The Savior's answer to the question about eternal life is both simple and difficult. It is simple because He offers nothing new. It is the same old, well-known path of the Torah, outer and inner, the path of keeping the commandments. It is what the questioner has known from childhood. But then comes an unexpected demand: give everything away and follow Him, his Teacher. And here the questioner stops. He is not ready for such a step. Jesus then speaks about the rich, for whom it is hard to enter the Kingdom. What kind of wealth is meant here? The questioner was materially rich. But the apostles were not rich, and yet they too feel uneasy. Who, then, can be saved?

They seem to have understood the Teacher correctly. Leaving everything is not only about material things. The concept of poverty in Yahwism, as in Judaism of the Second Temple era, was very multifaceted. Already Isaiah of Jerusalem spoke of poverty more as a spiritual state than as a material situation. And he considered himself a poor man, though he was a courtier and an aristocrat of the highest circle. Poverty means leaving everything. Jesus' question to the one interested in eternal life is this: can you leave everything? And Peter's question is: look, we have left everything; what comes next? The matter is no longer property.

The point here is to renounce one's own life. Not physical life; to renounce it means renouncing only a specific form of one's own existence. What one has to renounce is oneself, not one's life. That very self which, as most religious people believe, will not disappear even if earthly life is taken away. This is the self one has to renounce. A separate life, a separate existence. And everything connected with it, everything that defines it. Everything that can be described by the word "mine." And what remains, the true, pure "I," which one does not manage to notice right away, this pure "I" receives another, new life.

It enters another stream, infinitely more powerful and pure than the former one. There is nothing of one's own there in the narrow, earthly sense of the word, but there each "I," each one of us, begins to possess all the fullness of the life of God's great world, the life of the Kingdom. But for this, one must unclench the will by which we hold onto our present likeness of life. For it is precisely this will, clenched convulsively, that binds us to the life of this world. And unclenching it is far harder than unclenching the hand that holds a rope when you are hanging over an abyss. But otherwise nothing will work. Otherwise there is an eternal attachment to a likeness of life that will endlessly exhaust our soul and our body. And no freedom. Therefore no Kingdom either.

As we can see, each of the seven churches of Asia Minor to which the word of the Risen One was addressed had its own problems, and each of the messengers ("angels") heading to one church or another receives his own message to deliver to those to whom he is sent. Of course, such messengers could have been (and in this case really were) not angels in the sense we give the word today, but people sent on the apostle's behalf to a specific church community in order to deliver the message written for them and attest to its authenticity. On the other hand, the number seven is hardly accidental here: the seven-branched lampstand (menorah) symbolizes the light of God and the fullness of revelation, and in the New Testament context also the fullness of that sanctification which the world awaits from the Church. Understood in this way, the seven churches of Asia Minor become a symbol of the fullness of the Church, the fullness that the Church bears within herself throughout her whole history.

But the history of the Church differs from the history of any other community that has ever existed on earth in that it knows no development. Of course, external church forms change, but spiritually she always remains the same: at all times there is present in her both the righteousness by which the world is sanctified and the sin that hinders this. Of course, one can speak of better and worse times in church history, but here everything is relative: the universal Church is vast, and different communities can live, and in fact usually do live, in different ways, so that their spiritual condition can differ substantially even when the same historical period is in view.

This is also how the church of Asia Minor appears: the condition of specific churches (church communities) within it, as we can see, differs quite noticeably. Addressing the Ephesian church, Jesus points out to the Ephesian Christians that they have "left their first love" (v. 4), though He has certainly not forgotten their service and steadfastness during persecutions ("patience") (v. 3). It is possible that at this time the Ephesian church saw an intensification of the problems about which Paul had once written to the Ephesian Christians: a certain spiritual laxity and a known indulgence toward what are usually called sins of the flesh. In the setting of a large port city such as Ephesus, something of this sort can always be expected: bustle and petty fleshly sins are, as is well known, among the simplest temptations, yet they are very widespread, largely because their effect, especially at the beginning, is almost unnoticeable.

Considering that the Ephesian church had not lost its spiritual bearings, that it knew how to distinguish true apostles from false ones (v. 2), and that it was by no means trying to turn the sin of some of its members into a principle, as the Nicolaitans did (v. 6), the situation had not yet become catastrophic. Nevertheless, Jesus calls the Ephesian Christians to "remember their first love," to return to the purity of the first days when the Ephesian church had only just been born; otherwise, according to His words, the consequences may prove severe (v. 5). And He calls the Ephesian Christians to be more decisive and spiritually collected, so that through spiritual laziness and laxity they do not lose the fruit from the tree of eternal life that is intended for them in the event of victory (v. 7).

Today we begin reading the last book of Holy Scripture, the Apocalypse. This Greek word means revelation, that is, what God reveals to the chosen about invisible reality and about what we need to know concerning what is to come. Reading this book, one must be ready for the fact that all the visions here are described in the language of symbols, often obscure and strange, without strict form or narrative sequence. For this very reason, reading it is always joined to painstaking work of understanding and translating the text into accessible language. Otherwise the meaning of the revelation will remain hidden or distorted.

Like the book of the prophet Daniel, the Apocalypse is an answer to the sharpest question for believers: why does God permit persecutions of His chosen ones? The apostle and evangelist John returns to the main themes of all the prophetic writings of the Old Testament and speaks of the great Day of Yahweh, of the holy people enslaved by powerful enemies, scattered and almost destroyed as a result of cruel persecutions, of the proclamation of the day of salvation, and of the need to keep watch while awaiting the Second Coming.

In today's short text we find a greeting to the seven churches, and the use of a number expressing fullness means for us an address to the whole Church. John sees and contemplates what the Lord gives him and, using the language of the Old Testament prophets, tries to clothe what he has seen in the form most understandable to us. The nearness of the end of the world is so obvious to him that it could trouble us, if not for its obvious connection with Christ's words on the Mount of Olives that the times and seasons are not given to us to know. The nearness of Christ's coming in glory must mean constant readiness and watchfulness for believers. John calls us to keep the prophecy, thereby bringing us back to the fact that prophecy is not prediction of the future, but the proclamation of God's will through His messenger. Fulfilling this will is precisely what man was created by God for, God who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of creation and history, their beginning and end, or, as Isaiah says, the first and the last (Isa 44:6).