NOTES for Rev 7:2-4; Rev 7:9-14; Jo1 3:1-3; Mat 5:1-12

Today we commemorate not one saint, not two, not even twenty: we commemorate all the saints. The number one hundred and forty-four thousand given by John does not signify a specific quantity, but fullness. Who are they, the saints? Where do they come from, and how do they attain holiness? Today’s reading answers this question. First, they “have come out of the great tribulation.” This is important for us when we say that keeping the commandments is very difficult. It was not easy for the saints. Their path was by no means strewn with roses. They passed through the path of tribulation, but attained the light of Christ. The second very important point is the source of holiness. With what did they wash their robes? With a virtuous life? No. With repentance? Not that either. With the blood of the Lamb. Repentance by itself and virtue by itself would have no power were it not for the Blood of Christ. The source of all holiness is He, and He alone.

By the end of time the process of forming the people of God is also completed. The 144 thousand chosen symbolize it. This number is symbolic: 12 thousand people from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Israel here evidently means the people of God as a whole, but the people in its history, just as Israel itself exists within world history.

Since the expression 'thousands of Israel,' among other things, in biblical language means the fullness of Israel as the people of God, the 144 thousand of the Book of Revelation, where there are twelve of these 'thousands' from each tribe, signify a kind of 'fullness of fullness,' the absolute fullness of the people including all its generations throughout earthly history. This is not surprising: the issue is the history of the world that has already come into contact with the Kingdom, or more precisely, the history of the Kingdom entering the world, where no one disappears, goes into the world of shadows, or is lost.

The fullness of the people of God is the fullness not only of all historical spaces, but also of all historical times. That is why the 144 thousand include representatives not only of the Jewish people, not only descendants of Abraham by blood, but also his descendants by spirit, seekers of God and the Kingdom from all times and peoples. Of course, with a person's spiritual life and spiritual path, not everything is so simple.

Even regarding those who belong to the people of God in its history, nothing can be said with certainty. The apostle is shown the picture of the end of time, the completion of history, when everyone has already finished his path and therefore has spiritually determined himself. He does not see how many people, perhaps formally belonging to those who in history were called chosen, finally did not enter the number of the chosen. John sees those who reached the end, but does not see those who did not reach the end. And the 144 thousand revealed to him were determined and formed only there where he sees them, at the threshold of the Kingdom. There, where everything is decided and everything is determined.

Today we commemorate not one saint, not two, not even twenty: we commemorate all the saints. The number one hundred and forty-four thousand given by John does not signify a specific quantity, but fullness. Who are they, the saints? Where do they come from, and how do they attain holiness? Today’s reading answers this question. First, they “have come out of the great tribulation.” This is important for us when we say that keeping the commandments is very difficult. It was not easy for the saints. Their path was by no means strewn with roses. They passed through the path of tribulation, but attained the light of Christ. The second very important point is the source of holiness. With what did they wash their robes? With a virtuous life? No. With repentance? Not that either. With the blood of the Lamb. Repentance by itself and virtue by itself would have no power were it not for the Blood of Christ. The source of all holiness is He, and He alone.

These words are usually interpreted as an indication of the martyr's death of the people mentioned in the book. But the apostle's words can also be understood more broadly: all Christians in general can be called those washed in the blood of Christ, if only they have walked their path to the end and finally been freed from the power of evil and sin weighing over the fallen world. The white robes of these people clearly recall the white robes of the Savior Himself, in which He appears both to John in the vision and earlier to the apostles on the Mount of Transfiguration. People in white robes are people who have become like Christ, who have become as He is, living the same fullness of the life of the Kingdom that He bears, each in his own measure, of course.

Now at last they will see what they desired all their lives: the triumph of the Kingdom in all its fullness, the final transfiguration of the world and its deliverance from every power of evil. Strictly speaking, the opening of the seventh seal marks the beginning of this final transfiguration of creation. For the world, transfiguration is inseparable from shocks and cataclysms on a universal scale, not because God wants seriously and finally to punish His creation, but because the evil in which the fallen world lies will not simply let it go.

