I'll say right now, don't worry too much about it, I'll repeat that.

11:39
Today we're going to cover some basics. We're going to talk about content and intent, context and intent. And this is an important thing that I need to mention. And I'll do it only once and then we'll move on. Then we'll talk about biblical interpretive principles, the covenant, the heart of the matter, and we hit conclusion. There is an addendum that you can grab. I'm not going to cover it today, but it's in the deck. By the way, you see at the bottom this thing. Can I point?

12:09
Let's see, can I point? Yeah, I can. This here, Corbono, that is the website where you can find all the talks. It's free and it's available. And then in each of these talks and each of the podcasts, I attach all the material that you see here. So if you want them, you can grab them from there. ah Do check it out. This is my website. Like I said, it's free. You might want to also subscribe to the newsletter. I use it to remind people.

12:37
when the podcast is ready and when there is a lecture. That's all I do. Now if you're wondering about this addendum, I'll explain later, but it's there at end of the deck. Now if you please rise and we'll say this prayer together. In the of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful.

13:06
and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and thy shall be created and you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy his consolations. Through Christ our Lord, amen. May I receive the wisdom?

13:35
In the name of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Please be seated.

13:41
Okay, before I get into this section, I need to talk a little bit more about myself and tell you how I got into this Bible study business. It was not intentional. It was never my plan to do Bible studies. You might hear a little bit of an edge in my voice, because I feel like I got bamboozled into this business when I never asked for it.

14:06
I have, I hold a PhD in computational geometry and graph theory. That's a branch of theoretical computer science.

14:17
not the sort of study you do to lead Bible studies. I came down to San Diego from Canada because I wanted to help Catholic Answers, which is a small Catholic organization that sort of fields questions about the faith. I worked in IT.

14:35
That was my job. When I went to St. Ephraim and I met our pastor, Fr. Nabil, he asked me, do I do? And I made a mistake. Instead of saying, I work in IT at Catholic Answers, you see where this is going, right? I said, because I want to indicate where I work first, I said, I work at Catholic Answers, he didn't let me finish. You work at Catholic Answers, you do Bible study for us.

15:06
That's how we sport.

15:10
Now, we have respect for priests. if a priest stands in persona Christi, and if a priest says something, you take it seriously. And I went to my friend and what just happened? And I thought, OK, fine. He wants me to do some Bible study. I can do that. At least about one topic that I know pretty well, Our Lady. I know quite a bit about Our Lady, so I am going to do four or five studies once a month about Our Lady, and I'll be done.

15:39
Nobody will ask for anything anymore. I fulfilled my requirement and I'm finished. I'm a lazy guy. I don't want to work. So I went with a topic that I knew. So I did this once a month. And I thought, we're done.

15:58
Instead they came back and said, could you do it weekly?

16:02
Now I was flabbergasted. Why would they want me to do it weekly? I don't hold a degree in theology. I'm not a theologian. But then, because they asked, I started doing weekly. And it went on for 15 years.

16:18
Nevertheless, I still don't hold a degree in theology, which always is something that bugs me. What do I really want, like in the Bible and the Gospel of St. John? I want to go to a theologian who has done all the hard work. I can read a book, and I can pick out the good points and I can present them. That's easy peasy. That's what I want to do.

16:39
Well, that's what I tried to do.

16:43
and then I run into a problem.

16:47
So, if you read theologians, modern theologians, that is, their majority report is that the Gospel of St. John was written after 100 AD by an unknown author who is not St. John the Apostle. Their argument is that many passages in the synoptics, the synoptics are the Gospel of St. Matthew, St. Luke and St. Mark.

17:14
um One thing that really bugs me is when people will say John, Luke, Mark, and Matthew, as if they're their buddies. That bugs me. It's insane.

