NOTES for Dan 9:4-10; Luk 6:36-38

Every person has moments when he realizes that he is sinful. Daniel speaks of common guilt (Dan. 9:5), without denying it and without excusing himself by saying that he was not the only one who sinned. And he contrasts these sins not with some "other fellow," but with the holiness and beauty of God Himself. Daniel looks at the Lord, being purified beneath His merciful gaze, which will be revealed to the world in Jesus.

Jesus also speaks of God's mercy, reminding the Jews of Old Testament truths. But He goes further: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," calling them to action and imitation. Verse 38 appears contradictory, but this is what God's mercy, His law, looks like. In the second part of the verse we read about the eternal inequality of our relationship with God: He simply cannot give less, less than His Incarnation, Love, and Cross. By these gifts of His we test everything we do in the world.

When we speak of repentance, we sometimes mean by it something that, from a biblical point of view, is not repentance at all. We most often understand the word “repentance” as an acknowledgment of our sinfulness and worthlessness, necessarily followed by self-flagellation and timid promises to correct ourselves in the future, if we manage it, and to begin a new life, if we succeed.

Yet both the Hebrew word and the corresponding Greek word translated into Russian as “repentance” mean “turning.” Thus the chief thing in repentance is not self-flagellation or promises, or even awareness of one’s sin, although that, too, is of course necessary, but the resolve to turn to God. To turn as one is, without wishing to embellish the situation somehow or to “become better” through one’s own strength.

The desire to look more presentable in God’s eyes is of course quite understandable. It need not necessarily be a matter of fearing punishment: after all, one always wants to appear at one’s best in the eyes of someone one loves, sometimes even better than one truly is. Yet these attempts are useless: God already knows each of us through and through. He sees right through us, and nothing can be hidden from Him anyway.

Daniel does not try to hide anything from Him or to embellish the situation. Turning to God, he says to Him directly: all truth and all righteousness belong to You, while we have nothing but our sins. This is not self-abasement, but a simple, sober view of himself, his people, and their history. And at the same time it is hope that a new life is nevertheless possible, possible because the desire for this new life is present not only in Daniel personally but in the whole people.

So is the desire for a new life enough by itself? Can all the sins of the past be forgotten and never recalled? Both yes and no. It is absolutely necessary to become aware of one’s sins and mistakes, primarily in order not to repeat them. But what sense is there in tormenting oneself for them?

God does not need our self-flagellation in any form or shape. He is not a sadist who wants to punish the sinner as severely as possible. Nor will self-flagellation help us: to depart from sin, we need only to understand what happened and resolve never to act that way again. The rest is God’s work; He knows how to sustain our readiness to resist our sins. The main thing is that this readiness should exist. Daniel understands that it does. And he turns to God, asking Him to support those who are ready to renounce a sinful life and follow Him, choosing His path, the path that leads to life.

Daniel's prayer recorded in the book is a typical example of a prayer of repentance. Above all, it expresses the essential thing without which there is no repentance: the fear of God. Not fear of the punishment one may receive from God for breaking His commandments, but the awareness that something has been done that could destroy one's relationship with Him, destroy it once and for all. This is, in fact, where all repentance begins.

As long as a person is sure that nothing catastrophic has happened, that there is merely a small misunderstanding which can easily be put right by their own efforts, there is no true repentance yet. There is only awareness of certain mistakes which the person can, however, easily correct without turning to God. Yet without turning to God, nothing in spiritual life can be put right. Not because human beings became utterly powerless after the Fall.

Of course, after the Fall human beings are no longer what they were, but they can still do some things. The issue lies elsewhere: in their relationship with God. Sin is terrible not because it is immoral and displeases God. There is much in us that displeases Him, but He does not abandon us for that reason. Sin is terrible because it erects a wall between us and God, separating us from Him.

Only a shared movement and effort by God and the human person towards each other can break down that wall. It must be shared, or nothing will come of it. For human beings are free, and the absence of effort on a person's part can mean only one thing: that person is indifferent to God, is quite content with things as they are and has no intention of breaking down the wall that separates them from Him. In that case, God will not break it down either. He will impose neither His presence nor communion with Himself on the person.

And the second very important point is hope in God's mercy: the mercy inseparable from love which shows itself in God's readiness to do far more than the sinner deserves or has a right to. Only on this condition can a person count on anything. Hoping in one's merits and insisting on one's rights before God is a spiritual dead end. Not even because God's merits are greater in any case, but because such an attitude limits what He can do.

