NOTES for Mat 10:32-33

It obviously results from these words that we should not love any Man more than God. Does it mean that we should love God more that Men? I don’t think so! I think these words are saying we should stop perceiving love as something we can talk in terms of “more-less”. Who do I really love more: my father, my mother or my daughter? Foolish question, because I love each of them differently. Here is one question again, who does he Heavenly Father love more: His only-begotten Son or me? His Son? Then why He sends Him to suffer and die for my salvation.

Whilst we use the logic “more-less”, we apprehend love as emotion, as feeling, that can really be stronger or weaker. But Love isn’t emotion; it is interpersonal relation, thus all these relations will be different and incomparable between themselves, just as “Soft” and “green” are incomparable. We draw near to the way God loves when we renounce from this logic of “more-less”, we have His method of love in the basis of our own love to any one. Love to God and love to the neighbor turn out then to be two sides of one and the same medal.

If these words are taken directly, so to speak with mathematical strictness, they turn out to be insurmountably difficult. Where is the selflessness here? What is disinterestedness here? To give in order to receive a hundred times more - that is simply an incredibly successful investment!

In fact, something completely different is meant here. When such doubts overcome us, one text comes to mind. The person who wrote it found faith while awaiting execution for murder. He had no education, and for that very reason the text itself is perceived simply as a miracle. This is what he writes: 'Yes, I accepted faith in mortal danger, when it was unknown whether I would be pardoned or not; but even in childhood, when dogs attacked in the yard or neighborhood boys threatened to beat me, I ran to my parents. So what is strange in the fact that now I run to my Heavenly Father?'

Here lies a very important distinction. Did he accept faith because in his situation it was the best way out and nothing else remained for him? Because it was useful for him to think that God and immortality exist? 'Benefit,' a clever and cold atheist will think. But if one looks closely, how much sincerity there is in these words, how much childlike trustfulness there is in them, then not with the mind - no, in no case - but only with the heart can one feel that the truest truth is hidden precisely here.

And then you understand: the essence here is not calculation and not the search for benefit. One simply needs, like a child, with eyes squeezed shut, to cling to God as to mommy who has come to pick you up from kindergarten - and then... only then is it given to you.

"...Even the hairs of your head are all numbered..." What does this mean? No one dies apart from the Father's will, but does this mean that those who die die by His will? This is a very difficult question, and the abyss of unbelief lies very close here. But it can be avoided if we trust our heart and the Word of God.

Priest Georgy Chistyakov writes in his work "Martyrdom as a Phenomenon":

"To endure September 11, the almost daily explosions in Israel, and other horrors. Or does He behave the way a strict teacher sometimes does? No, that too is impossible! If God is merciless, then Job's wife is indeed right when she advises him to curse God and die. How can one not remember Voltaire here? 'How could God create this terrible cesspool of misfortunes and crimes? It is supposed,' says Voltaire, 'that God is powerful, just, and good, while we see madness, injustice, and malice on every side. Therefore people prefer denying God to cursing Him.' At the same time Voltaire himself believed in God, although he said that he preferred to believe in a God who was not almighty and was limited in His possibilities, but good. [...]

Yet despite everything, and above all despite what is obvious, we somehow feel God's presence in the world. [...] We feel this precisely, not knowing it, and understand not with the mind but with the heart, that the Lord shares with us every misfortune of ours in all its fullness. He is with us where things are bad. And this is the main thing. Descending with us as if into hell, into the depths of our misery and despair, He also leads us out of those depths, giving us wisdom and patience. As this is depicted on the Paschal icon 'The Savior's Descent into Hades'..."

How are we to understand this? We are fully entitled to ask. Not peace, but a sword? What, then, of “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you” (Jn 14:27)? Or “Go in peace” (Lk 7:50; Lk 8:48)? Or “Peace be with you” (Jn 20:26)? Did Christ not bring peace? Did He not promise to give rest to all who labour and are heavy laden? Should God not give peace?

First, God owes nothing to anyone. As the apostle Paul says, “It depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom 9:16). Yes, His words may contradict one another, but only at first sight. After all, God knows a little better than we do what He is saying and how all His words can form a single picture. The question is: how can He bring both “peace” and “not peace”? Quite simply. Notice that He gives and promises peace not to the whole world, but specifically to those with whom He has some relationship: His disciples, the woman who was healed... Fellowship with Christ truly brings them peace. But what about the others? What about the surrounding world?

Imagine an adult giving a child a sweet. The child is happy, but his happiness only arouses envy and resentment in the other children around him: he was given one, but I was not. The other child can then either withdraw into his grievance or demand the same sweet, instead of asking the giver calmly and politely, without asserting a supposed right to it, for the giver probably has sweets for everyone. So it is with God. A “you give me this, and I will give you that” arrangement does not work with Him. A different principle operates: “in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of Him who calls” (Rom 9:11-12). God is free to give peace, and He desires peace for everyone, but far from everyone comes to Him for peace and asks for it. Hence the sword: people who make no effort to understand God cut themselves off from His gifts.

