NOTES for Joh 12:34

Jesus and the people listening to Him understand the Messiah's path differently. And the very image of the Messiah in the popular mind differs from what the Savior proved to be in reality. The main difference is that for the great majority of the people who listened to Jesus, the work of the Messiah was something purely external. The Messiah, or, as Jesus usually calls Himself in the third person, the Son of Man (this messianic image is taken from the Book of Daniel), has in the people's consciousness no ordinary human path at all.

He is not an ordinary man. He "abides forever." He comes to earth in order to accomplish something great, something that must end with the creation of the messianic Kingdom, a strong earthly state that this extraordinary King will head. His earthly path will be mysterious and unlike the path of an ordinary person, though Jews still do not speak of the Messiah's divinity in the Christian sense. And here it turns out that the Messiah still has to undergo some kind of glorification. There was something to think about. Jesus Himself, meanwhile, speaks about His real earthly path. About a path that includes death on the cross and the resurrection that follows. And also about the path by which one enters His Kingdom. About a path that requires a change of life. Not the restructuring of human life according to some special rules, but its change, complete and radical.

Such a change makes the limited and finite life of fallen man part of another life: that life of the Kingdom in all its fullness, which the Savior brought into the world. Without this change it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. It would seem that there is nothing complicated here. It is far simpler than the many clever methods for restructuring and remaking human nature that countless magicians and occultists have offered in every age. Yet precisely this kind of change sometimes proves completely beyond a person's strength. Because here one has to open one's hand. And, what is still more difficult, one's will. To let go.

And to let go of one's own life, that very existence with which one has grown used to identifying oneself, is not simple at all. It is easier to remake it in any way one wants, but by oneself, under one's own control, than to give up such control and allow Another to govern one's life. Here trust is needed, and it either exists or it does not. But if it does not, then hope for the Kingdom will have to be abandoned. For in the Kingdom where Christ reigns, one cannot live without trusting the One who rules that Kingdom.