Main news for 12 June 2020

King James Version (en)

2 Corinthians, Chapter 5, verse 1

¹ That in his assured hope of immortal glory

¹For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

NOTES

For the apostle, Christian life is one in all its fullness and at all its stages. Before, prior to the coming of Christ, every person's life was clearly divided into "before" and "after," into life and life after death, which could not be called life in the full sense of the word even under the most optimistic view of it. For most people, life after death meant a world of shadows, where there is no life but only its likeness, where a person turns into his own shadow, forgetting earthly life and almost losing awareness of his own existence.

There were, of course, less pessimistic views of life after death, which assumed the immortality of the soul and recompense after death, but even then the matter concerned only the soul, not the whole person. Paul speaks of something else. He starts not from hope in the immortality of the soul, but from the expectation of the resurrection of the whole person, entirely and completely. And for him this process has already become reality, together with the Kingdom that has entered the world.

For a person living the life of the Kingdom, the difference between "before" and "after," if it does not disappear completely, becomes nonessential. The life of the Kingdom is one, and a person who has come to share in this life is no longer subject to death in the form in which it is present in the fallen world. Of course, insofar as the Kingdom has not yet entered the world completely, a person cannot be completely free from death. This refers first of all to the physical body, which in its fallen state can become a barrier between a person and God.

It was not intended to be this way. God created man so that he could remain with Him in the fullness of communion. But after the fall everything became different, and the embodied nature that had once been the place of meeting between man and God became a barrier separating man from God. A barrier that can, of course, be overcome, but one noticeable enough that it cannot be ignored. That is why the apostle says that the fullness of communion with God presupposes liberation from the body in its present state, not in the sense of complete rejection of it, but in the sense of its transformation, such a change in its nature that it would not hinder communion with God, but would instead help it.

In any case, this communion with God begins not somewhere in another world and not sometime after death, but here and now. The first stage of the path into the Kingdom begins when a person decides to follow Christ and enters the Church. And already at this first stage, more is decided than one might think when looking at fallen man.

At the first stage it is determined what the following stages will be, if not entirely, then to a great extent. God prepares the heavenly dwelling for a person, but the clothing that will be on that person when he stands at the threshold of that dwelling is prepared by the person himself during his earthly life. Life in the Kingdom begins here and now, and it is precisely here and now that what we will become later, at the next stage of our path, is determined. This is what the apostle reminds the readers of his letter.

In its view of history, humanity has still not invented anything beyond the alternative of progressivism or catastrophism. In exactly the same way, in its view of the human being, we stand before a choice between philanthropy and misanthropy. It is not hard to be convinced that the view of history naturally correlates with the view of the human being: a misanthrope will hardly believe in progress leading to universal happiness and prosperity, while one who believes that the human being is originally good will almost certainly also believe that in the life of humanity there are no insoluble problems and that universal happiness is attainable, at least in principle.

The biblical view of history, however, is antinomic: on the one hand, the entire history of the Christian era is nothing other than the history of the advancing and ever more fully revealing Kingdom, the projection of which into the untransformed world is the history of Christian righteousness, or, as it is usually called, Christian holiness; on the other hand, the whole history of the "Christian" world is the history of that evil in which, according to the word of the Gospel, the world lies, and which manifests itself in "Christian" history. The biblical view of the human being is just as antinomic: on the one hand, the path of righteousness was open to the human being in every age, and God gave His people the Torah as a guide on this path; on the other hand, as God says through the author of the Prologue of Genesis, "every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth", and nothing can be done about this before the full transformation of human nature. Thus it turns out that the coming of the Kingdom, neither in the life of an individual person nor in the history of humanity, resembles in the least that progress of which philanthropists of all times and peoples dreamed, being sure that gradual improvements both of technology and of morals would finally bring humanity into a golden age.

On the contrary, the coming of the Kingdom presupposes the polarization of the mutually opposing forces of the Kingdom and the forces of that evil in which the world lies. This is so both in the history of humanity and in the life of an individual person. And the more such a person is rooted in the life of the Kingdom, the more noticeably that evil connected with his fallen nature manifests itself in his life, both inner and outer. As in humanity in the course of world history, it does not, of course, appear anew from nowhere and does not even increase in size; it simply becomes more noticeable, just as its opposition becomes more noticeable.

But this opposition is pushed all the more toward the "external", to the periphery of life, the more the seeker of the Kingdom is rooted in its life. Then less and less periphery remains; it gradually disappears, while there is more and more of the inner, that in which the life of the Kingdom manifests itself. Only this process cannot be completed in an untransformed world wounded by evil. It is completed in the Kingdom, and the one who does not see the Kingdom does not see its completion either. A completion that coincides with the triumph of the Kingdom and the full transformation of creation.

Paul’s whole life is centered on the hope of something very distant. An eccentric. What normal person would subordinate his...

Paul’s whole life is centered on the hope of something very distant. An eccentric. What normal person would subordinate his existence to the expectation of some dwelling in heaven? Eternal it may be, but when will it ever come...

It is natural for human nature to seek the satisfaction of its needs as quickly and tangibly as possible. If something hurts me, or someone has offended me, or family relationships are not working out, I want one thing: to feel better as soon as possible. And at that moment sin can seem quite justified. Like Nuf-Nuf, the clever little pig, we build brick houses to protect us from the wolf. Yet those same solid walls also protect us from God.

To entrust ourselves to Him and, “groaning under our burden,” await the reward and joy of another world, and therefore to subordinate our intentions and actions not to the fulfillment of our desires but to following God’s will: this is the path to holiness. But it is a difficult and costly path, one that requires courage and faith. To renounce much here merely in the belief that immeasurably more will be given there... Easier said than done.

It seems that everyone who walks this path has more than once felt a strong desire to give up. Perhaps the Apostle Paul also had moments of temptation. But they could not shake his passionate striving toward God, who has prepared for His children “a house not made with hands, eternal”, a house where there will be neither sorrow, nor sickness, nor sighing. And so, living in a world whose mortality he feels keenly, Paul strives for only one thing: to be pleasing to God, so as not to lose life with Him. There are moments when God is felt to be so immense and beautiful, strong and tender, that in comparison with Him all problems, failures, and everyday worries become small and insignificant, taking their proper place. It is important not to lose such moments; may their memory sustain us when the brick mansion of our desires once again seems more attractive than a dwelling in heaven.

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