NOTES for Mar 14:1-72; Mar 15:1-47

Today's reading includes several episodes linked by one theme: the theme of faithfulness and betrayal. It begins with the story of the woman who anointed Jesus with precious aromatic oil ("myrrh") (vv. 1-11). It is noteworthy that the description of the event itself is preceded here by a mention of the chief priests' and scribes' desire to kill Jesus (vv. 1-2), and immediately after it follows a mention of Judas's betrayal (vv. 10-11), so that the story of Jesus' anointing and the story of Judas's betrayal merge into one and become a single story. In the evangelist's account, Judas's betrayal is somehow connected with the act of the woman who poured the oil on Jesus' head. It would seem that there can be no connection here, especially since the thought of betrayal, as usually happens, must have arisen in Judas's mind long before the final decision was made. But it is entirely possible that at that moment something in the situation became the final push after which he decided to carry out what he had long been planning. A clue in this case may be the mention of the indignation openly shown by some of those present, who considered such use of costly oil too wasteful (vv. 4-5). But Jesus at once puts everything in its place: first He Himself, and only then help for the poor (vv. 6-9). And in this way He points us to one of the most important laws of spiritual life: concrete, living relationships with God and with Christ are more important than anything else, while everything else, even something as important as works of mercy, is only a consequence of those relationships. The poor will always be in the world. Plans to rid the world completely of poverty are utopian, and charity, evidently, does not have that as its goal. It is only a means to something else, a way of expressing one's love for a neighbor who needs help. And if this deeply personal relationship to the one you help disappears, charity ceases to be a work of love and becomes an abstract idea, which of course can also be served, like any idea, but which in that case ceases to be mercy in the Gospel sense. Gospel love is not an idea and not an emotion; it is a relationship, and therefore, unlike ideas or emotions, which are often quite abstract, it is always utterly concrete. And therefore at the Last Supper, where this relationship of Jesus to His disciples is revealed in all its fullness, the bread and wine become His Body and His Blood (vv. 22-25). Every sacred meal among believing Jews was always, above all, an expression of spiritual unity and brotherly love, the very thing that reaches its ultimate fullness in Gospel love. And the more clearly this unity and this love were revealed, the more spirit there was in such a meal and the less there was of pure, unspiritualized nature. But the love of an ordinary person never by itself reaches the fullness that can completely transform nature and spiritualize it. This is available only to the One who bears in Himself the whole fullness of God and can love to the end, so that in His relationship to the one He loves there is no longer any place for untransformed nature. And then before us are no longer bread and wine, as before, but Body and Blood, which unite us quite truly with the One who came to give us the Kingdom. Yet precisely this depth of relationship can become unbearable for someone who is not ready to trust to the end. It is impossible to follow Jesus only in the name of an idea; without a personal relationship with Him, without the love that He gives to everyone who is ready to trust Him, such a campaign can end only in spiritual collapse. Apparently this is exactly what happened to Judas, who may well have been ready to accept Jesus as a leader and ideological inspiration, but apparently did not love Him at all. And this lack of love led Judas to spiritual collapse, which in his case turned into betrayal of the Teacher. And the push, evidently, was precisely that Jesus pointed to Himself as the main thing His disciples had. For here it was necessary to accept Jesus Himself, not as the leader of a movement or the bearer of an idea, but precisely Himself, as a Person, as a Man who simply had to be loved, loved humanly, as friends are loved. To love, or to betray. This is the choice before which, at some moment in his spiritual life, everyone stands who has decided for some reason to follow Jesus. It is the choice on which depends whether we will be in the Kingdom or in darkness.

The matter is moving toward its resolution. The true traits of the characters and their real desires appear more and more clearly. The scribes and Pharisees no longer argue. They have lost every argument. And this did not convince them, did not stop them, did not make them doubt. "Brood of vipers," as John called them. They argued with the Truth for a long time; now all that remains is to kill it. At last they have openly understood their real desire: "to take Him by stealth and kill Him." They had done this in their hearts long ago. They are concerned only that the people not think anything bad of them.

The woman, however, "who was known in the city as a sinner," could have feared anger and condemnation. It is impossible for her to hide her vices. Yet she is the one who brings the precious ointment. The impulse of her heart draws her irresistibly to Jesus. In it everything is expressed: love, gratitude, repentance. She does not think about what people will say about her.

Judas finally goes to carry out his betrayal. He too has made his decision.

What else can Jesus still manage to do for us, for His disciples, for people? What could He do at all? Give Himself. Remain with us. The Paschal Meal with the disciples continues to this day. Jesus comes to us, as He promised, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The covenant with God, the New Covenant, is renewed at every Liturgy. The Bread and Wine, transformed by His Spirit, nourish and satisfy each one: "...and they all drank of it." He remains faithful to the end and forever. And our heart rejoices after Communion, as did the disciples: they "sang a hymn."

At the same time, however, another theme runs through the passage: the theme of betrayal. Judas betrays. Peter will deny Him. The disciples are distressed and doubt themselves: "Is it I?" They do not know what is in their heart. They would like to "die with Him," but it turns out they cannot. They still cannot decide. And we?

And why does this keep happening to us? Everything has been given to us: wisdom, truth, love, life. Yet we doubt, deny, and often betray. Is it possible to remain faithful to the end? What is our decision? What is in our heart?

In today's reading Christ stops those who, out loud and in His presence, condemn the woman because she poured ointment on His head. In the Gospel there are only a few examples of such an offering of a gift to Christ. The first were the Magi on the day of His birth.

Christ says to the people condemning the woman: "Why do you trouble her?" It happens that in some impulse of the soul, in an aspiration of the heart, we perform personal and sincere acts for which we are mocked and condemned. This woman, in a kind of silent love and openness of heart, poured out precious ointment. She brought a gift. "Throughout the whole world this will be told in memory of her."

In the text we do not find her words. But Christ says: "She has done what she could; she has anointed My Body beforehand for burial." This woman is one of those silent witnesses and workers of Christ, like those who gave the donkey colt before the Lord's entry into Jerusalem, or the room where He could eat the Passover. And this woman became a witness to the path of Christ: the path of Christ's life, execution, burial, and Resurrection in glory and for the salvation of the world.

One of the unique, endlessly valuable, and dear qualities of the Gospel of Mark is that it notices living, one could even say everyday, details, details that seem insignificant but always turn out to be filled with immense meaning. Remember how he alone among the Synoptics notes that blind Bartimaeus throws off his cloak before coming to Jesus. Here, in today's reading, he alone notes that the woman broke the jar. It is a simple, highly visual image, but it is filled with the deepest meaning. Let us rest our prayerful gaze on it today. Why did she do this? The first answer is that nothing would ever be poured into that jar again. This is a remarkable interpretation, found in modern exegesis, and it is fully true. By doing this she brought the moment to completion. But let us allow ourselves one more interpretation. Let us remember that this woman is a sinner, as the evangelists portray her. And what is this state of sin for her? Let us remember the psalms. "Because of all my enemies I have become a reproach, even to my neighbors, and an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I am forgotten in their hearts like one dead; I am like a broken vessel, for I hear the slander of many; terror is on every side, as they take counsel together against me, plotting to take my life (Ps 31:12-14)." The wholeness of the vessel from which myrrh is poured on the head of Jesus, and its brokenness as soon as it ceases to serve Him. Wholeness with God, brokenness in the hands of sin. Or simply the impossibility, the uselessness of a thing, and of a person, "I am like a broken vessel," if it does not serve Christ.

