Main news for 8 June 2024

To what relate the words of God, addressed to Peter? Some interpret them, as the abolition of all the standards and the limitations of the cacherout for the Christians, others (and the context confirms such an understanding) as the right of the heathen entering the Church to remain who they are, without accepting the Judaism with its complex system of norms and rules of the ritual purity. But what really mean the words of God, Who cleansed those who were formerly unclean? The notions of purity and impurity are indeed connected not with the cacherout and not with the rules of the purity ritual as such, they are connected to the fundamental peculiarities of the created and moreover fallen world.

Particularly the fundamental characteristics of the universe in its present state assume the division of the whole creation in the clean and unclean. Besides “unclean” do not mean bad or deficient, it means only what is not intended by God for the sanctification in this stage of the world history. The unclean has the full right to exist in God's world, he does not only have the right to approach the altar. And the quality of every thing in the created world is very clearly defined; the exception is only of man, who can be clean, quite as unclean before God.

Probably, before the fall everything was otherwise, hardly the man was conceived by God, as a being not being liable to the sanctification, but the fall changed fundamentally the situation, such that now man could completely be in such state, which excludes any possibility of sanctification. But with the coming of Christ, the situation radically changed: because with Him, entered the world the Kingdom where everything is sanctified by definition. In relation to the Kingdom and its inhabitants the question of cleanness and uncleanness loses simply its sense: There can’t be anything unclean in the Kingdom. This is applied to food and people. The second is more important of course: because with such, the way to the Kingdom really opens to everyone.

Before, the question of the observation of the ritual purity was a question of the membership in the people of God, because it felt people-community, sanctified, and thus free of all that prevents the sanctification. Now every person entering the Kingdom was cleansed by the very contact with Him, and thus, and with this breath of God, by which it {the Kingdom} is penetrated. So with the coming into the world of Christ and the Kingdom, was solved the problem of the cleanness and sanctification, dividing during centuries the Jews and the heathen. Was solved by opening the way to the Kingdom to every person who seeks for it.