NOTES for Luk 6:21

Jesus strikes at what is most precious. "Woe to you when all people speak well of you!" He says. And this is the greatest desire of many of us... We act with an eye to others. We can allow ourselves a small, or large, meanness - but only if no one sees it. Yet we are afraid to take a step against common opinion. Why? Because we want all people to speak well of us. This is what the Lord warns us against. In such a situation the main thing disappears: objective truth, honesty. If we are honest, by definition we cannot please everyone. But if we adapt a little here, there, everywhere... then we can indeed manage to have everyone speak well of us. And then - woe to us. Because then we are not in the Truth.

The words of the Sermon on the Mount always shake us with their radicalness. Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich; rejoice, you who weep; weep, you who laugh... Christ calls us to a radical understanding of life, in which what is habitually white for us may turn out to be black. From the point of view of an ordinary person, these norms were invented for madmen, because they contradict the logic of life and the commonly accepted idea of a successful life.

But Jesus offers His disciples a look at their life from eternity, from that Kingdom whose unconditional value and beauty He tried to convey to them in many parables. And from this divine point of view our usual problems may appear completely different: insignificant, or, on the contrary, sources of great joy.

Jesus speaks these words immediately after many people came to Him in order to touch Him and be healed. Often we come to God bringing our burdens and wanting to be freed from them, but the Lord calls us to look at them in the light of His eternity, in which reproach, thirst, and poverty of spirit are the greatest blessings.

It is possible to imagine what fear and bewilderment Jesus' words about the coming Kingdom produced in His listeners. There everything will be unlike human ways. After all, wealth, prosperity, happiness, and a person's good reputation were all signs of God's blessing; all of this meant that God was pleased with him and would reward him even more when the appointed time of the Kingdom's fulfillment came.

But in Jesus' preaching, the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those cast out of society are at the center of God's love, while the rich and respectable will experience His judgment. In this paradox, the distinctions between insiders and outsiders, between "good" and "bad" people, become confused and erased: none of them can be compared with the infinitely merciful God. Therefore "to us who listen" there remains only to imitate this mercy, making no distinction between the righteous and sinners; our judgment will not stand in any case before the paradoxical judgment of Christ's Kingdom.

Like several other episodes of the Savior's earthly ministry, Luke describes the Sermon on the Mount somewhat differently than Matthew does. For Luke, the basis for presenting what Jesus said during this sermon becomes the contrast between two ways: the way of the rich, which the evangelist identifies with the way of the Gentiles, and the way of the poor, which turns out to be the way into the Kingdom.

The idea of two ways is not new in itself; it is well known from Old Testament texts, and for Luke it becomes the very prism through which he perceives the Savior's words. In mentioning the poor, Jesus undoubtedly meant not simply those without possessions, but those who understood poverty as a spiritual state. The Old Testament prophets had already spoken about such poor people. And the rich differ from them not by a property marker, but by a spiritual one: if the poor find their consolation only in the Kingdom (vv. 20-23), then the rich receive what is theirs in this world, having no need of the Kingdom (vv. 24-26).

But in order to enter the Kingdom, one must remain faithful to it to the end. Therefore those who thirst for the Kingdom cannot live by the laws of this world, which has not yet been transformed, even though the laws of the Kingdom do not yet operate in it. It is no accident that Luke singles out in Jesus' sermon the call to treat people as we would want them to treat us (v. 31), making it the compositional center of that part of his account in which he presents Jesus' instruction to those who want to live according to the laws of the Kingdom (vv. 27-36).

At first glance, this call resembles the universally known "golden rule," but there is one difference in the Savior's formulation that is not immediately obvious: if in its traditional version the "golden rule" calls us to treat people the same way they treat us, Jesus advises us to treat people as we would want them to treat us. In other words, if we are truly seeking the Kingdom, then in our relationships with people, according to the Savior's word, we must in a certain sense "work ahead," giving them our good attitude in advance and not waiting for them first to show themselves in relation to us.

According to the laws of our world, not yet transformed, this is of course completely irrational behavior: everyone knows that fallen man is very little capable either of good works or of a good attitude toward neighbors. But, on the other hand, any other approach to the people around us does not presuppose openness, and without openness it is impossible to enter the Kingdom. The Kingdom is arranged in such a way that one cannot enjoy it alone. One cannot acquire it by fencing oneself off from everyone. The Kingdom can be acquired only if one becomes part of it oneself, and one can become part of it only when what we have received we pass on to others, to those who, like us, seek the fullness of life in this Kingdom. And then we become servants of the Kingdom - those whom Jesus chooses so that through them the whole world created by God may become the Kingdom.