The connection between the transfiguration of the world and the coming cataclysms is shown to the apostle with complete clarity. He sees that the prayers of the saints, rising before the Throne of glory as fragrant incense, turn for the world into sacrificial fire that brings catastrophes and disasters. What is sanctification for God and for God's people is death and destruction for the world lying in evil. Of course, there is no fault of God here: the issue is only the incompatibility of evil and God's presence, of sin and sanctification, which was well known even before the coming of Christ. Already in those times believing Yahwists knew: such a combination can lead only to defilement, and defilement to destruction and death.

Something similar now happens on a universal scale: the Kingdom at last opens to the world in all fullness, sanctifying it, while the world, not fully cleansed from the sin in which it remains, defiles the holy thing that is the Kingdom and is destroyed, perishing in its former quality. Of course, God did not plan or desire this destruction; He wants the world to be transfigured without any catastrophes or cataclysms. But for the world such calm and organic transfiguration proves impossible because by the moment history ends it has not been completely cleansed.

And judging by the fact that God puts the final point before its complete cleansing, one has to think that, sadly, complete cleansing is impossible for the fallen world at all; otherwise God would have done everything for that possibility to be realized. He does not want the sinful world to perish; He wants the world to be saved and become His Kingdom. But the freedom given by God to the human being, and therefore in part to the world, has another side, which leads to the tragedy of the end of history so vividly described by John.

Speaking of those who came "out of the great tribulation," the elder addressing the apostle confirms that everyone who has partaken of the Kingdom, even directly on the day of Judgment, receives it in the same fullness as anyone else. They are given the same life, they see the same Throne, and they serve together with those who found themselves in the Kingdom much earlier than they did (Rev. 7:15-17). Only now, when the Church has finally reached its fullness, does the Judgment begin. But when viewed from the Kingdom, the Judgment is no longer simply a natural cataclysm putting an end to the former order of things; it turns out to be what it truly is, a spiritual act, a determination of God concerning all humanity as a whole and each person individually. It is not accidental that heaven and earth fall silent: they too await this determination, which will change their nature and their fate (Rev. 8:1). Meanwhile, for the world the Kingdom itself becomes judgment, its breath, which at the Throne merges into one with the prayers of its inhabitants belonging to the heavenly Church, who here, as in other books of the New Testament, are called "saints." It is not accidental that the censer with aromatic herbs, "incense," like the one used for censing in the Tabernacle and the Temple, is filled with the fire that falls upon the earth (Rev. 8:3-5): already in antiquity it was believed that aromatic smoke rising to heaven from the censer carries with it the prayers of those standing at the altar and those performing the sacrifice, not only the priests but all who take part in the sacred action.

The sacred space surrounding the altar became a prototype of the Kingdom, and now it was opened to John that this idea, despite its naivete in some cases, was deeply true at its foundation. But what for the residents of the Kingdom is the breath of life, without which not only prayer but existence itself is unthinkable here, becomes for the world, still not freed from the power of sin, a fire whose burning touch becomes judgment for those who oppose Christ and the Kingdom.

The Apostle John draws a very clear analogy with our human infancy. When we are born, we are already “human young,” although we can do almost none of the things a human being can do. Nothing about us is clear yet: who shall we be, what shall we be like? All of this develops and is revealed gradually. Yet it is very important that, as we grow and mature, we meet and communicate with other people, for this is how we learn what it means to be human. If this does not happen, then our “human likeness” is not realized either, as all real rather than fictional stories of “Mowgli children” attest.

It is exactly the same in our Christian life. In Baptism we died and were born anew as children of God, and we are already alive, although we are still infants. We do not yet understand very well what we shall be like when we grow up, but trusting in God’s goodness we want to become like Him. To do so, we meet Him and communicate with Him, for now “through a glass, darkly,” yet we know that a moment will come when we shall meet “face to face.” If we continue steadily toward this meeting, we shall enter “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

It is astonishing to understand that we are purified from sin and lawlessness by hope in God alone. For it seems that hope is so little, so easy, while to love and to believe are much harder.

Hope is the awareness that God can make the world and ourselves completely new, can transform everything, outside and inside. Hope is the refusal to rely on the experience that something is impossible, that something "does not happen," for with God all things are possible; He is the "Lord of the impossible."

