At the end of today's reading there are words saying that the love of Christ embraces us. The apostle explains why this happens, and what is required of us in order to be embraced by Christ's love. His thought is expressed in our Russian Synodal translation with less than full clarity. It says here: "the love of Christ embraces us, reasoning thus: if One died for all..." In the original, however, the apostle Paul writes: the love of Christ holds us, κρίναντας τούτο, having understood that One died for all. The Slavonic text at this point says: "we who have judged this," and it uses a simple past form, not the present tense used in the Synodal translation. Blessed Jerome of Stridon, translating this text into Latin, emphasizes this aspect even more: in the Vulgate these words read, "nos aestimantes hoc..." This verb means "to evaluate," like the English word "to estimate" derived from it.

So this is what is being said: the love of Christ embraces us and fills our whole life when we estimate the greatness of His sacrifice, when we understand and realize that in Him all of us truly died. More than that, it is important to realize this as an accomplished fact. Not to speculate, searching for meaning in a religious phenomenon, but to judge, to understand that this has already happened and, as a historical fact, has direct relevance to us. Only in this way can one receive this love, without which life loses its support.

Continuing the discussion of the Kingdom, Paul draws attention to what is in fact the foundation of Christianity: Christians are those who live one life with the risen Christ, the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world. They become a "new creation," being renewed by the breath of God that permeates this Kingdom (v. 17). Therefore it is pointless to approach witnesses of the Kingdom by the usual human measure, because what they say expresses not their own assessments of what is happening or their attitude toward it, but God's view of the situation, which the witnesses simply convey to those to whom they preach. And if the assessments at times prove severe, this is only an objective given, not the ill will of a witness who, on his own initiative, would never resort to such severity (v. 13).

The proof of a witness's sincerity can only be his openness both to God and to people (vv. 11-12), an openness without which no witness to the Kingdom is possible. When it comes to witness, the witness, more than anyone else, is guided by the spiritually understood principle of "nothing personal." All human sympathies and antipathies move into the background, since they are conditioned mainly by the limitation of fallen human nature and have nothing to do with the Kingdom. A Christian no longer lives his own natural life; he lives the life of the Risen One, for which these sympathies and antipathies mean nothing (vv. 14-15). Even the attitude toward the Savior Himself ceases in such a case to be purely human, as it necessarily was, for example, for the apostles who associated with Jesus during His earthly ministry (v. 16). The only goal of witness is the salvation of each person, his reconciliation with God through Christ, and his receiving in Christ the Kingdom that the Savior opens to everyone who seeks and is ready to trust Him (vv. 18-21).

The apostle Paul makes it all sound so simple: “the old has passed away; everything is now new”... Yet we keep thinking about how gradually, little by little, ever so quietly—smoothly and painlessly—we might, so to speak, pass into the state of a “new creation.” Did everything really happen to Paul instantaneously and without difficulty? I do not think so: if we read his epistles carefully, it becomes clear that things were not simple for him either. Then why does he speak so categorically? Probably because of what matters most to him. What matters most is the new reality within me through Christ's victory, whereas the “old self” is, alas, still present—but it is not the old self we must look at; it is Christ.