These words seem deliberately to contradict ordinary human ideas. Why are the poor and hungry, the weeping and rejected, suddenly blessed, while woe is pronounced upon the rich, the full, and those who laugh? One might think that Christ is proclaiming a revolution that will turn the world upside down! The Kingdom of God that He brings to earth really is radically different from the order of the world familiar to us. Relationships within it are founded on the Father's mercy, not on the struggle for survival. Even as believers, we often forget that entirely different laws prevail in this Kingdom. We call happiness what Christ calls woe, and conversely regard His blessings as misfortune. How greatly we must change to become true citizens of this Kingdom!

Over two thousand years of Christian history, more has perhaps been said and written about the Beatitudes than about any other Gospel text. Most often, commentators have tried to discover in them some new word, whether in the moral, theological, or spiritual-ascetic sphere.

But a natural question arises: how necessary was it for Jesus to begin His conversation with the people listening to Him with ethics, or asceticism, or theology? He was addressing believers, many of whom were surely very religious. There was little point in speaking to them about moral norms: the commandments of the Decalogue were already well known to them. And theological or ascetic subtleties were hardly suitable for this rather mixed and not very educated audience.

Besides, the people listening to Jesus were expecting an answer to a completely different question. At that time messianic expectations were very strong among the Jewish people. Quite a few claimants to messiahship had already appeared, and although all of them, unsurprisingly, had failed, the expectation did not become any less intense. The people looked with hope at anyone in whom there was even a hint of the Messiah.

It is no wonder that Jesus' listeners looked at Him Himself with such hope. And He did not want to deceive their expectations. But if He had declared His messiahship openly, that would almost certainly have happened. In rabbinic circles and in popular consciousness alike, the person of the Messiah was associated with something militant and heroic. According to these ideas, the Messiah had to be a great earthly king who would restore Israel's independence and make it a strong state governed according to the laws of the Torah. Jesus, of course, could promise the people nothing of the kind. So He simply reminds His listeners of what the messianists of earlier ages had awaited, beginning from the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem.

It was then, apparently, that the first messianic movement arose, whose participants came to be called "the poor." They accepted this name, which later became attached to those who lived a righteous life and awaited the coming of the Messiah. It is of the blessedness of these messianists, these poor ones, that Jesus speaks. He truly bears witness to His messiahship and to the nearness of the Kingdom, which is already entering the world. But it enters not to the sound of battle trumpets, but quietly, in that silence in which a spiritually sensitive heart hears God. It is a Kingdom whose blessedness is understood only by the poor.

In the sermon "on a level place," as this passage from the Gospel according to Luke is traditionally called, the Lord speaks to His listeners about what true life and true righteousness are, about the meaning and moral foundations of life. And precisely in connection with these words of Christ, the evangelist notes that all the people sought to touch Him, because power went out from Him. This is a very important remark, for we need to remember that the truth of God possesses real power, and precisely because it is truth.

The Lord says things that are far from obvious. Understanding and accepting His words, and still more fulfilling them, is very difficult. The blessedness of the poor and the hungry, the joy of those persecuted for righteousness: none of this follows at all from the experience of human life. But we have been given the possibility of feeling and experiencing in these words of Jesus the power of true life, because this is not simply the invention of an idle mind, but the word of God addressed to us.

That is why truth and purity in our relationships with one another turn out to be the place where, at times quite unexpectedly for ourselves, we meet the Living God.

"...And He spent the night in prayer to God..." From these words, which let us touch our Lord's experience a little, there came a huge and remarkable tradition of night services. Strictly speaking, an "all-night vigil" means staying awake and praying all night. It is a pity that now it has been reduced to a service from 6 to 8 in the evening... But we always have the opportunity to stay awake at home, and this is an amazing experience. It is very hard to explain what it is to someone who has never lived through it.

The main thing night gives is silence and solitude; only in this silence can the voice of God be discerned. The whole world is plunged into peace, and space and time lose their meaning. Have you noticed how differently time flows at night? This, of course, is also ascetic discipline, because at times, especially after a hard day, it is difficult not to fall asleep, just as the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

One can endlessly list reasons for the advantage of night for prayer. The main thing, it seems, is the desire never to part from God, even for a few hours of nightly insensibility.