17:31
Saint John. So the argument is that many passages in the Gospel of Saint Luke, Saint Mark, Saint Matthew that involve Saint John are missing in the Gospel of Saint John, particularly the Transfiguration. So the thought is if Saint John wrote this Gospel, he should at least mention the Transfiguration. So the argument goes, since he didn't, it wasn't Saint John who wrote it.

17:56
Now I don't know about you, but I find that argument very spacious. It's certainly not convincing. That is to me theology fiction. That is not grounded in reality.

18:09
St. John is not named in the Gospel. That's true. And then the Gospel centers on controversy with the Jews, therefore it expresses a sentiment of an early Christian community. Hence, some theologians will tell you that this Gospel is the product of a Christian community who wrote it over years. And the final version that we have here

18:36
may have some faint echo with something that St. John said.

18:44
When I read these books, I feel these people are dissecting a dead body. I'm not impressed, I'm not inspired, I mean. I'm not uplifted. I'm depressed. That's my conundrum. I can't take that stuff and present it to you because you'll end up with doubts and confusion, which is really not necessary.

19:12
So now I'm left doing the hard work, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place, and I don't have a degree in theology. So, what am I going to do? By the way, the Minority Report is that the Gospel was written by St. John before 70 AD. That's where I stand. I'll show you why. So I need to explain to you my approach. I need to be very transparent with you so you understand where I'm coming from.

19:42
First, text without context is pretext.

19:49
Perfect example is something that is often repeated in churches that bugs me to no end. Whenever two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be with them.

20:02
people get very romantic with that one particular verse and they completely misunderstand the intent. Why? Because it's taken out of context. You see, when you study scripture, one of the things you want to do is ask yourself this question, who is our Lord talking to? That matters a great deal. In this instance, he wasn't talking to his disciples, which would be us.

20:31
He was talking to his apostles. Which would be the hierarchy of the church. Why am I saying this? Because a couple of verses later he tells the same audience... Whomever sins you retain shall be retained in heaven. And whomever sins you lose shall be loose in heaven. I don't think that applies to any of us here. I don't think that any one of us would think he has that power. So it's the same group of people to whom he said the same...

21:00
those two statements. for whatever reason we take that other one out of context, we apply it liberally to all of us.

21:09
The problem is that as a secondary meaning it would make sense if you have a number of faithful who are praying in Jesus' name, yes, he can be in some sense with them. But the primary meaning...

21:24
is this, when he spoke to his apostles, he was establishing the infallibility of councils. You see?

21:35
When you bishops of the Catholic Church gather in my name, I am with you. That's why councils are infallible. So now, you have been robbed of that explanation, which means you've been robbed of that beauty that the Lord sees in the church.

21:59
That's why it bugs me. Text, context, pretext. Context implies intent. Why was a piece of text written? Now all of you, I am sure, know the intro to the Gospel of St. John. Yes?

22:19
Anybody can quote that to me? How does it start?

22:25
In the beginning was the word. And every theologian will tell you immediately while then he is making reference to Genesis. Because the book of Genesis starts with in the beginning.

22:38
None of bothered to say why.

22:44
They just tell you, he's making a reference to Jesus. But why? What's the intent? If there is a reference, there's an intent. What is it? If you can't understand the intent, we're blinded and we're confused. It'd like if I said, in the beginning was the Word, now I'm gonna go in other books of the scripture and find a book where maybe in the beginning of the chapter,

23:13
the first chapter, there is the word word. Shall I then say St. John is making reference to that book? Because the words are the same. Is that enough?

23:24
Do you do that in any other context?

23:29
We don't. You want intent. And I'll explain what I mean in a minute. What did the author want to convey? So to understand a text, we need to uncover the structural intent. Why was the text put together the way it was put together? There ought to be a logic in the text that we need to be able to uncover. Moral intent. What should we learn from this text? Prophetic intent. Where is the text leading us?

23:55
Let me illustrate what I'm trying to say. Those are the difficulties that I find when I'm reading these modern theologians. Look at this picture.

