NOTES for Luk 9:46-62

These words are addressed not only to those who are just setting out to follow Jesus, but also to the disciples themselves—and to us. Does the thought never “occur” to us as to which of us is the greatest? Or do we never feel the urge to “forbid” someone who thinks differently? Or to ask God to send fire from heaven upon our enemies, “as Elijah did”? Do we always know what spirit we are of? Many of us have not only “put a hand to the plough,” but have already ploughed half the field. And yet are we looking back again?

As can be seen, Jesus keeps explaining to His disciples, through different examples, what the life of the Kingdom is and what it is like. And the Evangelist gathers these examples together, making a kind of digest that contains short descriptions of them. Here are the disciples arguing over who is the greatest in the Kingdom. Well, after the Teacher, of course. Here are the same disciples eager to call thunder down on a Samaritan village where they are not received. Not for their own sake, of course, but for the Teacher's sake. And for the truth, naturally.

And here are people they meet along the road. One is ready to go, but Jesus tells him: I have nowhere to invite you. To another Jesus Himself says: Follow Me, and that man asks permission to bury his father, and receives an answer that sounds merciless. As does another one: the answer is softer outwardly, but in substance it says: leave it, forget everyone, or else you will have to forget the Kingdom.

What is this: a particular kind of selectiveness? Yes, of course: Jesus sees every person's heart; it is as transparent to Him as it is to His heavenly Father. But there is also something common here. The Kingdom is open to everyone. But on one condition: it must be first in the life of the one who wants to reach it. In the Kingdom people do not live out their remaining days; they live. And those who refuse to go, in one way or another, want to live out what remains. To stay with those who are living out what remains. They do not understand that one can go on living out what remains, alone or with others, endlessly. In the fallen world there is no real life; here there are only its remnants. And one has to choose: either gather up these remnants and try to squeeze the last out of them, or go where there is life in abundance. Without trying to drag along the remains of that imitation of life that can be found in the fallen world.

But there, in the Kingdom, the laws are different. There are no bosses and subordinates there; there are ministries that must be carried, and whoever knows how to do this better is the greatest. The one who is greatest in the Kingdom does not receive the best places, but the more responsible ministries. And there is no need there to prove anything to anyone. In this world too, the Kingdom does not need to be proved to anyone.

It can be shown, of course. But proving it is pointless. For proof, especially with heavenly thunder involved, always presupposes a desire to persuade by force. To make someone accept, to make someone believe. And then it no longer matters what the irresistible arguments will be: in any case they presuppose that a person yields before the inevitable, whether it is a force from which there is no escape or an obviousness that cannot be evaded. The Kingdom, of course, is both force and obviousness. But it is a force one can walk away from, and an obviousness one can choose not to notice. God does not impose Himself, and the person is free. To the free, freedom; to the saved, paradise.

Today's reading is entirely devoted to the theme of the Kingdom and to how the people around Jesus understood it, including His closest disciples. And once again we encounter a complete failure, even on the apostles' part, to understand what the Kingdom is and what its laws are. The very question of primacy, of who is greatest in the Kingdom (v. 46), loses all meaning there. Jesus was able to explain this by pointing the disciples to a child, whom the problem of primacy, because of age, does not yet concern at all (vv. 47-48).

According to the laws of our world, still not transformed, the great person is the one who is great by his own greatness; in the Kingdom, as it appears, one's own greatness means nothing, and the less a person relies on it, the more the greatness of the Kingdom shines through him. That is why there is no need to impose this Kingdom by force, as the apostles thought of doing in one Samaritan village where Jews, as usual, were not welcome (vv. 51-54): in that way one can only demonstrate one's own force and prove one's own importance, but it is impossible to bring people closer to the Kingdom by such a method. It is no accident that Jesus tells the disciples that they are not acting in the spirit of the Kingdom: for the Kingdom, any violence is unacceptable; no one can be driven there by force, because to enter it one needs above all a relationship with God and with the One whom He sends, and that relationship must not be imposed but freely accepted.

