NOTES for Luk 6:12-19

God truly is with us in everything; as a human being He truly experienced everything we can go through, except sin. There are situations in our life when it seems to us that God cannot know this. Fear? But in the garden of Gethsemane Jesus "was horrified and distressed." Sorrow? God wept over Lazarus. The difficulty of choice?

We do not know whether Jesus knew, when choosing the apostles, that one of them would betray Him. Perhaps He did not know who. Because there is choice. We have the same freedom of choice that God has. We may fail to hear Him and fail to obey Him. But we know for certain that God went through the difficulty of choice. We know from this text that before choosing the twelve apostles, Jesus spent the whole night speaking with the Father alone. That means it was not simple for Him to choose. He went through this too. And He showed us an example; He showed us how to choose.

In the Sermon on the Mount, as the passage from Luke’s Gospel that follows today’s reading is traditionally called, the Lord tells His listeners what true life and true righteousness are, and speaks about the meaning and moral foundations of life. It is precisely in connection with these words of Christ that the evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him because power went out from Him. This is a very important observation, because we must remember that God’s truth possesses real power precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious; it is very difficult to understand and accept His words, and still more difficult to fulfill them. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness—none of this follows from the experience of human life. Yet we are given the opportunity to sense and experience in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because they are not merely the invention of an idle mind but the word of God addressed to us. That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another become the place where, sometimes quite unexpectedly even to ourselves, we meet the Living God.

"...And He spent the night in prayer to God..." From these words, which let us touch our Lord's experience a little, there came a huge and remarkable tradition of night services. Strictly speaking, an "all-night vigil" means staying awake and praying all night. It is a pity that now it has been reduced to a service from 6 to 8 in the evening... But we always have the opportunity to stay awake at home, and this is an amazing experience. It is very hard to explain what it is to someone who has never lived through it.

The main thing night gives is silence and solitude; only in this silence can the voice of God be discerned. The whole world is plunged into peace, and space and time lose their meaning. Have you noticed how differently time flows at night? This, of course, is also ascetic discipline, because at times, especially after a hard day, it is difficult not to fall asleep, just as the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

One can endlessly list reasons for the advantage of night for prayer. The main thing, it seems, is the desire never to part from God, even for a few hours of nightly insensibility.

In the sermon "on a level place," as this passage from the Gospel according to Luke is traditionally called, the Lord speaks to His listeners about what true life and true righteousness are, about the meaning and moral foundations of life. And precisely in connection with these words of Christ, the evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him, because power went out from Him. This is a very important remark, for we need to remember that the truth of God possesses real power, and precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious. Understanding and accepting His words, and still more fulfilling them, is very difficult. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness: none of this follows at all from the experience of human life. But we have been given the possibility of feeling and experiencing in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because this is not simply the invention of an idle mind, but the word of God addressed to us.

That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another turn out to be the place where, at times quite unexpectedly for ourselves, we meet the Living God.

Over two thousand years of Christian history, more has perhaps been said and written about the Beatitudes than about any other Gospel text. Most often, commentators have tried to discover in them some new word, whether in the moral, theological, or spiritual-ascetic sphere.

But a natural question arises: how necessary was it for Jesus to begin His conversation with the people listening to Him with ethics, or asceticism, or theology? He was addressing believers, many of whom were surely very religious. There was little point in speaking to them about moral norms: the commandments of the Decalogue were already well known to them. And theological or ascetic subtleties were hardly suitable for this rather mixed and not very educated audience.

Besides, the people listening to Jesus were expecting an answer to a completely different question. At that time messianic expectations were very strong among the Jewish people. Quite a few claimants to messiahship had already appeared, and although all of them, unsurprisingly, had failed, the expectation did not become any less intense. The people looked with hope at anyone in whom there was even a hint of the Messiah.

It is no wonder that Jesus' listeners looked at Him Himself with such hope. And He did not want to deceive their expectations. But if He had declared His messiahship openly, that would almost certainly have happened. In rabbinic circles and in popular consciousness alike, the person of the Messiah was associated with something militant and heroic. According to these ideas, the Messiah had to be a great earthly king who would restore Israel's independence and make it a strong state governed according to the laws of the Torah. Jesus, of course, could promise the people nothing of the kind. So He simply reminds His listeners of what the messianists of earlier ages had awaited, beginning from the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem.

It was then, apparently, that the first messianic movement arose, whose participants came to be called "the poor." They accepted this name, which later became attached to those who lived a righteous life and awaited the coming of the Messiah. It is of the blessedness of these messianists, these poor ones, that Jesus speaks. He truly bears witness to His messiahship and to the nearness of the Kingdom, which is already entering the world. But it enters not to the sound of battle trumpets, but quietly, in that silence in which a spiritually sensitive heart hears God. It is a Kingdom whose blessedness is understood only by the poor.

These words seem deliberately to contradict ordinary human ideas. Why are the poor and hungry, the weeping and rejected, suddenly blessed, while woe is pronounced upon the rich, the full, and those who laugh? One might think that Christ is proclaiming a revolution that will turn the world upside down! The Kingdom of God that He brings to earth really is radically different from the order of the world familiar to us. Relationships within it are founded on the Father's mercy, not on the struggle for survival. Even as believers, we often forget that entirely different laws prevail in this Kingdom. We call happiness what Christ calls woe, and conversely regard His blessings as misfortune. How greatly we must change to become true citizens of this Kingdom!