How should we understand Jesus' words about household members who become enemies? One can, of course, see in them a reference to a fairly ordinary family conflict, when people living under one roof differ so much in views and worldview that they become ideological enemies. But there would be nothing special or unusual in that; it has happened in every age and for many different reasons. Meanwhile, Jesus' words clearly receive their meaning only in the context of everything He said about the Kingdom. Here the matter is no longer a question of worldview or ideological disagreements, but of something far more serious.

What, in fact, can one expect if one tries to combine under one roof life according to the laws of the Kingdom and life according to the laws of this world? Clearly, nothing except conflict, and a conflict almost impossible to resolve. When the matter concerns ideological or worldview disagreements, it is still possible to look for some compromises, mutual concessions, and, in the end, mutual acceptance. But the Kingdom and the world that lies in evil are in no way compatible, and here no other ties or relationships will save the situation, not even ties of blood.

Moreover, blood ties can turn out in this case to be the main problem, since they are perhaps the strongest natural tie possible in human relationships. But their nature remains part of the untransformed world; in its untransformed form it by no means brings the people bound by them closer to the Kingdom, but instead only leads them away from it.

Paradoxically, open conflict and even a break in this case can be more spiritually useful than a situation of ambiguous peace, full of things left unsaid and fraught with daily low-grade conflicts. Only when everyone living under one roof has made the Kingdom their chief goal can the situation change radically and family ties become part of the relationships of the Kingdom. But these ties will no longer be based on blood kinship, but on spiritual kinship.

Living on earth can be frightening enough as it is, and if we apply to ourselves Christ's words addressed to the apostles, it becomes deeply unsettling. That is why the words "do not be afraid" are repeated so often and so seriously in the instruction. Fear is one of the strongest human experiences, which means it can be overcome only by something even stronger. The Lord points the disciples to these "powerful remedies": trust and, strangely enough, fear.

The trust in question is not simply faith that "God will always help," but the deepest, most fundamental confidence that everything is in His hands, from the little birds sold in the market for copper coins to every human life and death. And the second is the fear of God: not fear of punishment, not even fear of sin, but precisely "fear" before God, reverence and awe that make God immeasurably more real and significant for us than any other fears.

Many times, when God addresses people, He begins with the words "Do not be afraid!" And now Jesus encourages His disciples in the same way. They are to preach "from the housetops" and bear witness to their Teacher. Is it frightening? It is! But fear departs when love comes, because "there is no fear in love" (1 Jn 4:18). Love the Father, who cares for you so deeply, and everything will become possible.

At first the words that a disciple cannot become greater than his teacher can appear to limit his possibilities. But if we take into account that to become like the teacher is already no small thing, and that not everyone is able to become equal to him, then here we can see a call to growth. If the matter is discipleship to Christ, then the call to become like the Teacher reveals to us His special attitude toward those who follow Him. For the matter concerns the high level to which Christ intends to raise fallen humanity - He wants to deify us.

And even in the stern words of warning that Christ will deny the one who denies Him, we can see how highly He has placed the human person. For relationships are implied here that almost make one think of equality...

Of course, it would be enormous insolence on such a basis to forget reverence before His majesty and to introduce familiarity into relations with Him. He did not become one of human beings so that we would bring into spiritual life what is "human, all too human," that is, in the words of one author, "always something animal." But what draws us near to God is a gift that imposes responsibility.

Today the Lord speaks to His disciples about coming disasters and trials. Betrayal, rejection, exile, and martyrdom await them. What, then, does He call them, and us, to do in this difficult hour? In such situations the world needs the intervention of God Himself, and Jesus calls His disciples to become instruments of this intervention. Let kings and rulers hear the word of salvation through them; let the suffering receive comfort and encouragement through them. They themselves will need nothing, for the heavenly Father Himself will care for them. They need only learn to trust Him. Then their bond with Heaven will become stronger than all earthly bonds, and God will be a greater reality for them than family, property, even life itself.

In the face of trials, the Lord calls us to surrender ourselves entirely to His will and to become His healing presence on earth.

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.

Of course, in today's Gospel reading, the words of Christ that draw the most attention are those saying that whoever loves his household more than God is not worthy of God. First, they concern everyone without exception, and second, one immediately wants to test oneself by them. Besides, these words often provoke a fairly decisive protest in us, because we are used to treating home as a fortress and considering close relatives the only safe and reliable circle. And Christ's words deprive us of this illusory security and call us to be open to the world. This is difficult, and therefore the human being does not like it.

But it is important to consider the Lord's words about relatives in the context of the whole Gospel passage, more precisely, of the whole second half of chapter 10. The Lord calls the disciples to confess their faith before people without fear. Then He says that in relationships characteristic of this world in its fallen state, the disciples' faith will inevitably meet resistance. This concerns relationships not only with authorities, but with people in general. This very resistance largely explains why the path of following Christ is the way of the cross. And this word of Christ ends with a call to the disciples to build their relationships with people not by the standards of this world, but to receive one another for God's sake.

"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.

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?

Living on earth can be frightening enough as it is, and if we apply to ourselves Christ's words addressed to the apostles, it becomes deeply unsettling. That is why the words "do not be afraid" are repeated so often and so seriously in the instruction. Fear is one of the strongest human experiences, which means it can be overcome only by something even stronger. The Lord points the disciples to these "powerful remedies": trust and, strangely enough, fear.

