NOTES for Luk 10:19-21
‘Yet do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’ These words of the Lord are of unparalleled importance for our spiritual life. Understanding and discerning spiritual joys is an indispensable condition of any life in the spirit at all.
We often use the phrase ‘spiritual rapture’. But what is it? What is joy in the Lord, and what is an ecstasy that gives pleasure only to me, even though I may think I am subduing spirits and saving someone from them? This requires the most delicate discernment, yet it is as necessary to spiritual life as air, without which we may perish.
‘Yet do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you...’ Do we know such joy, so that we can refrain from it? Some will answer no, others yes. But since our aim is to learn to read the Gospel as something deeply personal, addressed to you, like a letter that has arrived in your post, both must see what the Lord is saying to them personally now.
Let us try approaching from the other side if the first part of the sentence remains unclear and we do not understand exactly what joy we should refrain from. ‘Rejoice that your names are written in heaven...’ Perhaps this joy is no easier to grasp than the one we should refrain from. Yet the next verse gives us a clue: ‘At that hour He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit’, or, as the Russian Synodal translation has it, ‘At that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit.’ The Lord speaks to us of a joy we may not fully understand, but immediately seems to show us that joy in Himself. And this joy of Jesus in the Lord, His exultation in the Holy Spirit, pours out in the words ‘I glorify You’.
In fact, this is our only true joy: I glorify You. That is what we must understand today. I glorify You, although I know that I am going to the cross, or perhaps am already on it. It is no accident that, during its Latin period, the history of the word ‘glory’ acquired certain radiant, luminous connotations. Joy of joy, light of light: that is what these words mean—I glorify You. Perhaps they contain the only joy truly given to us.