Today's reading continues the theme of apostasy and punishment for it. Clearly, now that the "point of no return" in the relationship between God and His people has been passed, punishment becomes inevitable. But this punishment turns out not to be quite what we are used to imagining. Strictly speaking, God does not punish His people directly. He simply leaves them alone with the consequences of their own sins (vv. 36-43).

In a certain sense one could say that the warnings God sent to the people (v. 27) had the same character; but then God had not yet left them for good, He had only let them feel the weight of the possible consequences of the sin committed. Now these consequences crash down on the people in full measure. It would seem that such permission can well be considered genuine punishment. But in this case one should speak rather not of punishment, but of a kind of shock therapy, and in a certain sense a forced one.

Indeed, before the situation became what today's passage describes, the people had in essence already managed to break all the relationships that bound them to God. And without such relationships the possibilities for God's intervention in the situation become extremely limited, since He takes the free will of the people He created, and of whole nations as well, with complete seriousness. If the people say a decisive "no" to God, He also treats that "no" with complete seriousness. He will not play at freedom of choice: He truly gives this freedom to each person, while at the same time placing on each the fullness of responsibility for the choice made.

Of course, He could at any moment end the game, stop the experiment, intervene in the situation without regard for anyone's choice. But the point is that for God freedom is not a game and not an experiment, but an absolute reality. Meanwhile fallen man at times would perhaps like it to be a kind of game, so that if something happens everything could be started over. But God gives a person, and sometimes an entire people, such a chance only in one case: in the case of repentance and conversion.

And from His people He waits precisely for such repentance and conversion, in order to give them the opportunity to begin everything from the beginning (vv. 60-63). But this will not be a repetition of the former history; it will be a new stage of it. What was cannot be brought back, and the memory of committed sins is not erased without a trace (v. 63). Only when the Kingdom enters the world and is revealed in all its fullness, transforming everything, will sin disappear forever, and even its memory be wiped away.

Today's reading offers us Ezekiel's parable of the unfaithful wife, by whom he, like other prophets who use this image, means Israel. For the full perception of the image it is important to keep in mind that, unlike in Russian, in Hebrew the word "Israel" is feminine.

Similar parables are found not only in Ezekiel: Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Jeremiah also compared Israel to an unfaithful wife. But Ezekiel's parable is remarkable because it describes a kind of divine pedagogy: here the attempts of God to direct His people onto the path of repentance are clearly visible. The parable begins by recalling that without God the Jewish people simply would not have existed on earth: they would have perished like an infant abandoned on the road, and only God's direct intervention in the situation allowed them to become what they became (vv. 3-14).

But everything God had done for His people was forgotten by the people themselves, and forgotten very quickly. The reason for this, as can be seen, was self-reliance, a readiness to rely not on God but on His gifts, which came to be perceived not as gifts but as something self-evident and inalienable (v. 15). It is no wonder that the people considered themselves entitled to dispose of God's gifts at their own discretion (vv. 16-26). But God does not break off His relationship with the people despite their obvious and open infidelity; on the contrary, He makes attempts to bring to their senses those who have completely forgotten Him (v. 27).

The people themselves would perhaps have perceived such measures as punishment from God, but judging by the prophet's words, this was only the Lord's attempt to remind them of Himself and of the relationship that had once bound the people of God to their God. But no measures guarantee either repentance or conversion, since both are possible only voluntarily, and God does not need "repentance" obtained by force. Therefore He does not compel anyone to turn; He only lets His people understand that the path they have chosen leads to a dead end. Even then the choice remains, for in such a situation not only conversion but also rejection of God is possible.

In the case of rejection, however, the situation becomes completely unnatural. Apparently, in the relationship with God of an individual person, as of an entire people, there are stages, not only when the person or people are going toward God, but also when that person or that people are moving away from God. At the beginning of the path leading away from Him, God may still take certain actions in order to stop the one who is leaving. It may be that the disasters He permits in such a situation mark precisely the boundary that can be considered a kind of "point of no return."

And after passing this point, a person can no longer easily and without serious consequences return to God; now, even in the case of conversion and repentance, he will have to bear certain consequences of the sins he has committed. And for a people, to pass the "point of no return" in relations with God means to doom itself to an inevitable catastrophe, which for the Jewish people was the defeat of Judah by the Babylonians and the subsequent Babylonian captivity.

"Can one divorce for any reason?" In other words, is there anything that binds a man and a woman when their feelings no longer draw them toward each other so strongly? What answers can be heard to this question? "Nothing binds them" (that is, one can divorce for any reason); "Mutual obligations bind them" (but how great is the value of a human word?); "Duty to society binds them" (but love can hardly be compared in value with civic duty...); "Children bind them" (yes, if they are taken into account).

Christ gives a different answer: a man and a woman are bound by the design for creation; that is, God Himself joins them. And He does this not through commandments and prohibitions on divorce, since law cannot generate love (something the Mosaic law wisely takes into account); He joins them by His presence in the relationship itself, acting by His wisdom and love in those who trust Him.