NOTES for Joh 12:20-50

The Lord mysteriously tells us, His disciples: "The light is with you for a little while longer." Yes, of course, this refers to His imminent death on the cross, for the Word, like a grain of God's sowing, must die in order to bear fruit. And He died - of this, unlike His resurrection, no one doubts - and the light He brought into the world went out forever for the world.

But not for those who believed Him! He promised that those who believe in Him would be sons of light, bearers of this light revealed to the apostles in the Resurrection. And this is both a promise and a task: not to remain in darkness despite His death, obvious to all; to "walk in the light," that is, to live in His presence, believing that He is alive. Then His death, through us - and this is astonishing - will bear much fruit for the world and open access for all to the Kingdom of Light...

"And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to Myself." Strange words. John goes on to explain that this is about Jesus' Death, not about the Ascension. The word "draw" can be understood in very different ways, and both meanings are probably important. It can be understood as an expression of love. The Cross is the ultimate expression of God's love: God loves us unto death, even death on a cross. With these words Jesus in effect says to us: "I will draw you to Myself by My love, embrace you, take you by the hand, and lead you to the Father."

On the other hand, until Christ's Second Coming, while time has not ended and we live on this earth and sin, there is no other path for us: we too must pass through the cross. Christ has redeemed us, and after the Cross there will be Resurrection. But the path to resurrection and eternal life lies through Golgotha, where we will never be alone - Jesus will be beside us.

Jesus and the people listening to Him understand the Messiah's path differently. And the very image of the Messiah in the popular mind differs from what the Savior proved to be in reality. The main difference is that for the great majority of the people who listened to Jesus, the work of the Messiah was something purely external. The Messiah, or, as Jesus usually calls Himself in the third person, the Son of Man (this messianic image is taken from the Book of Daniel), has in the people's consciousness no ordinary human path at all.

He is not an ordinary man. He "abides forever." He comes to earth in order to accomplish something great, something that must end with the creation of the messianic Kingdom, a strong earthly state that this extraordinary King will head. His earthly path will be mysterious and unlike the path of an ordinary person, though Jews still do not speak of the Messiah's divinity in the Christian sense. And here it turns out that the Messiah still has to undergo some kind of glorification. There was something to think about. Jesus Himself, meanwhile, speaks about His real earthly path. About a path that includes death on the cross and the resurrection that follows. And also about the path by which one enters His Kingdom. About a path that requires a change of life. Not the restructuring of human life according to some special rules, but its change, complete and radical.

Such a change makes the limited and finite life of fallen man part of another life: that life of the Kingdom in all its fullness, which the Savior brought into the world. Without this change it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. It would seem that there is nothing complicated here. It is far simpler than the many clever methods for restructuring and remaking human nature that countless magicians and occultists have offered in every age. Yet precisely this kind of change sometimes proves completely beyond a person's strength. Because here one has to open one's hand. And, what is still more difficult, one's will. To let go.

And to let go of one's own life, that very existence with which one has grown used to identifying oneself, is not simple at all. It is easier to remake it in any way one wants, but by oneself, under one's own control, than to give up such control and allow Another to govern one's life. Here trust is needed, and it either exists or it does not. But if it does not, then hope for the Kingdom will have to be abandoned. For in the Kingdom where Christ reigns, one cannot live without trusting the One who rules that Kingdom.

Everyone is familiar with the situation when you offer someone something important, beautiful, valuable, necessary, or tasty, and the person refuses. One of the most typical reactions can be formulated childishly like this: "Fine then, I did not want it that much anyway," or even more cheerfully, "That means there will be more for me." But speaking this way, we pretend that another person's neglect does not touch us and that we are "free people living in a free country," that something of one's own can be dear to each person, and that we respect another person's choice.

In reality, beneath this showy calm lies hurt that what is precious to you turns out to be unnecessary to others. Gradually this hurt can poison life even more: it begins to feel as though it was not the thing offered that was refused, but that you yourself are not loved, not respected, not accepted. And then it begins...

Glory to God that He is not like that at all! When we refuse what He shares with us - not merely something important to Him, but also that without which no person will be truly happy - He still says that He does not judge us (see John 12:47). Then He will add that each person will be his own judge (see John 12:48). And this is an astonishing truth: the Lord cannot deprive us of salvation; only we ourselves can deprive ourselves of it. He not only does not condemn us, He does not even judge us for it. It simply hurts Him very much...

The evangelist describes the reasons for unbelief in Jesus quite exhaustively. He divides all unbelievers into two categories: those who do not want to see the truth and those who are simply afraid. The second case is more or less understandable: in every age fear and cowardice have been among the chief obstacles on the path of righteousness, preventing those who walk or want to walk that path from making the right decisions. The first category is more complicated. It is probably hard to imagine a person who in ordinary life voluntarily blinds himself or simply closes his eyes so that, no longer seeing the reality around him, he can replace that vision with fantasies. And understandably so: in everyday life the consequences of such an act can be most unexpected and unpleasant. Yet in spiritual life many people apparently make just this choice, and quite often, although the consequences here are hardly less serious. Why is that?

The Athenian philosopher Socrates, who lived five centuries before the birth of Christ, seems already to have understood the reason for such behavior. He said that people often take a small good for a great one and a great evil for a small one, as well as the reverse, simply because what is large looks smaller at a distance than it really is. This applies to spiritual life just as much as to everyday life.

Giving up comfortable and familiar views and a settled worldview, especially a religious one, is at the very least uncomfortable. The day of Judgment seems so distant, so small compared with this discomfort, that... it is disregarded—perhaps in the hope that by the time it comes, things will somehow have settled down, worked themselves out, and resolved themselves, and that we will somehow enter the Kingdom after all at little cost, without any particular sacrifice or loss.