Such hope purifies, because understanding that God will transform us so much that we will "see Him as He is" and "be like Him" leads to the fear of the Lord and to trembling, to the desire to become obedient children of a loving Father, to avoid sin, and to await the Meeting.

The most important sermon of Christ preserved by Matthew begins with the Beatitudes. And from the very beginning Jesus confronts His listeners with paradoxical formulations that are not easy for them to grasp. Throughout all the following centuries, puzzled questions about the Beatitudes have been raised more than once.

Meanwhile, the very construction of these commandments contains answers to the difficult questions that arise about them. Thus, if those who mourn are blessed because they will be comforted, then the poor in spirit are blessed precisely because in the Kingdom of Heaven their poverty will be filled. The meek, pushed to the margins in the present cruel world, will inherit the earth, which means they will not be crushed by the strong and insolent.

It is clear that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied near the One who is Himself the bearer of the highest righteousness. But the fact that the merciful will receive mercy means not only that they will receive a reward for their works of mercy; it is also a statement that in our earthly world they are too often repaid with evil for good.

The pure in heart are to see God. Yet from the Old Testament we know that a person cannot see God and remain alive. What power there must be in purity of heart, if even the impossible becomes accessible to those endowed with it.

The last two categories mentioned in the Beatitudes, the peacemakers and those persecuted for righteousness, to whom the highest rewards are promised, can be considered separately. Still, one wants to unite them, not only following the parallelism characteristic of biblical poetry, but also because all the faithful are called to possess these qualities, like all the others listed among the Beatitudes. It is no accident that the promises both begin and end in the same way: with the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven.

In one of the Beatitudes there is a word that often raises questions and is misunderstood. This word is "meekness," or more precisely, the adjective formed from it (see Matt. 5:5).

What qualities does a meek person have? How often the image that comes to mind is of some creature huddled in a corner, unable or afraid to open its mouth or show itself in any way... A dictionary gives us this definition of a meek person: submissive, gentle, humble. But the definition "submissive" needs an added clarification: submissive to whom?

But the most important thing Jesus wanted to say, it seems, we can understand when we remember that He Himself is "meek and lowly in heart" (Matt. 11:29). And He calls us to learn this meekness and humility from Him.

To whom, then, and to what is Jesus Christ submissive? We can say only one thing with certainty: He is submissive to the will of the Father. Truly, every person needs an awareness that a "higher principle" exists, and not merely awareness, but living relationship with God. It is precisely under the loving, encouraging, approving gaze of the Father that we can take our first steps and grow spiritually. Even our Lord, having become incarnate, needed a father's support.

The question of what seal is placed upon the faithful and believers very often leads people to look for a hidden meaning in these words. It should be noted that the words of the prophet Ezekiel used in this text are rendered imprecisely in the Russian Synodal translation. The original literally says, “Put a tav.” In ancient forms of the alphabet, this letter looked like a cross. What was a prophecy for Ezekiel probably became, for the first Christians, the tav sign: the first sign with which they crossed themselves and a sign of Christ. Perhaps, by using here both the prophetic text in Ezek 9:4-6 and the number 144,000, which symbolizes fullness, the apostle John expresses the fact that eternal life is offered to everyone and that everyone may enter into the fullness of Christ.

The picture of Judgment is revealed to the apostle from different points of view. Until now he has seen Judgment as the world will have to see and experience it; now God shows him His Church and how Judgment is revealed to her. The four angels at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds (v. 1), apparently personify the power of God by which the world, despite its damage from sin, does not turn into chaos. In this way God fulfills the promise given long ago to Noah, and in him to all the righteous of all times and peoples, that the flood which destroyed the world and wiped out humanity would never again be repeated (Gen. 9:8-11). But now, at the end of time, everything changes: the world awaits transformation, and the old order of things comes to an end. Those who remain in the world see only the sky rolling up like a scroll and the earth slipping away from under their feet (Rev. 6:12-14); but those to whom spiritual reality is open, the reality of the Kingdom, see, like John, the Church prepared to meet the Savior returning in glory.

