Main news for 18 May 2025

The closer the Crucifixion comes, the more time Jesus spends with His disciples. He speaks to them about the sufferings awaiting Him. But His disciples do not understand Him; they are thinking not about suffering and death, but about glory and privileges. This is where the argument comes from: "Who is greater? Who will receive more authority in the Kingdom of the Messiah?" John, in addition, seeks to protect the twelve disciples from competition on the part of "outsiders." At the same time, the boundary of "our own circle" is drawn by a very simple sign: "ours" are those who walk with us.

Christ rejects both attempts to build a pyramid of power and honors and the desire to turn the community of disciples into a closed club. He says directly to John: "Do not forbid him." Then He unexpectedly begins a conversation about the danger of stumbling blocks, ending it with the words: "Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." Here one can see an echo of John's question and of the disciples' arguments about who is greater. The desire to separate "our own" from "outsiders," and to arrange "our own" by rank, destroys peace and makes people suspicious and hostile. Without peace among themselves, Christ's disciples cannot fulfill their mission in the world: to be "the salt of the earth" (Matt. 5:13). (Let us recall that every sacrifice was salted with salt before being offered to God on the altar (Lev. 2:13). Salt, as it were, made the sacrifice fit for God).

What does the word "stumbling block" mean? Other translations of this Greek word ("skandalon") are trap, snare, noose. It is everything that by deception, on the sly, pushes the simplehearted toward a fall or simply gets in the way and obstructs. Let us think about the extent to which the struggle for power, quarrels, and divisions among Christians serve as a stumbling block for "these little ones" and hinder those seeking the Truth from coming to saving faith.

Everyone who reads the Gospel is struck by a characteristic difference in Christ's words about those who are not with Him and about those who are not against His disciples. With regard to Himself, the Lord says: "Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters." But when the disciples complain to Christ about a certain man who works miracles in Christ's name but does not go with them, the Lord says to them: "do not forbid him... whoever is not against you is for you."

The disciples can be understood. If this unknown man believes in Christ so much that he casts out demons in His name, how can he not follow the path of the Twelve apostles? Is their path deficient, mistaken? No, the path of the Twelve is not mistaken - but it is not the only one. For centuries, people coming into the community of Christ's disciples have tried to "forbid" those who do not go after them. Today's passage from the Gospel of Mark directly rejects such attempts.

It is characteristic that the evangelists tell us nothing about such people, who did not go after the disciples but did walk in the ways of Jesus Christ. Only occasionally, in passing, do we learn that there were not so few of them. At one moment the apostle Paul finds a community baptized with John's baptism, and by his apostolic authority passes on to them the gift of the Holy Spirit. At another, he himself testifies in a letter to the existence of more than five hundred witnesses of the Resurrection... In the end, all who have believed in Christ enter one holy catholic and apostolic Church. But people do this by following Jesus Christ, and not anyone else.

The question of power has always been the main one for the fallen world. Whoever has more power is greater in this world in every other sense as well. The matter, of course, is power in the real meaning of the word: power over souls, over people, over human lives, which can be manipulated at one's own discretion. This is power as such. Everything else is only means, and crude coercion is not even the most terrible among them. The true goal, though the one striving for power may not know it, is always one thing: to seize for oneself another person's life. Not physical life, but what the Bible calls the soul, the stream of life given to a person by God and unique in every case.

This is what the one striving for power wants to seize. He longs to gain access to this very life of another or of others; he wants to subject it to himself so as to dispose of someone else's life force and spend it at his own discretion, just as he spends his own life. Of course, each person understands life according to the measure of his own spiritual state, but one thing turns out to be common: the one striving for power longs to dispose not only of himself but also of others, whatever that may mean for him. Of course, if a person has not yet been completely corrupted by power and has not become a finished cynic, he tries as much as possible to hide even from himself the true motives of his striving, justifying it by lofty and far-reaching goals that he will achieve once he obtains the power he desires.

In reality, however, as the whole experience of the fallen world shows, one can avoid becoming captive to acquired power only by remaining God's person first of all, and everything else second, as King David managed to do, for example. He always remained first of all a prophet, and only afterward a king and everything else he was in life. For the Kingdom, the question of power in the earthly sense does not arise at all. There, power in that quality simply does not exist; in principle it is incompatible with the Kingdom and its life. A person's place in the Kingdom is determined only by the measure of the fullness of his life, and therefore by the fullness of his action, which draws into itself those who want to participate with him in his activity.

The initiator, of course, is responsible for the work begun, but the possibility of any manipulation of others is completely excluded here, because the goal of every activity in the Kingdom is the spiritual formation of the person, which is in no way compatible with manipulation, while all other goals are secondary and derived from the main one. Therefore there can be no power in the Kingdom in the form in which it exists in the fallen world. It can exist there only insofar as in the fallen world, according to its laws, the person is never the main goal of any activity. In the Kingdom this is impossible, and this is what Jesus is trying to explain to His disciples.