NOTES for Isa 26:7-9

The reading of today from the book of the prophet Isaiah is another hymn of love. "The desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of thee.", - Says Isaiah. Can we remember God ceaselessly? Probably, the prophet aspires to something of this kind: so that thought from any subject passes harmoniously and naturally into thoughts about Him – just as all the thoughts of a person in love smoothly and naturally return to thoughts of the beloved.

People who don’t read the Bible and don’t believe in God often say "it is God’s punishment", in relation to themselves or to other people, being in a difficult situation. But is it possible to lay a claim to God for having jumped from the ninth floor, you break to death? Scarcely can we find the inevitable action of the law of universal gravitation as a punishment. Unless we require from God explanations, on what account He established such laws. Even from a human point of view, such claims are ridiculous and absurd: the Creator has the right to decide Alone, without consultation with the creation, of which laws define the functioning of the world. And the disdain of the fundamental laws of the universe brings inevitably to terrible consequences. The ignorance of the law or the refusal to recognize that the law exists doesn’t mean that it stops acting, and stops to present to us each time its terrible account. And that is the demonstration of judgment. The ignorance of the law doesn’t free us from responsibility. Because the possibility of knowing it is given to us. They are all written in the Bible. But will that teach us something? Are the fruits of evil in the world little for me? Is work not enough for me here? We can close eyes on what does not concern us directly, but because of that His judgments will not in any case stop coming true in the earth and, if we don’t believe by words, then we shall learn the truth by terrible human methods.

The theme of universal resurrection appears quite early in prophetic preaching. Isaiah of Jerusalem already speaks of it quite clearly. As for existence after death—whether blessed or wretched—the biblical books say practically nothing about it, and what little they do mention is based not on revelation received by their authors but on pre-biblical pagan experience.

There is nothing surprising about this. What, after all, is the afterlife described at length, for example, in Egyptian and Greek sacred books? Ultimately it is a condition that can be called life in the full sense only with certain qualifications. Human consciousness is indeed preserved in the state after death described by these sources; this is not the biblical Sheol, the realm of shadows where, strictly speaking, there is no life at all. Yet the human being as God conceived and created him cannot be reduced to consciousness alone, even though self-awareness truly is the foundation of spiritual life. A human being possesses both a psychic and a physical nature, and this nature is necessary precisely for a full spiritual life. The preservation of consciousness alone, even in all its fullness and clarity, is therefore insufficient for such a life.

And God revealed to His people that what awaits everyone at the end of the journey is not an afterlife but resurrection—a return to life in all its transfigured fullness, the only life that can be considered worthy of a human being as the image of God.

The Apocalypse of Isaiah is not a story about coming disasters, but a vision of the triumph of God's Kingdom. Let us note for ourselves several details of which the prophet speaks: victory over the enemies of Israel, the gathering of Israel from dispersion, the Lord's feast for all nations on Mount Zion, the openness of the paths of personal righteousness, victory over death and the resurrection of the dead, the defeat of the serpent, and joy and gladness in God's salvation. Why was this written? We are called to take part in this victory - through our trust in the prophecy and our agreement with God's plan.

The Apocalypse of Isaiah is not a story about coming disasters, but a vision of the triumph of God's Kingdom. Let us note for ourselves several details of which the prophet speaks: victory over the enemies of Israel, the gathering of Israel from dispersion, the Lord's feast for all nations on Mount Zion, the openness of the paths of personal righteousness, victory over death and the resurrection of the dead, the defeat of the serpent, and joy and gladness in God's salvation. Why was this written? We are called to take part in this victory - through our trust in the prophecy and our agreement with God's plan.

The Apocalypse of Isaiah is not a story about coming disasters, but a vision of the triumph of God's Kingdom. Let us note for ourselves several details of which the prophet speaks: victory over the enemies of Israel, the gathering of Israel from dispersion, the Lord's feast for all nations on Mount Zion, the openness of the paths of personal righteousness, victory over death and the resurrection of the dead, the defeat of the serpent, and joy and gladness in God's salvation. Why was this written? We are called to take part in this victory - through our trust in the prophecy and our agreement with God's plan.

Here there are very difficult words that require a very careful approach: they crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. These words are generally seen as a basis for every kind of asceticism. This theme itself appears very often in the Apostle Paul. There are many other words related to these: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6:14). I have heard it said that these words mean: I have died to the world and the world to me. But if the apostle had wanted to say that, he would have said exactly that, whereas he said something different.

Here is what Fr. Georgy Chistyakov says: "The point is that the Bible has no orientation toward fighting the passions. The New Testament, through the mouths of the holy apostles, calls us not to fight anger, rage, malice, and so on, but to 'put off,' that is, to take off like old clothing, or to 'strip off' all these vices from ourselves. These two words are used many times in Scripture when it speaks of passions and vices, but nowhere here is there talk of fighting the passions. One must think that everything concerning the struggle with the passions that rule over us and nest inside us entered Christian literature from Stoic and, more generally, ancient philosophy at a later time.

The holy apostles see the Christian's path not as a road of fighting the passions, but precisely as the throwing off of old clothing, as growing out of that clothing... But if we begin to take sin apart bone by bone and subject it to analysis, then we are inevitably seized or sucked in by the very process of struggle, we turn into fighters, and at that point our Christianity simply comes to an end. From the depths of our consciousness we transfer the struggle into the outside world and begin to fight everyone who, as it appears to us, thinks the wrong way, does the wrong thing, and so on."

