NOTES for Luk 12:4-5

Let us show first of all the way the Lord expresses himself here: "my friends"; and not my slaves, my servants, and neither my followers, He says "friends". Who are these friends? For us, there are the ones we love, with whom we wouldn't like to separate and to whom we wish all the best. Let's read now what Jesus is saying to His friends, forewarning them of disasters, persecutions, murders to come.

We would have certainly looked for the means to avoid the coming danger, and spoken of adequate care… The words of Jesus are unexpected: "be not afraid "; perhaps the misfortunes will pass by? No, they might not pass by, but we should not be afraid of death - the physical death, because the murder can do nothing more with us once we are dead; physical death is not yet the end. So, if it is necessary to consider something, it should be what separates us from the One Who gives eternal life, this something is sin. To consider or to take into account means trying to avoid it here and now. Because resurrection waits us after death and after resurrection is judgment, which is carried out by the Judge, Who gave His life for our salvation. And if we have no reverential thrill (what is called "the fear of God" in the religious language) in front of this Judge, our road with Him will be interrupted and we shall be cast into hell.

The Lord calls us not to be afraid to profess our faith before those who do not accept it, even if they threaten us with death for doing so. And we, living in a historical era when faith is not persecuted and, on the contrary, openly professing it and belonging to the dominant church is prestigious and honourable, often think that these words do not concern us, that this cup has passed us by. We remember that the twentieth century in Russia was an era when steadfast confession of the faith shone anew, and we look upon these people’s feat as though from the sidelines.

But this should not be so. Not a single letter of the Gospel should be alien to us or be perceived as having been written for someone other than us. We need only understand what it means personally for each of us in the context of today. Yes, for example, being Orthodox is now accepted in Russia. But are we ready to stand on the Lord’s side, rather than on the side of public opinion or our own peace of mind, when we see certain statements by people calling themselves Orthodox beginning openly to contradict the spirit of God’s Word? And to do so humbly, without imagining ourselves to be new prophets.

Today’s passage contains words that often cause perplexity: “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” We are accustomed to the fact that, in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, all the Persons of God are equal in a certain spiritual way. But our Lord Jesus Christ is so meek that, even within the immutability of this equality, He humbles Himself before the Holy Spirit; even a small measure of such humility would suffice for us. Let us pray for it.

“I tell you: everyone who acknowledges Me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God. But whoever denies Me before others will be denied before the angels of God. And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (vv. 8, 9, 10). This quotation must not be broken apart; it can only be considered as a whole. We often make this mistake when we try, unsuccessfully, to understand the last two sentences (v. 10). They seem paradoxical and incomprehensible: is this the Lord's humility before the Holy Spirit, who is His hypostasis? Yes, we have witnessed Jesus' humility before the Father, who is also His hypostasis, so this explanation has a right to exist. Yes, it holds for the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, where the verses corresponding to verses 8 and 9, on the one hand, and verse 10, on the other, stand in different parts of the text and have no connection in meaning. Yet this idea of Jesus' humility does not exhaust the full meaning of verse 10 in Luke's Gospel. Its first part is very closely, and apparently deliberately, connected with verse 9—so closely that we apparently cannot separate them and quote verse 10 alone, apart from verses 8 and 9, without eliminating an idea distinctive to Luke. Thus, whoever “denies” Jesus before others will be denied, whereas whoever speaks a “word” against Him will be forgiven. At a glance, these seem mutually exclusive statements. Is there really some essential difference between denying and blaspheming that affects a person's fate so profoundly? In fact, there is. To deny, or “negaverit,” as we read in the Vulgate, means “to deny stubbornly, to reject persistently” (Petruchenko's Latin–Russian dictionary); and it is generally clear that one can reject only what is offered to one. But one can inadvertently blaspheme even against something one does not know. How often we speak skeptically about something we have never really encountered in our lives, something that has not yet come to us, simply on other people's word—the word of people we are used to trusting. But once the Holy Spirit is at issue, there can be no more talk of “not knowing”: the Holy Spirit enlightens everyone who has come into contact with Him. So the second part of verse 10 takes us back to verse 9: you are being enlightened, but you refuse—and that means you do so knowingly. What a wealth of new meaning comes from Luke's joining verses that were separate in the other two Synoptic Gospels! And like a refrain, the apostle Paul's stern warning resounds: “For it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and who have fallen away, to be renewed again to repentance, if they for their part crucify the Son of God and expose Him to shame” (Heb. 6:4–6).

Speaking about the Kingdom and about how to obtain it, the Savior, as can be seen, puts first the question of life, of what kind of life a person lives. Such an approach can be considered quite traditional. Indeed, in the Bible, when the subject is a person and his life or life force, the Synodal translation in this case usually says "soul," a clear line is drawn between the person as he was before the fall and the person as he became after the fall.

Before the fall, this force was connected above all with the breath of life that God breathed into the human being at creation. After the fall, it became connected mainly with blood, with the physiological essence of the human being, just as in animals, where it too is connected with blood. As can be seen, life is presented by the biblical authors as whole and indivisible. It is not divided into spiritual and physical in such a way that one of its components could be separated from the other. But the quality of life can differ, being determined by a person's spiritual state: the fuller and more intense his relations with God are, the more spiritual there is in the person's life, and the more his spiritual component prevails over the natural one, subjecting it to itself. In the Kingdom, as can be seen, a person's life is completely transformed.

