The Very Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready is the director of Orthodox Christian Studies within the Faculty of Divinity of Trinity College within the University of Toronto, where he teaches liturgy, Biblical studies, and pastoral theology.
Fr Geoffrey’s research interests focus on the enacted narrative of God and Israel in the Orthodox liturgy, as well as second Temple Judaism and Jewish-Christian origins, the “parting of the ways,” and Orthodox Christian theological dialogue with Judaism today. He teaches a course called “Salvation Is from the Jews: Christianity and Judaism in Theological Perspective and Dialogue.”
Under the auspices of the Orthodox Theological Association in America (OTSA), Fr Geoffrey chairs Orthodox Christians in Dialogue with Jews (OCDJ), a working group of theologians and dialogue partners studying and making recommendations to tackle elements of anti-Judaism in Orthodox preaching, teaching, and worship.
Fr Geoffrey is also on the steering committee of the global Orthodox Christian – Jewish dialogue co-sponsored by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), and was a participant and speaker at the 12th Academic Consultation held in Geneva in December 2025.
Fr Geoffrey is a regular participant in the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) including its theological committee. He is a co-founding director of Christian Jewish Dialogue of Canada (CJDC) and a an observer board member of the Christian Jewish Dialogue of Toronto (CJDT). He also takes part in the Chrétiens Orthodoxes en Dialogue avec les Juifs (CODJ) theological group in France.
He also pastors Holy Myrrhbearers Orthodox Mission, an Orthodox Church in America (OCA) parish that meets in the chapel of Trinity College on the University of Toronto campus.
Together with Fr Yuri Hladio, Fr Geoffrey produces a popular podcast on Orthodox liturgy and life, Enacting the Kingdom, which focused in its 11th season on the theme of Christianity within Judaism (see podcast info and links below).
Fr Geoffrey also represents the OCA on the Canadian Council of Churches’ Commission for Faith and Witness.
In addition to Fr Geoffrey’s involvement in all OCDJ events (see past seminars), here are some further online presentations that he has made.
Rev Dr Geoffrey Ready presents “Bearing Faithful Witness: Anti-Judaism in Christian Readings of the Scriptures” to an audience of the United Church of Canada in March 2024.
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of many of the Nazi death camps in the final months of the Second World War, OTSA’s working group Orthodox Christians in Dialogue with Jews (chaired by Fr Geoffrey Ready, Director of Orthodox Christian Studies at Trinity College) partnered in April 2025 with The Wheel journal, Volos Academy for Theological Studies, and ACER-MJO in hosting an online conference on “The Orthodox Church and the Shoah.”
This presentation on “The theological problem of the Shoah in Orthodox Christian tradition” was one of the introductory talks contextualising the wider issues discussed during the conference.
Conférence du Père Geoffrey Ready donnée le 15 mai 2025 « Dialogue avec le judaïsme: un chemin d’approfondissement pour la foi et la tradition orthodoxes » dans le cadre du cycle « La Liturgie après la Liturgie » organisé en partenariat par l’académie théologique de Volos et le vicariat Sainte Marie de Paris et Saint Alexis d’usine (patriarcat œcuménique).
In conjunction with its Canadian affiliate, the Christian Jewish Dialogue of Canada, on 9 September 2025, the ICCJ offered a webinar entitled “From 325 to 2025: The Council of Nicaea and Jewish-Christian Relations Today,” at which Fr Geoffrey was one of the panel of speakers.
“Renewing Orthodox Christian Faith, Worship, and Life through Jewish Dialogue.” Paper delivered at the American Academy of Religion, November 2024.
« Christianisme orthodoxe et Israël : renouveler un héritage commun » dans Manuel de Théologie d’Israël: L’Alliance jamais révoquée. Genève : Labor et Fides, 2025.
« Le christianisme orthodoxe et l’État d’Israël » dans Manuel de Théologie d’Israël: L’Alliance jamais révoquée. Genève : Labor et Fides, 2025.
“Christology According to the Scriptures: Complementing Nicaea with Jewish Narrative, Vocabulary, and Symbols.” Review of Ecumenical Studies, November 2025.