24:05
Now you look at this picture, it looks like it's a bridge to nowhere. Looks maybe it's a project that ran out of money and they stopped and they left it this way.

24:18
Here's what I'm doing. I'm interpreting out of context. You see?

24:25
If you see the full context...

24:29
Now suddenly you see the intent.

24:33
This particular type of bridge cannot be built any other way. The two parts have to start and meet in the middle.

24:45
Now you see context. Now you see intent. Now you understand what is going on. Again, you see somebody holding a very sharp knife.

24:58
Is that someone who is ready to do an act of violence? If you zoom out.

25:06
you actually see is about to save someone. Again, if you zoom in, which is what happens when you take something verse by verse or when you ignore what is surrounding the text, you get tunnel vision and you don't understand anymore what was the purpose. When you zoom out, what is zooming out? Zooming out is being able to say, well, here's what it means. This is the purpose of this.

25:38
That's what we need to do. That's what these guys are not doing.

25:44
Again, you look at something like this and you think, you know, maybe it's a piece of trash.

25:53
if you zoom out.

25:58
you see the full picture.

26:03
That's what I want to do. I want to show you the purpose of the Gospel of St. John.

26:12
I'm going to lay it out in front of you, so you decide.

26:18
My hope in the end is that you will develop that sort of approach, that sort of thinking, because faith is the illumination of the intellect.

26:34
Faith is the illumination of the intellect. Faith is mostly an intellectual process, not an act of will.

26:43
Faith is like 2 plus 2 equals 4. That's faith.

26:49
Belief is taking faith, mixing it with hope and doing something with it. But faith is illuminating your intellect. Illumination of the intellect means what? Means that your intellect now is able to grasp the beauty. It isn't just a pure semantic understanding, it is grasping the beauty. Scripture is like a cathedral.

27:16
If you've never been to Notre Dame, and if I took you there...

27:23
Initially you might be thinking about the structure, but when you walk in you can forget all of this. Why? Because you're captivated by the beauty. The totality of the architecture captivates you, transforms into beauty, and beauty leads to love.

27:41
That's what faith is. So I hope to show you the beauty of this cathedral we call scripture.

27:55
So oftentimes people will look at scripture like this. They look at this picture and they go, all right, this is pointillisme. It's a specific style of art where the artist draws dot by dot. Point in French means dot. So hence the word pointillisme. So it's dots. You can see it, it's dots. And you look at this and you start to analyze it, you might say, huh, he used a lot of green. And he didn't use any black.

28:25
And maybe this purple is some sort of late edition by somebody who just came and added on top of it.

28:32
You might think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. This is what modern theologians do with scripture. This was originally here. This other thing is a late edition by some other editor who slid it here from some other source. That's what they do. They're like Dr. Frankenstein building a monster.

28:53
Why? Because they don't have context. They don't understand the intent.

29:00
If you zoom out.

29:04
Are you going to now spend time thinking about the colors of the green and will you say that the purple was a late addition? No. You grasp the totality of the picture in an instant. You know its purpose. You know what it's made for.

29:20
That's what we need to do. That's what I want to do when we study the Last Will of St. John. I'm going to show you that.

29:33
So, I call this the Peacock Principle.

29:39
So you can focus on fragments and do these sorts of things. It's like somebody who looks at a wedding uh certificate and study the chemical composition of the paper, being completely oblivious to the commitment behind the paper.

29:59
You can do that or you can look at the full picture and you behold the intent. Oh, it's a peacock.

30:07
So the error that modern critics do is that they forgot to step back. They see committee edits where we see apostolic artistry. I want to convince you, I hope that by the end you will be convinced that the author of the Gospel of St. John is St. John the Apostle. He wrote it in one shot. There were no late additions and there is purpose behind the text.

30:37
And there was a good reason why he didn't even mention the transfiguration.

30:46
So we don't look at dots in the Gospel without first remembering that we are looking at the face of the King.

30:57
So.

