The messenger who told David of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan presents this sorrowful event quite differently from the way it is told in the last chapter of First Samuel. If desired, the discrepancy could be explained by the existence of different narrative traditions, but it is much more plausible to suppose that the Amalekite credited himself with actions he had not performed, hoping to earn a reward.

He knew David poorly. During the long period of armed opposition to Saul, when he repeatedly had the opportunity to strike him down, David preserved Saul's life and continued to show him the greatest respect. Therefore David could not endure the killing of Saul, who, despite all his sins and lawless deeds, remained the Anointed One.

David expressed his grief for the dead in a lament, and it is important to note which qualities of Saul and Jonathan he honors. David remembers their courage, their military service to Israel, and highly values the familial love between them, since they were not separated even in death. And the song ends with a final chord, an outpouring of grief for the most beloved of people, Jonathan, dearer than whom David would never again have any friend.

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.

Perhaps the most striking thing in the story by the evangelist Mark that we read today is that the Lord answers the outrageous statement of the scribes at all. A crowd gathers around Him. There are so many people that there is not even time to pause for a meal. One after another they come to the Lord Jesus with questions and pleas, and most of them need healing. It is hard even to imagine such a concentration of suffering in one place, and how terrible it must have looked from the outside... The possessed and the insane, the crippled and the ragged... One could easily become unclean there; one would not find profound theological insight into the law there; there was nothing respectable there. For an intellectual scribe, or even simply for a respected person with a position in society, it was somehow shameful even to approach this crowd. So even today people sometimes say about our Church that only old women and half-mad people go there...

The religion for which the scribes are zealous, by contrast, is very respectable. It does not concern itself with the fate of every outcast. Its goal is to raise man above the ugliness of a suffering world. Only the best, only the very best, are worthy to shine with virtue in the Kingdom of the expected Messiah. And this preacher from Nazareth... The natural conclusion for the scribes is that He associates with such people because He Himself is one of them. And even the obvious miracles, which cannot be disputed, He performs because He is possessed.

The incredible mercy of Christ is revealed in the fact that He receives and keeps receiving these crowds of suffering people, unattractive as all suffering is. He truly became one of us, though not in the sense the scribes think. He came to share this suffering and to bring His immaterial Light into this darkness. Yet even the scribes themselves, unaware of their own weakness and blindness, saying wild things offensive to any human being, are not strangers to Jesus. And in the midst of this crowd, He finds a way to address them too in their own language. It is the language of wisdom, the language of logic, the language of theology. Christ rejects only one thing: the mercilessness hidden behind the scribes' position.