The feast is approaching, and division takes place. It is not only that Christ's opponents, preparing murder, are far more concerned about the people's possible reaction to bloodshed during the feast than about the monstrous nature of the execution itself. The division is also that the separation foretold by the Teacher takes place among His disciples.

By pouring precious perfume on Jesus, the woman performs an extravagant, impractical act that does not fit notions of normal behavior. The disciples' reaction corresponds to "common sense": why not use such value for charitable needs? John testifies that Judas said this, but Mark speaks of some disciples. This means the confusion was shared by a group. And yet would the reaction of most of us be different?

The visible manifestation of love, with its seeming madness, troubled the disciples and became one of the stones over which one of them stumbled. But faith, hope, and love cannot always be justified by calculation, and yet how often those who were guided by them did the impossible.

In everyday life, of course, there is no need to reject thrift or practical sobriety; they have their legitimate place in the world. Still, one should not forget the bankruptcy of the calculating Judas.

Speaking about the poor, whom His disciples always had, and about Himself, whom they did not always have with them, Jesus draws attention to the system of priorities characteristic of normal Christian life. The main problem here is that Christians in every age have looked at Christianity, first, primarily as a religion, and second, as a practical religion, a religion of "good works."

This view was greatly encouraged by the fact that Jesus Himself places love at the center: love for God, for Him Himself, and for one another. In practice, people often forgot about love for God and for Christ, while love for neighbor was understood precisely as a religion of "good works." Of course, love for Christ too was formally remembered, but it was somehow taken for granted. Unlike the poor, He apparently needs no help, especially now, after the resurrection, after the ascension, after He already sits at the right hand of the Father, while neighbors remain in a much less favorable state and need that very practical help.

If in Christian history the emphasis was placed on love for Christ, it often poured itself out into something overly sweet and emotional, and at times even frankly sensual, so that people observing such religiosity from the outside reasonably thought it would be better to follow the path of practical service, the path of the religion of "good works," than to give oneself to such strange and sometimes unhealthy religious exaltation. Usually this was formulated in the sense that love for Christ and for God is taken for granted, and it is manifested in those same "good works" for the benefit of one's neighbor. Meanwhile, Jesus reminds His disciples that Christianity first of all presupposes intense relations with Him Himself, and only then everything else.

Love is not emotion and not exaltation; it is will and a spiritual state. Such a spiritual state, however, does not appear or sustain itself on its own. It must be cultivated, and here constant concentration on Christ and on relations with Him is necessary, concentration of the will, not intellectual or emotional-sensual concentration. Love as a spiritual state is born from these relations and is sustained by this effort of the will. Like every love, it presupposes purposeful spiritual effort and the spiritual work of two. Any good works, if they are to be good without quotation marks, must be derived from the love that binds the disciple to Jesus. They must be done and exist in the space of relations that bind the one doing them to Jesus. The poor will indeed always be found, but whether there will be relations depends on the person. That is why Jesus draws the disciples' attention to Himself: without Him, "good works" will remain good only in quotation marks, however hard the people doing them may try to do them "for Christ's sake."

Church history knows many disputes about the purpose of the Church, about the tasks before her, about her role in society. Incidentally, helping the poor and dispossessed, what today is usually called social ministry, was considered one of the most important forms of church activity. But Jesus, evaluating the act of the woman who anointed Him with myrrh, points to something more important that the Church has: Himself.

What, then, do His words mean when He says that we do "not always" have Him? Of course, this also concerns what awaited the apostles ahead, when He Himself would have to go to the cross. But that is not the whole matter. The point is also that social problems, poverty among them, have existed and will exist as long as fallen humanity has existed and will exist. But the Kingdom has never been in the world and never will be; it comes into the world from outside, and it does not come by itself. The Messiah sent by God brings it with Him.

Therefore the chief task of the Church in every age has been to carry the Kingdom into the world and bear witness to it. All other forms of church activity are only means for solving this chief task, because everything else church communities do could be entrusted to other organizations not directly connected with the Church. But no one except the Church can bear witness to the Kingdom and carry it into the world. That is why Jesus draws His disciples' attention to what is the foundation and meaning of their community's existence: to Himself and to the Kingdom He has brought into the world.

Is Jesus really suggesting that we, with a ruble clenched in our fist and with Him beside us, healthy, tall, and strong, and this beggar beside Him, dirty, sick, half-dressed, make a choice and give the ruble to Jesus?

No, of course not. From everything He says, something quite different follows: when there is a choice between doing something good for this specific Jesus standing nearby or for some abstract beggar in general, the choice should be made in favor of Jesus. But when we stand face to face with a specific beggar who stretches out his hand to us, then there is no choice at all, because Jesus Himself said: "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brothers, you did it to Me."

When reading the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and of everything that followed, one cannot help asking: could it have been otherwise? And if it could not, if "the Son of Man goes as it is written of Him," does this not mean that no one is guilty of anything, that all the participants in those events were merely acting out a drama, not written by them, predetermined in advance so that none of them could change anything in it? But why, then, does Jesus Himself, speaking of the inevitability of what is happening, immediately add: "but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed"? Perhaps, after all, there is inevitability and there is inevitability. Indeed, after the fall, the earthly path of the Messiah could not be without obstacles; one way or another it had to end in suffering and death. And yet, even in such a state of affairs, everyone is free to make the decision he considers right. Yes, in a fallen world every community inevitably has its own Judas; but this does not predetermine the specific choice of a specific person, and for that very reason responsibility for the choice he has made is not removed from him. Besides, none of the participants in that drama was, quite obviously, thinking about any predestination. Beautiful stories in the style of Leonid Andreyev are out of place here, and this is perhaps the most frightening thing of all. Jesus simply got in the way of many people, for different but entirely earthly reasons. And if so, then however sorrowful it is to admit, any of us could potentially have found ourselves in the place of His persecutors. The choice always remains. The main thing is for it to be the right one.

The Savior once spoke of how important it is that the soul, likened to a swept room, should not remain empty after being freed from an unclean spirit. And now Christ enters the prepared upper room to fill it with His presence and, in this clean place on the eve of His Passion, to unite the disciples with Himself through the Bread and Wine—uniting them while knowing their hearts and foreseeing the confusion of the coming night...

When the disciples heard that one of them would commit betrayal, they began asking one another, “Who? Is it I?” An anxious conscience compelled each of them to look within, and no one reproached the Teacher either for bias or for the injustice of His accusation.

Even when abandoned by His closest disciples, He remained united with them through His Body and Blood. Abandoned by the whole world, He Himself abandoned no one.

How often the question is asked: "What are Judas, Pilate, and the high priests guilty of if Jesus still had to suffer and be killed? Otherwise He would not have died."

