NOTES for Mat 10:32-36

"...Even the hairs of your head are all numbered..." What does this mean? No one dies apart from the Father's will, but does this mean that those who die die by His will? This is a very difficult question, and the abyss of unbelief lies very close here. But it can be avoided if we trust our heart and the Word of God.

Priest Georgy Chistyakov writes in his work "Martyrdom as a Phenomenon":

"To endure September 11, the almost daily explosions in Israel, and other horrors. Or does He behave the way a strict teacher sometimes does? No, that too is impossible! If God is merciless, then Job's wife is indeed right when she advises him to curse God and die. How can one not remember Voltaire here? 'How could God create this terrible cesspool of misfortunes and crimes? It is supposed,' says Voltaire, 'that God is powerful, just, and good, while we see madness, injustice, and malice on every side. Therefore people prefer denying God to cursing Him.' At the same time Voltaire himself believed in God, although he said that he preferred to believe in a God who was not almighty and was limited in His possibilities, but good. [...]

Yet despite everything, and above all despite what is obvious, we somehow feel God's presence in the world. [...] We feel this precisely, not knowing it, and understand not with the mind but with the heart, that the Lord shares with us every misfortune of ours in all its fullness. He is with us where things are bad. And this is the main thing. Descending with us as if into hell, into the depths of our misery and despair, He also leads us out of those depths, giving us wisdom and patience. As this is depicted on the Paschal icon 'The Savior's Descent into Hades'..."

In the passage from the Gospel according to Matthew that we read today, the Lord says two things that are important for our understanding of holiness. First, a disciple of Christ is someone for whom the Lord Himself and the confession of Him matter more than anything else in life; someone ready to lose everything, even his own soul—that is, his life—for Christ. Neither deeds nor spiritual or other achievements, nothing makes a person Christ's disciple except the concentration of his entire life around one center, the “one thing needful”—Christ.

No less important are the final verses of chapter 10: the Lord speaks of how the holiness of His disciples is expressed. It is the ability to receive other people and do good to them. The scale of the good deed is entirely unimportant—even if you can do nothing but give a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty, you will not lose your reward. The holiness of Christ's disciples is expressed precisely in their attitude toward people; everything else is beside the point.

Jesus' words are very difficult for us. We would like things to be simpler... Is everything really so stark? Are His ways of ordering the world truly incompatible with ours, and does following Him necessarily require us to give up what seems right to us? On the way to unity, must we really pass through division; on the way to love, through hostility; on the way to glory, through the cross; on the way to true life, through death?

Christ brings not peace, but a sword into human society. For centuries many have tried to justify their own militancy with these words. True, in doing so, such would-be warriors did not want to notice that the word sword here is not a synonym for the word war. After all, Christ did not say, "I have brought not peace, but war." Let us not forget that a sword, or in the Slavonic translation a knife, is not only a weapon of killing but also a cutting tool. With this sword, ties between close people are cut when on the most important spiritual questions they can neither find agreement nor attain religious tolerance. But the choice that cuts old ties is often unavoidable when the old ties pull a person not simply toward old acquaintances and family relationships, but toward former sins.

It does not follow from this that Christians should start hostility. No, we are called to bring love into the world around us. But the reality is that it is not always easy for others to understand those to whom faith has opened another life. Therefore the break often happens without being initiated by Christians.

Many who read the Gospel find it hard to receive the words that whoever loves his relatives more than Christ is not worthy of him. Here one almost imagines despotism, the denial of all natural human ties... Thankfully, here we are dealing with that paradoxical quality of the Gospel which reveals to us the depth of Christ's love for us. For our "natural" love for those dear to us is, let us admit it, imperfect. But by placing Christ at the center of our heart, we can receive from him the resources for a love toward our relatives so strong that we could never give it to them by putting them first.

Living on earth can be frightening enough as it is, and if we apply to ourselves Christ's words addressed to the apostles, it becomes deeply unsettling. That is why the words "do not be afraid" are repeated so often and so seriously in the instruction. Fear is one of the strongest human experiences, which means it can be overcome only by something even stronger. The Lord points the disciples to these "powerful remedies": trust and, strangely enough, fear.

The trust in question is not simply faith that "God will always help," but the deepest, most fundamental confidence that everything is in His hands, from the little birds sold in the market for copper coins to every human life and death. And the second is the fear of God: not fear of punishment, not even fear of sin, but precisely "fear" before God, reverence and awe that make God immeasurably more real and significant for us than any other fears.

Many times, when God addresses people, He begins with the words "Do not be afraid!" And now Jesus encourages His disciples in the same way. They are to preach "from the housetops" and bear witness to their Teacher. Is it frightening? It is! But fear departs when love comes, because "there is no fear in love" (1 Jn 4:18). Love the Father, who cares for you so deeply, and everything will become possible.

At first the words that a disciple cannot become greater than his teacher can appear to limit his possibilities. But if we take into account that to become like the teacher is already no small thing, and that not everyone is able to become equal to him, then here we can see a call to growth. If the matter is discipleship to Christ, then the call to become like the Teacher reveals to us His special attitude toward those who follow Him. For the matter concerns the high level to which Christ intends to raise fallen humanity - He wants to deify us.

And even in the stern words of warning that Christ will deny the one who denies Him, we can see how highly He has placed the human person. For relationships are implied here that almost make one think of equality...

Of course, it would be enormous insolence on such a basis to forget reverence before His majesty and to introduce familiarity into relations with Him. He did not become one of human beings so that we would bring into spiritual life what is "human, all too human," that is, in the words of one author, "always something animal." But what draws us near to God is a gift that imposes responsibility.

Today the Lord speaks to His disciples about coming disasters and trials. Betrayal, rejection, exile, and martyrdom await them. What, then, does He call them, and us, to do in this difficult hour? In such situations the world needs the intervention of God Himself, and Jesus calls His disciples to become instruments of this intervention. Let kings and rulers hear the word of salvation through them; let the suffering receive comfort and encouragement through them. They themselves will need nothing, for the heavenly Father Himself will care for them. They need only learn to trust Him. Then their bond with Heaven will become stronger than all earthly bonds, and God will be a greater reality for them than family, property, even life itself.

In the face of trials, the Lord calls us to surrender ourselves entirely to His will and to become His healing presence on earth.