31:00
The modern scholars trap, analyzing the text while ignoring the intent. This is like analyzing the chemistry of the ink on marriage license while ignoring the vows. The mosaic analogy, without the sun of the covenant, the verses of St. John look like random stones. And again, you can think of it as Stradivarius' violin. You can analyze the wood of the gospel forever, but if you don't hear the music of the Father's love, you've missed the point.

31:32
So our approach, we start with why. Why does St. John start with, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was why? If we can't answer this, not gonna go anywhere. We've got to be able to give a cogent answer that explains why he started this way. That's the interpretive key that'll allow us to get into the text.

32:01
So the reason why he wrote this way is because he wanted to prove the king has arrived to sign a new covenant. Every omission of synoptic stories and an intentional design choice, every Jewish custom is a legal fulfillment of new bond. You may not understand what I'm writing here, what I wrote, but it will become clear as we go through the text and as I repeat what I'm trying to say.

32:26
My approach is data driven.

32:32
The gospel is infallibly true and therefore it is reliable data. The gospel is data. I'm a mathematician, I'm driven by data. That's how I think.

32:46
From that data, the author's intent emerges. Therefore, every assertion we make must be substantiated by scripture. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'll show you how I substantiate my claim from the text. It's up to you to decide and challenge my assertions. If I give you a map of a city, but you think it's a painting, you'll complain about the lack of color. If I give you a covenant, but you think it's a committee report, you'll complain about the lack of synoptic details.

33:16
We are here to read a covenant. Now you heard me repeat this word a bunch of times. I'll get into that in a minute.

33:30
So I'd like to.

33:37
talk to you now a little bit about how we interpret scripture

33:44
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 115 through 119. The Four Senses of Scripture.

33:53
According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of scripture, the literal and the spiritual. The spiritual sense is subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. Don't worry too much about this. I'm going to just mention it, but my entire focus is going to be on the literal sense. So, earlier when I told you about whenever two or three gathered my name there, spiritual, you can take the spiritual sense of it and say, oh, from a moral standpoint,

34:23
If we're together and praying, Jesus is with us in some way. But that's the secondary meaning. The literal meaning was something completely different because it was addressed to the apostles.

34:34
The profound concordance of the four senses guarantee all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church. The meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rule of sound interpretation, all other senses of sacred Scripture are based on the literal. If we miss the literal, we miss everything.

34:56
And that happens so often. I can't tell you how often that happens. People miss the literal meaning. We don't understand anything anymore. I'll give you another example. You've heard, you've probably heard that reading in which our Lord says something rather cryptic. He's talking about rich people and then he says, the eye is the lamp of the soul. If your eye is dark,

35:26
How dark is your soul?

35:29
What is he talking about?

35:33
I've heard so many...

35:38
Imaginative explanation.

35:41
Here's the deal.

35:44
In Hebrew, if you want to say that somebody is a Scrooge, you say his eyes are dark.

35:56
That's what he was talking about.

36:00
It was a metaphor that is very well understood by the people who were listening to him. We don't understand it because we obviously lost the context and the meaning. So then people come up with very imaginative explanations about something that has nothing to do with the text.

36:19
Yeah. I gotta tell you, oftentimes going to mass is almost like a near occasion of sin. I get so upset. Anyway.

36:31
The spiritual sense, thanks to the unity of God's plan, not only the text of Scripture, but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs. So the allegorical sense is really the sense that deals with Christ. The moral sense is the one that applies to us, and the anagogical sense is the sense that applies to the Church and the End Times. Here's how it was taught in the 16th century. It's called the Catholic quadriga, invented by Saint Anselm, I believe.

36:59
Take the word temple. What does the word temple mean? The time of Jesus. The literal sense of the word temple at the time of Jesus is the building that was erected by Herod. That's the literal sense. The anagogical sense is the body of Christ. Destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it. Jesus himself applies that sense to him. That's the anagogical sense. applies to Christ.