And it is best to get rid of those who, as the saying goes, care far too much. There will be no quiet life with them anyway. How to get rid of them is merely a technical question.

By quoting the prophet Isaiah, the evangelist John lets us understand that there is nothing unusual in the unbelief of the Jews. Simple, understandable, and by no means honorable human reasons lead to it. What matters for us here is not to condemn those who do not believe, but to be penetrated by the spirit of Christ's words. Today the Lord speaks to us again about light. He is the light that came into the world so that those who believe in Him would not remain in darkness. This means that, knowing the Lord Jesus Christ, we ourselves can be filled with this light and see truth and falsehood, life and death, cruelty and mercy. And this gives us the opportunity to make a choice and follow the truth the Lord reveals to us.

There are only two causes of unbelief: unwillingness to see the obvious, and fear. But if we think about it, it is not hard to understand that the root is one, and it is precisely fear. Only, as we see, fear comes in different forms. There is open, unconcealed fear: in such cases a person usually admits simply and directly that he refuses to see and hear certain things only because he is afraid. He understands that once he hears and sees something, he will have to draw certain conclusions from what he has seen and heard, and then change something in his life, and the changes can bring at least undesirable consequences. Here everything is clear: a person does not want to listen to Jesus or follow Him because he does not want extra problems. This is, of course, bad, but still not the same as in the second case. Here everything is fairly open, and the fearful person understands it all himself: he knows that he is being cowardly and realizes what his problem is. Besides, although overcoming such fear is not easy, in general it is not so difficult either: this is precisely an external fear; it binds a person from outside, frightening him above all with external consequences.

The second cause is more serious and deeper. Here too there is fear, but a different kind, an inner fear. From the outside such a person may fear nothing at all. He may not tremble at the thought of the consequences of his choice. But such a person can fear for his inner world, and fear very much.

Usually the first type of fear seizes a secular, unbelieving person who tends to rely on external things and to attach great importance to what can easily be lost in the event, for example, of persecution. The second fear is more characteristic of a religious person, for whom the chief value is his inner world. Such a person is certain that this world cannot be taken from him even if his life is taken, and therefore he has nothing to fear from outside. But from within, the world of a religious person is very vulnerable, and such a person constantly watches carefully to make sure that no one somehow destroys his religiosity. If he senses in someone's words a threat to his religiosity, he at once becomes blind and deaf, simply for the sake of self-preservation.

Only the Savior can free us from both of these fears, for He can unite everyone who trusts Him to the life of His Kingdom. And the breath of the Kingdom that has entered a person's heart cannot be taken away from that person or destroyed. Then fear disappears too, because there is nothing more to fear.

What amazing words Jesus speaks in today's passage from the Gospel of John! The unity of which the Church speaks is visible precisely here. More than that, these very words of Jesus help us touch the depth of the relationship between the Son and the Father. They are so inseparable that whoever believes in the Son believes in the Father, and whoever sees Jesus sees the Lord of Hosts Himself. And by God's mercy, light comes into the world to reveal the Father to us by illuminating our hearts.

When the Greeks come to Jesus, they ask Philip for help. For some reason he goes to Andrew. It is hard to think the apostle was afraid to approach the Teacher himself. It is just as unlikely that Andrew was Christ's personal secretary, in charge of the Teacher's schedule. The matter is something quite different.

Something unusual is happening. For the first time, other peoples responding to Jesus' preaching are mentioned, even if they believe in the same God as the Jews. The community of Christ's disciples is encountering something new. And therefore Philip behaves very naturally: he does not hurry to act on his own. Jesus sent the apostles out to preach not one by one, but two by two (see Mark 6:7).

Who knows: perhaps Philip went to Andrew precisely because he was "paired" with him? Besides, Philip surely remembers how Christ said, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am among them" (Matt 18:20).

The Lord lays the foundation of the Church in this way: not scattered believers, but disciples coming to Him together. When we do not understand what to do, when we want to know God's will, we should not rely exclusively on how we ourselves hear it. God has given us His Church to help us: He has given us elders, He has given us brothers and sisters with whom we can turn to Him together. And so His word is fulfilled: "If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven" (Matt 18:19).

When it comes to the Savior's earthly ministry, we understand that something unique is at issue: indeed, He alone was destined to be born and to live His earthly life as the Messiah; this was given to no one else. And yet His life became a kind of spiritual model suitable for every one of His followers. Moreover, there is simply no other model that allows one to enter the Kingdom, and apparently there cannot be, at least in our world that has undergone the fall.

This model is very simple in theory and not so simple in practice: a person must agree to part with his own life in order then to receive it again, but now as another life, in a new quality suitable for the Kingdom. The one who loves his life ("soul") as it is, in its present condition, cannot count on the Kingdom. The demand appears excessively harsh, but as we can see, this harshness is caused precisely by the specific nature of the fallen world, of which the life of each of us is a part. Even Jesus Himself, over whom original sin has no power, was not, during His earthly ministry, completely free from this specific nature: He, being fully and to the end an inhabitant of our untransformed world and part of it, became subject, if not to sin, then to death - though, of course, not in the same way as we are: death was possible for Him, not inevitable as it is for us.

And the only thing that can help us is readiness to renounce our life in its present quality, what Jesus calls "hating one's own life." It is worth remembering that in biblical language love and hatred denote not the emotional states we often mean by them, but an attitude of acceptance or nonacceptance toward that to which our will is directed. Nonacceptance of life, including first of all one's own life, in its present quality and state, and readiness to part with it for the sake of another, new life, constitute the necessary preliminary condition for beginning the path into the Kingdom: the path during which our former life will be remelted into a new one, fit for eternity.