Only one thing is important here: whether the person lives this life or not. If his life turns out to be part of the life of the Kingdom, then even the death of his physical body changes nothing in principle. After all, in the Kingdom nature in its former quality does not exist, and in its new, transformed state it is no longer something completely foreign in nature to the spirit, as it is in the untransformed world. And to the extent that a person's life in our transforming but still untransformed world belongs to the Kingdom, he need not fear losses at the moment of physical death, because death has no relation to the Kingdom. But if the whole life of a person remains connected only with the untransformed world and with untransformed bodily existence, he has nothing to count on: death will prove to be the only and final reality for him.

The Kingdom will in any case eventually transform our world, making it part of itself, but a person who has no relation to the Kingdom will have no relation to this triumph of the Kingdom, at least until the day of Judgment. That is why Jesus advises us to fear not the one who can kill a person physically, but the One who can deprive him of the Kingdom: after all, having the Kingdom, a person loses nothing even in the case of physical death; but having lost the Kingdom, he will sooner or later inevitably lose everything, including the physical life he preserved at such an inadequate price.

Today's reading continues the theme of the Kingdom and religiosity. It begins with Jesus' warning about the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ (v. 1). And it is certainly no accident that Luke places this well-known saying of Jesus in the context of another saying of His: there is nothing hidden in the world that will not be revealed (v. 2). For religion changes a person only outwardly; inwardly, that person remains the same, and on entering the Kingdom will be unable to conceal their true nature behind religiosity.

But rejecting the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ inevitably leads to conflict and persecution, of which Jesus immediately warns His disciples (vv. 4–5). Here the Saviour returns to the theme of poverty as a spiritual condition. On the one hand, it is, of course, wholly incompatible with the pursuit of profit and possessions. This apparently explains why Jesus has no intention of settling the inheritance dispute in which He is asked to intervene (vv. 13–15). Moreover, He immediately tells a parable about a man who has laid up provisions for years to come, which, as the parable makes clear, he will never get to use (vv. 16–21). What we have here is not simply a condemnation of greed, but an indication of misplaced priorities that distort a person's spiritual life and render it meaningless. Jesus also explains how to put those priorities in their proper order (vv. 6–7, 22–34).

This is not a call to live in destitution, but simply a reminder of the Kingdom, which must in any case come first. Then God will give those who seek the Kingdom everything else: enough to live on, while those who seek the Kingdom have no need of stockpiles. And then the essential thing happens: a person begins to live no longer their own life, but the life of the Kingdom (v. 32). A life that no one can take away, unless the person living it renounces it of their own accord. Only someone who lives the life of the Kingdom can be a faithful witness to Christ: such a person knows that they are living not their own limited, finite life, which anyone can easily take away, but the life of the Kingdom, which can be lost only by yielding to the one who can ‘cast into Gehenna’ (v. 5). In this way Jesus reminds His disciples of the essential thing that gives a Christian's life its meaning: the triumph of the Kingdom, and the fact that the chief task of anyone wishing to follow Christ becomes the endeavour to do everything possible to become part of the Kingdom and, in due time, share in that triumph.

Speaking to the disciples about the Kingdom, Jesus describes it above all as a new life opened to those who seek it. But it can be found only in the case of absolute openness on one's own part. To live the life of the Kingdom, one must renounce one's own life. Not one's life-space as such, not that flow of life which the Bible calls the soul, but the attempt to appropriate this space and this flow for oneself, to regard it as one's inalienable property, belonging to oneself by right.

In the Kingdom everything is different. There life is shared. One life for all. It is not owned; it is given for use. And the measure of this use is limited by nothing except the spiritual potential of the person himself. As much of the life of the Kingdom as he can contain, that much he will receive. But it does not become anyone's own in the sense in which we are accustomed to use that word with reference to property relations in our world.

The life of the Kingdom is yours insofar as you can live by this life. And therefore Jesus advises surrendering oneself to the flow of the life of the Kingdom. Enter it like a river. And move together with it. Without trying, as people say today, to fix anything in place. Without trying to evaluate one's own states, achievements, or failures. Without clinging to anything that attracts and holds a person in this world. And certainly without trying to fit the life of the Kingdom into religious frameworks: the new life cannot be kneaded on either Pharisaic or Sadducean leaven. The Kingdom does not fit into any human frameworks, but it does fit into the human heart. If, of course, it becomes the person's chief treasure. For where the treasure is, there is the heart.

“You are worth more than many little birds”—for many people today these words sound like a revelation. When a human life is worth next to nothing (or worth a great deal of money), food inevitably becomes more important than the soul, and clothing more important than the body. The reality of the Kingdom of God frees us from this slavery to money, food, clothing, and the oppressive anxiety about tomorrow. The Lord simply tells us: “To Me, you are more important and more precious than all these things.” We are very good at seeing the ugliness of this world and the ugliness of those around us (and sometimes our own). But the Lord says: “To Me, you are more beautiful than the flowers of the field.” We tremble in fear for our well-being, health, and life. But He comforts us: “Do not be afraid; My Kingdom belongs to you.”

The coming Kingdom of God will require a particular path of faith from each person. Jesus tells His disciples, 'Do not worry,' yet He also condemns the thoughtless rich man who no longer has anything to worry about. The question cannot be resolved in terms of 'to work or not to work,' of whether or not to make an effort to care for ourselves and our loved ones. For what is at stake here is not food and clothing but hope—what a person relies on, the foundation on which that person stands. Christ's disciples still need to eat and drink; they do not turn into 'lilies of the field,' they remain human beings. But these people do not live by themselves, by their own efforts, or even by their own faith: they live by God, by His mercy toward them. Instead of our usual 'problems,' they set their hearts on the Kingdom, which becomes the measure and goal of all their daily labors and efforts.