Main news for 5 January 2022

King James Version (en)

Mark, Chapter 3, verses 13-15

¹³And he goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he would: and they came unto him.

¹⁴And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach,

¹⁵And to have power to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils:

NOTES

Today's reading concerns the choosing of the twelve apostles, called to be Christ's closest fellow workers: to proclaim the Good News and heal the world of disease and the powers of evil. Before this, Jesus spent the whole night in prayer to God and then...

It is interesting: at what moment do the apostles actually become apostles? At the moment when Jesus called them to follow Him, each in his own hour? On the day when He sends them out for ministry? After His resurrection and their meeting with Him, risen from the dead? On the day of Pentecost? It is probably impossible to give a single answer to this question. After all, an apostle is above all a witness, a witness of Christ and of the Kingdom. That means he becomes an apostle at the moment when he begins to bear witness. And what should be counted as the beginning? In essence, the apostles fully understood what the Kingdom was only after Pentecost, when they experienced its breath upon themselves. But they became witnesses much earlier. In a certain sense, their very readiness to follow Jesus immediately after He called them can already be considered a witness.

Of course, the moment when Jesus sends His twelve closest disciples out to preach really does become a turning point on their spiritual path. Before that, they bore witness by their very presence beside the Teacher, by the support they gave Him. Now they had to give independent witness, to walk their own path, certainly connected with the earthly path of their Teacher, but still their own. At the same time, of course, the question arises by itself: how could the apostles bear witness to the Kingdom, which they truly came to know much later, after the Resurrection and Pentecost?

Here, as we can see, one of the fundamental patterns of spiritual life shows itself, as spiritual life exists in our world that is being transformed but has not yet been transformed, and perhaps not only here. The point is that in spiritual life what might conditionally be called training and, just as conditionally, practice exist inseparably. Spiritual life and practice cannot be learned the way we learn one specialty or another in a secondary school or university, so that after finishing the course we then begin work. There is not even the practical internship familiar in such schools. One has to work, so to speak, directly on the job from the very beginning, learning without leaving it. Such learning can sometimes appear too difficult and even risky, but this appears to be the only possibility, at least in our fallen world. And Jesus teaches His disciples exactly this way: on the road to the Kingdom. So that when they arrive there, they will already know and be able to do everything they need. At least at first.

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something...

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.

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