“The Council of Nicaea in Jewish-Christian Relations Today. An Orthodox Christian View,” Jewish-Christian Relations, November 2025.
« Le Concile de Nicée dans les relations judéo-chrétiennes aujourd’hui. Un point de vue chrétien orthodoxe, » Jewish-Christian Relations, novembre 2025.
“The Fire and the Water. Christian Antisemitism, Narrative Diagnosis, and Theological Repair,” Jewish-Christian Relations, March 2026 (talk given at Christian-Jewish Dialogue of Montreal on 17 February 2026).
« Le feu et l’eau. L’antisémitisme chrétien, diagnostic narratif et réparation théologique, » Jewish-Christian Relations, mars 2026 (Conférence donnée lors du Dialogue judéo-chrétien de Montréal le 17 février 2026).
Forthcoming: “Review of Orthodox Liturgy and Anti-Judaism.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 2026.
Forthcoming: Challenging Anti-Judaism in the Revised Common Lectionary: Reading It Straight. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2026. Co-authored with Ellen Charry and Bruce Chilton.
Enacting the Kingdom is a podcast about liturgy and life jointly hosted by Fr Geoffrey and his friend and Trinity College MDiv graduate Fr Yuri Hladio.
In John’s Gospel, we find a unique narrative of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well. He shows her deep compassion, speaking with her, honouring her, calling out her sin while calling her into the Kingdom. As a Samaritan, she represents the gentiles, the nations who are not part of the covenant community, being brought in. There is a particular line in this narrative that we will use as the focal point for this series: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”
Our theology, our understanding of who God is, is mediated through the story of God and Israel. It is through the calling of a particular people, a particular nation, that all nations are saved. It is through God’s interaction with this particular and imperfect people, that He reveals himself to be the God that we know and worship and ultimately recognise in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the central story that we participate in and are grafted into. You can’t have Jesus, and the Church, and its sacraments, and a spiritual life, and our destiny in the Kingdom of God, without grappling with the story of God and Israel.
Jesus of Nazareth was and is a Jew. In point of fact, he was a faithful and Torah-observant Jew and first century Rabbi. If we are interested in his teachings and his example, then we must understand he was a real person who lived in a real time within a real culture. It is impossible to understand his teachings without first understanding that he lived in fulfilment of Jewish tradition, not in rejection of it. The more we come to see this, the more we can fully live out our own Orthodox faith.
To miss this, and to separate ourselves from the story of God and Israel, is to put ourselves outside of the worship of the one true God – and surely we want to be counted as those who “worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”
In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus teaches his followers how to pray using what we now know as The Lord’s Prayer. As Christians, most of us would claim this prayer as quintessentially Christian, however we will find that it is also quintessentially Jewish in nature. Again, we see how Jesus, far from rejecting his tradition, lived and taught in fulfilment of it.
In this episode, Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri begin to discuss each clause and its deep connection with Jewish tradition, and how its themes ought to inform what it is we bring to prayer, both communal and personal.
We continue to work through the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus gave to his disciples who asked to learn how to pray, beginning with “Give us this day our daily bread.” Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri explore how this traditionally Jewish theme (e.g. manna as daily bread, relying solely on God’s provision) also points to the Christian practices of receiving Holy Eucharist, and participating in the Messianic age in the here and now, a foretaste of the life to come. Kind of like ordering a pumpkin spice latte at the end of summer. Seriously, listen for this analogy, it’s a gem!
We also discuss the etymology, and Jewish stories and traditions that might advocate for certain translations of the Lord’s Prayer: using “debts” vs “trespasses”, “temptation” vs “trial”, or “evil” vs “evil one”.
Judaism, from the beginning, in all of its multiple forms, had a built-in inter-family debate over what the proper way of being Jewish is. Everything we have written in the New Testament is Jewish literature, and part of this inter-family argument, debating principally over whether Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. Yes, the argument can become strident, harsh and difficult, but not necessarily anti-Jewish, as it’s happening within Judaism itself.
We’ve established during this series that Rabbinic Judaism and what came to be known as Christianity are the two forms of Judaism that emerged from the post temple, first century Jewish environment. Over the centuries and millennia, as these two traditions and theologies ceased to recognise each other as being from one family, this rhetoric that was once part of a family dispute, now takes on a different character.