A person is free, and if they agree to receive from God only what they have earned or are entitled to, they will receive exactly what they ask for. There will then be nothing to blame except their own presumption. This is why repentance also means complete trust in God, despite one's own sinfulness. And a readiness to receive from Him an entirely unearned gift: freedom from the power of sin, to which one has succumbed through one's own foolishness and thoughtlessness, or even quite deliberately. And not only this gift, but a still greater one: the fullness of the life of the Kingdom, without which there is no salvation.

Repentance is the beginning of the healing, this conversion to God for forgiveness and salvation. That is why if we are worried by the fate of our people, then we should check ourselves particularly in this verse. Is there shame on our faces, haven’t we unlearned to feel shame? And what about our kings, and princes, and our fathers? Doesn’t it seem to you that in our world several problems are connected in particular to this?

We even know to make of our critical situation an object of pride. The number of slaughters in the world is only increasing. What is our reaction? But, only?! Where is shame on our faces, where is our cry: "we sinned against You"? God said: "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel. 33:11). But we only we not turn to, but seems have already forgotten that we are sinners.

Every person has moments when he realizes that he is sinful. Daniel speaks of common guilt (Dan. 9:5), without denying it and without excusing himself by saying that he was not the only one who sinned. And he contrasts these sins not with some "other fellow," but with the holiness and beauty of God Himself. Daniel looks at the Lord, being purified beneath His merciful gaze, which will be revealed to the world in Jesus.

Jesus also speaks of God's mercy, reminding the Jews of Old Testament truths. But He goes further: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," calling them to action and imitation. Verse 38 appears contradictory, but this is what God's mercy, His law, looks like. In the second part of the verse we read about the eternal inequality of our relationship with God: He simply cannot give less, less than His Incarnation, Love, and Cross. By these gifts of His we test everything we do in the world.

At first sight, this verse is just a concrete supplement to the “general golden rule of ethics ": " Don’t do to others what you will not like them to do to you ". But it is necessary to glance more deeply. We don’t want people to judge us, because we don’t trust their judgments: no matter, they can’t puzzle out anything. We do not accept their condemnations, because we consider that they are better not at all in ours. And that is why we proudly refuse their forgivenesses, what also allows us to forgive nobody. So, we judge, condemn, and do not forgive. But Jesus indeed speaks not only about human’s justice and forgiveness, but also about Divine’s. Everything is different here, God has absolutely the right to judge, and this judgment frightens us because the Judge sees us completely. Well here we begin "to dream" about forgiveness, about undeserved mercy. But we have then to recognize the superiority of mercy over justice and on the way we behave towards others. And this means- don’t judge, don’t condemn, forgive.

Today we read the penitential prayer of the prophet Daniel. Daniel is a man who remained faithful to God through the hardest trials. In essence, he has every right to say: "Lord, see how much I have endured for Your name, and I have remained faithful to You." But Daniel looks at the situation differently. He does not separate himself from his people. "We, Your people, have sinned before You and have departed from Your commandments." Daniel turns to the Lord on behalf of the whole people, who may be occupied with their own affairs and not thinking about repentance at all. On behalf of all he says: "Righteousness belongs to You, and shame is on our faces." He does not check what expression is on the faces of those around him; he brings the Lord his own repentance, his own shame for everyone. And God is pleased with this prayer of Daniel.

In today's reading the Lord calls us not to remember how many times we personally acted correctly, but to receive today's state of things as our own pain and our own shame, and to bring Him our repentance for everything that has happened and is happening in our families, in the Church, in the country, and in the world. And if we do not look for the guilty and separate ourselves from others, He will have the opportunity to act.

‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged.’ It is frightening to think how often we break this commandment without noticing it, without being aware of it. In fact, we have grown accustomed to continually passing judgement on ‘everyone and everything’. And it might seem that, if we impose our judgement on no one, perhaps do not even say it aloud, what is wrong with that? But no. When the Lord says ‘Do not judge’, He means that such an approach is absolutely unacceptable. Why? The answer lies in the complex, many-dimensional idea of the human person as a microcosm. We know no one in all the unique diversity of their relationships with other people and, above all, with God. Even when we think we know everything about someone, there are particular details we do not know that could turn the whole picture upside down.