Here everything is turned upside down. These people do not become murderers because Jesus has to die; rather, Jesus has to die because people are murderers. By his fall, man brought human death into the world. More than that, the first human death came not from disease or from an earthquake, but from a brother's hand. We are all sinners, and sin is death; we are all murderers. And the only non-murderer who came into this world was doomed. But what horrifies is the inner darkness, and therefore the "quality" of life, of those who become executors of this act of this world.

How often something said "in general" is received better than something addressed personally. The prophecy of the coming betrayal stirred a lively response in the disciples and moved them once again to look into themselves. But the impartial warning addressed personally to Peter was rejected by him. In his objections one hears wounded pride: that cannot happen; after all, I am so good.

And immediately Peter dozed off, leaving Christ alone with the God-forsakenness of Gethsemane. Coming up for a moment, the Savior calls him not Peter, but Simon. At that moment Simon son of Jonah is already, and yet still not, a rock.

Those who asked themselves, "Is it I?" ran away, but they had not promised that they would not waver under any circumstances. They showed weakness, but they did not commit betrayal and did not deny Him.

How often it is unbearable for us to hear bitter reproach from those around us; we immediately want to dispute unpleasant accusations. But without accepting the unbearable truth about ourselves, we will hardly be able to get rid of our own refuse.

After the Passover meal Jesus went with His disciples to the village of Gethsemane. There He asked the disciples to wait while He prayed. Jesus often withdrew for prayer, but now He took the disciples closest to Him, Peter, James, and John, to support Him. On the Mount of Transfiguration they had witnessed the divine glory of the Teacher (Mark 9:3-8). This time the Savior's human nature is revealed to them in its fullness; for the first time the Teacher stands before them as One who needs ordinary human support. But they were unable to give it: drowsiness overcame them.

Jesus knew what awaited Him. His hour was drawing near, and everything human in Him rose up against it. Falling to His knees, He prayed that, if possible, this hour might pass from Him. The heaviness of the struggle the Savior experienced between human feelings and the divine will remains a mystery forever. "Yet not what I want, but what You want," Jesus was able to say. Returning to the three disciples, He finds them sleeping and says: "Watch and pray, that you may not fall into temptation: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Going away from the disciples, He prayed again, saying the same words, until love for the Father strengthened Him.

The Gospel then tells how one of the twelve betrayed the Teacher with a kiss, how Jesus, with the words "but let the Scriptures be fulfilled," gave Himself into the hands of the soldiers who had come to arrest Him, and how all the disciples fled in complete confusion. Yet in a special way Christ's words, spoken also to us, reach us: "Watch and pray, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Only by watching and praying will we be able, overcoming all our fears of the future and of what we do not understand, to say together with Christ to our Heavenly Father: "Yet not what I want, but what You want."

Today's passage is devoted to something we usually do not find joyful to think about at all and by no means pleasant to remember: human weakness. For Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane revealed not only the suffering of Jesus' own soul, but also the weakness of His disciples, who proved completely unready to support Him (vv. 33-41). It is noteworthy that in the end they all ran away (vv. 50-52), although not long before they had all expressed their readiness to die with their Teacher (vv. 27-31).

Of course, the easiest thing would be to explain everything by hotheadedness and, perhaps, youthful maximalism, which often lets its possessor down at the most unsuitable moment. But among the apostles there were people of different ages and temperaments, and many of them were far from being boys. Evidently, the apostles' expressed resolve to follow Jesus, if necessary, to death, was not the fruit of emotion alone. And yet at the moment when the Teacher so needed support, the disciples, even the closest ones, could not hold out and fell asleep.

But what was it that they could not hold out against? The strain of waiting? A sleepless night? Probably that too. But there was something else: here, in the Garden of Gethsemane, for the first time they saw their Teacher like this: suffering, exhausted by anguish, imploring the Father for mercy, asking that the cup prepared for Him somehow, by some incredible miracle, might still pass Him by. They had always and everywhere seen the Teacher strong, and suddenly, completely unexpectedly, they saw Him weak. They were used to always hoping in Him, relying on Him in all the trials that had until then fallen to their lot, and now suddenly the Teacher Himself asks them for help and seeks support from them.

The apostles were evidently not ready for this. They were, of course, ready to die beside Him, but they probably thought it would be a heroic death in the struggle for the triumph of that Kingdom about which the Teacher had spoken so much and so often, not a meaningless death in a war that had not even begun. It is no surprise that the only reaction of one of the disciples to the appearance of those who came to arrest Jesus was a sword stroke (v. 47): if one is to die, then at least in battle. And when it turned out that there would be no battle, they all immediately ran away, no longer seeing any point in remaining there, in the place of what then seemed to the apostles a complete and final catastrophe.

And now, when the apostles run away, it also becomes clear why none of the three could endure the Teacher's prayer without falling asleep: they evidently understood, no worse than Jesus Himself, that what awaited them was nothing like what they had expected. This was impossible to bear, and, as often happens in such moments, their consciousness simply switched off, unable to withstand the strain. Perhaps the apostles even fled quite unexpectedly to themselves, as sometimes happens to a person in a state of shock, when he simply does not know how to react to a completely unexpected situation that has developed.

Here we have before us a very instructive example that reveals the main cause of every human weakness: spiritual unreadiness to accept a situation as it is. As a rule, we are ready for what we expect and completely unready for surprises. Yet readiness for surprises presupposes spiritual readiness, not merely psychological readiness. We prepare ourselves in advance for what we expect, developing possible models of behavior and preparing answers to possible questions. Sometimes this works, but it is important to remember that our psyche is just as much a part of nature as our body is. And our spiritual "I," the true center of our personality, what the Bible calls the heart, manifests itself when all home preparations, all plans, and all expectations prove untenable and unnecessary.

And here begins what is most important for us: only when a decision is made by our spiritual "I" can it be right in any situation, even the most unexpected. Then situations of "accidental" betrayal and thoughtless, "automatic" treachery become impossible.

The betrayal has taken place, and a raid has been organized against Jesus as against a robber. The attempt of one of the disciples to defend Christ according to the rules of this world is stopped by Him Himself.

Those who arrested Him probably did not themselves believe that Christ would begin actively resisting. But their precautions reveal another fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the other life brought by this incomprehensible preacher, and finally fear of looking into oneself and recognizing one's own wrong. It is fear that makes people attribute the most monstrous absurdities to their victim, just to drown out the voice of conscience.

The flight of the apostles during Jesus' arrest is usually explained by fear and cowardice. Meanwhile, we have no grounds to think that all of them were so cowardly, at least the Gospel accounts do not testify to this. Quite the opposite: some of them, and above all Peter, were very resolute. The same Peter, for example, at the moment of the Teacher's arrest seized a sword, and if Jesus had approved him, it is quite possible that if not all, then most of the disciples would have supported Peter in one way or another. The apostles were ready for an uprising and for war; they were ready to fight, defending their Teacher, and in this war they were ready to die for Him.

The problem was that no war lay ahead. Jesus was not going to fight; He was not even going to defend Himself from the people who came to arrest Him. The messianic war for which the apostles were inwardly preparing existed only in their imagination, and this was the main problem. They prepared for one thing, while in reality something entirely different happened to them; in such a situation a spiritual breakdown is not only possible but almost inevitable.