When the Jew is no longer me, or my family, or the tradition I believe I’m part of, but rather the “other”, we start to see the divisions and anti-Jewish stereotypes even in our teaching, preaching and worship. Jesus is no longer the quintessential Jew, living out the best of Judaism, but rather the rebel which saves us from the Law. We read back this othering and anti-Judaism back into the epistles and gospel teachings, and it becomes the seed bed from which antisemitism grows.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey explore the difference between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, parallel this whole othering process with marriage, separation and divorce, and also discuss Justin Martyr and his Dialogue with Trypho (both the good and the bad!).
Jesus often seems to be transgressing against the Torah and upsetting the experts in the Law, overthrowing their strictly rules-based religion in favour of a grace-filled one, yet is that really what is happening in the Gospels? Far from it. As we’ve discussed in this season, these inter-Jewish debates were actively being held in his day, and his viewpoints were shared by other rabbis. In many cases, Jesus held to an even stricter standard of Torah observance.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey examine how it was not the theology that Jesus proclaimed that led to his execution, rather it was the authority that he claimed, as Son of Man, Son of God, that the leaders (both Jewish and Roman) objected to. The fact that he was indeed at the heart of his Jewish tradition and made those claims, made it all the more objectionable. He was not some crazy marginal figure that could easily be ignored. He knew what he was about.
We also take a look at the Jewishness of his followers, a ragtag collection that represent the various types of Judaisms of the first century, and the symbolism of choosing twelve men in particular.
Jesus may be a Pharisee.
This might be hard to take, as many of us grew up equating the word “pharisaic” with “hypocritical” — sadly, a definition that still can be found in the Oxford Dictionary. So what is it that the Pharisees believed, and how can we say that Jesus was like them?
Today we’ll do a deep dive into understanding the different Jewish groups that existed in Jesus’ time. As we talked about in the last episode, Jesus drew his disciples from these various groups to show the renewal of all of Israel and the inclusiveness of his Kingdom.
We’ll see how Christian theology picks up on some aspects of Sadducean, Essene and Zealot theology but is more like a sibling to Pharisaic theology. In fact, Christianity is super-Pharisaic, not anti-Pharisaic.
In today’s episode, we take a closer look at the Gospel of John, the gospel from which we drew the title of this series, “Salvation is from the Jews”. It is generally considered to be the odd one out among the other gospels, telling the story of Jesus from a very different angle. Some claim that it is even antisemitic, as the opponents of Jesus are often blanketly called “the Jews”. Often? In actual fact, 71 times. But who’s counting?
Fr Geoffrey explains how we can better understand this term within different contexts by exploring the history of Judaeans, Galileans and other Israelites. We’ll also see how in his gospel, John beautifully connects Jesus’ words with the Jewish feasts that are occurring during his ministry (such as Passover, Purim, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Feast of the Dedication), with Jesus riffing off these festal themes and calling people back to the true meaning of the feasts. Often connected to these feasts are the “I am” statements of Jesus, also uniquely found in John’s Gospel.
The more we know about Jewish history, feasts and practices, the more the gospel comes to life!
There were many different ideas among the various Judaisms about what and who the Messiah might be, that coalesced around one or more of three central expectations having to do with land, kingship and temple.
Many Christians think that Jesus was rejected because he wasn’t what the Jews had expected, for instance, a spiritual teacher instead of a military leader. On the contrary, Jesus touches on every single one of the messianic expectations — and that was the confusing part! Everyone had something to object to.
There was no prophetic messianic checklist with boxes that needed to be ticked off. There is so much more to it than that. We see that in Jesus, every aspect of the scriptures is fulfilled, every part of the history and life of Israel is taken up, recapitulated and lived out in its fulness in the life of Jesus.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey discuss all this, as well as the wrinkle in the story — if the Messiah has come, where is the messianic age?
Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri field a question from one of our patrons in regards to the Pharisees at the time of Jesus. We reflect on the four roughly divided sects of the Judaisms of the first century (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes) and also how some Jews probably intersected more than one of the categories, or never properly belonged to any of them. Mapping geography on top of this adds a new dimension, and is affected by the primary focus of these groups.