From this understanding grows the sense of standing before God as the most unworthy of all people. Without the commandment ‘Do not judge’, this is impossible to understand. After all, it seems obvious that there are far more unworthy people. But this is how we must reason: there is simply something that speaks in their favour that I do not know. I do not even know everything about myself, although I know how little speaks in my defence and how much accuses me.

But we must not judge ourselves either. The commandment says ‘Do not judge’, not ‘Do not judge others’. This is infinitely difficult, because we have become so accustomed to doing it. At times, these judgements seem to be the structures on which our whole life rests. But the time will come when all the supporting structures will be removed.

The Savior's words, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged,” could, of course, be understood primarily or exclusively as referring to relationships between people. Then they might seem a certain concession, or even an indulgence of human weakness: an invitation to overlook other people's sins so that others will overlook your own.

Indeed, “civilized society” and “proper behavior” imply something of the sort. In such a society, if people who behave “properly” speak of others' sins at all, they do not do so openly, and certainly not to the face of the person they consider a sinner. Apparently, the instinct for psychological, if not spiritual, self-preservation tells everyone that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

But is this what the Savior means? There is another possibility: refraining from judgment as the utmost objectivity in approaching human actions. One of the great teachers of the Torah, Hillel, who lived approximately two centuries before Christ's coming, advised people not to judge their neighbor until they had been in that neighbor's position. At first glance, Jesus too might seem to be calling for something similar.

Yet there is a difference. Everything He says is spoken in the context of the Kingdom's life, to which He calls His followers. No one is ready for that life: there are no sinless people in the world apart from the Savior Himself. So no one is in a position to judge anyone else, for all are in the same situation. Each person must think first of their own salvation, their own path into the Kingdom.

That leaves no room for condemning other people's sins. But there is another side to the refusal to condemn that Jesus asks of His followers. The Kingdom comes to each person as an undeserved gift, but only on condition that everyone willing to accept it receives it in the same way, as an undeserved gift. Every attempt to single out the worthy will end in just one way: the evaluator will be counted among the unworthy. Jesus does not want those seeking the Kingdom to lose it through spiritual self-righteousness. He therefore advises them not to be spiritually self-righteous—for the sake of their own salvation.

Christ calls His disciples to build a house on rock. But this image is not as simple as it seems, for this rock is not a set of “universal human” notions about life, nor firmly established commandments and laws. It is the word of Jesus, that is, the Good News, which always remains new to a person and never hardens into a mass of stone. Try building your life on love for your adversary, on conscious and honest forgiveness. One cannot grow accustomed to such things, just as one cannot love “out of habit.” The paradox of the Christian life is that it is built on a rock fixed not in the earth but in heaven, where there is no support other than God. But to be able to grasp hold of “thin air,” one needs a courageous desire, a readiness to find what is firmer than any earthly stone.

Comparing the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke makes it clear that Luke generally presents it in less detail. Of course, hardly any of the evangelists transmitted Jesus' words verbatim. At that time it was customary to compile the sayings of teachers and preachers, shaping them into a special kind of literary text and sometimes into entire collections. Even taking this fact into account, however, it is obvious that Luke singled out what he considered most important in Jesus' sermon. For the evangelist, the most important thing is the absence of condemnation. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged”—these are the Savior's words that Luke considers most important in the whole Sermon on the Mount. Why these particular words? Matthew, for example, has many other themes that are no less important.

Yet the absence of condemnation really can be considered a measure of the quality of a person's inner life. This is not about making an assessment, of course, but precisely about condemning. It is entirely natural to assess a person's particular action in a given situation. Condemnation is another matter: it concerns not the action but the person himself. A person thus becomes the judge of another person, although God never appointed him to be such a judge. A person's path, its outcome, and its evaluation are the prerogative of God and God alone. Even if someone is clearly heading straight for the lake of fire, only God can sentence him to that lake.

Any human being can only state the fact that a sinner is moving in that direction. Why, then, do we pronounce judgment so readily where no one has given us the right to do so? Evidently because we do not see the situation as God sees it and do not use the same criteria—not absolute criteria but relative ones. We see a person not in the fullness of the life God has given him, but only in his particular present condition. We apply certain formal criteria, usually moral and religious, to this condition and naturally obtain a completely distorted picture of reality. But this is no surprise: as long as our life is determined not by the breath of life God has given us but by our own nature, nothing else can be expected.

