Main news for 12 September 2026

Today's reading brings us back to the theme of the messianic Kingdom, revealing it from a side perhaps somewhat unexpected for the prophet's contemporaries. Isaiah says that in the Kingdom a person receives everything necessary for life as a gift (vv. 1-2). And this is not simply about an extraordinary abundance of earthly fruits, which in the transformed world a person can receive without labor. It is no accident that the prophet connects this abundance with the covenant (v. 3), which presupposes witness to the pagans (vv. 5-6) and the turning of the wicked and apostates (v. 7).

Such an approach did not fully fit the ideas about the covenant and the Kingdom that were traditional for those times. To religious people, and they were the overwhelming majority in the Jewish community, whether among the repatriates or among those who remained in Babylon, it was completely obvious that the right to enter the Kingdom had to be earned. But Isaiah, speaking in God's name, says something else: the Kingdom is given as a gift to those who seek it.

Such a view, of course, immediately devalued all achievements and made all religious arithmetic meaningless. But it opened the road into the Kingdom to everyone who sought that Kingdom. Gold and silver can pay for earthly life and earthly goods; for the life of the Kingdom a person has nothing with which to pay. Earthly currency is not accepted there, even if it is the currency of religious achievements and merits. But relationships with God are fundamentally important; without them neither turning nor witness can be imagined. The person who turns to God and repents of his sins also can count not on the fact that from now on he will "reform" and "work it all off," but only on the mercy of God.

All this seemed so strange and so contrary to settled ideas that Isaiah, speaking in God's name, says directly to his listeners that human thoughts and ways are as far from God's designs and ways as earth is from heaven (vv. 8-9). And he says that God's word does not remain barren, making possible what is impossible for man (vv. 10-11). The time will come, and the impossible will become real: the Word will become flesh, and the Savior will enter the world.

When, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Russian censorship began to "block" materials about evolution from print, a remarkable epigram appeared:

  "How the Creator made this world,
  What He counted most fitting,
  The chairman cannot know
  Of the Committee on Printing"

A person who has gained a faith that he considers true, and which really may be true, for some reason supposes that he possesses the truth itself, that he already knows everything and determines things like God Himself. If not alone, then collectively.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God speaks quite unambiguously: no. He is not like us, even if we were created in His image. Even if we have memorized everything He said, we have not learned to think as He does. Therefore our attempts to build our model of behavior on the basis of what "Jesus would do" are completely useless. Therefore we will always need not the law of God and not stories about Him, but Him Himself, the Living God, who cannot be modeled.

Both then and now, the prophets, through their fiery preaching, drew those capable of hearing it out of the mire of commonplace religious notions. We really do often fashion for ourselves a god (God?) in our own image and likeness. We know what He thinks about this or that matter (Scripture provides us with enough material for such conjectures, while we overlook its paradoxes); we are always ready to help Him in the difficult work of judging the living and the dead, to remind Him of what He has forgotten to do for us, and so on. No, He is not like that! Believing in the incarnation of God, we must not believe that He became as petty, malicious, and foolish as we are: He remained Himself. He does not carry out our will; His purpose is not to fulfill our desires (somewhat... primitive as they are). He is incomprehensible; His thoughts are not our thoughts; He does only His own will. He remains the same, whether dwelling in unapproachable light, pervading all creation, or traveling the roads of the earth.