Her members receive a special sign, God's seal, which binds them to the One they await (vv. 2-3). The twelve tribes of which the people of God consist symbolically indicate here the fullness of the Church, as does the number 144,000, which implies 12,000 people from each of the twelve tribes (vv. 4-8). Here, of course, we are dealing with numerical symbolism: a thousand people was considered a full representation; if a tribe could field a thousand fighting men for war, it was regarded as independent and, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. By the time world history is completed, the Church, as the new people of God, represents exactly such fullness. There is nothing surprising in this: her history began on the day of Pentecost, and every century of Christianity added new members to the heavenly Church; and now, on the day of Judgment, the return of the Savior and the triumph of the Kingdom, she is ready to stand before her Head in all fullness.

But there are also others, those who came on the very day of Judgment, according to the word of one of the elders standing at the Throne, "out of the great tribulation" (v. 14). Before this, they may not have thought at all about God or the Kingdom; but when the decisive day came, the day of the final choice, their choice proved right, and now they sing the song of renewal together with the whole Church and await the One whom perhaps they had not known before, but now will surely know (vv. 9-12).

In speaking about the end of the world, the apostle John uses the same words as the great prophets and teachers of the Old Testament. The seven angels described in the book of Tobit stand before the throne of God and serve the One; the seven plagues make us remember the plagues of Egypt.

But in the midst of horror and catastrophes, the prayers of the saints rise like incense, and as a refrain to the book of the prophet Isaiah the apostle speaks about what the world looks like when it has been freed from the power of death and sin. No evil can any longer touch those who come to the Lamb. No suffering will have power over them, no darkness will be able to swallow them, because the One who has conquered death will be near, and the One who is Light, in whom there is no darkness at all.

The question of what seal is placed upon the faithful and believers very often leads people to look for a hidden meaning in these words. It should be noted that the words of the prophet Ezekiel used in this text are rendered imprecisely in the Russian Synodal translation. The original literally says, “Put a tav.” In ancient forms of the alphabet, this letter looked like a cross. What was a prophecy for Ezekiel probably became, for the first Christians, the tav sign: the first sign with which they crossed themselves and a sign of Christ. Perhaps, by using here both the prophetic text in Ezek 9:4-6 and the number 144,000, which symbolizes fullness, the apostle John expresses the fact that eternal life is offered to everyone and that everyone may enter into the fullness of Christ.

The picture of Judgment is revealed to the apostle from different points of view. Until now he has seen Judgment as the world will have to see and experience it; now God shows him His Church and how Judgment is revealed to her. The four angels at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds (v. 1), apparently personify the power of God by which the world, despite its damage from sin, does not turn into chaos. In this way God fulfills the promise given long ago to Noah, and in him to all the righteous of all times and peoples, that the flood which destroyed the world and wiped out humanity would never again be repeated (Gen. 9:8-11). But now, at the end of time, everything changes: the world awaits transformation, and the old order of things comes to an end. Those who remain in the world see only the sky rolling up like a scroll and the earth slipping away from under their feet (Rev. 6:12-14); but those to whom spiritual reality is open, the reality of the Kingdom, see, like John, the Church prepared to meet the Savior returning in glory.

Her members receive a special sign, God's seal, which binds them to the One they await (vv. 2-3). The twelve tribes of which the people of God consist symbolically indicate here the fullness of the Church, as does the number 144,000, which implies 12,000 people from each of the twelve tribes (vv. 4-8). Here, of course, we are dealing with numerical symbolism: a thousand people was considered a full representation; if a tribe could field a thousand fighting men for war, it was regarded as independent and, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. By the time world history is completed, the Church, as the new people of God, represents exactly such fullness. There is nothing surprising in this: her history began on the day of Pentecost, and every century of Christianity added new members to the heavenly Church; and now, on the day of Judgment, the return of the Savior and the triumph of the Kingdom, she is ready to stand before her Head in all fullness.

But there are also others, those who came on the very day of Judgment, according to the word of one of the elders standing at the Throne, "out of the great tribulation" (v. 14). Before this, they may not have thought at all about God or the Kingdom; but when the decisive day came, the day of the final choice, their choice proved right, and now they sing the song of renewal together with the whole Church and await the One whom perhaps they had not known before, but now will surely know (vv. 9-12).