A Kingdom imposed by force is not the Kingdom, but only its phantom, which can destroy a person but cannot save him. And since the Kingdom is not a place but a relationship, it is not limited by any structure. Even the apostolic community does not limit it, if one looks at that community not as a fellowship of people living in the Kingdom, but as a kind of organization for promoting the idea of the Kingdom of God. That is why everyone who bears witness to it in Christ's name, revealing to those around him its power and effectiveness, finds his own place in it, even if formally he has no relation to the apostolic community (vv. 49-50). Thus, dispelling the myths of mass religious consciousness that were so widespread in those days, Jesus strengthens in the hearts of His disciples those ideas about the Kingdom that must help them live through His death on the cross and receive His resurrection.

Today we read a small selection of short accounts about Jesus, assembled by the evangelist to show how extraordinary His Message is and how incompatible it is with normal human ideas. In the coming Kingdom of God, everything will be different from what is customary on earth: the most important and respected will be those who are least valued in human eyes (for children had no rights before reaching adulthood and were regarded as their parents' property, like slaves, yet Jesus holds them up as an example to the disciples). Jesus forbids His disciples to divide people into “ours” and “not ours,” although this is a fundamental principle of human society (for comparison, watch the news on television). His Kingdom lies outside our system of values and proves more important even than the sacred duty to bury one's father, more important than a comfortable home and family. It takes hold of a person entirely—the one who asked Jesus about His Kingdom has already “put his hand to the plow,” already begun the paradoxical path toward God...

The apostles ask Jesus one of those questions whose answer was meant to flatter their pride. They evidently considered themselves special, “advanced,” particularly close to the Teacher, and therefore more important than other people. But Jesus’ answer proves completely unexpected, overturning all their assumptions and reducing every kind of vanity to nothing. It turns out that on the divine scale, what the world regards as small becomes great and what it regards as unimportant becomes important. The disciples looked for the answer among adults like themselves, people made wise by experience, whereas they simply needed to look at something entirely different. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it is useless to develop to the utmost those qualities that society values. Christ calls us to be “born from above,” becoming altogether different. It is astonishing that the image closest to us, showing what such a new person should be, is a helpless child who can simply be “taken and placed before Him.”

It is striking that Christ's disciples, until His very Resurrection from the dead, are held captive by common Jewish ideas. Faced with the Samaritans' refusal to receive Him, they are already ready to pray for fire from heaven and cite the prophet Elijah as an example to imitate.

It must be admitted that for many Christians over the centuries such a form of preaching appeared optimal. In one empire, a special theological theory was even devised according to which the emperor had to be converted to Christianity, and then by fire and sword he would conquer the whole world and drive all subject peoples into the faith. Everything would have been fine; it is only a pity that the empire fell before it managed to fulfill the mission laid upon it.

Christ's words in response to this strange thought of the disciples are simple and stern: "You do not know what spirit you are of". Though empires nowadays seem to have disappeared (perhaps fortunately), this temptation, and this rebuke by Christ of our inclination to violence, remain very important in the lives of individual people as well. It is not fitting to defend truth by force, because Truth conquers on the Cross.

What is religion? And what is human religiosity worth? These questions have been debated for more than one century. Some see religion as the chief driving force of spiritual life; others consider it a terrible, destructive force, pointing above all to the forms militant religiosity intolerant of any dissent can take and the phenomena it can produce.

Jesus' disciples were undoubtedly deeply religious people, like most Jews of their age. By the time of the episode in the Samaritan village described by the evangelist, they had already spent at least a year with their Teacher. But then comes rejection, and the apostles' first, immediate reaction: cursed be this village! Let thunder strike its inhabitants! One could, of course, suppose that this was said in the heat of the moment, that it was merely an initial, spontaneous response. Jesus thinks otherwise. He tells His disciples: you do not know what spirit you are of. Apparently, these words were not spoken merely in the heat of the moment: this was no accidental mistake or slip of the tongue, but a settled attitude.

An attitude entirely understandable in terms of the religious beliefs of Jews in Gospel times. In that age, Samaritans were worse than pagans in Jewish eyes: like the Jews, they considered themselves God's people and worshiped the same God of Abraham and Moses. As one can easily imagine, the Jews could not forgive the Samaritans such claims. Pagans were simply different and had no connection with the God of Israel; Samaritans did have one and laid claim before God to the place rightfully occupied by the Jewish people. Religious feeling dictated only one response to such claims: hatred.