More precisely, it is inevitable to the extent that a person is immersed in his imagined reality, and to the extent that he spends much, or conversely comparatively little, spiritual effort in order to exist in it. For the disciples, the picture of the messianic war they had drawn was so real that they could not even imagine any other development of events. Peter grabs the sword precisely because his picture of reality in the situation that arose allowed only one possible course of action. Meanwhile, Jesus acts completely differently, not as the apostles expect.

At that point they are lost: what indeed remains for soldiers to do when their commander not only does not try to resist, but himself, completely voluntarily, surrenders? Surrender together with him? This is absurd and cannot fit into consciousness. The reality constructed by the apostles collapses before their eyes, and they run away because in such a situation nothing else remains for them. Jesus, seeing their spiritual state, had no doubt even during the Last Supper that everything would be exactly so, for in the fallen world all this is so understandable and so human.

The Gospel story of the trial of Jesus is interesting not so much for its unusual character as, sadly, for its ordinariness. History knows many staged and politically motivated trials, and in this respect there is nothing new or surprising in the trial of Jesus. But why did the Temple elite need this trial? Without their participation it could not have taken place at all. It would seem that Jesus had given the religious orthodox plenty of reasons to hate Him, and the Temple priesthood was clearly disturbed by His activity. Yet this concern alone would not have been enough: in those years in Judea a decision to impose the death penalty was not so common, and the sentence would have had to be submitted for approval to the Roman authorities, who were known for their legal meticulousness. This was quite different from a secretly organized assassination: the matter acquired public and political visibility. Besides, the Temple priesthood's hostility toward Jesus could hardly have had a strictly religious coloring: these people traditionally treated the prophetic books in general, and prophecies about the Messiah in particular, with restraint and even skepticism, and they considered only the Torah proper, the Pentateuch, to be Sacred Scripture. The messianic expectations of the Synagogue were in many ways foreign to the Temple. Therefore they viewed every messianic movement from an exclusively religious-political point of view, which is hardly surprising: it was precisely the Temple, or more exactly the High Priest, that then held the highest political authority in Judea; above him stood only the representative of Rome, the procurator, who at that time was Pontius Pilate, mentioned in the Gospel. From the point of view of high politics, any messianic movement was undesirable, and on this the procurator and the High Priest agreed, since any such movement could easily grow into an uprising against Rome, which in the end is what happened in A.D. 70. But the representatives of the Temple, and first of all the High Priest himself, were playing their own game, using the messianic expectations widespread among the people and the religious-political tension in Judea connected with those expectations to put pressure on Roman power and bargain for political concessions for themselves. They regarded this political game as a good for Judea and for the Jewish people, and they saw their main task in it as keeping the process under control in order, on the one hand, to get as much as possible from Rome, and on the other, not to give Rome a reason for direct military intervention in the situation. Jesus turned out in this game to be merely a bargaining chip: His preaching could least of all be a threat to Rome, but through His example they could demonstrate to Roman authority an active struggle against disturbers of order and peace in Judea. At the same time they could get rid of a figure who irritated both the Temple and the Synagogue. Thus casually, while playing politics, the Temple elite handed over to death the Messiah-Christ sent by God.

After seizing Jesus, they brought Him to the house of Caiaphas. To put Him to death, they needed the agreeing testimony of at least two people, but this was not easy. At last some were found who distorted Christ's words and said, "We heard Him say, I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands" (compare John 2:19).

But even this was not enough. The defendant answered nothing, just as Isaiah had prophesied (Isa. 53:7). The high priest was perplexed: "Do You answer nothing?" (v. 60). Silence in reply. "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" What would He say? This time the answer rang out firmly and confidently: "I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven."

This was more than enough. By acknowledging Himself as the Messiah, Jesus condemned Himself to death. Blasphemy was a crime worthy of death under Jewish law. The high priest, tearing his garments, as Jews did as a sign of bitter grief or when witnessing sacrilege, said, "What further need do we have of witnesses?" Jesus was judged worthy of death.

Peter was in the courtyard all this time, and one of the servant girls recognized him: "You also were with Jesus of Nazareth," she said. Peter loved the Teacher with all his soul. Moved by this love, he had followed the Teacher to the high priest's house. Peter had even been ready to die for Him (Mark 14:31). But now the one who would become the first of the apostles gave way to fear. Everything was different from what Peter had expected. "I do not know or understand what you are saying," he answered the servant girl. Twice more that day he denied the Teacher. The rooster crowed twice, and he, remembering Christ's prophecy, went out and wept bitterly.

How often we too give way to fear and are ready to deny the Lord, largely because His actions do not fit our ideas about Him.

Darkness thickened, and a succession of false testimonies began. Peter bears false witness by denying Him. Many bear false witness before the Sanhedrin. Yet no one could be found to give reliable testimony proving that He had committed evil deeds.

When slander and distortion fell silent, His testimony about Himself was heard. It was not given at the very beginning of the proceedings, but only when every version had already been voiced and it was time to choose: to accept or reject the truth that came from God.

We can construct theories, think through different scenarios, and surround ourselves with an invented little world, but sooner or later the hour of an unavoidable choice comes. Anyone who hopes to evade it rejects the truth by the very act of evading the choice.

The "trial" of Jesus can be called a trial only in quotation marks. It is entirely clear that no one in the Sanhedrin intended to examine the substance of anything or sort anything out. The evangelist says directly: the Sanhedrin gathered in order to condemn Jesus, to condemn Him at any cost, even if it was necessary to resort to false testimony. Where does such hatred come from? And is it even hatred?

In a certain sense, of course it is: everyone gathered then in Caiaphas's house wanted the Man who stood before them to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet the hatred here was cold and calculating. There was nothing personal in it, only politics and religious-political interests. The temple elite is often presented to oneself and others as some kind of infernal villains. If that were so, we today would feel calmer, because no one would call us infernal villains.

In reality, however, and unfortunately for us, everything here is more frightening: Jesus is killed by the most ordinary people, though highly placed ones, for the most ordinary, entirely earthly, and not at all "otherworldly" interests, the interests of religious politics and politics in general, which are usually called "higher" interests but do not cease under that name to remain quite earthly. He simply got in the way of the temple elite, in the complex game it was playing with Roman power, with the Synagogue, and with the Zealots. In this game Jesus turned out to be the factor outside the system that could spoil everything, and something had to be done with Him. The whole horror of the situation was that Jesus' "judges" were completely indifferent to who stood before them. It really could have been the most ordinary teacher or preacher, and the same fate would have awaited him.

No one in the Sanhedrin intended to kill the Messiah. They only wanted to remove from the road a man who was interfering with high politics, and in the end the One they "removed" was precisely the Messiah. This is understandable: murder is murder, and the murder of any innocent person is the same sin as the murder of the Messiah. In the fallen world the life of an outstanding person is valued differently from the life of an unnoticed one, but in the Kingdom the arithmetic is different. The Messiah dies as the most ordinary person because each person is as precious to God as He is.

