NOTES for Luk 16:16

The center of the good news brought by the Savior was the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Of course, people had spoken about the Kingdom before, ever since the early prophets. But in those days those who spoke of the Kingdom of God saw it primarily as a religious and political reality. It was, in essence, a fully earthly Kingdom, a social order embodying the Torah, the Law given by God.

But since the Torah in those days was perceived primarily as legislation and as a moral code, the Kingdom was also seen precisely as an earthly state. Sometimes, to be sure, the issue was not a secular state but a theocracy or a hierocracy, yet in any case what was envisioned was a fully earthly society, created by people, though guided by God's law.

Later, in the context of the experience connected with temple worship, the Kingdom began to be seen as a reality that was spiritual rather than religious and political. The Kingdom began to be associated with that Throne of glory that was revealed in the Temple to the prophets, and perhaps not only to them. This Throne of glory was perceived as the center of the Kingdom, and it was assumed that it would be revealed at the end of time to the people of God, and then the world would become the Kingdom: for then God would visibly reign over the world, becoming visible to everyone in such a way that no one would any longer be able to deny His authority or even His very existence, as had happened before.

And God would send the Messiah to earth, who would receive His authority at the Throne of glory from the One seated on it. The visible Throne of glory in heaven and the Messiah, the righteous King, on earth: this is how many imagined the Kingdom in Gospel times. The Kingdom itself remained largely earthly, but its center was the Throne of glory, located not on earth but in heaven, the Throne revealed in the Temple as the place of God's presence.

But then the Messiah comes and says that not only the Throne of glory, but the whole Kingdom exists and is revealed to the world as a spiritual reality, having nothing to do with any earthly institutions or arrangements. "The Torah and the Prophets," as what we now call sacred Scripture was called in those days, are until John the Baptist. After that comes a new age, the age of the coming Kingdom. The Kingdom enters the world, and now everyone who wants to can enter it.

True, this is not simple; effort is needed here, but without effort nothing happens in spiritual life, or in life generally. The point here is not that the sacred books we now call Old Testament books somehow become "outdated." The point is that everything described in them has happened. Both the Pentateuch and especially the prophetic books have at their center not only the Torah itself, but also the Messiah and the Kingdom. Much is said there about the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the Kingdom. And now all this has happened: the Messiah has come and brought the Kingdom with Him. The Messiah, of course, will have His own ministry, and the Kingdom its own history, but other books, the New Testament books, will tell about them.

There is an astonishing quality in the Good News brought by Christ. On the one hand, the Law stands within it with unassailable strength, firmness, and holiness. “But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of the law to drop out,” says today's Gospel reading. On the other hand, the person who breaks it is forgiven - and forgiven not only by God. The Lord also calls us to become like Him in this universal forgiveness: “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” Possessing only a human mind, we find it very difficult to grasp the infinite distance between these features of Christ's proclamation. If we establish ourselves in some principle as firmly as the Law stands, we seek to remove, destroy, and suppress everything that does not fit that principle, everything that contradicts it. We are not given to understand this difficult spiritual duality, in which the Law exists and the one who has broken it is forgiven. At other times, however, we become so accustomed to the idea of God's mercy that we cease to marvel at the miracle and the seeming unnaturalness of such a duality. In that case, the Lord will always find a way to renew our trust.

The Savior's words about the Torah and the prophets, and about the Kingdom whose “good news is being proclaimed,” present briefly yet fully the entire spiritual history of God's people in its relation to the Kingdom He has brought into the world. Judging by what He says, the earlier history—which, for God's people, included events as significant for them, and for the whole world, as the giving of the Torah and the preaching of the prophets—ends with the beginning of John the Baptist's preaching, which proclaimed the nearness of the Messiah and the Kingdom.

A new age then begins, the age of the coming Kingdom which, in Christ's words, “has drawn near” in order to enter the world and transfigure it. It is impossible not to notice this: only those who do not want to see fail to notice, those who for one reason or another do not accept the Kingdom and the Messiah coming into the world. It is no accident that Jesus tells the people listening to Him and rejecting His words that they follow not the commandments given by God, but their own ideas about God and the Torah.

