Today's reading prompts us to reflect on the truth expressed in a well-known saying whose Gospel origin, however, is far from universally known today: no prophet is accepted in his own country (v. 24). By quoting a messianic passage from the Book of Isaiah, Jesus quite plainly identifies Himself as the One of whom the prophet spoke (vv. 17-21). At first glance, His listeners' reaction seems paradoxical: on the one hand they agree with Jesus, but on the other they immediately begin to doubt. How could their fellow townsman, whom they had known since childhood, make any claim to be the Messiah (v. 22)? They demand miracles from Him not as signs of the Kingdom but as proof of His messiahship (v. 23). It is then that Jesus speaks the bitter words about a prophet in his own country (v. 24).

Yet the paradoxical reaction of Jesus' listeners was actually quite understandable, and not merely because “great things are best seen from a distance.” The issue here was ordinary familiarity, which often proves to be one of the most serious obstacles on the spiritual path. Their doubts are justified, not by chance, with the thought that they have known Him since childhood: “Is not this Joseph's son?” So how could there be any question of messiahship? Of course, if Jesus had been recognized by respected people or official authorities and they had directly identified Him as the Messiah, He would undoubtedly have been welcomed with joy and celebrated as a famous fellow townsman. But there was no official recognition, and the townspeople had to decide for themselves. The force of habit weighed upon them.

Fallen human beings tend to see reality not as it is but as they are accustomed to seeing it. Clichés are common and widespread, and they arise for a reason: reducing reality to patterns and using ready-made models to describe it form a kind of psychological mechanism by which human beings adapt to the world—a mechanism without which, after the Fall, they can no longer manage. Yet this same adaptive mechanism often prevents a person from seeing what is new and unusual. It offers ready-made patterns and models where they do not apply, where the realities involved fit no pattern and can be described by no model.

The Kingdom to which Jesus bears witness is just such a reality. It fits no familiar framework. Yet Jesus' fellow townspeople do not want to lose that framework; they are prepared to defend it at any cost, and Jesus simply will not fit within it: an unrecognized Messiah, a disturber of the peace, someone passing Himself off as no one knows whom and claiming what no one in their small town had ever claimed or would ever have dared to claim. This is how He appeared to the people of Nazareth. They were left with only one remedy: to rid themselves of their excessively troublesome fellow townsman. And they would have done so if they could (vv. 28-30).

As we can see, it is not only the hatred of religious rigorists and the maneuvering of politicians that lead Jesus to the cross. He is driven there also by the narrowness of fallen human nature.

The problem of insiders and outsiders has always existed, in every society and every culture. Everywhere and always it has turned out that it is better to be an insider than an outsider. But then the Messiah came into the world, and it turned out that everything was not so simple. It turned out that an insider is not necessarily someone we know. Most often it is someone we think we know. And this is understandable: we perceive our own people as part of the familiar and known world. There is no need to look closely at them, and no need to listen carefully to their words. In general, we already know more or less what our own people can tell us.

Outsiders are another matter. An outsider is always someone you do not know. Someone who is not part of the known and familiar world, and here it does not matter where he is from: another continent or the neighboring village. Outsiders are often rejected, but they are always looked at closely. People listen to what they say. Not necessarily in a friendly way, but always attentively. After all, an outsider has to be understood. Or at least explained to oneself. Explanation is often an illusion of understanding. Understanding presupposes the perception of another person as he is. Explanation begins when we perceive this other person as we want to see him, so that he will fit within the bounds of our perception of the world familiar and known to us.

Christ can and must be accepted as He is. And He can and must be understood too - also as He is. But He does not need to be explained. Not to ourselves and not to others. Provided, of course, that we want to communicate with Christ and not with our images of Christ. And here it turns out that it is easier for those to whom He is an outsider. They know nothing about Him. His own people also know nothing about Him, but they think they know everything. Unlike outsiders, who at least are not mistaken about their ignorance. And it is this way not only with Him.

It is this way with God too. With His heavenly Father. It is no accident that Jesus gives examples from ancient Jewish history of God's not being recognized by His own people. A failure to recognize Him that separates people from God. And from the Messiah too. For God or the Messiah to begin to act, a person must want it. And must turn directly to God. Directly to Christ. But not to those images of God or Christ that he has invented for himself. Otherwise even the Kingdom may turn out to be unreal. Imagined. And so may life in it.

Speaking of resurrection, Paul is not speaking at all about the immortality of the soul or some other partial immortality. In fact, by that time there was nothing new in the idea of the immortality of the soul: the Egyptians spoke of it, the Greeks spoke of it, the Indians spoke of it in their own somewhat different way, and among other peoples too, even if there was no developed teaching about the immortality of the soul, there was nevertheless a certain vague idea that a person does not die entirely and completely, and that the world of shadows may not be the only possible lot of those who have left the world of the living.

But in every such idea there was always the idea of some residual existence of the person. Death was imagined as an inevitable catastrophe for man in his present state, the loss of part of the human person, in which, however, its core is preserved, so that the person loses neither memory nor self-consciousness.

This is what distinguished all ancient ideas about the immortality of the soul from earlier ideas about the world of shadows: there, in the world of shadows, a person precisely lost memory of earthly life, and self-consciousness barely smoldered in him. Ideas about an immortal personal principle were connected with the hope of the continuation of life after the death of the body, of an immortality that might be reduced but was still immortality, and a personal immortality at that, in which a person, though deprived of the body, still remains himself in the main.

Paul, however, has something greater in mind. He is speaking not about preserving something from the human person so that this remnant may live forever, but precisely about full life, life in the body, the life to which man was called from the very beginning, since God created man in the unity of spirit and nature, soul and body.

More than that: the matter is not simply the preservation of man, but also his transformation, the qualitative change of human nature under the influence of the breath of the Kingdom as the person is ever more included in its life. Here the matter is no longer the afterlife, but the fullness of life, compared with which our present existence is fit to be called pre-life. And the beginning of movement toward this fullness is connected with a person's entry into the Church and with the first experience of the Kingdom that a Christian receives at the moment of this entry.

But the beginning is not yet the end, and the Christian's path is not limited to the earthly stage alone. In fact, with regard to the Kingdom one can hardly speak of the afterlife in the pre-Christian sense of the word, since it includes the life and path of the Christian as a whole, at all its stages, both the present one and all subsequent ones. This single life is what the apostle has in mind when he speaks of the natural, or "soulish," body and the spiritual body. The fullness of life, natural and spiritual, not the immortality of the soul, is what awaits us at the end of the path. The path of which the apostle does not tire of reminding the addressees of his letter.