We also learn about a canonised saint within the Orthodox tradition who is also a key figure in Jewish tradition, who held a senior position in the Sanhedrin, and is considered in the Mishnah to be one of the greatest Jewish teachers.
The people of the first century lived in a god-infested world. In fact, we still do, though in our society we experience it more as a god-vacuum, as our theological imagination is devoid of divinity and the spiritual realm.
At the time of Jesus, it was understood and accepted, even by Jews, that every nation was associated with multiple gods. Jews were not monotheist in that they believed there was only one god, rather they were set apart because they believed that their god was the one True God, the Most-High God, to whom all other gods were subject. It’s more accurate to call the Jews monolaters, a people who would only offer worship (latreia) to their one true God.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey explore what it would have been like for the average everyday Jew to navigate this world of multiple gods, participating in society along with the nations, and also why it would have been difficult for early gentile Christians to adopt monolatry.
Did Paul really convert on the road to Damascus? As a Torah-observant Jew, conversion would have meant turning away from the one true God of Israel, so Paul certainly would not have considered it as such.
Clearly, there was a change of heart, but how can we properly understand this in light of what we have learned through this season so far? We discuss how, from Paul’s point of view, his understanding of who God is, the covenant that He has made with His people, and the purpose of the covenant to bring in all the nations, is being fulfilled — not changed.
In this episode, Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey discuss the Old Perspective on Paul, New Perspective, Fresh Perspective and Radical Perspective (also called “Paul within Judaism”).
Paul insists that gentiles should no longer have to abide by the covenant markers in order to worship the God of Israel, but does it follow that he believed the Torah was now abolished? No, it was rather fulfilled in Jesus, and in the Messianic Age, the time has come for the nations to worship the one God as the nations.
The nations will be recognisable as nations because they don’t give up their own cultural boundary markers in their worship of the one God, but have baptised them instead. What a beautiful image!
We take a closer look at chapter 11 in the letter to the Romans, where Paul is talking about the relationship between Israelites and gentiles, and in particular how the gentile believers should relate to the Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. By inference, it should give us something to say about how we as Orthodox Christians should be relating to Rabbinic Jews today. If we are to believe Paul, we are in the same eschatological moment, and the same framework should apply.In this episode, Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri will be looking at different translations of the Bible, and the history behind those translations, when certain words were added and new meanings layered in. Our English translations are thoroughly infected by the Old Perspective that we discussed last time, and when we return to the Greek, in light of the Paul within Judaism Perspective, the complexion of the themes and metaphors are completely changed and make a whole lot more sense!
What does the coming of the Messiah of Israel mean for the nations, and does it mean something different for Israel?
With a careful reading of the first three chapters of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, especially as we consider the pronouns used, we see a distinctness in terms of Jew and gentile, as we also witness them coming together. Emphasizing their distinctness does not deny their unity; on the contrary, their differentiated unity, and unified diversity, is cause for rejoicing!
Both are unique, and both are called to participate in the worship of the one true God, the Most High, enacting the Kingdom in their own particular ways. Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri explore why the call for the nations to worship in their own tongues, within their own cultural norms, is such a beautiful thing, and also discuss what changes for the Israelites with the coming of their Messiah.
Some imagine that the the first people in Jerusalem who accepted Jesus as the Messiah radically broke away from the Jews, forming a new religion. We might even picture the apostle James, brother of the Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem, wearing Byzantine Orthodox robes and serving at a Christian temple across from the synagogue. Of course, this was hardly the case. So what did the first century ecclesia in Jerusalem look like?
The early Jesus followers were primarily Jews, continuing on in their Jewish faith and practice. They would not have thought of themselves as fundamentally departing in any way from what they believed before. They still believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and they would have still participated in temple worship.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey discuss what these believers would have added to or complemented their synagogue and temple practice with, the relationship between gentile believers and Jews, and how the destruction of the temple and then the fall of Jerusalem drastically changed the culture of the ecclesia.
In light of a listener question, Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri discuss a passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where Paul speaks about women covering their heads while praying, “on account of the angels”.