Peter did not limit himself to denying that he knew Jesus. He began to swear and call God as witness, and as a result he aggravated his denial with the blasphemy of a false oath. In many Gospel episodes the words spoken by Peter turned out to have been spoken on behalf of all the apostles. This was so, for example, when in the name of all he confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Should we consider that he also spoke the words of denial not only in his own name? If so, this means that in different situations he expressed not only the faith and wisdom given to the apostles from above, but also their old human weaknesses. Then it turns out that he also accepted the shame for all who faltered, for all who were ashamed of their faith, and not only for his own weakness. But it appears that he also had to realize the fall more deeply than the others. And therefore the repentant words of love for Christ that Peter later spoke were spoken not only for himself. Perhaps not only for the apostles...

The trial before Pilate is one of the most terrible moments in the Gospel narrative. The fate of Jesus of Nazareth no longer depends at all on His teaching or on the attitude of the Jewish authorities toward Him. What He did and what He said no longer matters. Here the Lord encounters an impersonal machine created by people, built from the balance of their momentary interests and career calculations. Even the question of Pilate's responsibility looks pale and not very meaningful... And, of course, the incompatibility between God and this impersonal machine is striking.

The behavior of all the participants in the proceedings, except the Lord Jesus Himself, gives us a very vivid example of what lack of freedom is. Even Pilate, who pretends that everything depends on his decision, is not free. His actions are determined by circumstances. Right in front of him stands the Son of God, and he functions instead of living. In a certain sense this is a very instructive moment, because most of us take part, one way or another, in the grim work of this social machine.

In the situation that led to Jesus' crucifixion, what is perhaps most frightening for us is precisely that it happened in a rather ordinary way. Ordinary in the sense that Christ was not crucified by some terrible villains or servants of the devil for some mysterious goals known only to them, but by very ordinary people moved by very ordinary human motives and interests. If everything had been otherwise, we could feel uninvolved in the Savior's death; but it turns out that in principle any one of us could have become involved in it if we made the wrong choice in one or another very concrete life situation. What moved those who wanted to get rid of Jesus? For some, as for example for a certain part of the Pharisaic brotherhood, He was a destroyer of religious foundations and traditions and for that reason alone deserved death. For others, for the Temple elite, for example, He was a threat to national peace and well-being; and if so, let Him die for the good and peace of the people (John 11:50). And for Pontius Pilate He was merely a threat to his personal well-being and career: what sense was there in "quarreling with the people" if it was simpler to do what the shouting crowd demanded and thereby calm that crowd (vv. 5-15)? And the Temple representatives are here too; the matter may reach Rome, and then perhaps it will not be so easy to wash oneself clean of accusations (John 19:12)... All these motives and considerations have moved people in every age; there is nothing new here. But in a situation where one must choose between Christ and something that obscures Him, these human motives and considerations become a real instrument of the devil, and this instrument works all the more effectively the less noticeable it is. It becomes especially dangerous when the issue is not simple human egoism, but such lofty, though somewhat abstract, concepts as "the good of the people" or "religious tradition." Of course, neither concern for the good of the people nor the preservation of religious tradition is bad in itself. Trouble comes when they move into first place and become ends in themselves. One only has to put the good of the people ahead of God and Christ, and both are lost (the fate of Judea and Jerusalem in A.D. 70 is a vivid witness to this). And religiosity cannot be preserved by making it the sole goal; it will spiritually degenerate and die. But the most terrible thing turns out to be not even the death of religion or social catastrophe. The most terrible thing is what precedes it: the rejection of God and of Christ. That very rejection which condemns the Savior to the cross.

Standing before Pilate, Jesus does not defend Himself. This is not surprising, since what the members of the Sanhedrin rejected would be even harder for Pilate to grasp.

Though he finds no guilt in Christ, Pilate nevertheless grants amnesty not to Him, but to Barabbas, whom the people demand. Strictly speaking, Pilate has no concern for the wishes of conquered provincials, but political circumstances required him to curry favor with them. To this day even many Christians repeat the pagan proverb, "The voice of the people is the voice of God," forgetting or not knowing the people's own wisdom: "The voice of the people crucified Christ." On that day the openly pagan Pilate and the Jewish crowd that supposedly knew Scripture united in rejecting the true God in the name of unstable immediate interests.

Scripture does not tell us the later fate of the freed Barabbas. Yet he became the first of sinners whom Christ saved by dying in his place. Barabbas accepted salvation not for eternal life, but for temporary earthly life, and we do not know whether he used his chance for full salvation. But after Barabbas, this chance has now been given to each of us by the sacrifice of Jesus. How we use it is for us to decide.

High politics does not notice the little person; it has always been this way, and this has long been known. In the fallen world the Messiah's path could only be the path of a little person. This is understandable: He Himself said that His Kingdom is "not of this world." And if so, then for the fallen world He is nobody, and His Kingdom is nothing. So they deal with Him accordingly: not as some great nobody, but as the most ordinary nobody. In the way any little person in that time and place would have been treated.

And in any other time and place as well: different in form, perhaps, but the same in essence. Jesus' arrest, the sentence of the Sanhedrin, the confirmation of the sentence by Pilate as Rome's representative, the shameful execution itself; all this was ordinary and typical. In those days in Judea, something like this could have happened to anyone under similar circumstances. Pilate has nothing personal against Jesus; in some sense he even finds Him sympathetic. But for a high-ranking official there are, of course, things more important than personal sympathies and antipathies.

He understands that Jesus is guilty of nothing. But what difference does that make when the interests involved are, if not Rome's, then at least those of Pontius Pilate's own career? Quarrel with the temple elite, go against the crowd stirred up by them? For what? In the name of justice? Pilate, apparently, was a skeptic and cynic, like most of Roman high society in those days. Judging from everything, he did not believe in higher justice, just as he did not believe in truth; both were relative for him.

If it had been safe, he could have displayed showy nobility and principle; perhaps he even knew how to be kind and generous, so long as neither burdened him much or threatened him in any way. Here, however, there was a threat: the high priest and his circle could have had their own connections in Rome, and who knows how they would view a procurator there who indulged dangerous preachers. It was better to be cautious, and who cares about the fate of some wandering teacher? So the path to the cross passes through the hatred of some and the indifference of others.

Today's reading may help us, to some degree, make sense of the sharpest question facing a person: how does almighty God allow the existence of suffering and evil, especially when it is always the purest and most innocent people who suffer? Today we are given a glimpse of how God relates to evil in the world. We read how the Lord Himself passes through the very thick of human suffering. He descends from heaven in order to share with humanity all the darkness, all the horror of its loneliness and pain. Jesus is abandoned by His disciples; He passes through the soldiers' mockery, the shameful procession to the place of execution, and the agonizing crucifixion on the cross. In order to drink to the end all the bitterness of human torment, He refuses to drink the wine with myrrh that would dull the pain.

The King of all the earth, the Son of God, is "numbered with the transgressors." He does not come down from the cross, so that He may pass through the most terrible thing: "My God! Why have You forsaken Me?" He passes through the darkness of God-forsakenness belonging to fallen humanity. After this He, like each of us, sinks into the cold of death. The veil in the temple, which separated God from people, was torn: the Son of God had walked the human path to the end. The few disciples who remained buried Him like any mortal man.

Such is God's answer to the existence of suffering on earth. He does not merely sympathize; He suffers with us completely, with us and for us.

