NOTES for Mat 11:1-19

Today the Lord speaks about Old Testament prophecy: all the stories, prophecies, and promises about the Kingdom of God continued until John; now the time of their fulfillment begins. Now the Kingdom is real in Christ, accessible to every person who believes in Him and follows Him.

His surprised disciples were accustomed to speaking of the Kingdom as something expected, something that does not yet exist. Strangely enough, we too often speak of the Kingdom of Heaven, of life with God, as a kind of posthumous reality, or as something that must be revealed in the age to come, after the Second Coming. But Christ says that the Kingdom has already been opened - and those who are ready to make some effort can enter it.

"And whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water..." Only a cup of cold water... These are very important words. Goodness has no measure. "For God gives the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34). It is bitter for us to see how immeasurably smaller the good we do is than the burning of our heart, than our thirst to embrace the whole world with our love and make everyone happy. If we suffer too much over this, then our suffering is supplied by pride, which has pushed some people into terrible crimes in similar situations. And here before us there is only a cup of cold water...

To give, or more precisely to give a thirsty person water to drink each time, may be no less precious to God than all the apologetic theological treatises written over the past 2,000 years taken together. For goodness has no measure. Only evil has a measure.

Traditionally, it is held that John did not doubt Jesus' messianic calling and sent his doubting disciples to Him so that they could see for themselves. Other interpreters allow that John himself may have doubted it. Be that as it may, it is hardly accidental that he sent two of his disciples to Jesus: they were to become witnesses to Christ's words, and under Jewish law there had to be at least two witnesses. And then they heard an answer that still puzzles some readers of the Gospel: why did Christ say neither yes nor no? Why instead did He need to speak a long phrase listing His works?

Apparently, He answered this way so as not to confuse ahead of time those who were not yet ready to hear a direct confirmation. But the verbal message that Jesus asks them to convey to John contained a list of the signs of the Messiah's coming that had been foretold in the Old Testament, and this means that Jesus was quite definitely confirming that He is the very One who was to come.

Christ gives John a high evaluation. But next to it stands the indication that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven will be greater than John. Such a definition may sound like belittlement. But anyone who, confident of his own salvation, decides on that basis to exalt himself above John will be deeply mistaken. Those who enter the Kingdom of Heaven transformed will surpass John as he was on earth. But he himself in the Kingdom of Heaven will surpass himself as he was in the earthly world.

In the immediate historical context, Jesus' words about John are significant insofar as in those days there were many people who considered John the Messiah. In any case, he corresponded much more closely to widespread popular ideas about what the Messiah should be than Jesus did. And in the days when the Gospel texts were taking shape, Palestine had fairly numerous communities of followers of John the Baptist who considered their teacher the Messiah. Against this background, the story of the disciples sent by John to Jesus in order to ask Him one more question about His messiahship was important as John himself bearing witness that he made no claim to any messiahship.

But the matter, of course, is not only history. The Savior's words are important above all because, on the one hand, He gives a brief and concise characterization of John himself and, on the other, He evaluates quite harshly the people who surrounded both John and Himself. According to the Savior, John's witness still belongs to the previous era, the pre-Christian era, when there was still no question of the Kingdom entering the world. But John, more vividly than anyone else, bore witness to the Messiah's imminent coming, while also understanding what needed to be done in order to enter the Kingdom. Of course, in the Kingdom there is a different measure of fullness, and therefore everyone who belongs to the Kingdom is greater than John, who still belongs to the untransformed world.

But to enter the Kingdom, effort is necessary; the Kingdom is "taken by force," and "those who use force seize it." And many of those who first listened to John and then to Jesus did not want to make such efforts. They simply felt good near John, and then near Jesus.

Fire in the Bible is a symbol of purification, sacrifice, and sanctification, a symbol of what can completely change a person's very nature by transfiguring and sanctifying it. Yet many thought the fire had been given to them only so they could warm themselves and rest in its warmth. The point here is not that this is bad, but that when fire is used this way a person does not change at all: he feels good for a while, but the fundamental problems that poison his life and keep him from sharing in the Kingdom do not disappear. And then all the efforts of those who carry fire into the world and bear witness to it prove fruitless. One may admire Jesus' words and Jesus Himself as much as one likes, but if the admirer still remains outside the Kingdom, one can say that all his admiration was useless. The Kingdom with its life passed him by, and admiration, even sincere admiration, does not save.

The poor and needy seek water, and there is none... How much this resembles what happens to us. The tongue dries up from thirst, and there is no water... And we want to ask angrily where God is and why He allows this... If we stop in time and phrase the question differently, we will receive the answer. He is here. He is near, waiting for us to open our hearts to Him.