We can consider this a case study into how Paul, a Pharisee who believes Jesus is the Messiah, engages with a pastoral topic in a community. We must bear in mind that this was a particular issue for a particular people in a particular place, that place being Corinth, a metropolis noted for its wild pagan culture. As a Pharisee, Paul is a follower of Torah who wants to see it applied contextually, in the current time and place, not because of religious conservatism, but because he is keen to see a real living and meaningful practice in people’s everyday lives. Paul brings all of his Jewish tradition to bear, a deeply rich tradition that is complex, multi-faceted, storied, and mythological.
Fr Yuri and Fr Geoffrey cover the hierarchy of relationship, what it means for a woman to have exousia or authority and agency over her own personhood, the book of Enoch (a text which cannot be ignored), and the narrative accounts of Genesis that explain why Paul was concerned with angels and women in the act of worship.
If you think this episode got wild, just wait until the next episode! It’ll be reserved for our top tier of patrons, and will offer further cultural context in which what was covered becomes all the more pertinent, and even further removed from our contemporary mindset. It’ll be a fun one!
In today’s episode, we’re going to go “there”. We’re going to step back in to the Graeco-Roman world and learn about some unquestioned medical truths of their day, held by Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle, which pertain in particular to hair and why Paul is so concerned about veils. Once you know about it, you’ll see it everywhere in ancient literature, and things will start to make more sense. But also, once we all learn it, can we all just agree to forget it?! Asking for a friend.
Thankfully we don’t need to accept first century Graeco-Roman medicine in order to be an Orthodox Christian, but we really should use this opportunity to be challenged: are we living our lives in a way that looks like we’ve been transformed by participating already in God’s future kingdom? The way we dress, the clothes we choose to buy, the clothes we choose to store, it’s so much more than modesty. For us, as for Paul, this must point to the primordial, cosmological battle that we’re involved with at all times.
Today there is clear distinction between Judaism and Christianity, but it wasn’t always so. The family resemblance is quite strong! Rather than think of Judaism and Christianity as having a mother-daughter relationship, its helpful to think of them as sisters, both born from the womb of Second Temple Judaism. As any siblings who fight, it can get quite nasty at times, and they can squabble over seemingly trivial things.
This is the first of three episodes discussing the “parting of the ways”, the scholarly term for the process of the gradual distinction between what we now call Judaism and what we now call Christianity. This complicated process took place over a long period time; we can see its beginnings in the tensions of the New Testament, but its end point is probably a lot later than you would have imagined!
In this episode, we move out of the discussion on New Testament writings and into the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (or to borrow Fr Yuri’s turn of phrase, “The Bible: The Next Generation”). How are they speaking to their communities about Jesus-following Jews continuing to follow Torah, and also gentiles coming in to the church who find this practice attractive? We’ve already seen how for Paul, gentiles do not need to become Jewish, because in and through Jesus, we are now in the eschatological moment when the nations come together alongside the Jews to worship the one true God of Israel. This is a beautiful theology! However, the practicalities of that on the ground is what these authors are now dealing with, and some of the rhetoric can be very harsh indeed.
Of course, this is not just happening on one side! Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri also discuss how the compilation of the Mishnah by the end of the second century draws its own line in the sand as well. On the early Christian side, the focus is more on belief (the right way of thinking about who Jesus is), and on the other side, who can be considered to be part of the Jewish family.
The parting of the ways is becoming more evident, but come back for the third instalment on this topic next week!
A full blown Christology was in place long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. There was an understanding in ancient Judaism that God related to the world through a property of Himself that was called Son of God, the Word of God, and God’s Glory. One aspect of the parting of the ways between what is now called Christianity and what is now called Rabbinic Judaism is a result of theological wrestling on both sides around this Yahweh Christology.
Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri discuss the theological debates on both sides that framed each group’s view, along with Melito of Sardis, a church father of the 2nd century who could either be seen as the source of everything antisemitic, or as someone who saw himself as being part of the very family he was critiquing.
Can we say that the parting of the ways is complete, even in our time?
As Fr Yuri takes some time with family to welcome his newborn son (many congratulations, dear Fr Yuri!), we begin a special series within a series, where Fr Geoffrey has conversations with leading scholars connecting to the themes we’ve been exploring.