Here is also our answer: Christians, each in his own measure, take part in the sufferings of Christ, suffer with the world, and in this way take part in Christ's redeeming sacrifice, and through this also in His Resurrection.

In the Gospel account of the Savior's crucifixion, the description of the triumph experienced by all who hated Jesus during His earthly life makes a special impression. Those who loved Him can only grieve and weep. Of course, this is only an apparent triumph; it simply throws into sharper relief what will happen very soon, three days later, when everything falls into place. But those three days still have to pass; they have to be lived through, and not even Jesus' closest disciples expected the Resurrection. Those days were all the harder because the triumph of the forces of evil was not some convention or staged scene; it was as real as Jesus' death on the cross itself. In essence, here at the foot of the cross, two realities, two worlds, came into contact with each other: the great world of God, and the small, limited little world of those who stand against God, separated from Him. But to those who find themselves in that little world, it always appears to be the only reality. And in that reality it is evil that triumphs, and it triumphs as truly as that little world itself is real. Physically, the great world of God and the little world of those who oppose God can exist in the same space and at the same time; those who belong to them can see one another and speak with one another. Spiritually, however, they are two different worlds, and on the day of the Last Judgment the distinction between them, formerly visible only to a few, becomes obvious to everyone: the great world of God becomes the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks, and the little world of those who oppose God becomes the outer darkness of the Gospel parable. In the outer darkness death triumphs; in the Kingdom, life. And the victory of darkness, which appears so real in the little world, turns out on the day of the Resurrection to be its real and complete defeat in the great world of God. Each person decides for himself which of these worlds to live in, just as those who stood at the foot of the cross on the day of the Savior's death made their own decision.

Christ's death on the cross seems mysterious to many. It truly is mysterious, and if it does not seem that way to us today, it is only because the Gospel accounts have become familiar to us. So familiar that we no longer think about their mystery, taking everything described in them as common knowledge and self-evident. In reality, Jesus' death is an utterly incredible event. Not death on a cross - that can be explained by the sinfulness of fallen humanity - but the fact that death became reality for Him at all.

The matter is not only that He is the God-man: God's fullness in Him could be hidden, could become unconscious even for Him, and only He knows what He experienced at that moment. The state of God-forsakenness is familiar to us, and even in a certain sense habitual, and our nature corrupted by sin has adapted to such an abnormal existence for itself. But nothing of the kind can be said of Him: He was born and grew up conscious within Himself of God's fullness, and to lose it was for Him a trial we simply cannot imagine. The matter also lies in the fact that, for human nature in general - and for transformed human nature, such as the Savior's human nature is, especially - death is an unnatural phenomenon. To us it seems natural, and in a certain sense it truly is natural for us, but only in the sense in which, for example, the presence in an addict's body of the drug that is killing him is "natural." For normal human nature, death is something unnatural, and for transformed nature it is directly impossible.

How then could the Savior die, even from the point of view of His own humanity? Death obviously could not have become reality for Him in any way unless... unless He Himself, absolutely voluntarily, fulfilling the Father's will, consented and resolved to enter it. To come into contact with it. To make it voluntarily, for Himself and for His own existence, just as real as it is real for us apart from our will. To do this for our sake - because otherwise even the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that He brought us would have remained incompatible with our fallen nature. God's fullness had to be brought into the world not simply in human nature; it had to enter the world clothed in mortal human nature, absolutely identical to our own in our present condition.

The only difference was that our mortality turned out to be the involuntary consequence of a sin committed by free choice, while His mortality was a temporary condition He voluntarily accepted upon Himself, unconnected with any sin. In this sense Jesus' death was truly absolutely voluntary: without any compulsion or necessity, He agreed to enter a condition entirely unnatural to Him and absolutely foreign to Him. Here He was moved not by necessity or inevitability, but by love - for the Father and for those whom He wants to save.

According to the letter of the judicial sentence, Christ was condemned only to crucifixion. But too often people are not satisfied with "lawful" suffering. Some are possessed by hatred; others are excited by the thrill of persecution. And so, from the soldiers amusing themselves, and then from the gawking crowd, additional mockery and suffering before death begin. They did not end on that long, endless day, and for twenty centuries now we have continued to inflict wounds on the Lord beyond those mentioned on the Gospel pages.

On that same day Simon of Cyrene had the lot of carrying the cross for a little while, and by doing so he eased the way of the cross a little. Christ forces no one to carry His cross; He calls each of us to carry our own, which cannot be compared with His. We are inclined to avoid even that, but it can happen that by avoiding the carrying of our own cross we refuse Christ any easing of His burden.

And it is good if we see this before it is too late, not together with the centurion who understood Who had been crucified only after the execution had already taken place.

Today two texts are read which, at first glance, are striking because their thoughts do not coincide. The Second Epistle of John can be called a pastor's letter to friends, in which he blesses them and informs them of his arrival. In the Gospel text we read about the execution and death of Christ. And after reading these texts it may seem that, after such an execution of the teacher, a group of people continues his work, speaks about what he spoke about, and remembers him. But that is not so. Before His death Jesus says, "My God, My God! Why have You forsaken Me?" And, as if in answer to Christ's words, the apostle writes to a Christian family: "Whoever abides in the teaching of Christ has both the Father and the Son." This points out to us that, in following Christ, we are not alone on this path. Doubts and fears, a feeling of abandonment and confusion, may torment us, but we are guarded and led by Christ. Christ's death proclaimed to us the Resurrection from the dead and the salvation of the world through His sacrifice, through Communion. And as we follow Christ, we must remember His sacrifice and partake of His Holy Mysteries. Lent is a time of constant prayer and of following the path of repentance. During Lent the Church helps the Christian on this path. But the path of repentance always passes through Communion without condemnation, with a pure heart and humility. Let us walk the path of those who followed Him in Galilee, who came to Jerusalem and became silent, suffering witnesses of the execution. And let us approach the bright days of Easter in prayer and in special participation in the works of Christ.

However wordless the effort to overcome one’s own pain and suffering may be, every person still seeks to put those experiences into words. Philosophy has a problem known as theodicy. It asks how the supremely good God could allow suffering and evil. Everyone approaches it differently: some recall Leibniz and his statement that the Lord created the best of all possible worlds; some recall Ivan Karamazov; some recall Job. We often use their words in place of our own rejection of suffering. Yet there always remains a sense that this question cannot be answered positively, that it is altogether insoluble. At this point many turn their gaze toward the Cross. It is impossible to understand why small children fall ill and die, but it is possible to understand that the Lord shared their suffering: He Himself made Himself the object of evil, and now evil is no longer evil. For the most terrible and only true evil is the absence of God, Sheol; but God is present in suffering, so it is no longer the same kind of evil, because He shares our suffering within it. The single thought that Christ shares my sufferings is the greatest happiness. One recalls the saying, “With the one you love, even a hut is paradise”; likewise, with God, evil is not evil.

Today we stand before our tortured Lord, and, like a tragic overtone to everything taking place, the clock strikes the third, sixth, and ninth hours. Have you noticed how painfully the clock sometimes strikes when we are waiting for someone? Even when we are no longer waiting, but simply sitting in petrified stillness, as if not in this world, the clock can suddenly strike so ominously, frighteningly, and yet soberingly. And it is so remarkable that we have these prayers of the Hours. Let us turn to them now. And let us try to live through the third, sixth, and ninth once again...