The trust in question is not simply faith that "God will always help," but the deepest, most fundamental confidence that everything is in His hands, from the little birds sold in the market for copper coins to every human life and death. And the second is the fear of God: not fear of punishment, not even fear of sin, but precisely "fear" before God, reverence and awe that make God immeasurably more real and significant for us than any other fears.

Today the Lord speaks to His disciples about coming disasters and trials. Betrayal, rejection, exile, and martyrdom await them. What, then, does He call them, and us, to do in this difficult hour? In such situations the world needs the intervention of God Himself, and Jesus calls His disciples to become instruments of this intervention. Let kings and rulers hear the word of salvation through them; let the suffering receive comfort and encouragement through them. They themselves will need nothing, for the heavenly Father Himself will care for them. They need only learn to trust Him. Then their bond with Heaven will become stronger than all earthly bonds, and God will be a greater reality for them than family, property, even life itself.

In the face of trials, the Lord calls us to surrender ourselves entirely to His will and to become His healing presence on earth.

In the book of Judges we read the story of Gideon's calling. The Angel of the Lord comes to him when he was about to hide from the enemies, and Gideon asks how it happened that the Lord had abandoned His people. "The Lord looked at him and said, Go in this strength of yours and save Israel from the hand of the Midianites; I am sending you. [Gideon] said to Him, Lord, how shall I save Israel? Look, my clan is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father's house. And the Lord said to him, I will be with you, and you will strike the Midianites as one man."

And now let us read the Gospel passage. After Jesus overturns the disciples' ideas about the role of wealth in a person's salvation, they cry out bitterly, "Who then can be saved?" Jesus, looking at them, utters one of the most important phrases in the whole Gospel: "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." And then, as in Gideon's case, He encourages the disciples who are aware of their weakness and smallness: "But many who are first will be last, and the last first." Notice this word "looking" in both cases. Did the Lord not look at His conversation partners before this? He did, but before saying something very important, He establishes a special contact, "eye to eye," so that the listener will not miss what is about to be said.

We often expect God to say something to us; we are afraid of missing it, and rightly so. Still, we can hope that if He wants to say something truly essential to us, He will "look" at us, and we at Him.

What advice can be given to someone who wants to live a worthy life, so as not to be ashamed later of years lived without purpose? Probably the same advice Jesus gave the young man: keep the commandments, live according to the Word of God—that is, receive from God the revelation of the life He has conceived and try to fulfill His design. It is not so very difficult to be a good person: do no harm to others, be honest, be faithful to God and people, and live in love. What more is there? What further perfection can one speak of? Apparently, when God descends to earth, He brings with Him another, new path of righteousness: a person lives not only according to God’s Word, but by God Himself—through unceasing communion with Him, following Him, and placing hope in Him alone. Earthly wealth then becomes out of place, and things once valued lose their meaning: houses, lands, and family ties. How could one not go away sorrowful? Or, after all, is everything possible for God?

It can be said that the young man himself "asked for" the proposal to give up his possessions, since at first he was simply told to keep the commandments prescribed for everyone. But then he declared that he had kept all this, that is, the commandments, from his youth.

Of course, one can ask another question: is the young man claiming too much for himself, since it is very hard never to break a single commandment even once? But let us suppose that the young man managed to live blamelessly. Even so, in that case he still feels that something is lacking for him; his spiritual hunger is not satisfied. What should he do next? And only after this does Jesus propose that he make a difficult decision.

But the proposal corresponds to the request: the commandments given for everyone are not enough for you; you wanted to surpass the general level, so do what surpasses what is offered to the rest. And so the young man leaves, unable to do what he himself had asked about.

The words Jesus speaks to the disciples after the young man leaves are full of sorrow. If we listen closely, He is grieving that earthly wealth blocks people from heaven. We are used to applying these words to those who are especially rich, but if we think carefully, even people of modest means, or even the poor, may have some very small treasure that blocks heaven no less, or even more, than millions of dollars or vast estates. It is hard for even a very thin and unloaded camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

But Christ again and again invites us not to cling to earthly wealth. After all, He gives us not only everything necessary for earthly life, but much more as well, that which surpasses any earthly wealth.

The disciples’ horror is understandable: if it is so difficult for a rich person to be saved, what can be said of the poor, who often have no opportunity to fulfill the precepts of the Law? Christ confirms their intuitive realization: salvation—that is, passing into a new life with God and being delivered from hatred and unbelief—is altogether impossible. It is impossible for human beings; God alone can accomplish it. Those closest to salvation, therefore, are those who do not suppose from the outset that they are capable of drawing near to God by their own power. The young man, who had kept the chief commandments since childhood, was clearly a very good person. Yet his wealth—not money, but confidence in his ability to “be perfect”—leads him away from the Gospel message that “all things are possible with God.” He “goes away sorrowful,” thereby losing his “wealth of spirit” and gaining the possibility of entering the Kingdom together with the disciples, not by his own righteousness but through the almighty power of God’s love.