Today’s guest is Adele Reinhartz, a professor in the department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Among her many areas of research are the New Testament and early Jewish-Christian relations, particularly focused on the gospel of John. She is an author of numerous articles and books, including “Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John” and “Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John”.
The question of the parting of the ways is undergoing revision and change all the time. Adele argues against certain views while offering her own hypothesis about the process, a nuanced and historically grounded perspective that highlights how Christianity defined itself in contrast to Judaism almost as a one-sided process rather than through the model of mutual parting.
Adele speaks about four ways of reading texts, compliant, resistant, sympathetic and engaged, and how we can choose to situate ourselves in each mode, but also asks what our relationship to our sacred texts should be. Should we accept without question, or suppress problematic passages, or are we meant to faithfully wrestle with them?
In today’s episode, Fr Geoffrey has a conversation with Mark Nanos, a Jewish historian with a research focused on the Apostle Paul. He is a lecturer at the University of Kansas, and his book “The Mystery of Romans” won the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish-Christian Relations. This book, published in 1996, kickstarted the Paul Within Judaism school. Mark is a co-founder of a section within the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) on Within Judaism and has continued to be a key figure within that over the last couple of decades.
Mark discusses both the beauty and the limits of the New and Fresh Perspective on Paul, and why Within Judaism does not continue on from them but is a completely fresh school of thought. It is a fundamental shift in thinking, asking new historical questions without knowing what the the theological payoff will be. The Within Judaism perspective is still, and will always be, considered more disruptive and provocative, since it is a challenging paradigm that asks the reader to defamiliarise and approach the text in a different direction. It can also potentially be applied beyond Paul, so that we can read the gospel writers and New Testaments books as also being within Judaism, though we are still learning if this is the right way to categorise these authors.
Mark shares his first insights that led to this new way of reading Paul, the difference between being a “Jew” and being “Jew-ish”, what Paul is arguing for and against, and Paul’s use of the term “Israel” (which was always clear to Paul, but not always to his readers). Finally, he asks the most important question, “How do we move forward with this new knowledge?”
Helping us round out our reflection on some core themes explored through this season, we are joined by Rabbi Mark Kinzer, an American Messianic Jewish cleric, author and theologian. He is an advocate for a Torah-observant Messianic Judaism engaged with Jewish tradition and heritage. He coined the term “bilateral ecclesiology” which expresses the idea that the Christian church is made up of two distinct but united Jewish and gentile bodies, as God’s covenant with the Jewish people is everlasting and cannot be broken, and is known for his dialogue with the Catholic church.
Rabbi Mark and Fr Geoffrey discuss Fr Lev Gillet, author of Communion in the Messiah, as a prophetic figure, with his grasp of the enduring significance of the Jewish people in a way that was Christologically centered — and lament how the Orthodox Church has not actively continued this work to renew and repair the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.
Rabbi Mark also shares his idea of what a corporate acknowledgement of Jesus by the Jewish people could mean, his understanding that Israel is meant to be a focal point for the Church to re-unite the people of God, and his vision of a bilateral ecclesiology, not as a structure, but as a relational dynamic.
Having solved all the world’s problems regarding the relationship between the Jewish and Christian traditions, we’re bringing the season to a close. We jest! We have, however, come to a good time to pause and reflect on what we’ve discussed so far, before we return with a follow-up season later on.
Who are we? Are we the new Israel? Or are we the gentiles that have come alongside Israel to worship the One True God? The answer to this question will frame how we move forward in our reflections, relationships and dialogue in this remembering.
Fr Geoffrey and Fr Yuri discuss three prompts based on a patron’s insightful questions posed during the “Salvation Is From the Jews” series:
How do the Synoptic Gospels and Acts portray early conflict between Christ-followers and synagogue authorities and in what way does John’s Gospel deepen, reflect, or reinterpret this dynamic?
How can we responsibly talk about early Jewish opposition to the Jesus movement in a way that neither distorts history nor fuels anti-Jewish sentiment in our interpretation and preaching today?
What it would look like for the Church to fully embrace the self-critical stance of the Hebrew prophets? Not to accuse others, but to repent ourselves in our identification alongside and with Israel?