A hatred that seemed entirely justified to the religious mind: every religion is fundamentally all-encompassing, claiming the whole person and completely determining their worldview, behavior, and system of values. Naturally, no religion tolerates competition: interreligious tolerance usually appears only when religious fervor subsides. There may, however, be another reason: a person can be tolerant of another's religiosity not only when they have not yet grown spiritually into religious feeling, but also when they have spiritually outgrown it.

This is precisely what the Savior means when He tells the apostles that they do not know what spirit they are of. They think that by wishing to destroy their Teacher's opponents they are bringing the triumph of His Kingdom closer. In reality, they are only delaying it. Christianity is not a religion, but life in the Kingdom, and the Messiah came into the world not to destroy His enemies but to save everyone who can be saved.

Yet this is not easy to understand. Indeed, human effort alone cannot make it understood, and religious feeling is no help here; apparently, it can even obstruct understanding of the Kingdom the Savior brought into the world. Only the breath of God reveals to the apostles what the Kingdom is. After Pentecost, it will never again occur to them to establish the Kingdom and plant the Church by force. Even in the hardest circumstances and with the best of intentions.

We have to travel quite a long road before arriving at the simple thought that whoever is not against us is for us. It is easier to look for enemies than to live among fellow fighters and fellow workers. It is more pleasant to consider oneself the final authority on truth than to acknowledge oneself as one among many. It takes a long time to digest the knowledge that you are not the first but the last among those whom the Lord has called. Along this road we are always trying to turn away from “whoever is not against you is for you” toward “whoever is not with Me is against Me.” We try to equate ourselves with the Lord and take the place of the first and best disciple, the one who has understood everything and will immediately reorganize the world according to their own understanding. It is precisely from this that the Lord protects us when He sets before us a child's, an infant's attitude toward hierarchy, authority, career advancement, our place in the world, and, ultimately, toward what we know at all about Him and about ourselves.

The Savior's words that those who are not against Christians are thereby "for" them can at first glance seem somewhat strange. In fact, there are plenty of people in the world who have nothing against Christ and even against Christianity, but who also have nothing, in general, "for" them. They are simply indifferent to all this, either remaining agnostics or choosing for themselves other spiritual traditions and spiritual paths.

Can such a position be called a position "for" Christ or "for" Christianity? If Christianity is viewed as some new religion, then, of course, the answer can only be negative. Every religion needs supporters, preferably conscious, active, and convinced of their rightness, people who could spread this religion and testify to its truth.

But Christianity is not a new religion; it is a new life. Life with Christ in His Kingdom, which He brought into the world. And with life everything is not as simple as with views and convictions, whether political, social, scientific, or even religious. One can become a supporter of certain views or convictions only when one understands and accepts them to the end.

Of course, every religion has among its supporters those who do not especially understand not only its theological subtleties, but sometimes even the subtleties of its doctrine; however, even such adherents who understand little of the subtleties express their support for their religion quite consciously and unequivocally, and sometimes even more decisively than everyone else. But with life everything is not so simple. People often live their whole life, or most of it, without thinking at all about how, by what, and why they live.

The same is true of the life of the Kingdom, which now, according to the Savior's word, has drawn near. A person can sometimes feel the movement of the breath of the Kingdom without really understanding what is happening to him and what he is dealing with. After Christ's coming this happens often, because the Kingdom has drawn near to everyone, not only to Christians. It is an objective spiritual reality, not a spiritual experience belonging to some particular confession or, even more, monopolized by it.

Today anyone can feel the breath of the Kingdom, provided, of course, that he does not reject in advance everything connected with Christ and Christianity. In that case it turns out that a person who appears to have no relation to Christianity can turn out to be "for" Christ and "for" Christians, provided, of course, that he takes his experience and his life seriously.

Of course, such "anonymous" Christianity does not yet guarantee that a person will consciously set out on the Christian path, but he will not become an enemy of Christ and Christians either. This means that the way into the Kingdom will be open for such a person, and the possibility of walking this way can remain for him long enough, as long as the One who brought the Kingdom into the world wishes.