But the wounded inner voice goes on: "Then why did He allow everything around us to become a desert?" The answer is simple. Because the true desert is the human heart without God. And only if He enters will the desert become a beautiful garden.

These lines say a great deal about the astonishing humility of John the Baptist. Though he was the greatest prophet, a great ascetic, and a teacher respected by all, he saw himself only as the forerunner of the One who was to come after him. Many took him for the Christ, saw in him the Savior for whom the Jews had waited for long centuries. He may have been offered certain benefits and honors due to the Messiah. And he rejects all this, assigning himself the modest role of the one who prepares the way for Jesus.

Elsewhere John says that the time has come for him to "decrease." His words are alien to false humility; he does not belittle himself, but on the contrary soberly accounts for who he is. The question of what your calling is, what your role in this world is, is very difficult and painful for many. The life of John the Baptist helps us believe that everyone is called to recognize and accept his mission. To live the life that would truly become a preparation of the Lord's way.

We may already have grown used to the idea that everything in the world depends on God. And this is truly so: the Lord Himself tells us that all the hairs of our head are numbered, and not one of them will fall without His will (Matt. 10:29-31).

But here, as often happens in Christianity, there is a paradox: we are free. God does not force us to be dependent on Him. One may say that He is "unable" to prevent us from going toward what we very strongly want. Each of us is the prodigal son, and He is the Father who, with immense patience, love, and pain, allows His children to make mistakes (see Luke 15:11-32). And we may be aware as much as we like that God holds everything in His hand, that He sees everything, that everything depends on Him, but at times this cannot move our stubborn will even a single step...

Yet the Lord still waits for this step from us, even if it is a timid one. We can make the effort of which Christ speaks, we can submit to God (James 4:6-7), we can overcome our pride, for God has promised to give us strength for this. And every time we take this step toward Him, and not toward the place where our desires, often opposed to God, lead us, we win, solely by God's power, a small victory that is nevertheless the most important one in life.

Our first reaction to these words will be ambiguous. How can this happen in Heaven? We just don’t understand Jesus; He puts entirely a different accent on these words. We underline the words “violence” and “violent” when we read today’s text. In that the miracle of the New Testament, now violence is not fruitless as before, when access to God was closed by our sins, the way is open now, and if we follow it, then we will reach the Kingdom. The most important – to redeem us from sin slavery, and this redemption accomplished by Christ is been giving to us freely. But we have to do something, we have to make some efforts in order to receive it. Which effort? The mention of John the Baptist preaching about repentance here s isn’t fortuitous. This effort is expected from us also –effort in repentance, in our turn from sin to God, and then the Kingdom of Heaven as a little grain will be sown by God in our heart and will begin to grow.

People are hard to please. John’s asceticism seems to them a sign of possession, while in their opinion the Son of Man should not eat and drink with sinners. But He thinks otherwise, for that is precisely why He came: to live among sinful people, and not only to eat and drink but also to proclaim the Kingdom intended for them. Faith, as the Apostle says, comes from hearing. All this is very difficult to accept for those who do not want to defile themselves by associating with outcasts. Indeed, divine Wisdom can be understood only by those who have already shared in it at least a little—the tax collectors and sinners, the friends of the Teacher from Nazareth.

This phrase very often raises questions. There is another variant of translation into Russian: "Wisdom is justified by her works." Like any translation, it offers a certain ready interpretation, possibly correct. But the ambiguity of the Synodal translation leaves more room for reflection, which is also not bad.

If the question is still about "children," that is, children of wisdom, then in the language of Scripture this can mean those who seek wisdom, who value it, who share in it. Then the meaning of the phrase is different: only such people, "children of wisdom," can discern in deeds and events that seem ordinary or even mad the actions of wisdom, the actions of God. Let us also note that this does not mean discrimination, as if some people are given the ability to see this and others are not. It is given to those who seek it.

Today's reading tells us much about wisdom in the sense in which Jesus understands it. It begins with an episode describing John the Baptist's strange, at first glance, perplexity over the Savior's ministry (vv. 2-6). Indeed, the question was asked by the very man who first pointed to Jesus as the Messiah-Christ (Matt 3:13-17). And for Jesus Himself this episode became the occasion for bitter words about human wisdom. The issue is not the limitation of human reason: there is nothing terrible in such limitation in itself, for from the beginning God did not intend man to be omniscient. The issue is how and for what purpose a person uses the reason given to him by God. And fallen man, it turns out, most often uses it for self-justification and self-assertion.