But then it turns out that the third hour is about something else; it is about Pentecost, not about the nailing to the cross. "O Lord, who at the third hour sent down Your Most Holy Spirit upon Your apostles, do not take Him from us, O Good One, but renew us who pray to You." Why? Why this sudden disruption of the logic of the liturgical text's construction? But of course we remember: "...these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour..." (Acts 2:15) Someone will find this circumstance insignificant, a chance coincidence; someone else will see it as a conscious falsification for the sake of preaching "one's own" truth; someone will say that the evangelist Luke symbolically linked the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles to the moment when the execution began, as a symbol of the beginning of the preaching of the Word of God in the world. But perhaps we need neither the first, nor the second, nor the third line of reasoning. What we need is simply to stand before the events that are taking place and cry out: "Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me."

"O Christ God, who at the ninth hour tasted death in the flesh for our sake, put to death the reasoning of our flesh and save us." Put it to death, for "the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). These words are often interpreted in the traditional way: I have died to the world, and the world has died to me. But if the apostle Paul had wanted to say that, he would have said that; instead he said "crucified"...

When our Lord was crucified, the world changed so much that it is now impossible to live in a world where the Lord is not crucified. And although many still live that way, we live differently; therefore we too are crucified. With Him.

When the Pharisees demanded that Christ stop the people who were shouting to Him as He entered Jerusalem, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” the Lord answered them: “if they keep silent, the stones will cry out.” Today, shortly before the beginning of Great Lent, we read about that turning point in history when human voices fell silent and the stones cried out. The darkness over the whole earth from the sixth hour to the ninth, and the earthquake, reveal to us that what is taking place on Golgotha concerns the whole creation. The curtain torn in the Temple becomes a sign of God’s boundless self-emptying for our sake. Throughout the time that follows, we will prepare to live through this event anew in our hearts.

We are accustomed to thinking of Easter as a joyful feast, with Easter cakes and gifts. This is of course true. But the ancient Church called the very day of the Crucifixion the feast of Pascha, and the Resurrection was celebrated together with it on the same day. The form of celebration was in fact fasting, a prayerful concentration on the day of Jesus Christ’s death. At first this fast lasted one or two days, and only from the year 330 did a forty-day fast become customary. Thus Great Lent, generally speaking, is not so much a preparation for celebrating Easter. Rather, it is itself the celebration of the central event of our life: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What so amazed this centurion about the death of the Lord Jesus? After all, the centurion was a soldier who had seen many deaths and executions in his lifetime... We can only wonder.

Three evangelists testify to the darkness that covered the earth during the execution, and Matthew speaks of an earthquake at the moment of Christ's death. Perhaps these natural phenomena became signs for the centurion, because in the Greco-Roman "Olympian" religion the immortal gods often react in similar ways to the death of their mortal children. This is how Matthew and Luke understand the centurion's reaction. Mark, however, says that the death itself, the way Jesus died, became for the centurion a sign of the unusual nature and distinctiveness of this Executed One.

Death on a cross is terrible and agonizing. A crucified person dies very slowly, gradually suffocating and losing strength. By the moment of death he has no strength left even to breathe in, much less to cry out. The centurion had surely seen this many times. But this Crucified One dies unexpectedly quickly, before they even had time to break His legs, as if the One who has authority over the times of life and death revealed His love for Him even in death. Jesus dies, giving His spirit into the hands of the Father, and the centurion hears these words. And finally, His cry before death testifies, as modern doctors explain it, that Christ dies not from suffocation but from a ruptured heart: in the view of a Roman centurion, not a shameful death, but a noble one.

We do not know whether this is so or not. But what matters is that the contemplation of the cross of Christ touched the heart even of a hardened and not at all sentimental pagan. Are we losing this ability to respond from the heart to the suffering of the Savior? For only by being crucified with Him can we also be raised with Him...

In the hour of suffering, those who were usually not especially active and were not in view were nearby. These were the silent women who served Christ and the apostles from their possessions; this was Joseph of Arimathea, who had long hidden his discipleship but now cast caution aside. Joseph, who was not afraid to go to Pilate to ask for the Body of the Executed One, also had the chance that day to serve Jesus with his possessions: a piece of cloth and a tomb. First of all, however, all those who buried the Lord served Him with faithfulness and unexpected steadfastness.

At decisive moments, when questions of life and death stand starkly before us, faith is proved not by theories, and problematic arguments recede into the background. What becomes most important are simple deeds filled with quiet courage and wordless love.

Sometimes people who have remained unnoticed for a long time suddenly find themselves at the center of events. Thus, all at once, Joseph of Arimathea, whom the evangelist mentions, appears on the scene. Almost nothing is known about him except that he was a man of very high standing. What was Jesus to him? What was his relationship with Him? A secret disciple, as the other evangelists also say about him, but what did it mean to be His secret disciple? To give support in a situation where none of the open disciples could do anything, to use one's position so that the impossible would become possible? Yes, of course, that too. But the main thing was readiness.

In a certain sense it is easier to be an open disciple. Jesus, of course, tells all the disciples and everyone willing to hear that one must always keep watch, that spiritual laxity and the path into the Kingdom are incompatible. Still, for those who are constantly beside Him, it is easier in a certain sense. They see the Teacher with their own eyes; for them He is absolutely real at every moment of their life. The secret disciples, no doubt, communicated with Him much less often. He appeared to them and disappeared, and one could never say exactly when He would appear next.

The apostles experienced something similar during the Last Supper, when they understood that Jesus was going to leave them for a time. They did not know where He was going; they did not truly understand the Teacher and could not imagine what they would have to live through very soon. But they understood that, at any rate, now they would be left alone for some period of time, and a completely undefined one at that. They would not see the Teacher, would not hear Him, would not know where He was or what He was doing, and would not know what He would require of them when He returned.

This situation very much resembles the situation of every Christian today. We live in the age of the coming Kingdom, but when it will be completed no one knows except the Father. We cannot calculate any time frames here, even approximately. We can only live with the awareness that on any day everything can come to an end and the Savior can return.

One cannot prepare for that day in the way we prepare for one event or another in our world. We can usually imagine the events of our world somehow; we can at least try to think through and calculate what we may need, though how successful and adequate that calculation will be is another question.

But as for the Kingdom and the return of the Messiah, here we can neither imagine nor calculate anything. What remains is readiness as an inner spiritual state, presupposing the very spiritual alertness whose necessity Jesus spoke of and which His secret disciples constantly had to maintain: waiting for the Teacher's unexpected appearance and inwardly ready to do what is completely impossible to imagine in advance.

There is one point in common for both of today’s readings. In the Gospel of Mathew Jesus says: ‘As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.’ (Mat. 24:27). And Paul writes in his letter to Corinthians: ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ (2 Cor. 4:6) The New Covenant is not a secret knowledge available just for a few chosen ones. It is not an exclusive association hostile to aliens. Nor is it a list of requirements that sets up a scale of good and evil based on the depth of the person’s fall into the abyss. The New Covenant is not an ideology intended to mould the souls and minds of its disciples. It’s not even a life-pattern that brings you flowers and fruits in return for rejecting something. It is the light that shines as a lightning from one end of heaven to the other. The light that illuminates and reveals everything – truth and lie, good and evil, life and death. The light beaming from the face of Jesus Christ. And is not just that it can be hard to live without this light in a world that is dark, frightful and cold. Reality proves there is simply no life at all outside of this Light.

