NOTES for Co2 5:6-10

At the end of today's reading there are words saying that the love of Christ embraces us. The apostle explains why this happens, and what is required of us in order to be embraced by Christ's love. His thought is expressed in our Russian Synodal translation with less than full clarity. It says here: "the love of Christ embraces us, reasoning thus: if One died for all..." In the original, however, the apostle Paul writes: the love of Christ holds us, κρίναντας τούτο, having understood that One died for all. The Slavonic text at this point says: "we who have judged this," and it uses a simple past form, not the present tense used in the Synodal translation. Blessed Jerome of Stridon, translating this text into Latin, emphasizes this aspect even more: in the Vulgate these words read, "nos aestimantes hoc..." This verb means "to evaluate," like the English word "to estimate" derived from it.

So this is what is being said: the love of Christ embraces us and fills our whole life when we estimate the greatness of His sacrifice, when we understand and realize that in Him all of us truly died. More than that, it is important to realize this as an accomplished fact. Not to speculate, searching for meaning in a religious phenomenon, but to judge, to understand that this has already happened and, as a historical fact, has direct relevance to us. Only in this way can one receive this love, without which life loses its support.

Paul’s whole life is centered on the hope of something very distant. An eccentric. What normal person would subordinate his existence to the expectation of some dwelling in heaven? Eternal it may be, but when will it ever come...

It is natural for human nature to seek the satisfaction of its needs as quickly and tangibly as possible. If something hurts me, or someone has offended me, or family relationships are not working out, I want one thing: to feel better as soon as possible. And at that moment sin can seem quite justified. Like Nuf-Nuf, the clever little pig, we build brick houses to protect us from the wolf. Yet those same solid walls also protect us from God.

To entrust ourselves to Him and, “groaning under our burden,” await the reward and joy of another world, and therefore to subordinate our intentions and actions not to the fulfillment of our desires but to following God’s will: this is the path to holiness. But it is a difficult and costly path, one that requires courage and faith. To renounce much here merely in the belief that immeasurably more will be given there... Easier said than done.

It seems that everyone who walks this path has more than once felt a strong desire to give up. Perhaps the Apostle Paul also had moments of temptation. But they could not shake his passionate striving toward God, who has prepared for His children “a house not made with hands, eternal”, a house where there will be neither sorrow, nor sickness, nor sighing. And so, living in a world whose mortality he feels keenly, Paul strives for only one thing: to be pleasing to God, so as not to lose life with Him. There are moments when God is felt to be so immense and beautiful, strong and tender, that in comparison with Him all problems, failures, and everyday worries become small and insignificant, taking their proper place. It is important not to lose such moments; may their memory sustain us when the brick mansion of our desires once again seems more attractive than a dwelling in heaven.

For the apostle, Christian life is one in all its fullness and at all its stages. Before, prior to the coming of Christ, every person's life was clearly divided into "before" and "after," into life and life after death, which could not be called life in the full sense of the word even under the most optimistic view of it. For most people, life after death meant a world of shadows, where there is no life but only its likeness, where a person turns into his own shadow, forgetting earthly life and almost losing awareness of his own existence.

There were, of course, less pessimistic views of life after death, which assumed the immortality of the soul and recompense after death, but even then the matter concerned only the soul, not the whole person. Paul speaks of something else. He starts not from hope in the immortality of the soul, but from the expectation of the resurrection of the whole person, entirely and completely. And for him this process has already become reality, together with the Kingdom that has entered the world.

For a person living the life of the Kingdom, the difference between "before" and "after," if it does not disappear completely, becomes nonessential. The life of the Kingdom is one, and a person who has come to share in this life is no longer subject to death in the form in which it is present in the fallen world. Of course, insofar as the Kingdom has not yet entered the world completely, a person cannot be completely free from death. This refers first of all to the physical body, which in its fallen state can become a barrier between a person and God.

It was not intended to be this way. God created man so that he could remain with Him in the fullness of communion. But after the fall everything became different, and the embodied nature that had once been the place of meeting between man and God became a barrier separating man from God. A barrier that can, of course, be overcome, but one noticeable enough that it cannot be ignored. That is why the apostle says that the fullness of communion with God presupposes liberation from the body in its present state, not in the sense of complete rejection of it, but in the sense of its transformation, such a change in its nature that it would not hinder communion with God, but would instead help it.

In any case, this communion with God begins not somewhere in another world and not sometime after death, but here and now. The first stage of the path into the Kingdom begins when a person decides to follow Christ and enters the Church. And already at this first stage, more is decided than one might think when looking at fallen man.

At the first stage it is determined what the following stages will be, if not entirely, then to a great extent. God prepares the heavenly dwelling for a person, but the clothing that will be on that person when he stands at the threshold of that dwelling is prepared by the person himself during his earthly life. Life in the Kingdom begins here and now, and it is precisely here and now that what we will become later, at the next stage of our path, is determined. This is what the apostle reminds the readers of his letter.