"Religion is an ecological niche," "religion is a social game." This is how many thoughtful and serious people speak about religion. A game... That is exactly what Jesus calls the Pharisees: devout people who know and fulfill all religious prescriptions, who live solely by this and nothing else: "Actors!" It is not that He condemns acting as such; these people are simply playing at what must not be played at.

However much our life resembles theater, God cannot be part of a performance. That is why this social game is completely unacceptable for Jesus: God is too important and too near to Him for such playacting, first praying for show and then deceiving and humiliating, preaching and then forgetting about God, being honest before Him in the meticulous counting of a tithe from vegetables and then deceiving Him with one's whole life. Perhaps this is our human need: to portray someone, to present ourselves as someone... But the Heavenly Father does not play house. His love is real.

The most terrible thing is that the higher a person's calling, the more tragic and painful his falling away, his unbelief, becomes. The Pharisees were religious teachers of God's people, guardians of tradition, law, and Scripture. Jerusalem is "the city of the great King," but it is precisely there that Christ dies. The Jews are the chosen people, "God's own," yet "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him."

We Christians are also a people chosen by God, children of Abraham by faith, guardians of the Gospel Tradition. Therefore we too walk along the edge of the abyss; we too are in the risk group. At any moment our piety can turn into hypocrisy, conviction in faith into a sense of our own rightness, respect for traditions into legalism. How can we avoid "the leaven of the Pharisees" and still remain God's people? How can we preserve faithfulness to the Gospel without losing Christ?

The rules of conduct for Christians whom the Lord obligated to preach the Gospel are repeated by the apostle Paul more than once or twice. And here in today's reading we have a concise statement of the foundation of life for everyone. First, witness is not instead of ordinary life, but together with ordinary life, with daily duties, with care for daily bread. We cannot justify our inaction by saying that our life is too complicated. Second, holy, righteous, blameless conduct. Easier to say than to do. But before us stands a person with an obviously difficult character, with his own problems and illnesses that plainly burden and torment him. And he tells us that our conduct before God must be blameless.

But most strongly of all, Paul defines the center of his preaching: "we asked and persuaded and implored you to walk worthily of God, who called you into His Kingdom and glory." It is unbearably painful for a modern person to accept this phrase. Because it is most convenient to imagine God as something abstract, mechanical, many-faced, and cruel. Such a god is easier; he is controllable. But with one phrase we find ourselves before the face of God, in whom there is no darkness; before the face of the Son of Man, the apostle Paul implores us to be worthy of the One who has called us into His wondrous Light. Readiness to bear witness to the Light, to the Glory, and to the Kingdom is based precisely on the fact that all of this is not an abstraction. We are speaking about the properties and qualities of a real Person.