It is not without reason that today is called the Christian "Women's Day". Today's readings show us very clearly why. Indeed, looking back over biblical history, we can see that the role of women in Christianity came to be far greater than prevailing social norms allowed. Perhaps the most important female figure in Christianity is Mary, the Mother of God. She became the most perfect of all human beings: she was able to say "yes" to God so completely that He could become incarnate in her. Next come the very women we read about today: the myrrh-bearing women. Exactly how many there were is unclear—the Gospel writers' accounts differ—but that is not the point. What matters is that it is women, those who perhaps, unlike the apostles, have nothing left to lose, since their Lord has already been taken from them, who come to the tomb and are the first to receive the news of the Resurrection. The Lord sees into the depths of a woman's soul better than any of us, better than all the psychologists and other specialists. And the Lord wants the joyful news to spread throughout the world from those very depths: Christ is risen! The Lord does not entrust this to men. Why? He knows best. And this completely refutes the theory that Christianity discriminates against women. The Lord Himself has determined each person's calling; He Himself has put everything in its place. The passage from Acts explains very clearly what happens when we inadvertently rearrange what He has put in place. The early Christians' neglect of poor widows becomes one sign of the "cooling" and gradual fading of the love that had existed in the Church. So let us remember our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. Thanks be to God for them!

Today in the Gospel we read about one manifestation of true human greatness. The faithfulness and love that moved Joseph of Arimathea are truly worthy of every praise and imitation. When every hope had ceased, when Jesus had died on the Cross and everything was over, at precisely that moment there remained people faithful to Him.

It is not easy to remain near the Crucified God. It is still harder to mourn His death. What did Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and Mary Magdalene experience and think on Holy Saturday, when the Lord lay in the tomb in the flesh? And how did Joseph dare to go in to Pilate to ask for the Body of Christ, disregarding both the laws about ritual defilement, since that morning the chief priests would not enter the house of the pagan Pilate, and the danger of being accused of complicity in the case of the Executed One? They pass through the horror of Friday and Saturday to the end and remain together with the One who has died and with His Mother. To be with God to the end, wherever He goes. And when He descends into hell, where people cannot go with Him, they weep and wait for Him on earth.

And this waiting does not remain in vain.

In reflecting on today's Gospel reading, let us focus on Peter's denial. Let us try to experience this event with Peter. Let us not hurry to say that we never even thought of denying Christ, because we love Him more than anything in the world. By speaking this way, we show that we do not know what love is. If someone wants to understand the words from the First Epistle of John (1 John 4:8), that God is love, he should first of all think about what Peter felt and experienced in the moments of denial and during the three days that followed. Why is this so?

What is most frightening to us when we love? The most frightening thing is that the beloved person will die. And when he dies, literally as soon as his life goes out, we begin to understand how much we did not do for him that we could have done, but now it is no longer possible to do it, because he is no more. We cannot come to him, embrace him, and beg forgiveness for all the bad that happened and for all the good that did not happen.

What did Peter experience, not yet knowing about the Resurrection? A fierce pain of repentance and the impossibility of asking forgiveness. And if we think about it, his denial is not much better than Judas' betrayal. But Judas cannot endure the feeling of guilt, while Peter endures it. What is the difference? Perhaps by understanding the difference, we will understand what love is.

Why does Jesus not answer such a burning question about times and dates? Does God really deliberately hide such an important fact from people? Indeed, if only we knew the exact date of the coming triumph of the Kingdom... Still, it is not so simple to say unambiguously what any of us would do in that case. One cannot even be sure that everyone would take such a revelation seriously. And yet, as is well known, to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and each person decides for himself how to respond to a warning. In any case, for those who take spiritual life seriously, the situation would become noticeably simpler: they would not have to remain in a state of continuous spiritual, and perhaps not only spiritual, tension, expecting every day the main event of their life. Besides, Jesus Himself says that even He does not know the time of His own return. Why is this so? Maybe the point is not that something is being hidden from us, but that the time has not been fixed? After all, the history of the Kingdom is, above all, the history of those who live in it and bear witness to it, the history of Christian righteousness, which is determined not only by God's will but also by the choice of those people whom God calls. And then it inevitably turns out that the time of the Messiah's return and the triumph of the Kingdom depends not only on God, but also on us.

The women’s first reaction to the news of the Resurrection is striking: fear. Such a reaction would be understandable and expected if these were enemies of the Risen One. In this case, however, they were devoted followers who, it would seem, should only have rejoiced at the news that their Teacher was alive. Instead, they are so frightened that they are even afraid to tell the others what they have seen and heard. What is the matter? One could, of course, explain everything by the unusual and, above all, unexpected nature of what was happening. None of Jesus’ disciples actually expected His resurrection, although He Himself had told them about it more than once. It is difficult to say what the women who came to the tomb associated with the news that their Teacher was no longer there, that He had risen. Perhaps they recalled folk legends about the shades of the dead emerging from tombs. After all, when the apostles later saw the risen Jesus, their first thought was that they were seeing a ghost, a shade that had emerged from the tomb. But another explanation is also possible: the women truly decided that the last day had arrived, the very day of Judgment that would be preceded by the resurrection of the dead, who rise precisely in order to stand before God. Such an understanding of the general resurrection on the day of Judgment was widespread at that time and generally accepted in the Synagogue; the women who came to the tomb could not, of course, have been unaware of it. Perhaps they expected that judgment would soon come upon them and upon everyone living on earth. Such a prospect could not fail to evoke holy awe and, at the same time, the fear natural to fallen humanity because of its own sinfulness. None of Jesus’ disciples could yet know that their Teacher’s resurrection was only the beginning of a process that, by earthly standards, would extend over more than one millennium. And the women remain silent, afraid to speak about what they believe lies ahead.

In reflecting on today's Gospel reading, let us focus on Peter's denial. Let us try to experience this event with Peter. Let us not hurry to say that we never even thought of denying Christ, because we love Him more than anything in the world. By speaking this way, we show that we do not know what love is. If someone wants to understand the words from the First Epistle of John (1 John 4:8), that God is love, he should first of all think about what Peter felt and experienced in the moments of denial and during the three days that followed. Why is this so?

What is most frightening to us when we love? The most frightening thing is that the beloved person will die. And when he dies, literally as soon as his life goes out, we begin to understand how much we did not do for him that we could have done, but now it is no longer possible to do it, because he is no more. We cannot come to him, embrace him, and beg forgiveness for all the bad that happened and for all the good that did not happen.

What did Peter experience, not yet knowing about the Resurrection? A fierce pain of repentance and the impossibility of asking forgiveness. And if we think about it, his denial is not much better than Judas' betrayal. But Judas cannot endure the feeling of guilt, while Peter endures it. What is the difference? Perhaps by understanding the difference, we will understand what love is.