How close the apostles' reaction is to us. On the one hand, there is nothing surprising in this, since we are all human, and besides, being like a future apostle is a very good thing. On the other hand, in what way are we like them? Precisely in the fact that we are human, and in our "common human" reactions. The disciples, burning with zeal for the Teacher, are offended that people did not want to receive Him. Someone treated their Teacher the same way any other people would be treated: a traveler was refused shelter. And now "righteous anger" is raging before us, since these simple fishermen surely did not calmly speak the words about calling down punishing heavenly fire, however unemotionally this is set out in the Gospel (see Luke 9:54). And these simple people consider themselves entitled to avenge such inhospitable treatment of their Lord. They may be moved by the words of Christ when He sent them out to preach: "And if any place will not receive you and will not listen to you, when you leave there, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town" (Mark 6:11). And then it was about them, while here it is about their Teacher. So the punishment must be corresponding!..

And if we imagine Joseph behaving this way when no one wanted to admit him and Mary, who was about to give birth? How many people and houses would have been burned with fire?

It is astonishing that in this case the disciples have faith that fire will come at their request. And the question does not sound like this: "Will fire come down from heaven if we ask?" but "Do You want us to say that fire should come down from heaven and destroy them?" (Luke 9:54).

And how wonderful it is that faith in God and in the truth that "whatever they ask will be given them by My Father in heaven" is accompanied by dialogue with the Lord. Because He rejects the disciples' proposal and rebukes them (Luke 9:55), directing their paths along the right way.

We do not know what spirit we are of. Today the possibility of judgment does not surprise us; we easily judge not only in our own name, but also in the name of Christians, in the name of the whole Church. One often hears, "the holy fathers say..." or "the Pope said," and so on and so forth. In the name of the Church we accuse people of sins, without seeing the beam in our own eye. In every confession there have been periods when people were killed in the name of the Church: the Inquisition, the struggle against the Old Believers, religious wars... In this text we see that even while Jesus was alive, the apostles wanted to destroy in His name those who had not received Him.

This was a manifestation of love for Him, but not true love. Love for God is impossible without love for one's neighbor. We do not know what spirit we are of, but we know for certain that Machiavelli was wrong when he wrote that the end justifies the means. Love for one's Teacher and God cannot be imposed by violence. Nothing can be achieved by violence, especially not love. God and violence are incompatible. God died for every inhabitant of that Samaritan village that did not receive Him; He also died for each of the apostles, He died for Judas, He died for each of us, and apart from Him, no one can judge.

Jesus says these words in response to the disciples' strange proposal to call down fire from heaven and destroy those who had refused to receive them. “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of,” the Savior exclaims bitterly. And these words contain a very important aspect of our faith.

With Christ's coming into the world, as with the moment when each person comes into contact with Him, judgment begins. According to the Lord's own words, judgment consists in this: the Light has come into the world, and everyone's deeds and intentions become visible in that Light. Each of us chooses between the Light and repentance, or darkness and self-satisfaction. Difficulties and dangers await us along this path; despite how obvious the choice appears, making it is far from easy. And often, very often, we find ourselves unable to follow Christ.

And now the Lord says that He did not come to “catch us out” in our unreadiness to receive Him and condemn us to destruction. No, the purpose of His coming is to save human souls. This is one of the most important reasons why He so often and so insistently warns His disciples against judging and condemning others. And this is an astonishing hope for us, who are unworthy of His sacrifice.

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. Nowhere... but why? Why do we find somewhere to lay our heads, while there is no place for Him? Even the most destitute homeless person in Moscow will find some warm corner in a railway station or elsewhere, but there is no place for our Lord. Why? He did, after all, recline at meals and even visit wealthy homes, which means that rich people received Him. Why, then, does He say that He has nowhere to lay His head? Is He really complaining of homelessness and poverty? Certainly not.

One might say that our first reaction to these words really is boundless pity, love, and tenderness. How many mystical experiences these words have inspired, how much has been said about giving the Lord one's heart so that He might lay His head there. But are these the only feelings the Lord wants to awaken in us through the words of today's reading? If so, it would mean that He is simply complaining, simply asking to be pitied. One cannot say that this is entirely absent, for the Lord also assumed human nature, in which the desire for love and tenderness is embedded and is not in itself sinful. Yet there remains a sense that we should not stop at this understanding of His words alone; we must think more deeply and seek other meanings.