If, however, we live the life of the Kingdom, such a distortion of reality simply cannot occur. If it does occur, it means that we are still far from the Kingdom, as the evangelist bears witness to us.

How should we understand the parable of the bad or good tree? After all, all people, including us, sometimes bear good fruit and sometimes bad fruit. Here again there is a temptation to divide people, and ourselves, into good and bad. And sometimes it is even pleasant to say, "Oh, what a bad person I am!" as though that were useful for humility. But here we are judging again, and it is said: "Do not judge."

Here it is more about the inner, spiritual direction that stands behind our actions, and that direction depends on us. Therefore, in order not to be a bad tree, one must bear good fruit; and for the Lord's words to benefit us, they must be put into practice. This is the Christian's basic moral task: to do good, not to judge. Christ will judge.

The parable of the house built on the rock concludes the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. It also concludes the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus explains what He expects from His disciples and what it means to be "sons of the Most High." In this parable He once again draws our attention to how important it is not merely to listen to and accept the truths of the Gospel, but also to act in accordance with them.

If, after hearing the Beatitudes, we calmly say, "Yes, this is very wise and beautiful," but do not embody it in any way in our life, then we will not be His disciples. Our Christianity will remain only an ethical system, one that can break under the pressure of trials. But if we truly live by His commandments, look at the world with His eyes, and do His will, then this will be a foundation that nothing will be able to shake.

Today's reading is devoted to one of the central themes of the Sermon on the Mount—the theme of judgment. Jesus evidently links a person's ability to abide in the Kingdom directly to the way they judge their neighbor (vv. 37–42). At first glance, such an attitude toward others would seem to rule out any assessment of them at all. A closer reading, however, shows that this is not quite so. For Jesus clearly links the prohibition on judging to the possibility that the person making the judgment may be mistaken about their neighbor (vv. 41–42).

It might seem that there is nothing terrible about such a mistake. And that would be true if we did not turn our judgments about our neighbors into absolutes. It is no accident that Jesus compares our assessments to the behavior of a blind person leading another person just as blind (v. 39). The point here is not who is more sinful. The point is that any sin of ours, even if, compared with our neighbor's sin, it really is like a speck compared with a log, prevents us both from seeing the person beside us clearly and from helping them. The only things we can assess more or less adequately are specific deeds and actions, which Jesus advises us to take as our guide (vv. 43–44).

In a sense, we could say that outside the Kingdom we are all equally helpless before sin, and in this sinfulness and helplessness we are equal before God and one another. Of course, we can try to deny the obvious and begin counting our own sins and those of others, but then God too will count our sins as meticulously as we count our neighbors' sins (v. 37). This is not a matter of forgiving everything, nor of God's desire to “humble” us. The point is that a position which gives us the moral right to count our own and other people's sins necessarily rules out abiding in the Kingdom. For in the Kingdom everyone receives life in all its fullness—a fullness that excludes every sin, even the most insignificant—so that our earthly moral arithmetic loses all meaning there. And if such arithmetic still matters to us, it means we are not yet ready to enter the Kingdom.

But something else also matters for abiding in the Kingdom: the degree of our openness to our neighbor. For the Kingdom is not only a space; it is also a relationship—or rather, an entire system of relationships between people and God and between people themselves. And the relationships of the Kingdom presuppose unconditional openness, a readiness to share what we have been given with everyone who needs what we have received. If we decide to share only with those we consider worthy, there will be no place for us in the Kingdom. For the fullness of the Kingdom can be given to us if we are ready to share it with everyone. Not everyone who is worthy, but everyone who seeks and thirsts for the Kingdom.

It is the most difficult commands of Jesus. Going to the Church, most of us understand this exactly as it, by feeling their disinterestedness and their cruelty. And after we get used to, we become "common" Christians, love towards our enemy is replaced by "the unwillingness to hurt him ", we are ready to lead mercy to almsgiving, and we oppose the proposal to lend without restitution to the words of Jesus “be wise as snakes ". Then… we forget that this command is the most difficult to fulfill, we stop aspiring to the inaccessible, we close up ourselves into our blind optimism.

