The disciples are glad that they have become heralds and co-workers of God's Kingdom, victors over demons and healers of diseases. But Jesus stops them: "You are rejoicing over the wrong thing"... God gives those who believe in Him many good and amazing things (if they can see them), but the chief value of His Kingdom is not this.

The disciples, and with them the readers of the Gospel, are blessed, happy already because they have seen and heard what the prophets and sages of antiquity only dreamed of: they are witnesses, witnesses not only of miracles, healings, victories over evil, but they are near the very Center of God's Kingdom.

So this is not an abstraction, not paradise, not an afterlife, not gifts and miracles, but God Himself, revealed to people in His Son Jesus.

At first glance, the Savior's call to rejoice not over victory against the spirits of darkness, but over sharing in the life of the Kingdom, since Jesus says in this case that the names of those who share in it are "written in heaven," sounds a little strange. In truth, one thing is inseparable from the other: the powers of darkness flee from those who share in the life of the Kingdom not because the citizens of the Kingdom are frightening in themselves, but because the life in which they share becomes, for the spirits of darkness, a power that kills them. Yet on closer examination it is not hard to see that Jesus has in mind, above all, the priorities that determine the whole pattern of spiritual life. First the Kingdom, and only then everything else, even successes in the spiritual warfare that awaits, in our transforming but still untransformed world, everyone who shares in the Kingdom.

And this may be the hardest thing: not to rejoice in anything by itself. It is not so hard not to be enticed by what one already considers vanity, foolishness, or especially sin. It is much harder to remain calmly detached when thinking about something that clearly testifies to progress on the path into the Kingdom. Yet the spiritual gaze must be directed toward the Kingdom itself and toward the One who brought it into the world, and toward nothing else. It is not for nothing that the Savior Himself says that such a gaze belongs more to children, who have not yet lost the ability to be carried away by what truly interests them, self-forgetfully, to the point of complete disregard for everything around them. If only we could be carried away by the Kingdom with the same self-forgetfulness, our path there would be, if not simpler, at least shorter.

The Lord's disciples were people just like us. They also argued, were afraid, were vain, were proud... But they knew how to trust. They followed Jesus, leaving everything, although they had no idea what awaited them. They cast out demons and healed the sick, believing that in the name of Jesus a demon would leave and the sick would be healed. They rejoiced like children that it worked.

This very ability - the ability to trust - is what we have lost. We need proof that we can do something; it is not enough for us to know that God thinks we can. In response to God's request to do something that we consider impossible for ourselves, and sometimes simply difficult and unusual, instead of trusting and doing what God asks us to do, we say to God, "Prove to me that I can do it." And when it turns out that yes, I can, instead of thanking God who gave us this opportunity, we boast about our abilities.

There is nothing wrong with rejoicing that we do something well, because when God created the world He said, "It is good," and the ability to create something new has been given to us by God, so we too can sometimes say those words. But we cannot say them without adding, "Lord, I thank You," because without God we can do nothing.