NOTES for Mat 11:11-15

The poor and needy seek water, and there is none... How much this resembles what happens to us. The tongue dries up from thirst, and there is no water... And we want to ask angrily where God is and why He allows this... If we stop in time and phrase the question differently, we will receive the answer. He is here. He is near, waiting for us to open our hearts to Him.

But the wounded inner voice goes on: "Then why did He allow everything around us to become a desert?" The answer is simple. Because the true desert is the human heart without God. And only if He enters will the desert become a beautiful garden.

We may already have grown used to the idea that everything in the world depends on God. And this is truly so: the Lord Himself tells us that all the hairs of our head are numbered, and not one of them will fall without His will (Matt. 10:29-31).

But here, as often happens in Christianity, there is a paradox: we are free. God does not force us to be dependent on Him. One may say that He is "unable" to prevent us from going toward what we very strongly want. Each of us is the prodigal son, and He is the Father who, with immense patience, love, and pain, allows His children to make mistakes (see Luke 15:11-32). And we may be aware as much as we like that God holds everything in His hand, that He sees everything, that everything depends on Him, but at times this cannot move our stubborn will even a single step...

Yet the Lord still waits for this step from us, even if it is a timid one. We can make the effort of which Christ speaks, we can submit to God (James 4:6-7), we can overcome our pride, for God has promised to give us strength for this. And every time we take this step toward Him, and not toward the place where our desires, often opposed to God, lead us, we win, solely by God's power, a small victory that is nevertheless the most important one in life.

Our first reaction to these words will be ambiguous. How can this happen in Heaven? We just don’t understand Jesus; He puts entirely a different accent on these words. We underline the words “violence” and “violent” when we read today’s text. In that the miracle of the New Testament, now violence is not fruitless as before, when access to God was closed by our sins, the way is open now, and if we follow it, then we will reach the Kingdom. The most important – to redeem us from sin slavery, and this redemption accomplished by Christ is been giving to us freely. But we have to do something, we have to make some efforts in order to receive it. Which effort? The mention of John the Baptist preaching about repentance here s isn’t fortuitous. This effort is expected from us also –effort in repentance, in our turn from sin to God, and then the Kingdom of Heaven as a little grain will be sown by God in our heart and will begin to grow.

Traditionally, it is held that John did not doubt Jesus' messianic calling and sent his doubting disciples to Him so that they could see for themselves. Other interpreters allow that John himself may have doubted it. Be that as it may, it is hardly accidental that he sent two of his disciples to Jesus: they were to become witnesses to Christ's words, and under Jewish law there had to be at least two witnesses. And then they heard an answer that still puzzles some readers of the Gospel: why did Christ say neither yes nor no? Why instead did He need to speak a long phrase listing His works?

Apparently, He answered this way so as not to confuse ahead of time those who were not yet ready to hear a direct confirmation. But the verbal message that Jesus asks them to convey to John contained a list of the signs of the Messiah's coming that had been foretold in the Old Testament, and this means that Jesus was quite definitely confirming that He is the very One who was to come.

Christ gives John a high evaluation. But next to it stands the indication that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven will be greater than John. Such a definition may sound like belittlement. But anyone who, confident of his own salvation, decides on that basis to exalt himself above John will be deeply mistaken. Those who enter the Kingdom of Heaven transformed will surpass John as he was on earth. But he himself in the Kingdom of Heaven will surpass himself as he was in the earthly world.

In the immediate historical context, Jesus' words about John are significant insofar as in those days there were many people who considered John the Messiah. In any case, he corresponded much more closely to widespread popular ideas about what the Messiah should be than Jesus did. And in the days when the Gospel texts were taking shape, Palestine had fairly numerous communities of followers of John the Baptist who considered their teacher the Messiah. Against this background, the story of the disciples sent by John to Jesus in order to ask Him one more question about His messiahship was important as John himself bearing witness that he made no claim to any messiahship.