As an example, He cites the permission to divorce which the Torah does indeed contain, but which, like the right to vengeance, is less a permission than a restriction. Both are highly undesirable, yet are granted, as Jesus says, “because of hardness of heart”—not cruelty, but rigidity and unyieldingness. Since it was perfectly clear that fallen human beings could not completely change their sinful nature, this sinfulness had at least to be brought within some limits: for example, by restricting the right to vengeance or divorce, so that vengeance would not turn into outright violence or unlawful killing, and divorce would not become a pretext for sexual immorality.

Such limits included, for example, restricting vengeance to harm equivalent to the harm suffered—the rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—and restricting divorce by forbidding divorced spouses to remarry one another. To make such rules absolute is to distort the meaning of the Torah and pervert its spirit.

The Torah in the true sense of the word, understood as its real spiritual core and above all the commandments of the Decalogue, of course remains unshakable: becoming a person's inner, spiritual backbone, it goes with them into the Kingdom. Such a Torah will indeed endure even when the world changes and the present heaven and earth disappear, giving way to a new order of things. For, like the Kingdom itself, it belongs not to time but to eternity.

The Pharisees who mocked Jesus when He said that it is impossible to serve God and wealth think about the Kingdom of God the way we usually do. Only when someone dies do we say, "May the Kingdom of Heaven be his"; to wish the "Kingdom of Heaven" to a living person is psychologically impossible for us. A stereotype formed over the centuries places the Kingdom "afterward," beyond the bounds of this life. The Pharisees thought the same way, hoping for the resurrection of the dead and expecting the Kingdom in a historical but distant future. The Pharisees regarded wealth, honor among those around them, and family well-being as the only, or in any case the chief, manifestation of God's favor in this life. Our stereotyped religiosity matches the Pharisaic one here too. This is visible when we reproach God for injustice, seeing swindlers prosper and the righteous suffer.

But the Lord tells the Pharisees, and us who think as they do, that the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as something belonging to a distant future was valid only until the time of John the Baptist. From the moment his witness to the Lamb of God sounded, to the beloved Son in whom the Father's favor was given to people, from that moment the Kingdom of God has been proclaimed as a present reality. And therefore, the Lord says, to enter it only effort is required: the effort of faith and resolve. The Pharisees do not want this nearness and openness of the Kingdom; for them it has come too unexpectedly and too early. Alas, here too we do not differ from them. To His disciples, however, the Lord speaks of the need to forgive people without limit, as God forgives. This is an essential mark of the Kingdom, into which we are called to enter here and now.

Speaking of the new era that began with his coming, Jesus describes it this way: the Torah and the prophets were until John—clearly John the Baptist—and now, a ‘now’ that continues to this day, people enter the Kingdom by making the effort this requires. Yet this certainly does not mean that the Torah has lost its force and is no longer needed: heaven and earth will pass away sooner than a single stroke of the Torah disappears.

The Saviour's words make it clear that we live in the era of the Kingdom's coming. The former order of things has passed into history, whether we realise it or not. The era of the Kingdom's coming means that everyone who seeks it can share in it, but doing so requires the appropriate effort. Clearly, the moment must one day come when the Kingdom triumphs in full, a moment bound up with Christ's appearing in glory. The central spiritual content of the present era, however, is precisely the process of the Kingdom's entering the world.

The Torah is not thereby left in the past. This is understandable: the Torah is not, strictly speaking, a religious phenomenon, but a spiritual one. It is not merely legislation given by God or a moral code he established; it is a revelation of the spiritual laws that govern a person's relationships with God and with other people. As such, the Torah obviously cannot lose its significance in any era, even when the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness.

At the present stage of history, in the era of the Kingdom's coming, those who seek the Kingdom need the Torah as a means of shaping their spiritual life. For the Kingdom enters the world with human participation—with the participation of those in whose hearts it has found a place. But for the heart to be ready not only to receive but also to retain that breath of the Kingdom without which there is no Christianity, it needs the Torah: the inner Torah that gives a certain form to our existence and shapes our spiritual life.

