NOTES for Co2 3:12-18

Spiritual existence is not subject to the limitations characteristic of a material object: shape, location, confinement to the present moment, movement through time in only one direction, and so on. When Jesus, speaking with the Samaritan woman (John 4:24), says, “God is Spirit,” He shatters human ideas that “bind” God to a particular place—a country, a city, a temple. The apostle Paul has something slightly different in mind: he says that the Spirit can act not from outside but from within, destroying our inner bondage through His grace of forgiveness and peace.

In the Bible one often finds the statement that God is spirit. The apostle connects freedom with this undoubted fact, as if affirming that God, being spirit, is the God of freedom and not of enslavement, even when the matter is enslavement to one or another form of religiosity.

At first glance, the connection between these two statements is not visible. But if one thinks about it, it is not hard to see that this connection does exist, though it is not noticed at once. Indeed, every spirit, whether God Himself or any spiritual being created by Him, differs from nature, in all its possible forms, perhaps even forms still unknown to us today, precisely by complete and absolute freedom. God has no nature. He is pure will and pure self-consciousness.

It is no accident that, unlike theologians, the Bible tells us nothing about the nature of God, while it speaks constantly about His will and His personal qualities. Will is the foundation of every spirit and its primary manifestation, and it is no accident that will forms the basis of every spiritual life, including human spiritual life. Self-consciousness is derived from will; in the normal case it is conditioned only by will and depends only on it.

Practically, this means that spirit in the true sense of the word depends only on itself and never on anything or anyone else. Any relations between spiritual beings will always be free and deeply personal, while any limitation of the manifestation of will means a limitation of freedom, which in the end leads to a diminishment of the fullness of spiritual life in the one whose will is limited. Nature is different: it never determines its own being, since it is always dependent on something, and in the final analysis on someone, else. If spirit is by definition free, so that the diminishment of its freedom lowers its spiritual potential, then nature is just as much by definition unfree.

Of course, every spirit can interact with nature without losing its freedom, just as God created the whole natural world without in any way diminishing Himself or constraining His freedom thereby. His self-emptying and self-limitation turned out to be connected not with nature, but with the spiritual beings He created, with whom He is bound by relations of love. Such self-emptying and self-limitation can, of course, formally also be considered a limitation of freedom, but since the matter is an absolutely voluntary choice, such a limitation ceases to be external and becomes for God an organic form of His own existence.

And in the Kingdom all forms are determined in the same way, proceeding from relations of mutual love, which presuppose mutual self-limitation as a consequence of taking into account the existence of those who are nearby. There are no external boundaries here, only the form of one's own being voluntarily accepted by each person, taking into account relations with God, with Christ, and with one's neighbor. In the untransformed world, by contrast, all limitations are connected first of all with the natural component of man, which after the fall gained the upper hand, subordinating to itself the breath of life that every person receives at birth. It is no wonder that they bind and fetter a person's spiritual freedom.

And religion is no exception here: besides its spiritual component, it contains much that is natural, connected with the psyche and behavioral patterns of fallen man. The apostle, of course, could not fail to know this. That is why he calls his correspondents to freedom. To the freedom of the Kingdom, without which real, full relations with God are impossible. And that means salvation is impossible too.

In the third chapter of the epistle to Corinthians, Apostle Paul speaks about the understanding of the Old Testament as a code of bans and permissions, which God expects man to accomplish. He underlines that it is only by Christ that the Old Testament opens to us as a testimony of God, Creator of the Heaven and the earth.

The face of Moses shone with the reflection of the glory of the Almighty - says the apostle, but this glory remains hidden without Christ for those who see Moses, and for those who read his books. For those who address Christ, this "cover" is removed, this veil retaining us from the vision of the glory of God. And here after these words, the apostle writes: "the Lord is that Spirit, and where the Spirit of Lord is, there is liberty".

Relationships with God are thus similar not literally bans and permissions, but to the liberty of the spirit. But it doesn’t in any case mean that in the liberty of the New Testament we can violate the commandments, of which the Jews were forbidden to violate.

The non-liberty consists of the fact that the “cover” is in our human hearts, and not giving to us the possibility of seeing the glory of God. That is why the apostle says of those who address God: "we all, with open face beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed". Consequently, he understands by the word liberty the real possibility of meeting with God and our capacity to come to this meeting.

Today’s reading contains the very well-known words, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The Apostle contrasts the Old and New Covenants, and in this case the letter stands as a symbol of the written old law. Why does the Apostle declare that the written law is something deadly? What if the law is right and just? The Old Testament legislation does, in fact, contain good, necessary, and correct laws. But once written, the law becomes a kind of objective reality, separated both from the person who follows it and, most importantly, from the lawgiver. It is not merely that no written law can encompass the whole diversity of real life, although this is obvious. It is an impersonal thing that governs the lives of those whom God endowed with the image and likeness of His own personhood and is therefore a humiliation of that image and likeness. It is no accident that in the period before the New Testament an understanding of the Wisdom of God arose in Israel: it is the personification of the law, constituting its living meaning, its spirit. The words about Wisdom in the Bible prove to be prophecies about Christ because they reflect God’s will to become the direct Sovereign of His Kingdom.

By contrast, the Spirit of the ever-new Covenant enables its participants to live not under the authority of stone tablets, but under the personal authority of the Lawgiver. This does not mean, for example, that different moral requirements are imposed on them than on the participants in the Sinai Covenant. “I have come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it,” says the Lord Himself. Yet these requirements do not constitute the essence of human life. Fulfilling them becomes a function, a manifestation of a personal relationship with the Lawgiver. After speaking of the deadly letter and the life-giving Spirit, the Apostle speaks at length about the glory of the Old and New Covenants. Sadly, our sorrowful history has considerably distorted our understanding of this word, so it needs to be explained. This is not at all about what slogans mean by it. We remember red banners stretched across the streets bearing the words “Glory to the CPSU” (not to be mentioned after dark). We remember the glory of earthly kings and rulers. Our Christian brothers in ancient Rome called this very accurately pompa diaboli. The biblical meaning of the word “glory” (Greek δόξα, Latin gloria) is revealed most vividly in Isaiah’s vision: “and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.” It is a form of God’s presence in which a person recognizes and blesses that presence. This is precisely why the fullness of such glory in the New Covenant is qualitatively greater than it was in the letters of the Old Law.