37:30
Analogical sense, I'm sorry. The moral meaning is you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul takes the temple, literal meaning, and then gives it a moral meaning. And finally, the analogical meaning, the church is the new temple of Jerusalem.

37:51
So those are the four senses, that's how they play together. They don't apply everywhere, but they apply mostly everywhere. However, no matter how you think about it, the literal meaning is what we need to go after. We need the literal meaning. The challenge that we have isn't that we are 2,000 years later speaking in English, when this was written most likely in Hebrew initially. The problem is that we've lost a fundamental, a fundamental...

38:21
understanding of the way God deals with his people. That's the silver lining in scripture. That is the foundation. We've lost that and we need to recover it. And I'm going to tell you about it in a minute.

38:38
So content and unity of all of scripture. Be especially attentive to the content and unity of the whole scripture. Different as the books which compose it may be scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God's plan of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart open since his Passover. This paragraph emphasizes that sacred scripture must be read as a unified whole. What does that mean? It means that anything I'm going to tell you cannot be contradicted by scripture. Anytime I think about, oh, this might mean this.

39:07
The first question comes to mind is, are there any other parts in scripture where I find the same pattern? Is this pattern I'm thinking about apply only here? If it applies only in one place in scripture, I find it suspect.

39:23
But if it applies multiple places, I'm much more comfortable.

39:31
This is known as the canonical approach, meaning that no single passage should be interpreted in isolation, but in the context of the entire Bible.

39:41
So for instance, in the Gospel of St. John, our Lord says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Okay, how are we to interpret this? Well, we think of St. Dismas on the cross. And he didn't the flesh of the Son of Man, he didn't drink His blood, but he's the first canonized saint.

40:07
So you can't interpret what Jesus said apart from this. You've got to take all of scripture and make sure whatever interpretation you're providing is consistent with the whole of scripture.

40:24
Now, literal doesn't always mean literally. That's a mistake that some folks do, for instance, when they decide to interpret the first chapter of Genesis literally. God created the world in six days, literally, 24-7. Maybe the case, the Church hasn't ruled one way or the other, but maybe it's not the case. We to be careful. However, there are specific examples, like...

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For instance, in the six days of creation, in Genesis 1, 11, 19, God said, let the earth put forth vegetation a third day, and then in verse 16, He made the stars also. So the stars were created after the vegetation.

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Now you might come up with a cosmology that works that way, but was it the author's intent when he wrote that? Was he thinking about cosmology and aliens? Or perhaps he was thinking about the fact that when this book was penned down, the Jews were exiles in Babylon. Now Babylon was the New York of the time. It was hip.

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It was cool. The temple of Marduk was the place to go if you wanted to party.

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Now imagine a conversation between a young Babylonian and a young Jew. And the Babylonian will say, ah ah, Marduk is one of our gods. We have plenty of gods and then we have all these beautiful statues. Who's your god? Well, I can't say. Why? Well, can't say his name. What does he look like? We don't know. We can't represent him.

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The Jews were under severe cultural pressure.

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The Babylonians were known to study stars. They were astronomers, but they were also into astrology. The implication is that the stars affect your life. This is still well and alive today. There people who read their horoscope. Now if you're a Catholic, don't do that. Or if you do, go to confession. Because it's a sin.

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Perhaps the intent of the author by lining the stars under the grass is to tell his readers, uh-uh, stars have no impact on you.

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they have even less impact than the graph. In other words, the way this text was written was to strip away superstition.

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By the way, this is not my interpretation, it is that of...

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the late Cardinal Ratzinger. But now you see how intent gives meaning to the text. You understand at least why the author, the literal meaning was, huh, I have these issues that I'm dealing with and I want people to understand that these stars have no impact on your life, therefore I'm going to write it this way.

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That's what we're after. We're after intent.

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Jonah and the belly of the fish. So they took up Jonah and threw him into the sea and the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now, I don't know much about fish. Actually, I don't like fish.

