Main news for 15 November 2022

The Savior's reaction to the news of Lazarus' illness and death shows well what the Way is. But not only the Way with a capital letter, the Way of the Messiah; every spiritual path of an ordinary person is subject to the same laws. And the first condition of the path is the quality of life. Of existence. Of being. The Savior's words about Lazarus' illness, which is "not unto death, but for the glory of God," look at first at least strange: after all, Lazarus did die.

Of course one could say: Jesus knew in advance that He would raise His dead friend. But that would be only part of the answer. The issue is not that He knows the past and the future in all their fullness. The issue is how He knows them. How He sees them. And this, in turn, is determined precisely by that quality of existence.

Where do we live: in the fallen world, where space, time, and chains of cause and effect are absolute reality? Or in the Kingdom, where all this is relative, where even cause-and-effect connections are reversible, and where the past can therefore become as if it had never existed at all? This determines the quality of our life. And the possibility of the path as well. Jesus stands on the Way from His very birth: from the very beginning of His Way, the fullness of His communion with His heavenly Father was absolute. We ordinary people still have to step onto the path, if, of course, we want to reach the Kingdom the Savior promises us and enter it.

But the very possibility of the path is connected with our spiritual state. It determines the quality of our life and what we are able to see. The glory of God can be seen only from the Kingdom. If we have no relation to the Kingdom, all we will see is death. Christianity is the life of the Kingdom. But in our earthly life, life in the world where the Kingdom has not yet been revealed completely and in fullness, abiding in the Kingdom becomes the way of the Kingdom. The very way on which, if one follows it to the end, one can see the glory of God. And meet Christ returning in glory.