When a child is ill and lies feverish at night, the mother cannot sleep. Even if nothing depends on her and there is nothing she can do, she cannot lay down her head and fall asleep. But as soon as the temperature falls, sleep comes of itself. In reality, our world too is gravely ill. Think about it: has a single minute ever passed on earth without someone dying somewhere or some disaster occurring? For us, time is divided into night and day; for the Lord, in whose hands is the whole earth, there is neither night nor day.

One recalls the “Evening Prayer” of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: “In a hospital or in a sick person's room there are people who will not fall asleep because they are in pain, because they are afraid, because they are anxious for those they love, some of whom share the burden of their illness while others will be left bereaved by their death. There are people in the solitude of prison; some are young, and somewhere beyond the walls there is a girl they love, there are their children, their friends, there is freedom, there once was hope, and now nothing remains. There are also prisons where the nights are terrible, where interrogations are about to begin; they drag on for long hours in the heart of the night; someone will be beaten, someone tortured. They will return to their cells exhausted and enter a day in which they will have no comfort, only fear of the coming night. Night is now closing over them, fear enveloping their body and soul. Moreover, in every city there is the noisy night, the night of bars, the night of gambling, the drunkard's night, the night in which young men and women will lose their purity; the night when spouses, forgetting love and seized only by desire, will be harsh with one another. There are people who will lose their honour and be ashamed to wake in the morning.”

And as we reflect on these words of the Metropolitan, we may ask: when there are such nights on earth, how can the Lord sleep?

The Lord Jesus Christ's replies to the words of three people who come to Him expressing a desire to follow Him often leave the reader troubled. Why, instead of welcoming new followers, does the Lord in effect reject them and expose something in their desire to follow Him? This question is often prompted by our own fears: we are afraid that He might also reject our desire to follow Jesus. In any case, Christ's words in today's reading from Luke's Gospel shock us; they contradict certain deeply hidden assumptions of ours. Sometimes we even feel resentful towards the evangelist: without this passage, everything would be much smoother and more pleasant for us.

We should probably distinguish three main reasons for this attitude towards these words of Christ. First, our habitual, stereotyped ideas may be wrong. Second, we may not understand what the Lord is saying. And third, perhaps we are applying to everyone, including ourselves, what is being said to quite specific people for quite specific reasons. In this case, all three reasons seem to be at work at once.

The belief that the Lord will not cast out anyone who comes to Him is based on His own words. Yet He Himself also says that not everyone who calls Him ‘Lord’ can enter into life, but only the one who does the will of the heavenly Father. God, then, is not a politician whose aim is popularity at any price. Only someone with a certain purity of intention can follow Him. Probably, whenever we seek God, there is some corruption in our motives; in certain cases, however, it makes our coming to Christ—not impossible, no—but ruinous for us ourselves. Such are the three examples given by the evangelist. One person, attracted by the glory of the messianic Kingdom, wants to share in it, but the Lord speaks of His path as one of rejection and suffering. The second and third want to follow Christ on their own terms: ‘I will follow You, but...’ they say. Here the person determines his own path and tries to do God a kind of favour by agreeing to follow Him. All these things are far from spiritually harmless, as the Lord Jesus' replies point out.

Clearly, the first reason for our rejection of Christ's words is directly linked to the third: we should not apply His answers to these three people to the whole world. For them not to apply to us, we need only avoid repeating these people's mistakes.

And finally, we really do need to grasp the essence of what the Lord wishes to say. To the first of the three people mentioned He is, in effect, speaking about the Cross. It is important that suffering on the Cross and rejection by people appear here as the Lord Jesus' constant companions throughout His earthly journey, from the cave at Bethlehem to Golgotha. It is important to hear Christ's answer to the man who does not agree to follow Him because of a most important filial duty together with the question. This man says: allow me to leave You, because something important is waiting for me somewhere out there. But there is only one place one can go on leaving God: hell, because wherever God is absent, that is hell. And Christ says to this man: no, it is from there that you need to leave and come to Me. Both question and answer are built around the verb apelauno, ‘to leave, to go away’. Where Christ is absent, Jesus says, there is the realm of the dead. One should leave not Christ to go there, but that place to come to Christ. You, the Lord says, go and proclaim the Kingdom. The third man, while agreeing to follow Christ, tries to reserve a certain degree of freedom for himself; perhaps, too, he is looking to boast to his loved ones about how much he has grown spiritually, now that he is leaving to follow the Teacher from Nazareth. And the Lord tells him that such double-mindedness is impossible before the face of God.

