Today's reading brings us back to the image of the coming Kingdom, emphasizing the difference between it and our world, which has not yet been transformed. It begins with a mention of events we know about only from the Gospel, one connected with some kind of persecution (v. 1), and the other with what today we would call a technological disaster (v. 4).

Clearly, those who told Jesus about the persecution expected His comments. In this case it may have involved some kind of reprisals undertaken by the Roman authorities in response to another uprising, perhaps affecting those who had not been involved in it, as often happened in those days. But Jesus does not try to explain anything when the subject is a world lying in evil. For Him, as we see, evil has neither explanation nor justification. He offers no theological reasoning, no arguments of the kind representatives of various schools of moral theology so often resort to. He says something more terrible, something no theologian would have dared to say aloud: there is no justice in the world; virtue is not rewarded in it, vice is not punished, and a tower can collapse on anyone's head, whether he is righteous or a sinner (vv. 2, 4).

The only way to avoid this fate is conversion, or "repentance" (vv. 3, 5). On Jesus' lips, conversion was certainly inseparable from readiness to accept the Kingdom He had brought into the world. And to accept it not someday, when the one receiving it has "ripened," but here and now, when the Kingdom has overtaken the one who is turning. This is also the meaning of the parable of the fig tree that Jesus told to those who had asked Him the question (vv. 6-9): if someone remains alive in a world full of evil, it is only because God again and again gives him time and the opportunity for conversion.

But the situation is already at the boundary; all deadlines have long passed, and every time a person postpones conversion, he risks not living to the next attempt. There is no salvation in this world; it is only in the Kingdom, and one should not delay, putting off the moment of meeting it. Better now than later, when it may already be too late. That is why Jesus treats so sternly every attempt to push the Kingdom into second place and to postpone the meeting with it "until later." He demonstratively heals on the Sabbath (vv. 10-13), and not only because the synagogue, the assembly of the faithful, is the most fitting place for the Kingdom to be revealed, and the Sabbath, God's day, is the most fitting time. He also acts this way because in this case waiting is a matter of life and death. He says to the synagogue ruler, the "ruler of the synagogue": do you not water your livestock on the Sabbath? You know that otherwise the animal will die, and therefore you do not consider it a violation of the Sabbath if someone unties the animal and leads it to water; how, then, is a human being worse, especially one who belongs to God's people (vv. 15-16)?

Of course, Jesus could not have failed to know the traditional answer to the question He asked: if an animal is not given water, it is in danger of dying of thirst, and therefore watering an animal is not considered a violation of the Sabbath. But the woman Jesus healed would calmly have lived until the end of the Sabbath day, as she had already lived for many years, and from the point of view of a person faithful to religious tradition there was no need to hurry with her healing. But Jesus cannot and does not want to wait when it comes to bringing a person into the Kingdom. Unlike the synagogue ruler, He knows how time is contracting as it moves toward the end. And He hurries--hurries so that the Kingdom may be opened to everyone who seeks it and is ready to accept it.

In healing a woman who had suffered from a serious illness for 18 years, Christ pays no attention to what day He does it. He acts too quickly to have time to think about it. In some other places in the Gospel, Jesus does not heal the sick right away, but speaks with them, finds things out, asks questions. In this story, however, He acts, one might say, without thinking. Seeing the bent-over woman, He hastens toward her and sets her on her feet, thereby provoking the Pharisees' displeasure.

Their displeasure makes one wonder whether these teachers of the faith were blind. If they had looked not at the law, but at a real person, such severe suffering would hardly have left any doubt about the need for immediate healing. Their reaction speaks for itself. When the Pharisees, encountering a miracle of God, begin checking whether it conforms to the canons, the woman begins glorifying God.

Reading some Gospel stories, one might think that Jesus intentionally violates the Sabbath rest, doing it to spite the traditionalists of religion. But the Savior never wanted scandals and did not like them. He did not need scandalous fame, the fame of a destroyer of foundations. Besides, according to His own words, He came not to destroy the Torah, but to bring it to fullness. Why then does He act as He acts?

In fact, could the healing of the woman mentioned by the evangelist in his story not have been postponed until the next day? After all, she was not threatened with death; she had already lived with her illness, as we can see, for more than one year, and one additional day of waiting would no longer have changed anything for her. And if this had been simply a matter of healing, even a miraculous, supernatural healing performed not by human power but by God's power, the synagogue ruler who condemned Jesus' action would have been right.

But that is precisely the point: this was not simply a matter of healing, even miraculous healing, but of the manifestation of the Kingdom, whose consequence was this healing, just as it was many other healings of the same kind mentioned by the evangelists. And the Sabbath, in view of its original spiritual meaning, was ultimately needed precisely in order to open the Kingdom to a person, to give him the opportunity to establish deep, sincere, full relations with God, without which there is and can be no normal spiritual life. The multitude of ritual prohibitions and restrictions with which the Sabbath later became surrounded is connected with the obvious predominance of religiosity over spirit. Jesus is precisely striving to return the Sabbath to its original meaning as time spent with God.

And where, if not in the Kingdom that He brought into the world, was one to seek the fullness of communion with God? Where could one spend the Sabbath day better than there? But for those who do not notice the Kingdom, religion with its prohibitions and restrictions proves more important. It is hard to condemn them for this: in the absence of spiritual life, religion may really be the best thing a person can find for himself. Yet in the absence of spiritual life, it is precisely religion that separates a person from the Kingdom, from communion with God, and in the end from life. From that fullness of life for which no religion can offer anyone a substitute.