Otherwise, God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, having touched us and even entered our hearts, will leave us as easily as it came. There will simply be no vessel in our hearts in which it can be held. Then every touch of God's breath will mean beginning a new life from scratch. And every joyful sharing in this new life will be followed by a retreat to our former state. The inner Torah is needed precisely to prevent such a retreat. Down to the last stroke. In all its fullness.

In the Gospel, parallels are very often drawn between earthly and heavenly wealth. This is no accident, because life always works out so that some people always have more of something (material or spiritual) than others.

Perhaps the central words in this chapter are verses 9-12. Do we realize that everything we have is not ours? That it has been given to us only as stewards, who must rightly manage what they have? And Christians (and human beings in general) can have only one goal: to make God's eternal love real in their own place, that is, to serve one another. Therefore, if we use this wealth that belongs to another rightly (guided by love), then in return we will receive what is truly our own: the fruits that grow out of such relationships, abiding in God's love and light.

Today's reading brings us back to the theme of Gospel poverty, which Jesus regards above all as a spiritual state. The question of unrighteous wealth has been relevant in every age, and the steward in the parable quoted in this passage naturally knew perfectly well what a person who had broken the eighth commandment was required to do: he had to return what he had stolen and add something beyond the amount taken. This is precisely what the thieving steward does. When his master is already prepared to dismiss him (vv. 1–3), he thinks about his future and not only returns everything stolen to his master, but at the same time lightens the burden of his master's debtors in order to earn their gratitude (vv. 4–7). Thus this man not only atones for his own sin, but also does good to his neighbours. It is hardly surprising that such conduct restores his master's trust in him: a person who not only returns what he stole, but also helps his neighbours can be trusted, and such repentance deserves praise (v. 8).

The problem of wealth is thus placed in the context of relationships and priorities. Even when wealth has been acquired dishonestly, or, to put it simply, when it is stolen, the main point is not its redistribution in itself, but helping particular people and thereby establishing (or restoring) relationships with them, without which a person finds that he has nowhere to go. In this case, as in all others, the central question is one of priorities, of what matters more: relationships with God and other people, or wealth. Jesus speaks of this directly at the end of the parable (vv. 9–13).

The same applies to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (vv. 19–31), but here the question of wealth is considered in the context of the messianic and eschatological perspective. The path of the rich man and the path of the poor man are shown in keeping with the traditional biblical idea of two ways, one of which leads to the Kingdom, “to Abraham's bosom” (v. 22), while the other leads to Sheol, the world of shadows, from which there is no escape and whose inhabitants have no path to the Kingdom (vv. 23–26; Sheol is called “hell” here). The meaning of the parable is perfectly transparent: wealth hid a human being from its owner and, together with that person, the Kingdom as well. For the rich man everything begins and ends in our limited world, where he receives everything, but where neither the Kingdom nor eternal life can be found. And no evidence will persuade someone who is not ready to break through the boundaries of the untransformed world (vv. 27–31), for each person chooses his own path and receives what he has chosen.

Another funny anecdote about a resourceful scoundrel and, as always, a strange and frightening conclusion: "the sons of this age" know their business better than the "sons of light." Always and in every age, people seeking wealth, fame, and power know how to get what they want, by fair means and foul, by deception, force, cunning, and ingenuity. But those who seek the "Kingdom of God and His righteousness" sink into laziness, slackness, and indifference. It turns out that money and power are stronger incentives, if for their sake a person is ready to give up anything and devise any scheme, just to achieve the goal. So much for "spirituality." Spirituality, however, also finds a place: it serves as one form of leisure, since one cannot work for "unrighteous wealth" all the time. Of course, like every parable, this anecdote is told not so much to accuse as to make a person, after rejoicing over the resourceful thief, think about what he wants in life and how he goes about obtaining it.