NOTES for Mar 10:23-32
"Many who are first will be last, and the last first." What do these words mean? Why must it be this way? Have we become so used to words of this kind that nothing in them surprises us anymore? It is clear, we think, that justice requires the very last, the poorest and most unfortunate, to be repaid in another world with honor and power. But, as we have said with you more than once, such logic does not go beyond the logic of the communists: "whoever was nothing will become everything." And it is impossible even to imagine joining this soul-destroying force to the teaching of our Lord. In the late Soviet years there was a joke: in 1917, an old princess looks out the window and asks a man passing by what all the noise is about, what is happening. The man answers that the Red Army soldiers want there to be no rich people. Strange, she replies; my grandfather wanted there to be no poor people. This logic of shaking the world upside down, which the Bolsheviks served, has nothing in common with the teaching of our Lord, who is the God of ineffable kindness. It is only an evil parody of it. So let us try to think about what these words mean after all: many who are first will be last, and the last first. Imagine this scene: a group of runners at the starting line. The signal is given and everyone begins to run. Someone breaks ahead, and someone falls behind. Suddenly a signal is given to run back to the start. Who will arrive first? Obviously, the last. And we see this movement of return as repentance, because metanoia is a turning, a return. Let this be only an image. But why could it not be that this is exactly what the Lord wanted to say? Let us remember Psalm 84: You forgave all the iniquities of Your people; You covered all their sins; You turned back from the wrath of Your anger; turn us back, O God of our salvation. The same situation appears, for example, in the Vulgate, where this conversus - converte sounds twice, while it disappeared in the Synodal translation, where it says "turned away - restore." All this appears to us as an argument, perhaps not a very weighty one but still an argument, in favor of our image for today's words of the Lord, even if we have differed somewhat from the way the apostle Paul uses this image.