What has Christ's coming given us? Salvation from evil? Yes, of course... but evil and suffering did not vanish from the world by the wave of a magic wand. Jesus Himself not only endures terrible sufferings on the Cross; He endures them innocently. And He also says that those who want to be His disciples should likewise take up their cross and follow Him. In what, then, does this salvation from evil consist?

Perhaps this is too human an approach. In one of the Gospel readings Jesus reminds us that if you have merely been freed from an evil spirit, but its place in your heart remains unoccupied, in the end something even worse will overtake you. Salvation only from what we consider bad is, alas, too little. Too little for a person who looks the truth in the face. But, fortunately, it is too little for the Creator as well.

And therefore He offers us something immeasurably better: adoption. We can enter the family of Jesus of Nazareth and become His adopted brothers and sisters. More than that, the possibility of an exceptional, essential union with Him is open to us, the same as His Mother's. To be brothers of Jesus, and therefore to be adopted by His Father and His Mother, to share His divine-humanity with Him, only one thing is required: to say to the Father as Jesus Himself says, "Not My will, but Yours be done."

Salvation from the unpleasant, the bad, the evil is a human approach. Such escapism is hardly proper to God. He does not flee from evil, but confronts it on the Cross and conquers. You may seek comfort and sweet piety, but then from the hell of violence you will go straight into the hell of hypocrisy; or you may agree to adoption by the Heavenly Father. Yes, this is a difficult path, at times painfully difficult, and your adopted Brother, Jesus, died on it. But by becoming His brother, you will also share His victory over evil. The choice between defeat, flight, and victory is yours.

Freedom! This is the main miracle that took place at the Red Sea: behind the Israelites ended the fertile land of slavery, and ahead opened the desert of freedom. More than once they will regret choosing this path, because freedom and death always walk side by side. All the other miracles - the pillars of fire and smoke, the journey through the sea on dry land, and everything that awaits Israel in the desert - are only testimony that God is near.

This will not keep them from doubting and grumbling at any convenient moment. But it is precisely in this, in the very possibility of believing or not believing (God, not miracles), that salvation from slavery is realized, where everything before had been reliable and constant.

But now before Moses and his companions there is only desert and sky: ideal conditions for understanding much and deciding much. God invites us also to make this step from slavery to freedom, from certainty to faith.

In this episode Jesus may at first seem hard-hearted. Indeed, it is strange to see a preacher so absorbed in spreading His teaching that a crowd of admirers becomes so much dearer to him than his relatives that he is ready to trade his own Mother and brothers for them. Yes, any demagogic speaker in such a situation would look unattractive.

But when we consider the Gospel account carefully, we will have to admit that Christ's words contain no renunciation either of His Mother or of His brothers. After all, He called those who do the will of the Heavenly Father His brothers and mother. And did not Mary open herself to God with the greatest fullness? Did she not become the Mother of Christ precisely because she fulfilled the will of the Heavenly Father? The brothers are a somewhat different matter: they did not have Mary's spiritual experience and did not immediately recognize Jesus as the Christ. But the time will come when they will see and accept what is still hard for them to accept now. Then they will become brothers not only by kinship.