The Old Testament authors look at wisdom as the art of building relationships with God and with people, as the science of righteous life. But it often happened that it degenerated into something like intellectual games serving only for entertainment and, in this sense, little different from children's games (vv. 16-17). Worst of all was that these games, taken with complete seriousness, at a critically important moment blocked the "wise men" from the living Truth that had come into the world, and blocked them from the Kingdom.

What kind of Messiah did believing Jews expect in those days? There were many messianic theological concepts, but it happened that the real Messiah did not fully fit into any of them. Even John the Baptist himself may have expected something different from the Messiah-Christ whom he had recognized.

In any case, it is impossible to please those for whom their theories are dearer than the truth: if He fasts, then He is possessed; if He does not fast, then He is a glutton, a drunkard, a sinner (vv. 18-19). Here only one thing matters: does the person being evaluated meet the criteria of "one of us," does he fit within the framework of the concept or not? If not, then one can always find reasons to declare such a person "wrong," a sinner, a violator of the Torah, and a servant of Satan. And supporters of the "right" theory will always be able to justify its "rightness" (v. 19). Only at the Judgment such "theorists" will have a harder time than those who simply sinned without any theories (vv. 20-24). This is, in general, not surprising: the wise person who has used his wisdom for evil bears greater responsibility than the one who makes no claim to any wisdom.

Speaking about the realization of the Kingdom of God, the evangelist clearly emphasizes Christ’s own central role in it. He proves to be the principal content of the Baptist’s proclamation—for it was precisely for this that people from all over the country came to him, not to watch the wind sway a reed in the wilderness! He stands at the center of the proclamation in the towns of Galilee: with His coming Capernaum is “exalted to heaven,” but when it refuses to hear His preaching it is “brought down to hell.” Finally, He gathers the divine law and the divine will in Himself. This can be seen in the vocabulary of the final verses of this chapter. “Weary and burdened” was what pious people called themselves when they took upon themselves the “burden” of keeping all the commandments of the Law. Thus, this is not at all about the working class going to church after work to soothe the soul through worship. Jesus, however, calls the disciples to take Him upon themselves as their “burden,” to live by Him and to serve God through Him, because unlike the fixed and unchanging commandments of the Pentateuch, His “burden” is easy and light: He has an individual approach for everyone, and in addition there are faithfulness, love, and forgiveness.

The Pharisees refused to recognize either John the Baptist or the Lord Jesus Himself as messengers of God. Each of them, despite all their differences, displeased the Pharisees in some way. John the Baptist displeased them with his asceticism and his call to renew faith. The Lord... The Lord pleased them in nothing, in particular because He did not reject the repentance of sinful people whom the Pharisees considered doomed to perdition.

In reality, of course, behind this stood an unwillingness to accept the Good News, first of all because the Pharisees most wanted to look better than everyone else in their own eyes. The Gospel gives neither them nor anyone else such an opportunity. The Lord applies to them the image of children who do not weep at sad songs and do not rejoice at joyful ones. God, the Lord is saying by this, tries to communicate His word, His will, the Good News to the Pharisees in this way and that, by many different paths. But they react to nothing, and this reveals precisely their unwillingness to respond to God's call.

The point is not what John the Baptist is like or what Jesus Himself is like. Those who seek the Word of God will in one way or another be able to find and accept it, the Lord concludes with His words, "wisdom is justified by her children": some came to Christ through the Baptist's preaching, others recognized the Savior in Him for themselves... Whoever has ears and wants to hear will hear.

In our time this Gospel fragment remains exceptionally relevant. People often say: "I would believe, but..." Something is always unsatisfactory to the person who does not want to believe. Either there is too much bad in the Bible, since the truth about history is written there, or Christians are bad, or the commandments are strange... Christ's words apply precisely to such a position.

Jesus’ words about children playing the flute describe more fully than any others the chief spiritual problem that prevented many who saw and heard Him from accepting the Kingdom and entering it. He speaks of children’s games in which one group asks another to guess a melody and respond accordingly. Often the beginning of the tune did not make it possible to say with certainty whether it would turn out sad or cheerful, or whether those guessing should dance or weep. The main point of the game was to guess the players’ intentions correctly and respond in tune with them. Evidently the people around God’s servants, and around the Messiah Himself, expected something similar from them. They were supposed to dance to the players’ tune, or they could not win. It is no accident that Jesus says that wisdom is justified by her children. Those who listened to John and to Jesus Himself wanted both the prophet and the Messiah to be as they wished to see them, to correspond to human ideas about them. It is unsurprising that with such an approach there could be no question of accepting Christ and the Kingdom. The problem was not even that neither John nor Jesus Himself intended to dance to anyone’s tune. It was above all a matter of priorities: those who wanted this effectively preferred their own ideas about the Messiah and the Kingdom to the Messiah and the Kingdom themselves. In doing so, they closed the road to the Kingdom before themselves and remained with their religious ideas, which, unlike the Kingdom, neither save nor give new life.