Returning to the Christian's spiritual life, John repeats again and again that Christian life and sin are incompatible. He develops an idea already expressed at the very beginning of his letter: the path of righteousness entails renouncing conscious sin, sinful intentions and sinful actions. Only the one who acts righteously, like Christ Himself, is righteous. Yet the apostle emphasises Christ's role in a special way. Indeed, it is only because of Him that we can speak of a final victory over sin. He alone is free from sin, and He alone can carry away our sins as well.

The Saviour is not merely an example of the ‘living Torah’. He is the One who can help anyone become ‘living Torah’ who gives themselves to Him and shares His life, the life of the Kingdom He has brought into the world. This does not, of course, mean that the person seeking the Kingdom and following Christ no longer needs to do anything. The ordinary spiritual work, already known before Christ's coming, of which John reminds the recipients of his letter, remains absolutely necessary.

Everyone who follows Christ must be concerned with purification—complete purification—so as not to differ from their Teacher in this respect. Every sin is lawlessness, a violation of the Torah. And lawlessness must be understood literally here: not as breaking the law, but as its absence. This is roughly the same sense in which another apostle, James, says in his letter that whoever breaks one part of the Torah breaks it all. An odd statement, it would seem: sin is something specific, and so is breaking the law.

But when it comes to the inward Torah, this is exactly how things stand: any sin destroys it, producing lawlessness as the complete absence of the Law—the Torah—from a person's heart and life. John sets the bar as high as it can go, but this is understandable, for it is the Kingdom that is at stake. At the same time, the apostle points to the One who can help us enter that Kingdom if we trust Him and walk with Him rather than alone. Christian life becomes life with Christ in His Kingdom, and its purpose becomes taking root in the Kingdom and becoming, as a Christian, ‘living Torah’, like one's Teacher.

The need for purification when approaching God was recognized before, but here we encounter an entirely new motive for purification: we are called to be like God, and He is pure. We have been granted a great calling, not yet revealed in all its fullness, but even the little that we can already comprehend is enough for us to build our daily life and our relationships with those around us differently. Let no one be troubled that against the background of His absolute purity, our relative purity will inevitably stand out as less than spotless. The Lord has the power to complete the efforts we have begun so that they become “as no launderer on earth can whiten” (Mk 9:3).

Sin is identified by the apostle with lawlessness. For people accustomed to biblical thinking, this idea is familiar and natural, but those who, as is customary in our culture, are used to distinguishing the legal approach from the moral one may object that not all sins violate the laws of the state. That is true, but there are also other laws established by the Creator in the universe and in the human heart. Unlike rules devised by people, violating them leads not to human punishment but to the spiritual self-destruction of the lawless person who turns away from God and His love.

Speaking about the spiritual life of a Christian, John describes it as becoming in Christ and at the same time being established in the Torah (the Law). Jesus is the only one in whom there is no sin (1 John 3:5). In this way He showed the world the only example in history of what in those days was called the living Torah: to become the living Torah meant precisely to be the living embodiment of the ideal that the Torah requires. Accordingly, such a person had to be completely free from every sin, because sin and the Torah, sin and God's commandment, are incompatible things. That is why, before the coming of Christ, the ideal of the living Torah remained only an ideal, one toward which many strove but which no one managed to attain.

Following the Torah cleanses from sin. The inner Torah, as believing Jews of the Gospel era called it, was the spiritual imperative without which the way of righteousness was impossible. The inner Torah was the spiritual core on which the whole life of a person seeking righteousness and striving to become the living Torah was based. Any sin destroyed this core, and that is why the apostle speaks of sin as lawlessness, as a departure from the inner Torah (1 John 3:4).

But for fallen humanity, sin is a sad inevitability, and that is why the ideal of the living Torah remained unattainable. The only hope is in the Savior, who not only showed this ideal to the world but is also ready to help everyone seeking righteousness be freed from the captivity of sin (1 John 3:5). For this only one thing is needed: to give oneself and one's life into His hands, and then He will make it part of the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world.

There is no place for sin in the Kingdom, and therefore the one who lives one life with Christ does not sin. Sin has a place only in human life separated from the life of Christ and the Kingdom (1 John 3:6). We live in the age of the Kingdom that is coming but has not yet been revealed in all its fullness, and until the end of this age, until the full transformation of humanity and all creation, our Christian life retains the duality of which the apostle speaks.