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I eat it, it tastes like wet cardboard in my mouth. Don't ask me, something wrong with me. I'm not big into fish. My kids love fish. They know a lot about fish. And I'll tell you, there isn't a fish that can swallow a man. Whales can't do that. Their throat isn't big enough to swallow a man. So whatever that fish was,

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doesn't sound like a fish we know. Therefore, we have to have a loose hand. Maybe an angel, and maybe something God created supernaturally in the moment. We don't know, but we have to. We can't take it literally to mean a fish, because we're faced with data that says otherwise.

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The Gospel of St. Matthew Chapter 2 verse 1, Why is man from the east? For we have seen his star. That's a funny star that appears and disappears.

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By all accounts, if you look at the behavior of that star, given that stars are also synonyms for angels, most likely this was an angel, not a real star. There's no star that this way. First of all, if you look at the sky, you will not see a star moving. They don't move.

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So you line up the data with what we know. There needs to be consistency. It has to be coherent. And you let the meaning emerge from that coherence. And finally,

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In the Gospel of St. John, am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread which I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Here we have to take it literally. That's what the Protestants don't do. They tend to interpret Scripture literally everywhere except here. In fact, when Jesus said, Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, the word he uses is chew.

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There's no ambiguity about what he was trying to say. And we'll get into that when we get to the Gospel of St. John Chapter 6. All right. So literal doesn't always mean literally, but sometimes it does.

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So, in the gospels, audience matters, like I told you. God the Father...

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Our Lady, St. John the Baptist, Chief Priests and Elders and Pharisees and Sadducees and Scribes, Herodians, demonic spirits, apostles, disciples, Roman authorities, crowd, pagan. You've got to know who Jesus is talking to so you can infer the literal meaning. It makes a huge difference.

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Oh yeah, I told you about this so I'm not going to repeat it. But it's there. That's exactly the argument I made. I'm not going to repeat it again. So, Four Senses of Scripture. Scripture must be interpreted in light of Scripture and the living tradition of the Catholic Church and we have to pay attention to the audience. between now and next time, you might want to try and read the Gospel of St. John and as you go, ask yourself, who is Jesus talking to?

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Just get into that habit.

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Alright, now let's move on to the Covenant.

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Now if there's one thing I want you to remember from today is this.

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What is a covenant? A covenant is an agreement between a strong and weak party. Now key onto those two words, a strong and weak party. A covenant is not egalitarian. Not in scripture.

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So when you go to church to get married, you have a strong and weak party. And no, I don't mean the man is the strong and the woman is the weak. It's not at all what I mean. I mean strong party is God and the two sinners are the weak party.

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It spells the condition the weak party must fulfill. There's no if, there is no but. The strong party will tell the weak party, this is what you're going to have to fulfill. If you fulfill, if the weak party is faithful to the covenant, the strong party blesses the weak party. And this is the bit that we dropped. If they are disobedient, the strong party curses the weak party.

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Blessings and curses.

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That structure, by the way, was the standard political structure of all ancient kingdoms in the Middle East. When a kingdom want to conquer a city, they send an army, but before they go to war against the city, they make this announcement. This is King So-and-So. They introduce the strong party. This is what he's done. This is his power.

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And then they lay out the condition, surrender the city to us if you do. And if you are, if you send your guys, your men to fight with us, in a year from now we'll make you citizens of our kingdom. But if you betray us, if you play games with our enemies, we'll destroy you. Blessings versus. So introduction of the strong party, laying out the conditions.

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blessings and curses, standard fare. That's how they function.

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And you see that structure in Genesis.

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So the reason why Genesis starts by introducing God as the creator is because it's a covenantal document. It starts by telling you who the strong party is.

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Then it introduces the weak party. Hadam and Eve. Then the strong party tells the weak party, here's the garden, you're gonna till. You can eat from everything except from this tree. If you touch this tree, so if you don't touch this tree, you're blessed, you live forever and you're everything you need. If you touch that tree, you'll die. Blessings versus, this is it.