The Lord understands that we are always inclined to evade the need to make a clear choice. We find this almost physically unpleasant, and we begin to protest: Help, they are taking away our freedom! How can they do this?! What if we do not want to give an answer? This is an assault on the individual! But God does not play such games with us. He knows that freedom does not mean making no decision at all, and that what matters is not the ability to evade, but a courageous decision—agreement with either one option or the other. Of course, it is not hidden from Him that until the very end we can keep finding counterarguments and rejecting every option He offers: we do not like the place here, the time there, or the company elsewhere… Although He allows us to carry on misbehaving, He still waits persistently and with astonishing, incomprehensible patience—humanly speaking, “without losing His temper”—for the moment when we will finally make our choice. He is ready to wait until the very end, until the very last moment when we are still capable of an effort of will. All the more so because His will for our salvation must eventually be fulfilled!

Sometimes the words of Jesus seem too harsh. What, in fact, does He mean when He says that one cannot love father or mother more than Him? And then comes the explanation: whoever wants to save his life (“soul”) will lose it, but whoever gives it up for Christ’s sake will save it.

At first glance it may seem that this is about some life after death, about the paradise that awaits martyrs. But in fact here too the point is the Kingdom. The Kingdom that is not somewhere “in heaven” and not later, but here and now. And not some other life that awaits the faithful in some other dimension, but that very life to which every Christian can and must, if he truly is a Christian, be joined already here and now.

But in order for participation in the life of the Kingdom to become possible, it is necessary to renounce one’s own life. Not because it is life, but because it is one’s own. And one’s own not in the sense of unique and unrepeatable, given by God to me and to no one else, so that no one but me can answer for it before God, but in the sense of belonging only to me alone: the life into which I will let no one and which I will share with no one, fearing to lose even a small portion of my so precious life. Such a desire to hold on to one’s own life, separate from the rest of God’s world and from the Kingdom, in the end inevitably turns into catastrophe: all attempts to preserve the little that remains to us in the fallen world from the fullness of the life once given us by God end with our losing even that little. Only by renouncing such spiritual and, in the language of modern philosophers, existential self-isolation can we receive the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the Savior has prepared for us.

But then one will have to give up the small for the sake of the infinite, limitation for the sake of fullness. And not only with regard to one’s own life, but also with regard to relationships with people, even the closest. For relationships with them too must cease to be part of our small, isolated little world in order to become part of the Kingdom. Then there will no longer be those irrevocable losses to which this little world condemns us. For the life of the Kingdom is, according to the Savior’s word, “life in abundance.” And it is given to everyone who enters the Kingdom. The one who enters brings into it all the relationships that bind him to those close to him. Relationships that also become part of the Kingdom.

Christ brings not peace, but a sword into human society. For centuries many have tried to justify their own militancy with these words. True, in doing so, such would-be warriors did not want to notice that the word sword here is not a synonym for the word war. After all, Christ did not say, "I have brought not peace, but war." Let us not forget that a sword, or in the Slavonic translation a knife, is not only a weapon of killing but also a cutting tool. With this sword, ties between close people are cut when on the most important spiritual questions they can neither find agreement nor attain religious tolerance. But the choice that cuts old ties is often unavoidable when the old ties pull a person not simply toward old acquaintances and family relationships, but toward former sins.

It does not follow from this that Christians should start hostility. No, we are called to bring love into the world around us. But the reality is that it is not always easy for others to understand those to whom faith has opened another life. Therefore the break often happens without being initiated by Christians.

Many who read the Gospel find it hard to receive the words that whoever loves his relatives more than Christ is not worthy of him. Here one almost imagines despotism, the denial of all natural human ties... Thankfully, here we are dealing with that paradoxical quality of the Gospel which reveals to us the depth of Christ's love for us. For our "natural" love for those dear to us is, let us admit it, imperfect. But by placing Christ at the center of our heart, we can receive from him the resources for a love toward our relatives so strong that we could never give it to them by putting them first.

Jesus' words are very difficult for us. We would like things to be simpler... Is everything really so stark? Are His ways of ordering the world truly incompatible with ours, and does following Him necessarily require us to give up what seems right to us? On the way to unity, must we really pass through division; on the way to love, through hostility; on the way to glory, through the cross; on the way to true life, through death?