NOTES for Dan 9:1-19

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.

Historians, sociologists, psychologists, and economists in every age have tried to understand what drives history, what directs the historical process and how. The Bible speaks of God and of God's providence as the main active force of history. What about the human person? Can he participate in history, and how exactly? It would seem that great people answer this question, for it is usually about them that people say they "make history."

Although it would perhaps be more correct to say that history makes them: in essence, all great people became great not because they had outstanding qualities, though such qualities could help them become great and also might not, but rather, from an ordinary human point of view, by chance. It is not enough to possess the properties and inclinations of a great person, not enough even to have the will to victory and determination; one must also find oneself in the right place at the right time and, in addition, remain alive in order to become a great person in the ordinary human understanding of the word.

History carries its great people, manifesting through them the power and scale of historical processes. But to manifest and reveal is not yet to direct. To make history, one must become part of God's providence. It would seem that not very much depends on the person here: after all, God Himself chooses those He needs for solving His tasks. But there is one indispensable condition without which participation in God's work is impossible in principle: repentance.

Such as the main hero of the Book of Daniel has. Not repentance of the kind we often speak about today, as private or public self-flagellation, individual or even collective, in which there is usually nothing but fleeting emotions, but real repentance, which presupposes first of all reflection and awareness of what was done and, having been done, separated us from God. Indeed, to act together with God means to act consciously, not assuming but knowing exactly what God wants from us here and now, in the concrete situation in which we find ourselves.

Sin hinders such clarity, and repentance presupposes that we sort out what hinders us and where it came from. Only after that can one speak of some possibility of conscious participation in history. Of course, the scale of participation differs, but everyone who consciously acts together with God according to His plan participates in history. What role Daniel's prayer played in liberating the people from captivity is known to God alone. One thing is clear: he was not history's plaything, but a man of God. And therefore he made history.

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.

It is now impossible to know where the author of the Book of Daniel got the prayer for deliverance that he placed in the mouth of his hero. Most plausibly, it really goes back to the end of the exilic period, to the time of the preaching of Isaiah of Babylon, which began with the proclamation of the imminent collapse of the Babylonian empire and the liberation of the people of God. The tone of the prayer is clearly penitential: here we hear a sober and self-critical spiritual assessment of the entire pre-exilic period as an age of universal apostasy and violation of the commandments given by God. But there is also hope for forgiveness, hope born of the words of the pre-exilic prophets who promised that the captivity would not last forever, that the time would come when the people of God would repent of their sins and turn to God, becoming the people of God not only in name but in essence, turning into a community of the faithful to whom the land promised by God to Abraham could at last be entrusted without fear.

Yet this hope is no longer connected with any special rights or merits before God, as often happened in pre-exilic times, nor even with the idea that God might somehow be persuaded to close His eyes to the sins committed by the people. The issue is only God's plans, witness and anti-witness, the fact that the house of God lying in ruins makes the surrounding nations think that God's plan has failed and the history of His people has ended forever. It was no longer possible to count on righteousness; there remained only hope in God's condescension, His mercy, that God, fulfilling His design for the world, for His people, and for salvation, would still not neglect those with whom He had spent so much time trying to make them a perfect instrument for carrying out His plans.

Now only one path remained for the people: the path of complete surrender to God's will, the path of the community of the faithful, for whom any attempt to turn aside from the path is equivalent to historical destruction, disappearance, assimilation. For historical experiments like those made in the pre-exilic age, attempts to arrange one's historical destiny without God and live like everyone else, there was no longer any strength of soul or body, nor any historical time. History was already entering the home stretch: according to the prophets' witness, the next great event in the history of the people was to be the coming of the Messiah and the advent of the messianic Kingdom.