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Anybody in the ancient world would have read this thing and then, okay, we understand this is a strong party. But he is really the strong party. He's created everything. So there's no way of escaping him. We can't get out of his power.

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And that's what he asked us to do. Here's the week party. And boy did they mess it up.

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they would have immediately recognized the structure, the intent. We don't. Because we no longer live covenantally. I hope that by the end of this Bible study, even through it, you will start to really live biblically, meaning covenantally.

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because that affects profoundly how you live your faith.

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So the Old Testament five major covenants, Adam, the tree of life, Noah, Noah is going to be really important because again in chapter six, the reason why the Jews reacted really strongly, the disciples reacted really strongly when Jesus told them, you must drink my blood. They reacted strongly to him saying, you must drink my blood, even more so than eat my flesh. The reason is because

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One of the curses in the covenant of Noah was that you will be an outcast if you eat flesh with its blood.

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So they all understood precisely what Jesus was telling them. He was asking them to break the Noahic covenant.

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and they couldn't understand how they would be able to do that but if they were to do that they would be excommunicated thrown out of the family of Adam and Jesus would have said bingo because you can't belong to the family of new Adam without leaving the family of Adam

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There was a covenantal crisis for these people. That's why they left him.

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Now you see, I give you the intent, the text illuminates itself. Without it, you're scratching your head. And you think it's about, they don't like blood. No.

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We still eat raw meat in the Middle East.

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That's not the problem. It was a covenantal crisis. Alright. The covenant with Abraham, with Moses, and with David. And then the New Testament covenant. Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood. I hope now you start to hear these words very differently. Every time you hear the chalice of my blood, you must understand I no longer belong to the family of Adam. I belong to the family of the new Adam.

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He purchased me with his blood.

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The blood of the new and eternal covenant which will be poured out for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins, do this in memory of me. So the covenant is fundamental. And my assertion is this. The Gospel of St. John is a covenantal text. In the Gospel, the prologue is the introduction of the strong party. The Book of Signs,

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which we're going to go through. We call it the book of signs because the seventh sign, St. John never uses the word miracle, uses the word signs. So of the wedding feast of Cana, he says this is the first sign. I'm going to show you quite conclusively, every one of those signs violates a Jewish law.

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The book of signs is Jesus taking over. It is a repeat of what I just told you. He's not only asking them to leave the covenant with Noah, he's even asking them to leave the covenant with Moses, is the way they understood it. It is him conquering.

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And in the book of glory is him instituting his kingdom. But it's kind of incomplete, isn't it? Because St. John starts with telling us, here's the strong party, he's coming, he conquered, he institutes his kingdom and he stops. What's missing is that how is he going to govern?

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Well guess what? That is the purpose of the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is the perennial kingdom of Jesus Christ, how He governs the world. Its main purpose isn't the end of the world, it's showing us Christ governing the world. So you put the two together, basically you're putting Humpty Dumpty back together, and now you have a full picture, end to end.

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That's the intent.

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and I can for the life of me.

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figure out why these very smart guys can't see it. Funny enough, when I read these books, not once do I find the word covenant used.

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It's mind blowing.

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So. uh

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So you see the strong party, the gospels introduce Jesus and he introduces God the Father. For instance, why does Saint Matthew start with the genealogy? He's introducing the strong party. But he's doing it from the Davidic line because he wants to show his kingship. Why does Saint Luke start with the genealogy? He's introducing the strong party, but he's doing it Because he's not talking to Jews, he's talking to Gentiles.

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What does St. uh John do? Again, in a sense, it's a genealogy, but it's Trinitarian. It is the introduction of the strong party. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It's right there in front of you.

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Okay. Now, some of you may be perturbed by this idea that God curses because I'm sure you haven't heard it. Presumably you've heard in a very consistent way that God is merciful and yes, God is absolutely merciful. 100%. God is merciful. But if I say God is merciful and I stop, it's almost a heresy. I need to complete that sentence.