The commandments that the Lord Jesus gives His disciples look impossible and excessive at first glance. Impossible because no human being is able to act as the Lord commands. Excessive because our measure of justice is narrow and limited, and is satisfied with far less than mercy toward enemies. Of course, compared with the boasting of Lamech, who in deep antiquity counted it to his credit that he killed for a single scratch inflicted on him, the idea of adequate repayment that has soaked into our psychology, good for good and evil for evil ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), can be considered great progress. But the Lord looks not from the viewpoint of the depth of moral fallenness from which we need to climb out, but from the viewpoint of the height to which we need to ascend. He concludes His word about our attitude toward others with a call for us to be merciful, as the Father is merciful. Indeed, it is God who loves us, who have become His enemies and rejected Him; it is God who gives infinitely much to us, who can repay Him with nothing.

Often we think that these commandments about love for enemies and mercy toward those who hate us were given "for us to grow into," that someday we will "grow" enough to become able to fulfill them. This position has meaning, but it is still far from satisfying. Who, indeed, can "grow into" the perfection proper to the Creator? And the time of our life is so short that we have no chance to wait. Therefore the Lord, who fully knows our nature, offers us an astonishingly practical principle: "in everything, as you want people to do to you, so also do to them." It cannot be said that this is easy to fulfill, but still, when we try to understand how we should act in a concrete situation, we can be guided by it.

The main place where the Lord calls us to apply this principle is forgiveness. Many times He repeats that if we want to be forgiven by God (and by people), we ourselves need to be able to forgive. It is clear that the principle proposed by Christ is much broader than it appears at first glance. It can be extended not only to relationships with people, but also to our relationship with the Almighty Himself. In other words, in everything, as we want God to act toward us, we ourselves should act that way toward God and toward people.

Being a kind person, it is easy to lend without expecting anything in return, especially if one's material situation is more or less stable. Even if you understand that you are depriving yourself of something, on the contrary, because of this you somehow grow in your own eyes. But here is the trap. In return you expect personal growth, first; you expect God's favor, second; you expect the favor of those people to whom you have shown mercy, or, if you do it anonymously, of those people through whom you do it, third. And getting rid of these three things is not at all simple; sometimes it even appears impossible.

Let us try to analyze them. It would appear that the favor of people and of God is a sign of the increase of love between us, and therefore also lies in the line of God's commandments and should not be a source of shame; but in reality, although this is very hard to understand, this is not so, because love is in principle an act between two absolutely equal people. The feeling of the person who has become the object of your charity, that he is now obligated to you and has nothing with which to repay you, can destroy the relationship between you, although outwardly it will look like love. And only for this reason, only in order not to destroy love, one should try with all one's strength to make it so that the person you benefit, even if he is very close to you, does not know that it was you, so as not to ruin that equality of love that exists between you.

As for personal growth... One can, while doing a mercy, immediately do something that cancels out all the good; one can do something such that no good deeds will count anymore. We, our fate in eternity, remain in question until the moment of our death, and what of it if we have grown a little? This may be one step forward after which there will be two steps back, and we ourselves will not even notice how. So all of this is trifles: growth, falling... One cannot keep a finger on the pulse all the time; one cannot always keep a ruler in one hand in order to mark daily how much I have grown, because one cannot keep one's hands occupied; they are needed for the work. As experimental physicists joke, every reasonable operation requires three hands. At least two, but certainly not one.

The idea of loving one's enemies can hardly be considered something entirely new and unknown to the pre-Christian world. The Torah already contains a requirement to refrain from harming an enemy who finds himself in difficulty. In this case, however, the Torah proceeds not from the need to love one's enemies as such, but from the fact that enmity between people cannot and must not become grounds for violating the Torah. In other words, if we want to adhere strictly to the Torah as the law given by God, we must follow its precepts even when dealing with enemies who wish us harm. Some philosophers of the pagan world held the same view: Socrates, for example, who saw the chief purpose of philosophy as learning to distinguish good from evil and to follow the good. He was convinced that, since we must never do evil to anyone, we must not do it to our enemies either: any evil a person does harms, first and foremost, the person who does it. Yet Jesus' words about loving one's enemies have a quite particular context, connected with His testimony to the Kingdom He brought into the world.