That, apparently, is why it mattered to the evangelist Luke to include these three brief dialogues in the Gospel: so that we might see a true picture of what was happening and learn something from this example.

Jesus did not give the same answer to everyone who wanted to follow Him. In general, of course, He had the particular person and their situation in view, answering according to what could be expected of that individual. But this is a general view; what about the specifics? Jesus did, after all, more than once turn away people who wanted to remain with Him. Here a man approaches Him who is ready to follow Him anywhere. Jesus replies that He is homeless, with nowhere to go, just like the man who has approached Him. It all seems logical enough. Yet consider the two other cases related by the evangelist: here, on the contrary, Jesus calls people to follow Him who, it should be noted, do not refuse Him at all, but only ask for a very short delay, one fully justified from a human point of view.

Of course, understanding everything precisely here is virtually impossible: to do so, one would have to reconstruct in full the reasoning that guides the Savior's decisions, both generally and in particular cases. Yet something can still be understood. Evidently, what matters most to Jesus is not only, or even primarily, a person's present spiritual condition, but their spiritual potential. He looks not only at their readiness to follow Him at that particular moment, but also at what it will lead to later.

Indeed, readiness to follow a particular person, even an ordinary human being, may spring from a momentary emotional impulse or from speculative ideas, from the conclusions one draws from the words spoken and from what one imagines lies behind them.

The Savior, of course, sees at once, in speaking with a person, all the driving forces and motives behind the desire expressed: the human heart is as transparent to Him as it is to His Father.

He understands perfectly well that if someone expects a warm, cozy refuge from every wind blowing through the world, that person cannot share His path: He can offer nothing to someone seeking a safe shelter. It is another matter to draw a person out of such a cozy refuge when the time has come for them to move on, to set out on the path leading to the Kingdom.

Here Jesus can be utterly uncompromising: no delay, leave everything and follow Me! Indeed, any delay can prove—and often does prove—to be merely a pretext for putting off a decision whose time has come, and then for avoiding it altogether. That is why Jesus invites those whose time has come to look forward, not back, just as a plowman looks only ahead and must not turn back if he is not to spoil the whole task.

Jesus' words about the dead burying their own dead may seem too harsh in the situation in which they were spoken. But on reflection, it is not hard to see that the situation itself was essentially critical, although the man whom Jesus called to follow Him apparently asked nothing extraordinary of Him. On the contrary, he was speaking of what we would normally call a sacred duty: burying his own father. There is an interesting interpretation of this request. Some commentators believe that the father of the man mentioned in the account was not already dead, but was still alive and awaiting death, either because of illness or simply because of advanced age. The man was asking for a postponement so that his father could live out in peace the—probably few—years remaining to him on earth. He was ready to follow Jesus; he was only asking for a delay.

But Jesus did not grant him this delay. Why? One might say that postponements weaken a person, often depriving them of the resolve they had at a particular moment, a resolve that fades with time because they never did what they had decided to do. But this is only one side of the matter. The other is that, in spiritual life, there is generally no “later” at all. God is outside time, and one can meet Him only in the present, only here and now. Yet “here and now,” as the meeting point between a person and God, is projected into one entirely specific moment in time and one entirely specific point in space. Jesus marked out precisely this point for the man mentioned in the account. At that point, the utmost concentration is required on God's presence, on the revelation of His will, and on the task set before the person in the context of all this.

But the man of whom the evangelist speaks does not have this concentration. He is not in the eternal present where his meeting with God took place; he is in the temporal present, where the past gives way to the future and the present proves to be not a meeting point with God but merely the place where what does not yet exist meets what no longer exists. The Savior's sharp words are needed to tear the man out of the temporal present and set him before God in the eternal present. This, of course, is still no guarantee in itself, for a person is free. But a moment of the greatest clarity possible for a person always becomes their moment of truth: the truth toward which they must take a stand—for the sake of the Kingdom and salvation.