But the matter, of course, is not only history. The Savior's words are important above all because, on the one hand, He gives a brief and concise characterization of John himself and, on the other, He evaluates quite harshly the people who surrounded both John and Himself. According to the Savior, John's witness still belongs to the previous era, the pre-Christian era, when there was still no question of the Kingdom entering the world. But John, more vividly than anyone else, bore witness to the Messiah's imminent coming, while also understanding what needed to be done in order to enter the Kingdom. Of course, in the Kingdom there is a different measure of fullness, and therefore everyone who belongs to the Kingdom is greater than John, who still belongs to the untransformed world.

But to enter the Kingdom, effort is necessary; the Kingdom is "taken by force," and "those who use force seize it." And many of those who first listened to John and then to Jesus did not want to make such efforts. They simply felt good near John, and then near Jesus.

Fire in the Bible is a symbol of purification, sacrifice, and sanctification, a symbol of what can completely change a person's very nature by transfiguring and sanctifying it. Yet many thought the fire had been given to them only so they could warm themselves and rest in its warmth. The point here is not that this is bad, but that when fire is used this way a person does not change at all: he feels good for a while, but the fundamental problems that poison his life and keep him from sharing in the Kingdom do not disappear. And then all the efforts of those who carry fire into the world and bear witness to it prove fruitless. One may admire Jesus' words and Jesus Himself as much as one likes, but if the admirer still remains outside the Kingdom, one can say that all his admiration was useless. The Kingdom with its life passed him by, and admiration, even sincere admiration, does not save.

Today's reading tells us much about wisdom in the sense in which Jesus understands it. It begins with an episode describing John the Baptist's strange, at first glance, perplexity over the Savior's ministry (vv. 2-6). Indeed, the question was asked by the very man who first pointed to Jesus as the Messiah-Christ (Matt 3:13-17). And for Jesus Himself this episode became the occasion for bitter words about human wisdom. The issue is not the limitation of human reason: there is nothing terrible in such limitation in itself, for from the beginning God did not intend man to be omniscient. The issue is how and for what purpose a person uses the reason given to him by God. And fallen man, it turns out, most often uses it for self-justification and self-assertion.

The Old Testament authors look at wisdom as the art of building relationships with God and with people, as the science of righteous life. But it often happened that it degenerated into something like intellectual games serving only for entertainment and, in this sense, little different from children's games (vv. 16-17). Worst of all was that these games, taken with complete seriousness, at a critically important moment blocked the "wise men" from the living Truth that had come into the world, and blocked them from the Kingdom.

What kind of Messiah did believing Jews expect in those days? There were many messianic theological concepts, but it happened that the real Messiah did not fully fit into any of them. Even John the Baptist himself may have expected something different from the Messiah-Christ whom he had recognized.

In any case, it is impossible to please those for whom their theories are dearer than the truth: if He fasts, then He is possessed; if He does not fast, then He is a glutton, a drunkard, a sinner (vv. 18-19). Here only one thing matters: does the person being evaluated meet the criteria of "one of us," does he fit within the framework of the concept or not? If not, then one can always find reasons to declare such a person "wrong," a sinner, a violator of the Torah, and a servant of Satan. And supporters of the "right" theory will always be able to justify its "rightness" (v. 19). Only at the Judgment such "theorists" will have a harder time than those who simply sinned without any theories (vv. 20-24). This is, in general, not surprising: the wise person who has used his wisdom for evil bears greater responsibility than the one who makes no claim to any wisdom.

Today the Lord speaks about Old Testament prophecy: all the stories, prophecies, and promises about the Kingdom of God continued until John; now the time of their fulfillment begins. Now the Kingdom is real in Christ, accessible to every person who believes in Him and follows Him.

His surprised disciples were accustomed to speaking of the Kingdom as something expected, something that does not yet exist. Strangely enough, we too often speak of the Kingdom of Heaven, of life with God, as a kind of posthumous reality, or as something that must be revealed in the age to come, after the Second Coming. But Christ says that the Kingdom has already been opened - and those who are ready to make some effort can enter it.