But at the end of time, after the Savior returns in glory and our human nature is fully transformed, this duality will disappear. Only then will we become what we are meant to be according to God's purpose for us (1 John 3:2). For now we are pure to the extent that we live one life with Jesus, the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world (1 John 3:3). And not only we Christians: everyone who acts righteously has a relation to Him (1 John 2:29; in the Synodal translation, "does righteousness"). And that is not surprising, because He is the only righteous one in the world without any qualification. He is the only one who has shown the world the pattern of the living Torah.

The Beatitudes are a hymn to happiness, to the paradoxical Christian happiness of those who mourn and are persecuted, the meek and the poor. For Christ does not say, "Blessed are the well-fed and honored," although even they, difficult as it is, can still enter the Kingdom of Heaven (see Matt 19:23). On the contrary, through all these commandments the Lord shows that true life is found in simplicity. And these are not merely wishes, but commandments that must be fulfilled.

A very logical question arises: how is this possible? About some commandments we can still say that at times we correspond to them, for example those about mourning, but with others we have serious trouble. Who can honestly say that he is meek, pure in heart, and poor in spirit? No one, in essence. It is simply beyond our strength: our faith does not reach the level set in these verses.

And yet the Lord knows what He is doing when He sets such a standard before us. The mechanism of our relationship with Him is also paradoxical: hardly any teacher would pass a student who tries a little, has learned a little, and has understood something, but cannot answer all the exam questions. But the Teacher Himself promises to deal with us in exactly this way: to lead us "from faith to faith" (Rom 1:17) - from the small grain we already have to the fullness that only He can give.

The Beatitudes are a completely unique text, one of the most important in the whole New Testament. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke transmit these words of Christ differently, which allows us to conclude that the Lord spoke about this more than once and that the ancient Church preserved several accounts of these words that do not fully coincide. This means that we are dealing with something truly important. Interpreters of the Gospel usually say that the Beatitudes designate the path of spiritual growth given to every person, or outline the places where we find Christ. But before all this, it is important for us to hear what Christ is speaking about. What is blessedness? The word has the meanings of both happiness and abundance, fullness. That is, from the very beginning of His ministry Christ speaks to people about what happiness is: the highest, overflowing happiness, happiness given in a measure pressed down and running over.

Instinctively, by some inherited stereotype, we expect something else from God. Denunciations of sins and cleansing from them, deliverance from pain, sorrow, and death, moral guidance. But the Lord first of all speaks of overflowing happiness, and this even embarrasses us a little. We ourselves are ashamed to think that we need this, so as not to appear somehow too primitive. Therefore it is important for us to understand that Christ calls us to fullness of life, to fullness of happiness. The path He points out to us is the path of the Cross. In order to live a full life, Christ says, we must receive as a gift the suffering that is inevitable in a fallen, distorted world. The happiness He offers us is not a wonderful and frightening elixir of forgetfulness. On the contrary, it is the victory accomplished in His Crucifixion and Resurrection. And for that reason the fullness of life to which we are called is all the fuller and more real.

We are beginning to read the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ. Christians have always considered this text one of the most important for a person's formation in faith; it is said that in the early Church it even served as a basis for catechesis, the preparation of a person for baptism. We will see further on that the moral demands of the Sermon on the Mount are so high that they expose every one of us. And it would be very easy to fall into despondency, but throughout all the following days let us remember what we read today. Christ begins with a promise and encouragement, promising blessedness on the path of following Him, that is, some highest degree of happiness. And all this is because this is the very path where He Himself goes before us and does not leave us.

The Sermon on the Mount is truly the preaching of the Kingdom. The "beatitudes" themselves, as the blessings pronounced by Jesus at the very beginning of the sermon are usually called (vv. 3-11), testify that Jesus connects His coming with the manifestation in the world of the fullness of the Kingdom. It is not by chance that He speaks of the blessedness of the "poor in spirit" (v. 3). Here the reference is plainly to those whom the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Psalter simply call "the poor," although even there the issue is clearly not material poverty.