This is, of course, primarily about love as an attitude toward another person—an attitude that entails wishing one's enemy good rather than evil. In this sense, Jesus' words are in harmony both with the Torah and with those pagan philosophers who, like Socrates, understood that the evil done to an enemy inevitably affects, first and foremost, the person who has done it. But whereas in the untransfigured world such conduct was characteristic only of the truly righteous, for the inhabitants of the Kingdom, in the Savior's understanding, it must become the norm, the only possible way of spiritual life. This is not only because any other course spiritually destroys the person who departs from that norm, but also because it is unacceptable in the Kingdom as a realm of all-embracing love. Indeed, in the untransfigured world, the psychological environment, natural at its foundation, within which all relationships develop admits, in principle, both positive and negative elements in them, both constructive and destructive interactions.

The nature of the Kingdom is different: here it is love itself that constitutes the environment within which all relationships between its inhabitants develop. One might say that here love is not only an attitude, but nature itself, just as the elements constitute the nature of the untransfigured world. It is hardly surprising that in such an environment there can be no place for any negative relationships, even when enemies are involved. This is not because Christ's enemies can enter the Kingdom and become its inhabitants without repenting, but because hatred, even toward the enemies of Christ and His Kingdom, is incompatible with the very nature of that Kingdom.

Continuing His preaching of the Beatitudes, Christ speaks about exactly what must be done in order to "be sons of the Most High." If the Beatitudes spoke about a person's states, about the qualities and properties that belong to him, here Jesus lists a number of actions that a Christian must perform. "But I say to you who hear," He addresses those who have already heard and accepted the radical commandments of blessedness, which contradict the usual understanding of life.

It turns out that a Christian must not only accept life passively, but also actively carry Christ into the world. Bless those who curse, give away the last shirt, turn the cheek... The Lord, saying, "As you wish that people would do to you, do so to them," calls His disciples to perform actions that could move other people also to act in a Christian way.

By answering evil with good, trying to love where there is hatred, and showing true mercy to our neighbors, we are only giving others what we ourselves have received from God as His children.

Skeptics who rebel against Christianity and Christians often speak of self-interest. They say that, in doing good, Christians are concerned about a reward from above and do everything "for the promises of future blessings." How should we answer them, since we really do say, following the evangelist, "...and your reward will be great"?

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the Lord calls us to absolute selflessness. And today's passage, in which the Lord calls us to give while receiving nothing in return, and even without hope of receiving anything, should also serve as a warning against this pseudo-Christian reliance on posthumous or some other recompense from the Lord.

It is another matter that the Lord is just. And His justice is above all. But it belongs only to Him; we have no right to judge either it or ourselves in its light. That is why the Lord says, "Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay." In these words there is not only the promise of the final triumph of good over evil, or more precisely, of evil being turned into good. In them there is also the condition of our selflessness before Him.

Probably no passage in the Gospel has provoked as much argument, bewilderment and rejection as this one. How much irony and outright mockery have been directed over the centuries at the words about loving our enemies and turning the other cheek! More often than not, Christians themselves have been embarrassed by these words and, in response not merely to a slap on the cheek but to any offence, often an imagined one, have been eager to strike back harder.

Yet turning the other cheek often requires greater courage than striking back. Someone being beaten is forced to turn the other cheek when standing silently before tormentors who are beside themselves at that person's composure; this is not masochism but steadfastness. Soldiers, too, turn the other cheek when they do not respond to the enemy's armed provocations, so as to strike at a calculated moment. Finally, think of assaults intended to intimidate the enemy, when the ranks of the attackers are thinned by machine-gun fire, yet the advance continues.

Of course, although the biblical authors repeatedly use military terminology, we should not see these images as having only a practical military meaning. Those faithful to the Lord are called to a steadfastness comparable to a soldier's, but our struggle is not against flesh and blood. We must therefore see even a person who is hostile to us as a brother worthy of love, stricken with the infection of evil as with leprosy. Even when force has to be used to stop that person, we should remember this, however difficult it may be.

Such words are difficult and seem impossible to put into practice. But if we hope to limit our possibilities to the little we can already do, we will not accomplish even that little. To achieve anything, we must set our sights higher than our accustomed capabilities. A minimum of good is already good, but Christ offers us more. And with His help we could be capable of more.

