NOTES for Мф 11:21-22
Jesus' comparison of the cities where He preached with ancient cities known for their looseness and immorality may at first glance seem excessively harsh. But it seems so precisely only at first glance. It would seem impossible to compare people who, even if they reject the Messiah, are still religious and, in their own way within that religiosity, pious, with the depraved for whom God's commandments are an empty sound. But everything turns out not to be so simple. Indeed, every sinner who sins openly knows who he is and what he is doing. He may not consider that he is doing something sinful, he may not understand at all what sin and righteousness are, but as to the essence of what he is doing, he does not doubt or deceive himself. If such a person, under the influence of some internal or external factors, decides that what he is doing is sin, he has every chance to change the situation, because he does not take sin for righteousness. That is why, as we can see, Jesus says that if the inhabitants of cities known for looseness and depravity had seen what the people around Jesus saw, they would have repented of everything and turned, for they were not deceived about themselves. But those who heard Jesus and saw the miracles He performed were dissembling and deceiving themselves. Many of the Pharisees, for example, tried to assure not only themselves but others as well that they rejected Jesus and His witness for exclusively principled reasons, and not at all from a desire to protect their own tradition, religious and theological, which was dearer and more important to them than the Messiah and the Kingdom. Such self-deception became a spiritual dead end: one could hardly count on quick repentance and conversion if sinners considered themselves righteous people and defenders of orthodoxy. Hidden sin is always more terrible than open sin. It is no accident that Jesus thanks the Father for revealing this to infants: the wise and understanding are too dependent on their tradition, while "infants" are not burdened by this and perceive everything more simply and clearly. As we can see, every tradition is spiritually ambivalent: it can both help a person on the path to the Kingdom and hinder him on that path. And if one must choose, it is better to have no tradition at all than to have one that hinders, for no tradition, even the most ancient and profound, is worth the Kingdom.