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God is merciful to those who repent.

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God is merciful to those who repent. Otherwise, why did Saint Paul say in his letters, Vengeance is mine says the Lord, I will repay.

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God is merciful to those who repent. Yes, always. But we have to repent. That's on us.

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ah One thing I'll tell you...

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Once you start to understand the covenant, you may be tempted to look at the lives of people around you and go, oh, look at these people. Everything is going great for them, so they must be blessed. And look at those people. They have all these problems. They must be cursed. You're attempting to reverse engineer God's judgment.

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Don't do that. We're not God. We can't judge.

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And if anything, the book of Job demonstrates that this whole theology is completely wrong. doesn't work that way. So just don't do that. The purpose of the covenant is to remind us there's a strong party who takes care of everything. Our job is to align our will with his. If we can do that, he'll take care of the rest.

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All right. Now, the heart of the matter. And I'm sure I'm already over time.

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Okay, so I will throw that back into the next time because I'm not going be able to cover all this in detail. But I'll tell you this. I already alluded to it, but I'm going to repeat it again. My assertion is that when we get into the prologue, which is John chapter 1, verse 1 through 18, and I would suggest you read it before we reconvene, you'll find out that this text is...

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picture perfect covenant introduction of the strong party. um It starts with in the beginning was the word, the word was very lofty.

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And then it drops down and we have the second paragraph that says there was a man named John. Now the style changes completely. It's almost journalistic. It's no longer lofty. That's why it causes some of these modern theologians to tell you, oh, that was a later edition. Somebody came in and slid that in. But if you understand the way a covenant works, when the king sends his army, somebody's going to go talk to the city. That somebody.

01:01:18
Sorry, somebody shrunk that platform. That somebody is called a herald. There was a very well-defined role of the herald. The herald was the mouthpiece of the king. Whatever the herald says, the king says. Whatever the king says, the herald says.

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Guess what is the Assyrian and Babylonian word for herald?

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My luck.

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Now some of you here understood what the meaning of that word is. Malak means angel.

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Angels are covenantal heralds.

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What is then John? The Herald of the King.

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That's why the text was there. You introduce the strong party, you introduce this herald, and we'll move on. Everybody would know that because they were used to know, all right, this is the king, and this is guy who's going to talk to us on behalf of the king. That was it.

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I don't need to go find some late edition editor who's to come and slide this because the style is different. As if St. John cares about the style. He's not writing to impress you with his style.

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He's writing to tell you he's a strong party and John was not him because there was a controversy about St. John the Baptist. Some people thought he is the Messiah. In fact, some people today...

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in not in Gaza, the Palestinian territory, some of the Palestinians are Baptist. They still believe John the Baptist is the Messiah. So there was a controversy around this, so St. John addresses it, but his focus is to say, here's the king, here's the herald. uh

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That's it. The structure flows naturally.

01:03:33
So I'd like you to read this and then see if you can tease out those bits I told you about within these 18 verses. And then when we'll come back, I'll tell you more about the heart of the matter. And then we'll dive straight into this beautiful text. So with that in mind, I'd like you now to stand up. We'll finish with a word of prayer. Like I said, we'll take a five minute break if you need to leave.

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May God be with you if you'd like to stay for questions. We'll take those shortly. In the name of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Spirit, Lord Jesus, we want to praise you and thank you and give you glory for your gospel. We want to ask you to send the Holy Spirit upon us all to open our hearts, enlighten our minds.

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and help us see what you want us to see so that we may come to know you, love you, and serve you better every day of our life. And then one day, be happy with you in heaven forever. We ask this on the intercession of our Lady Mary Most Holy as we pray.

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Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death, amen. Saint Joseph. Saint Michael. All ye angels and saints. In the name of the Father, of the Son, the Holy Spirit, God bless you.