Like several other episodes of the Savior's earthly ministry, Luke describes the Sermon on the Mount somewhat differently than Matthew does. For Luke, the basis for presenting what Jesus said during this sermon becomes the contrast between two ways: the way of the rich, which the evangelist identifies with the way of the Gentiles, and the way of the poor, which turns out to be the way into the Kingdom.

The idea of two ways is not new in itself; it is well known from Old Testament texts, and for Luke it becomes the very prism through which he perceives the Savior's words. In mentioning the poor, Jesus undoubtedly meant not simply those without possessions, but those who understood poverty as a spiritual state. The Old Testament prophets had already spoken about such poor people. And the rich differ from them not by a property marker, but by a spiritual one: if the poor find their consolation only in the Kingdom (vv. 20-23), then the rich receive what is theirs in this world, having no need of the Kingdom (vv. 24-26).

But in order to enter the Kingdom, one must remain faithful to it to the end. Therefore those who thirst for the Kingdom cannot live by the laws of this world, which has not yet been transformed, even though the laws of the Kingdom do not yet operate in it. It is no accident that Luke singles out in Jesus' sermon the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 31), making it the compositional center of that part of his account in which he presents Jesus' instruction to those who want to live according to the laws of the Kingdom (vv. 27-36).

At first glance, this call resembles the universally known "golden rule," but there is one difference in the Savior's formulation that is not immediately obvious: if in its traditional version the "golden rule" calls us to treat people the same way they treat us, Jesus advises us to treat people as we would want them to treat us. In other words, if we are truly seeking the Kingdom, then in our relationships with people, according to the Savior's word, we must in a certain sense "work ahead," giving them our good attitude in advance and not waiting for them first to show themselves in relation to us.

According to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, this is of course completely irrational behavior: everyone knows that fallen man is very little capable either of good works or of a good attitude toward neighbors. But, on the other hand, any other approach to the people around us does not presuppose openness, and without openness it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. The Kingdom is arranged in such a way that one cannot enjoy it alone. One cannot acquire it by fencing oneself off from everyone. The Kingdom can be acquired only if one becomes part of it oneself, and one can become part of it only when what we have received we pass on to others, to those who, like us, seek the fullness of life in this Kingdom. And then we become servants of the Kingdom - those whom Jesus chooses so that through them the whole world created by God may become the Kingdom.

Today's reading offers us two episodes connected with the Sabbath and with the way Jesus understands the Sabbath. One of them (vv. 1-5) describes a situation well understood by every Orthodox Jew. In gospel times, as now, the Sabbath day was subject to many prohibitions regulating what Judaism regards as work forbidden on the Sabbath day by the fourth commandment. The systems of such ritual prohibitions in different rabbinic schools could differ somewhat from one another, but in essence all of them had already largely lost their spiritual meaning, while retaining a strictly religious function. The purpose of the Sabbath commandment was to draw a person away from his everyday occupations so that at least one day out of seven he would devote himself entirely to God, forgetting his own affairs. Meanwhile, the system of ritual prohibitions that took shape after the Babylonian exile was based not on this spiritual and practical task, but on more-or-less formal theological criteria that defined one action or another as work. All such actions, of course, were forbidden on the Sabbath day, and rubbing grain, even by hand and in a very small amount (v. 1), was formally equated with grinding grain and was included among the forbidden actions.

Jesus answers by referring to events from the history of ancient Israel (vv. 3-4), alluding to a rabbinic rule well known to the Pharisees, which allowed Sabbath prohibitions to be broken if this was necessary to save the life of a person or a domestic animal. More than that: He reminds His interlocutors that in ancient times even the norms of ritual purity were violated to save life, because to give sacred bread to someone who was not a priest meant to defile that bread.

Of course, if Jesus' disciples were starving to death and had no other food, they would have been allowed to rub as much grain as they needed in order not to die of hunger; in that case, rubbing the grain would not have been a violation of the Sabbath. But for that to be so, the threat of starvation had to be unavoidable for them. Jesus, however, looks at the Sabbath differently. He says that in the Kingdom the Sabbath is not a system of ritual restrictions, but the fullness of communion with God, inseparable from the One who brought the Kingdom into the world (v. 5).

The second episode (vv. 6-11) describes Jesus' healing of the man with a withered hand. And here we see the same difference in understanding the Sabbath. For Jesus, healing is not work, but the manifestation of the Kingdom, which is most fitting to appear precisely on the Sabbath, the day dedicated to God; therefore He heals on the Sabbath especially often, reminding those present of the true meaning of this day (vv. 8-10). But for religious formalists there is no Kingdom, only a violation of prohibitions, which they carefully track (v. 7). And they hate anyone who violates those prohibitions (v. 11). Thus devotion to religious prohibitions hides the Kingdom from a person. And it leads to the cross the One who brought this Kingdom into the world.

In their conversations with Jesus, the Pharisees often challenge Him over how He treats various prescriptions and traditions. The Sabbath occupies a central place in these disputes. What may and may not be done on the Sabbath?

In the mind of a Jew of that time, answering this question required serious knowledge of the Law and the commentaries of authoritative teachers. But the way Jesus poses the question turns a theological discussion into a direct challenge to the conscience, which is not limited to teachers and theologians: what may be done on the Sabbath—good or evil? Save life or destroy it? The Gospel teaches us to frame the questions that concern us in precisely this way, for conscience is often the best adviser, even in theology.