When reading today's passage, a question arises: why does John the Baptist still give no definite answer to the question asked him about his ministry (vv. 19-23)? Indeed, he had every right to define his mission as prophetic, and such an answer would have fully satisfied the commission sent by the Synagogue to check him (vv. 24-25). But John refuses on principle to speak of his ministry as something having significance of its own. He sees his mission only as a preliminary stage necessary for preparing the people for the coming of the Messiah-Christ, and outside the context of this task John's ministry evidently loses all meaning, including for the prophet himself (vv. 25-27).

And it is precisely this view of his own mission that enables John to see and recognize the Messiah (vv. 29-34). For in order to recognize Christ, it is not enough simply to see Him physically. Outwardly Jesus differed little from an ordinary person. Of course, what He said was not something one could hear every day or from everyone, but the main thing was still not in the words. The main thing was in the Kingdom that He carried with Him wherever He went. Therefore, in order to recognize in Jesus the Messiah-Christ promised by God, one had to touch and share in the Kingdom.

But one can share in the Kingdom only on one very important condition: the one seeking it must forget his own importance, forget that he, as well as his deeds and ministries, can mean anything in themselves apart from the Kingdom into which he wants to enter. Perhaps this is why John does not want to testify about himself as a prophet: all the great prophets of Israel had their own mission, and each of these missions was, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. Each prophet was a figure in his own right, and those around him always noticed this, even when, as was most often the case, the prophets themselves wanted nothing of the kind. But in those times, the prominence of the prophet helped accomplish the main task entrusted by God to one or another of His servants. Now, however, the task evidently consisted precisely in pointing to the Messiah and remaining as unnoticed as possible oneself. John the Baptist succeeds in this: he disappears in the radiance of the coming Messiah, and in the radiance of the Kingdom that the Messiah carries with Him.

Speaking about his prophetic ministry, Isaiah utters bitter words: "I have labored in vain, and spent my strength for nothing." What disappointed the prophet so deeply? At first glance, it appears that his ministry, on the contrary, was quite successful. He became, in effect, the prophet of the first aliyah, that first repatriation, that return of the Jews from captivity to the land of their fathers, which everyone, both those who set out for Judea and those who preferred to remain in Babylon, perceived as the triumph of God's people, as the beginning of blessed times that would be crowned by the soon coming of the Messiah.

Isaiah began to speak about the imminent end of the captivity when the Babylonian Empire still seemed unshakable, and when what he had spoken about actually happened, the prophet became a true national hero. But this did not make him glad, and his own words allow us to understand why. He says that God made him a gatherer of the people, the one through whom He wants not only to gather the people but also to renew them spiritually. God wants Yahwism itself to become different, for the witness about Him to resound throughout the whole earth, for His people, a significant part of whom had by that time remained in the communities of an already quite extensive and numerous diaspora, to become His witness for all who seek truth and spiritual life.

Meanwhile, the people did not correspond at all to the task that had been set. There was euphoria over the decree of Cyrus the Great about the return; there were intense, almost feverish messianic expectations. But the closedness of the community was already showing itself, along with a certain contempt for the nations and self-isolation explained by the demand for strict observance of ritual purity. In short, all the traits had already appeared that would later bloom luxuriantly and produce the worst examples of Pharisaic religiosity.

Under such conditions, there could be no question of any witness to the nations, not because there were not enough missionaries, since Jewish mission was quite active over the following centuries, but because these missionaries bore witness to themselves, to their people, to their tradition - in short, to anything at all except the main thing needed for spiritual life: living communion with God and how to find it.

This was not done out of malice or because the missionaries considered those whom they addressed unworthy. They were simply absolutely certain that until those whom they addressed became Jews in every respect just like themselves, no communion with God was possible for them. Thus the mission among the nations that God wanted to organize through His people, scattered throughout the whole civilized world of that time even before Christ's coming, failed. It had to be postponed until Christian times and entrusted to the Church.

In bearing witness to Jesus, John notes an astonishing feature of the Kingdom in its relation to our world, which is being transformed but is not yet completely transformed. He speaks of Jesus as the One who has gone ahead of him, although He came after him. Of course, traditional Jewish ideas about the Messiah are reflected here as well, since according to those ideas the Messiah was conceived by God before the creation of the world.

But the matter, it appears, is not only Jewish tradition, but first of all the very nature of the Kingdom. From the point of view of our earthly history, the Kingdom comes at the end of time, after that history is completed. For God, however, it is neither "before" nor "after" history; rather, if we resort to the space-time concepts familiar to us, it is "above" it. It is greater than the space and time familiar to us; it embraces them and includes them in itself, after first transforming them and radically changing their very nature. And the Messiah, who brought the Kingdom into the world, belongs to our world only insofar as this world becomes part of the Kingdom.

That is why His coming becomes an event that does not fit within the framework of earthly history, while people who belong to that history entirely can see only a small part of what is taking place. But to those who, like John, understand what is really happening, it becomes clear that the One has entered the world who has enclosed all earthly history in Himself, so that no one is given a place ahead of Him.