Let us feel the important circumstance that our Lord Jesus did not derive pleasure from His suffering, the pleasure that we at times derive from our own asceticism. After all, there is such a mental disorder as masochism - that is where Freud had grounds to accuse us. And this is, in fact, essential.

Jesus sometimes describes the Kingdom in a completely astonishing, paradoxical way. What, for example, are we to make of a "good yoke" or a "light burden"! And yet such definitions very accurately describe what the Kingdom is for fallen humanity.

For a normal person, hardly anything positive can be associated with a yoke: in the original sense of the word, a yoke is a collar symbolically placed on an enslaved person as a sign of the person's new condition. And a burden is more readily associated in our minds with a weight that must be carried simply because it cannot be thrown off, and certainly not with the lightness of being. Yet for fallen human nature the Kingdom really is a burden, just as the fallen person can walk the path into the Kingdom only by taking upon himself what the learned rabbis of those times called the "yoke of the Torah."

On Jesus' lips, the "yoke of the Torah" becomes the "yoke of the Kingdom," for the same inner struggle is in view, the struggle characteristic of every fallen person who wants to walk the way of righteousness. It is no accident that Paul also said that through the Torah comes the knowledge of sin: it is precisely the attempts to walk the way of righteousness, to follow the Torah, that reveal to a person his true sinful nature, and then the way of righteousness becomes hard, and the Torah becomes a yoke voluntarily taken upon oneself.

But Jesus speaks of more: He brought into the world not the Torah, which the world knew before His coming, but the Kingdom, where the one walking the way of righteousness could finally receive relief by reaching the goal. Now even the burden of one's own sinfulness, which begins to be felt only when one tries to keep the commandments, becomes light, for now not only the fallen world is real, but also the Kingdom with its life; and the heavier one's own sin becomes, the more one senses the breath of the Kingdom easing its weight. This duality is inevitable. It will remain until the end of time, until the complete transfiguration of human nature. But this duality itself inspires hope, for it testifies that the Kingdom entering the world is not fiction, but reality.

It is strange to hear that what is inaccessible to the wise and prudent is revealed to infants. Of course, we are already used to the fact that Jesus' words contain not only a direct meaning but also a parable. And yet: how can infants contain what proved beyond the strength of the wisest?

Here Christ's words once again do not fit the logic of our everyday life. But human wisdom proclaimed already in antiquity: "I know only that I know nothing." Only by recognizing one's own limits can one hope to overcome them, and in order to begin understanding something, one must admit oneself to be ignorant. Meanwhile the scribes and Pharisees of every age find it hard to admit their own ignorance, and this pride blocks their ability to see something new with an unclouded gaze. And although the most important thing, as we know, cannot be seen with the eyes, much can be sensed by a soul not clogged with pseudo-knowledge, a soul that has preserved childlike openness.

When we hear Christ's promise to give rest to those who labor and are burdened, this rest first appears to us simply as relief from heavy labors. Only later do we remember the rest of the Seventh Day, communion with the Lord, who grants the possibility of entering His rest.

At first it looks paradoxical that Christ calls precisely those who labor and are burdened to take His yoke upon themselves. Yet this apparent contradiction is removed by the Savior Himself: He is the only One whose burden, when accepted freely, does not bend us down but straightens us up. His burden is light precisely because it gives strength and removes from us the unbearable weight of the burden of sin.

The inhabitants of the towns where Jesus' signs and wonders had been shown did not believe in Him, while among His disciples were "infants" - simple, uneducated people, often with an "imperfect" past: the sick, the unclean, the desperate, the "poor in spirit." This brings us face to face with the question of knowing God and receiving true faith. It turns out that miracles play a very small role in the inner upheaval that the Gospel calls repentance. God can be known only when He reveals Himself: the Son reveals the Father, and the Father brings people to faith in the Son. This revelation is a kind of inner miracle, a sign invisible to others and often even to the person himself. It happens in the experience of rest that the Lord Jesus gives to those who "labor and are heavy laden," in an intuitive encounter with the One who is truly meek, when a person's life becomes discipleship under Christ and the acquiring of a humble heart.

Speaking about the realization of the Kingdom of God, the evangelist clearly emphasizes Christ’s own central role in it. He proves to be the principal content of the Baptist’s proclamation—for it was precisely for this that people from all over the country came to him, not to watch the wind sway a reed in the wilderness! He stands at the center of the proclamation in the towns of Galilee: with His coming Capernaum is “exalted to heaven,” but when it refuses to hear His preaching it is “brought down to hell.” Finally, He gathers the divine law and the divine will in Himself. This can be seen in the vocabulary of the final verses of this chapter. “Weary and burdened” was what pious people called themselves when they took upon themselves the “burden” of keeping all the commandments of the Law. Thus, this is not at all about the working class going to church after work to soothe the soul through worship. Jesus, however, calls the disciples to take Him upon themselves as their “burden,” to live by Him and to serve God through Him, because unlike the fixed and unchanging commandments of the Pentateuch, His “burden” is easy and light: He has an individual approach for everyone, and in addition there are faithfulness, love, and forgiveness.

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.