Poverty in the Gospel sense was first spoken of in the history of God's people by the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, who connected the triumph of the poor with the coming of the messianic age (Isa. 29:19). Later, "the poor" came to designate the members of the community of Isaiah's disciples, which then gave rise to a whole movement that remained connected with the prophetic milieu even later. Isaiah considered himself "poor" as well, although he belonged to one of the finest aristocratic families of Jerusalem.

By "poverty" he and his followers understood a spiritual state in which a person relies on no one and nothing in the world except God. With such complete surrender of oneself to the will of God, a person, even if rich and influential, still remained before God a poor person possessing nothing. And in a world that, in the Gospel's words, "lies in evil," such a person most often could not count not only on a kingdom, but even on a quiet life.

And now, according to Jesus' testimony, the day of which Isaiah spoke has finally come: the day of the triumph of the "poor," to whom the Kingdom is given. The reference, of course, is not to an earthly kingdom, but to that messianic Kingdom whose coming Isaiah foresaw and Jesus testified to. Sometimes in the Psalter such people were called "meek" or "humble," and if before they could not even think of inheriting the earth, now, in the world being transformed, such a possibility appears for them (v. 5).

And yet the Kingdom has not yet triumphed to the end and in its fullness. It is not by chance that Jesus speaks of the blessedness of those "expelled for truth" (v. 10; it would be more exact to translate this phrase as "blessed are those persecuted for righteousness") and of the blessedness of those persecuted for His sake and for faithfulness to the Kingdom (v. 11). The Kingdom "has drawn near" (Matt. 4:17), it is already entering the world and transforming it, but it has not yet opened in all its fullness, and the forces of evil resist this opening, falling upon those who live by the Kingdom and bear witness to it. Such is our age, the age of the coming Kingdom.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most important Gospel texts, laying the foundations of Christian morality. Yet the beginning of this sermon, though traditionally called the "Beatitudes," speaks not about rules but about happiness: the happiness of a righteous life, the life Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven. In such a life, consolation, mercy, and joy overcome tears and pain, and grace and peace reign.

The blessings pronounced by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount are commonly called the Beatitudes in Christian tradition, and are compared with the commandments of the Decalogue. Yet Jesus Himself did not treat them as new commandments replacing the old ones. In fact, in form they do not resemble commandments at all, but rather the series of blessings and curses with which Deuteronomy ends, or the blessings by which the Torah instructs priests to bless the people. But these blessings, of course, acquire a special meaning: they make sense only if the Messiah has already come and the messianic Kingdom is near and about to arrive.

The mention of the poor and the humble in such a context is especially significant. Historically, this refers to members of a movement that had formed even before the exile around Isaiah of Jerusalem. They came to be called 'the poor,' although in the literal sense they usually were not beggars. Sometimes they were also called 'meek' or 'humble,' with the same meaning: these are people who completely refuse to rely in life on anyone or anything except God, and who await the coming of the messianic Kingdom, where they will receive reward and consolation for the difficult path of righteousness they tried to follow. Speaking of the blessedness of the poor and the meek, Jesus thereby makes it clear that the messianic Kingdom has already come or is about to come.

Just as natural is the mention of those who thirst for righteousness: for the image of 'the poor one' was inseparable from the image of the righteous person, and already in pre-exilic hymnography these words had become virtual synonyms. At the same time, before the exile, purity of heart and mercy began to be perceived as integral traits of the righteous person. In addition, already in the pre-exilic period the image of the righteous person becomes the image of one persecuted by the authorities or the powerful of this world. Jesus proclaims the blessedness of those persecuted for righteousness, that is, following the tradition already existing at that time, for faithfulness to the Torah. And He adds: blessed are those persecuted for My sake, thereby in fact pointing to Himself as the Messiah; for the image of the suffering Messiah was known to tradition after all, although in those days it had somewhat receded into the background, and those persecuted for the Messiah and the messianic Kingdom were, of course, also understood as persecuted for righteousness.

Thus Jesus, proclaiming the nearness of the coming Kingdom, at the same time answers the hopes of those who were awaiting the Messiah and His Kingdom. He lets them understand that the long-awaited day has come - although not in the way they had imagined.