NOTES for Mal 3:18

The worst thing happens when we begin to count the little time we devote to the Lord and our few good deeds. We begin to argue our case against God: I spent so much time standing in prayer, but You gave me nothing for it; I did such-and-such a good deed for such-and-such a person, which is the same as doing something for You, but You still have not rewarded me. At that moment the distance between us and God becomes monstrously great, because God is Love, while we try to calculate love, bargain with love, and use our displays of love for God, without true love for Him, to buy outward displays of His love. At such moments we do not really believe in God’s love for us; we cease to understand that God does not count, that He loves us all the time. Yet we do not always notice His love; we fail to see in the world around us and in our life His tender smile and His words addressed to us.

And if He truly is silent, might it not be because God does not wish to bargain with us, since He loves us without self-interest?

The relevance and urgency of the story told by the prophet are hard to dispute. We ask ourselves the question "how can this be?" far too often, because life gives us countless opportunities for it. The world looks unjust; it lives by laws that seem not to require faith in God, humility before Him, or trust in His will. The question "what is all this for, if in any case the one who does not submit himself to God's laws is better off?" is sometimes very hard to answer even for oneself, and it is practically impossible to say anything to someone who, on the basis of that question, presents God with a bill.

And nevertheless, this is the simplest way to see the difference between the human and the divine, to see the difference in height between the human person and God. Yes, the one who does not bind himself by love for God may be better situated. But all the same one must make a choice: whether this security is worth life with God. We have the right to refuse every day, but do we need such a life? We want visible signs of God's presence in life, yet for some reason we try to measure grace in monetary terms, in career terms, in outward terms. To this He answers us that acquisition is fitting only in relation to the Kingdom of God (Matt. 6:33), which has no price.

Malachi's prophecy about the Messiah — the Messenger of the covenant — ends with remarkable words about God's unchangeableness, from which the whole subsequent dialogue develops between God and the prophet on the one side and the people on the other. ‘I am the Lord; I do not change,’ God says. Many different consequences follow from this fact. It is important in itself as a doctrinal statement; the Church Fathers, in particular St Basil the Great, contrasted the fluidity and changeability of creation with God's unchangeableness and saw in Him the only true foundation of all being, the ‘anchor of salvation’, as early Christians often called the Lord. God's unchangeableness is important for understanding human history, so that we may see and recognise Him in the events of the past. We need to know that God does not change so that we can trust in His goodness and mercy. This is precisely what the prophet stresses when he says that the sons of Jacob have not perished amid history's upheavals only because God, who made a covenant with Abraham, does not change.

But against this faithfulness of God, which flows from the unchangeableness of His own incomprehensible divine nature, human unfaithfulness becomes especially evident. And so, through Malachi in the fifth century BC, the Lord again says what He had said through the prophets of the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries: ‘Return to Me, and I will return to you.’ God does not change, and so the only cause of the breakdown of our relationship with Him lies in ourselves. Yet instead of believing and turning to God, Malachi's contemporaries say that they are guilty of nothing... And so, in answer to people's habitual ways of thinking, the prophet proclaims God's truth. This dialogue between God and fallen humanity essentially defines the entire genre of the book of Malachi. A dialogue in which Truth itself becomes one of the participants, in which it reveals itself through human thoughts. It must be said that dialogue became something of a genre of the age: besides the prophet Malachi, at least two of his great younger contemporaries also used it — the author of the book of Job and Socrates.

Two things are striking in Malachi's dialogues. First, God condescends to take part in the dialogue: He answers, argues, teaches and gives reasons. The almighty Creator of heaven and earth speaks with human beings! This is an extraordinary revelation, and it is on this basis that Malachi calls the coming Messiah the Messenger. The second thing that cannot escape our attention is how closely the ideas and attitudes of the Jews of the mid-fifth century BC match opinions widespread among our own contemporaries.

This is what the people say in their dialogue with God through Malachi: ‘How shall we return?’ ‘How do we know what God wants of us?’, ‘What more does He need?’ — we say the same today. What is this turning back to which the Messenger of the covenant calls us? ‘How are we robbing You?’, the Jews ask. ‘We are doing nothing wrong’, ‘What is wrong with us?’, we say. ‘What have we said against You?’, the Jews ask. ‘What have we done that God refuses to make us happy, healthy and rich?’ — we ask ourselves the same question. ‘It is vain to serve God, and what profit is there in having kept His ordinances...’, the Jews of Malachi's time assert, saying that God neither rewards righteousness nor punishes evil. Therefore, they say, it is better to do lawless deeds: unlike righteousness, they bring an income. We reproduce these arguments almost word for word. Since both the Jews of the fifth century and we today count the same thing to our credit — the restoration of the Temple (or churches) and of worship — the resemblance cannot fail to astonish us.

Behind all this lies an unwillingness to have God near. Deep within the human being, there seems to remain an unconscious knowledge of that searing flame of divine love of which Malachi speaks at the beginning of the chapter. And this flame frightens us. We fear that in the presence of the Almighty neither our life nor we ourselves will remain as we were. And so God calls us to trust, calls us to convince ourselves of His goodness. He says that we rob Him by neglecting the tithe. But the point is not that God needs our offerings. From the beginning, the tithe and the dedication of the firstborn were meant to be a sign to people that everything belongs to God and that everything we have is a gift from Him. The offering was an act of thanksgiving, without which a gift becomes theft. Yet the Lord is not even reproaching people for disregarding Him. Test Me, He says; see for yourselves that God is faithful. He calls people to experience trust and, in that experience, to find blessedness. Here Malachi speaks not of blessing, unlike other prophets. The time of the New Testament is already near, and its messenger — Malachi — speaks of blessedness, as the Lord Jesus Himself will soon do.

There is one more important point. When Malachi sets out the Jews' outrageous and, to be honest, rather foolish arguments that the righteous do not prosper while those who commit lawless deeds grow rich and remain unharmed, the Lord does not dignify this with a direct answer. The mention of the blessedness that can be found in trust makes an answer unnecessary. The difference between a comfortable but brief life and the blessedness of the righteous is all too obvious. The Lord says only that the righteous person seeks not good things but God. ‘And they shall be Mine... My own possession on that day... and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him.’ They shall be Mine! There is not and cannot be any other good, any other reward for doing God's will. Everything else, in the words of Ecclesiastes, is vanity and chasing after the wind. This is the choice: to seek God Himself or to replace Him with earthly well-being. And the difference between the righteous person and the wicked, the Lord says, lies in what they choose. It is important that the prophet Malachi goes on to remind us that this is also what makes the difference between life and death.