The text usually called the Beatitudes forms the foundation of the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, strictly speaking, it is difficult to call them commandments. What, indeed, is a commandment? Take the Decalogue—the Ten Commandments—what are they? At first glance, a system of prescriptions and restrictions. On closer examination, God's intentions addressed to the human person. And however we look at them, an imperative. For some, an external one—legal or moral. For others, an internal one—spiritual and ethical. But in any case, an imperative. Something that demands to be carried out. Followed. Or built up within us—if we are speaking of the inward Torah. In any case, it involves some kind of activity, outward or inward. Something that requires a person to act. To fulfill the commandments of the Decalogue, one has to do something. It is impossible to fulfill the Beatitudes in this sense.

Throughout Christian history, theologians have tried to determine exactly what must be done to fulfill the Beatitudes. A wide variety of opinions has been expressed, and this only confirms that the Beatitudes cannot be fulfilled in the sense in which we speak, for example, of fulfilling the commandments of the Decalogue. There, one has to do something—what exactly is beside the point here. Here, one has to be. Exist. Abide. There, it is a matter of human activity; here, of the quality of one's existence. To fulfill what are called the commandments of the Beatitudes, a person must begin to live a different, new life.

We might say that all nine Beatitudes come down to one: the commandment of new life. And all of them simply describe different aspects of this new life. A life that the human person does not possess. A life in which one can participate by accepting Christ as King of the Kingdom that is entering the world, but which one does not and cannot possess of oneself. And the entire Sermon on the Mount is about the same thing: the new life that a person can enter and that can enter a person. Otherwise, one cannot love one's enemies. And certainly cannot become perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

Like several other episodes of the Savior's earthly ministry, Luke describes the Sermon on the Mount somewhat differently than Matthew does. For Luke, the basis for presenting what Jesus said during this sermon becomes the contrast between two ways: the way of the rich, which the evangelist identifies with the way of the Gentiles, and the way of the poor, which turns out to be the way into the Kingdom.

The idea of two ways is not new in itself; it is well known from Old Testament texts, and for Luke it becomes the very prism through which he perceives the Savior's words. In mentioning the poor, Jesus undoubtedly meant not simply those without possessions, but those who understood poverty as a spiritual state. The Old Testament prophets had already spoken about such poor people. And the rich differ from them not by a property marker, but by a spiritual one: if the poor find their consolation only in the Kingdom (vv. 20-23), then the rich receive what is theirs in this world, having no need of the Kingdom (vv. 24-26).

But in order to enter the Kingdom, one must remain faithful to it to the end. Therefore those who thirst for the Kingdom cannot live by the laws of this world, which has not yet been transformed, even though the laws of the Kingdom do not yet operate in it. It is no accident that Luke singles out in Jesus' sermon the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 31), making it the compositional center of that part of his account in which he presents Jesus' instruction to those who want to live according to the laws of the Kingdom (vv. 27-36).

At first glance, this call resembles the universally known "golden rule," but there is one difference in the Savior's formulation that is not immediately obvious: if in its traditional version the "golden rule" calls us to treat people the same way they treat us, Jesus advises us to treat people as we would want them to treat us. In other words, if we are truly seeking the Kingdom, then in our relationships with people, according to the Savior's word, we must in a certain sense "work ahead," giving them our good attitude in advance and not waiting for them first to show themselves in relation to us.

According to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, this is of course completely irrational behavior: everyone knows that fallen man is very little capable either of good works or of a good attitude toward neighbors. But, on the other hand, any other approach to the people around us does not presuppose openness, and without openness it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. The Kingdom is arranged in such a way that one cannot enjoy it alone. One cannot acquire it by fencing oneself off from everyone. The Kingdom can be acquired only if one becomes part of it oneself, and one can become part of it only when what we have received we pass on to others, to those who, like us, seek the fullness of life in this Kingdom. And then we become servants of the Kingdom - those whom Jesus chooses so that through them the whole world created by God may become the Kingdom.

These words seem deliberately to contradict ordinary human ideas. Why are the poor and hungry, the weeping and rejected, suddenly blessed, while woe is pronounced upon the rich, the full, and those who laugh? One might think that Christ is proclaiming a revolution that will turn the world upside down! The Kingdom of God that He brings to earth really is radically different from the order of the world familiar to us. Relationships within it are founded on the Father's mercy, not on the struggle for survival. Even as believers, we often forget that entirely different laws prevail in this Kingdom. We call happiness what Christ calls woe, and conversely regard His blessings as misfortune. How greatly we must change to become true citizens of this Kingdom!