The Bible offers many examples of this “looking back”: Lot's wife, Israel during the Exodus... We look for ideals in the past, without realizing that the Kingdom of God is always here and ahead of us. Here it is worth recalling a thought from the contemporary author Richard Rohr:

“The Good News always points to the future, toward some new place, toward a promised land. It never points backward. Yet the irony of Christian history lies in our habit of turning backward and saying: ‘Miracles happened in the old days. It was back then that God was God, back then that the great prophets lived. It was in the Middle Ages that the great saints lived...’ Through this irony, the Word of God has changed from a liberating force into a defensive force. Because we did not truly listen to the Word of God, we began performing religious gymnastics and lost touch with the power of God's Word.”

A child, a little one... this being is so beloved by the Lord. And if this child is made lowly not only by childhood but also by illness, then here is an angel in the flesh, reaching heights on earth utterly beyond our reach, while we stand looking up from below. Once, an eight-year-old child gravely ill with cancer said before an extremely difficult operation: “Don't be upset with me if I die.” Such manifold lowliness brings one close to God like nothing else. We have somehow grown accustomed to treating children's spiritual lives condescendingly. We say they should not fast or go to confession before a certain age. In most cases, that is probably right. But here is what the prophet Joel writes: “Yet even now, says the Lord, turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and mourning. <...> Gather the people, call an assembly, invite the elders, gather the children and the nursing infants...” (Joel 2:12, 16). He says that children and nursing infants should take part even in penitential assemblies—not, of course, to torment their flesh, but so that in the mirror of their transparent souls the Lord may see our love for Him.

Another child, a perfectly healthy four-year-old, once told this story of her own invention: “Once there was a girl. And she was killed. Then she was killed again. Then they took her to the hospital, and the doctors gave her injections, but they didn't cure her. Then they took her to Christos (that's how she says it for now), and He cured her. And she began to dance. The end of the story is coming soon.” This child does not yet know that a doctor may fail to cure someone, because in her four years she has had nothing worse than the flu. Yet somehow she has already reached the understanding that what is impossible for man is possible for God (cf. Matt. 19:26 or Mark 10:27). We adults find this enormously difficult to understand, but for children it is what they live by, something that seems to come “of itself,” simply through receiving the Holy Mysteries of Christ and by other paths unknown to us. That is precisely why we hear: “Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants You have established praise, because of Your enemies, to silence the enemy and the avenger” (Ps. 8:2). For their mouths, though they do not yet know the law, are full of grace. And grace triumphs over the law (cf. “mercy triumphs over judgment,” James 2:13).

Continuing to reveal the essence of the way of the Cross that He offers, the Lord speaks to us today about self-abasement. The Evangelist reports that a thought arose among the disciples following Christ as to which of them might be the greatest. A very human thought, unfortunately not foreign to many who follow Him in every age. We need to experience God's love; we need to feel that God accepts us. Christ responds to this need by saying that He came to seek and to save the lost.

A lost person still has to rise from the dead and be cleansed of many sins. We often imagine that God lies in wait for us as we clumsily scramble along this path, mildly irritated by our slowness. In fact, He came into this world to accept us as we are and lead us after Him along the path of holiness. Every person must experience all this personally; life is impossible without it.

Yet under the influence of sin, the human soul distorts this need to experience God's love, turning it into what psychology calls positive self-esteem. We depend on how we assess ourselves and how those around us assess us, and this is expressed precisely in the thought that “arose” among the disciples: which of them might be the greatest. We do not know exactly whether they were asking who was closest to the Teacher, who was more righteous, more intelligent, or simply more resilient... Unlike Christ's disciples, we ourselves generally measure one another by more primitive things, even by money.

What matters is how Jesus answers the disciples. First, He does not reject the very idea of greatness, so dear to people, but offers a different scale by which to “measure oneself.” Above all, this means not striving after one's own greatness but, counting oneself last, being zealous for other people; and because He Himself humbled Himself utterly to save us, this scale becomes a scale of likeness to God. Second, as in everything Jesus says, for example about forgiveness, He proposes that, in order to experience God's acceptance of us, we ourselves should accept others, especially the weakest and least significant. Therefore His words about those who receive a child and thereby receive the One who sent Him become a direct and exact answer to the disciples' thoughts about greatness.